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Monday, May. 03, 2004

The London-based human rights group said it had received "scores" of reports of ill treatment of detainees by British and American troops.

But the top U.S. military officer said Sunday there was no widespread pattern of abuse and that the actions of "just a handful" of U.S. troops at a Baghdad prison have unfairly tainted all American forces.

"We review all the interrogation methods. Torture is not one of the methods that we're allowed to use and that we use," said Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I mean, it's just not permitted by international law, and we don't use it."

Coalition spokesman Dan Senor also denounced the abuse of prisoners.

"I think it offends the sensibility of all Americans, it offends the sensibility of the overwhelming majority of men and women in uniform over in Iraq, it offends the sensibility of most Iraqis," Senor said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer."

"Careers will be ended and criminal charges are going to be leveled," he added.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army Reserve general who commanded the military police officers photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners said she was "sickened" by the photos and believes the culprits are "bad people" who deserve punishment.

But Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski of the 800th Military Police Brigade also told The New York Times that the Abu Ghraib prison cell block where the abuses occurred was controlled by military intelligence officers, who she said may have encouraged the actions.

"The suggestion that this was done with my knowledge and continued with my knowledge is so far from the truth," she said in Sunday's editions. "I wasn't aware of any of this. I'm horrified by this."

On Saturday, The New Yorker magazine said it obtained a U.S. Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the prison near Baghdad.

The internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found that reservist military police at the prison were urged by Army military officers and CIA agents to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," the magazine said in its May 10 issue.

Karpinski was formally admonished in January and suspended from command while being investigated, The New Yorker reported.

Karpinski told The New York Times that she believed military commanders were trying to shift the blame for the abuses from military intelligence officers in Iraq to the reservists.

"We're disposable," she said of the military's attitude toward reservists. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the M.P.'s and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

Questions Have Arisen

A senior U.S. military official in Baghdad responded to those comments by saying, "The very fact we are running an investigation concerning the interrogation procedures out there would indicate there are questions that have arisen as part of this investigation that leads us to other areas."

In Iraq, a leading association of Sunni Muslim clerics called Sunday for an international investigation into the prisoner abuse allegations, and the country's interior minister demanded an Iraqi role in the running of all prisons.

Also, British military police are investigating allegations of abuse by U.K. soldiers after the Daily Mirror newspaper published photos allegedly showing a hooded Iraqi prisoner who reportedly was beaten by British troops.

Amnesty's Middle East spokeswoman, Nicole Choueiry, said she was not surprised by the pictures.

"We've been documenting allegations of torture for a year now," she said. "We have said there are patterns of torture."

The British allegations surfaced after CBS' "60 Minutes II" broadcast images allegedly showing Iraqis stripped naked, hooded and being tormented by their U.S. captors.

Six U.S. soldiers face courts-martial in connection with allegations of mistreatment of detainees at an Iraqi prison.

President Bush expressed "deep disgust" at the photos, and Prime Minister Tony Blair said any abuse of Iraqi prisoners by coalition troops would be "completely unacceptable."

The Associated Press reported last week that one of the six American soldiers facing court-martial wrote in a journal that his commanders ignored requests for rules of conduct and silenced his questions about harsh, humiliating treatment of inmates.

In a journal started after military investigators approached him in January, Army Reserves Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick wrote that Iraqi prisoners sometimes were confined naked for three straight days without toilets in damp, unventilated cells with floors 3 feet by 3 feet.

"I questioned some of the things that I saw ... such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in females' underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell. I questioned this and the answer I got was, 'This is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done.' MI didn't want any of the inmates talking to each other. This is what happened when they were caught talking," Frederick wrote.

Amnesty said Friday it had received "frequent reports of torture of other ill-treatment" of detainees by coalition forces. The methods included "prolonged sleep deprivation, beatings, prolonged restraint in painful positions, sometimes combined with exposure to loud music, prolonged hooding, and exposure to bright lights."

The Daily Mirror's front-page picture showed a soldier apparently urinating on a hooded prisoner. The newspaper said it had been given the pictures by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment.

It quoted unidentified soldiers as saying the unarmed captive in its pictures had been threatened with execution during eight hours of abuse, and was left bleeding and vomiting. They said the captive was then driven away and dumped from the back of a moving vehicle, and his fate was unknown.

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Sunday "a very high-level investigation" was underway.

"These allegations are taken extremely seriously, and they will be investigated very thoroughly," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.'s "Breakfast with Frost" program.

The BBC cited unnamed sources close to the regiment as expressing doubts about the authenticity of the photos. The sources said the gun and hat of the soldier pictured appeared to be the wrong type, a truck was not a model used in Iraq and the photos looked tidy and staged.

The Daily Mirror stood by the photos, saying it carried out "extensive checks" to establish their authenticity.

© 2003 Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Editor's note: