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Rumsfeld: Abusive soldiers 'un-American'
The deaths of 10 prisoners and abuse of 10 more in Iraq and Afghanistan are under criminal investigation, the Army disclosed Tuesday as U.S. commanders in Baghdad announced interrogation changes and the White House reached out to the Arab world to try to blunt a widening and increasingly damaging controversy.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld condemned abuses of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers as "totally unacceptable and un-American."
President Bush's national security adviser said Bush "will speak directly to the Arab world," and a White House official said the president might do interviews with Arab television to underscore his feelings about photographs of naked prisoners and gloating U.S. soldiers.
"We all feel outraged at these pictures," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the Arab television station Al-Arabiya. She said Bush was "determined to find out if there is any wider problem than just what happened at Abu Ghraib. And so he has told Secretary Rumsfeld that he expects an investigation, a full accounting."
Among Tuesday's revelations, one week after the publication of devastating details of Iraqis suffering physical and sexual abuse at the hands of U.S. soldiers:
_ The Army said one soldier had been court-martialed for using excessive force in shooting to death an Iraqi prisoner last September. The soldier was reduced in rank and dismissed from the Army, an official said.
_ The Army also disclosed that it had referred to the Justice Department a homicide case involving a CIA contract interrogator alleged to be responsible for the death of an Iraqi prisoner last November. That death was at Abu Ghraib prison, notorious during Saddam Hussein's rule for torture and killing and now the focus of global outrage over U.S. mistreatment.
In Baghdad, the new commander of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq said he would cut in half the number of Iraqis in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and end some interrogation techniques considered humiliating, such as hooding prisoners. Some Iraqis who have been freed from coalition jails stepped forward with new allegations of beatings, sleep deprivation and hours spent hooded and kneeling before interrogators.
In somber tones at his first Pentagon news conference since the reports of abuse surfaced, Rumsfeld said Americans should not believe that the behavior captured in the photographs of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with naked Iraqi prisoners is tolerated.
"The images that we've seen that include U.S. forces are deeply disturbing, both because of the fundamental unacceptability of what they depicted and because the actions by U.S. military personnel in those photos do not in any way represent the values of our country or of the armed forces," Rumsfeld said.
The defense secretary rejected suggestions that part of the Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq — to remove a ruthless government that tortured its own people — had been undermined by the behavior of U.S. soldiers responsible for detention facilities.
"The pattern and practice of the Saddam Hussein regime was to do exactly what you said, to murder and torture, and the killing fields are filled with mass graves. And equating the two, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what took place" at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said he hoped the photos represented an isolated case.
But the basis for such hope seemed to be eroding.
Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, told reporters there were 10 investigations underway of prisoner deaths — mostly in Iraq — and 10 pending cases involving possible assault of prisoners, including one sexual assault. Also, one prisoner's death was ruled to have been a justified homicide.
Investigations into 12 other detainee deaths that have occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002 had concluded that the causes were either undetermined or natural, Ryder said.
The Pentagon does not recognize detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba as prisoners of war. The Army's second-ranking officer, Gen. George Casey, was asked at a news conference with Ryder whether that policy might have led soldiers to think they could use excessive force against the detainees.
Casey said no. "It's very basic for us, how we treat detainees," Casey said. "We treat all of the folks we come in contact with with dignity and respect." Rumsfeld said U.S. military authorities have pursued the allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq since Jan. 14, one day after a soldier brought the matter to a commander's attention. He also said investigations were being opened to determine whether abuses occurred in other prisons and camps run by the U.S. military, including the Guantanamo Bay detention center and the Charleston, S.C., Naval Station brig, where war-on-terror suspects are held. Asked about the impact of Abu Ghraib on the U.S. image around the world, Rumsfeld said it was "unhelpful in a fundamental way. It's harmful." The sexual humiliation photographed in the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad — which has drawn worldwide condemnation — is "as serious a problem of breakdown in discipline as I've ever observed," said Sen. John Warner, R-Va. In Baghdad, Iraq's U.S.-appointed human rights minister, Abdul-Basat al-Turki, said Tuesday he had resigned to protest abuses by American guards, and Interior Minister Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi demanded that Iraqi officials be allowed to help run the prisons. Al-Turki said he resigned "not only because I believe that the use of violence is a violation of human rights but also because these methods in the prisons mean that the violations are a common act." Many of the allegations of abuse were contained in an internal Pentagon report completed in March. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., demanded to know why Bush was not earlier informed of the report and why Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers had not yet read the two-month old document. At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush first became aware of the allegations of abuse some time after the Pentagon began looking into it, but did not see the pictures until they were made public last week. Bush did not learn of the classified Pentagon report until news organizations reported its existence, McClellan said. Rumsfeld said he had read an executive summary of the report. He denied any foot dragging by the Pentagon and said the correct military procedures were being followed. "These things are complicated, they take some time," he said of the investigations. "The system works." Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, said the February report had been moving up the chain of command. "There had been no attempt to hide this," said Pace, who joined Rumsfeld in briefing reporters at the Pentagon. Pace said Pentagon officials agreed with the internal Army report's findings that the prisons in Iraq were understaffed for the number of prisoners incarcerated and that those serving as prison guards had been inadequately trained. |
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