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Baghdad - The man looked much older than his 24 years, in part because his front teeth had been smashed, he told us, during one of his interrogation sessions in the secret prison here. His emaciated body and trembling arms were those of a fragile hospital patient rather than the fearsome terrorist the security forces had accused him of being. His psychological wounds matched his physical state: He confided that after repeatedly being sodomized with a stick and a pistol, he frequently wets his bed and has trouble sleeping.

Despite overwhelming evidence that torture was routine and systematic at a secret prison in the old Muthanna airport in West Baghdad where the young man had been held, Iraqi officials at the highest level appear to be in denial, claiming the accounts by the men who were held there are fictitious. Instead of ordering an independent inquiry, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has dismissed the torture accounts as "lies" and "a smear campaign." He told the state-run Iraqiya television that the detainees inflicted the scars on themselves "by rubbing matches on some of their body parts."

But the wounds that my colleague and I witnessed on April 26, when we interviewed 42 of the men who had been held in that place, could not have been self-inflicted. Huge scabs on their legs matched detainees' descriptions of being suspended upside down with their lower legs trapped between bars. Deep welts on their backs were consistent with cable whipping. These scars were just the beginning of the horror the men, and the evidence on their bodies, revealed.

We hadn't been in Wing 5 of Baghdad's Al Rusafa detention facility for more than a few minutes before dozens of detainees pressed against the 19 overcrowded cage-like cells to which 300 of the men had been moved after the secret prison was exposed and began re-enacting the dreadful abuses that interrogators at Muthanna had subjected them to. They lifted their shirts and pant legs to reveal fresh scars, bruising, scabs and disfigurements. Each wanted to share his story, and each story was horrifically like the ones before. We had been in Iraq for about a month recording human rights violations through interviews with victims of torture and other abuses across the country, but nothing prepared us for this encounter.

The 42 men the two of us were able to interview in the three hours we spent there recounted in appalling detail interrogation sessions that lasted three or four hours each. They described how their torturers kicked, whipped, beat and tried to suffocate them, gave them electric shocks, burned them with cigarettes and pulled out their fingernails and teeth. The prisoners said that interrogators sodomized some detainees with sticks and pistol barrels. Some young men said they had been forced to perform oral sex on interrogators and guards and that interrogator forced detainees to molest one another.

If the detainees still refused to confess, interrogators would threaten to rape the women and girls in their families.

The detainees were among about 430 who had been kept for months in the secret facility, which was run by the Baghdad Operations Command, one of several regional security commands set up by the prime minister that answer directly to him. All were transferred or released, with 300 of them moved to Al Rusafa, after the Human Rights Ministry inspected Muthanna in March and reported abuses to the prime minister. Until then, the detainees had no access to their families or lawyers. They didn't even receive a case number, never mind formal charges. An investigative judge questioned many of them individually in a room just down the hall from one of the torture chambers.

The Iraqi Army had detained them between September and December 2009 during sweeps in and around Mosul, a Sunni militant stronghold, accusing them of aiding and abetting terrorism. They were forced to sign false confessions but even after they confessed, many said, torture persisted.

If the Iraqi government wants to avoid comparisons with U.S. abuses at Abu Ghraib and the appalling practices of the former government of Saddam Hussein, it needs to stop stonewalling.

The sooner it brings those responsible to justice, the better for these victims, the government's reputation, and for all Iraqis who hope that the country is on its way to peace and justice.

Samer Muscati is a Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch.

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