Top US officer can't rule out pattern of prison abuse

1.00pm

WASHINGTON - The top US military officer declined on Sunday to rule out the possibility that US forces might be guilty of a pattern of abuse of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he had not yet read an Army report said to document "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings and sodomy.

Asked how he could be sure that any such abuses were not "systemic," Myers said on the CBS programme Face the Nation, "I'm not sure of it."

A 53-page internal Army report, cited in the May 10 issue of the New Yorker Magazine, detailed reported abuses at Abu Ghraib between October and December. The prison, 40km west of Baghdad, was notorious for torture and executions under the ousted government of President Saddam Hussein.

The military, spurred by the Pentagon's civilian leadership, was investigating throughout the region, including prison in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.

"If we find out it is (systemic), then we've got to take action" to end the abuses, Myers said, calling them a breach of US operating procedures as well as international law.

In comments on other Sunday programmes, Myers voiced confidence there was no widespread problem, including at Guantanomo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 600 prisoners in its declared war on terror.

Army intelligence was investigating "if there's any pressure from the intelligence side (as) has been alleged," Myers told Fox News Sunday.

Asked why he had not yet seen the Army report, Myers said: "It's just working its way up the chain." The report was completed in late February, and not meant for public release, the New Yorker said.

Photographs of naked prisoners being humiliated, for instance by being forced to simulate sex acts, stunned audiences worldwide after they were aired on the CBS programme 60 Minutes II Wednesday night.

Echoing comments by President George W Bush, Myers said he was appalled by outrages shown in the pictures that have sparked worldwide condemnation and harmed US efforts to win friends in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world.

According to the New Yorker article, Maj Gen Antonio Taguba, author of the Army report, cited witnesses as saying prisoners had been beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks among other mistreatment.

Taguba found Army reservist military police at the Abu Ghraib prison had been urged by military intelligence, CIA agents and private contractors to break the prisoners' will before interrogation, said the New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh.

Hersh, in a CNN Late Edition interview on Sunday, described what he said was an attempt to hide the body of an Iraqi who had died during an Abu Ghraib interrogation.

After stashing the body on ice for 24 hours, those responsible put it on a trolley and stuck in a fake intravenous tube. "Walked him out, got him an ambulance, drove him off, dumped the body somewhere," said Hersh, adding he had pictures of the body on ice.

An Army Reserve general who oversaw guards at the prison said military intelligence, not reservists under her command, dictated the prisoners' treatment.

Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, in a Newsweek interview published on Sunday, said she did not have enough troops or resources to do the job right and higher-ups ignored her complaints. "The entire detainee system ... is broken."

She has said in other interviews that CIA employees often joined in the prison interrogations.

The Central Intelligence Agency's inspector-general has two long-standing investigations underway into possible mistreatment of prisoners, at least one of them at Abu Ghraib, a CIA spokesman said.

The inspector was working with Defence Department officials, he said, adding that there was no specific evidence connecting the CIA to the incidents in the pictures.

In March, the Army charged six military police officers with the physical and sexual abuse of 20 prisoners at Abu Ghraib in November and December.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq