Previous to that announcement, The Los Angeles Times reported that prisoners
were kept under harsh conditions at the detention facility in the defence
ministry complex in Baghdad’s heavily-fortified Green Zone, sometimes for up
to two years.
Former detainees at the facility told HRW last year that “interrogators beat
them, hung them upside down for hours at a time, administered electric
shocks to various body parts, including their genitals, and asphyxiated them
repeatedly with plastic bags put over their heads until they passed out”.
Amnesty International also said in a February 2011 report that Iraq operates
secret jails and routinely tortures prisoners to extract confessions that
are used to convict them.