Friday, October 21, 2005

Pentagon investigations in to prisoner deaths are "grossly inadequate and flawed", according to Human Rights First (HRF), "a 25-year-old lawyers' group":

"...criminal investigators have routinely failed to interview key witnesses or collect and maintain usable evidence, such as body parts or basic ballistics evidence, for possible prosecution"

"In addition, commanders have often either repeated failed to even to report deaths of detainees in the custody of their command, or delayed reporting them for days or even weeks after they occurred, greatly complicating efforts to collect relevant evidence. In one case, a death of an Iraqi detainee was not reported until a year later, and the case was closed without any determination of the cause of death"