Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has released more documents it obtained under the Freedom of Information Act-these dealing with Afghanistan. According to the documents, members of an Army Special Forces unit allegedly punched, slapped, kicked and beat Afghan civilians in two villages southeast of the capital Kabul last May, prompting official complaints from two senior Army psychological operations officers who were present and said they witnessed the incidents.

The incidents are detailed in internal Army criminal files that the ACLU released yesterday. They also document other allegations of abuse in Afghanistan as recent as last year. In one strikingly similar event, the Army last year found about half a dozen photographs that depict masked U.S. soldiers standing with their weapons pointed at the heads of handcuffed and hooded or blindfolded detainees at a base in southern Afghanistan and, in one case, pressing a detainee’s head against the wall of a “cage” where he was brought for interrogation.

The photographs were found on a compact disc left in one of the unit’s offices. None of the photos have been published and an Army spokesman said yesterday that they are being withheld from release “to protect the privacy” of the Afghan victims.

The acts photographed in Afghanistan occurred without provocation between December 2003 and February 2004 and violated Army regulations, according to testimony in the Army documents. Members of the unit said they took the pictures for sport and also said they destroyed some images after photos appeared in the media of similar acts at the Abu Ghraib prison.The ACLU said some of the photos depicted “mock executions.”

None of those involved in the seven new cases of alleged abuse were charged by the Army with criminal wrongdoing. Even though investigators found probable cause to charge another soldier in the unit with assault for punching a bound detainee in the back of the head, the documents do not indicate any punishment was imposed.