BREAKING NEWS
ATROCITIES COMMITTED BY AMERICAN AND BRITISH SOLDIERS. SHAME OF ABUSE BY BRIT TROOPS
Later, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was appointed deputy commanding general of prison operations in Iraq after the scandal erupted last month, told Arab and Western reporters who were taken on a tour of Abu Ghraib that “I would like to apologize for our nation and for our military for the small number of soldiers who committed illegal or unauthorized acts.”He also said some interrogation techniques at the prison would be halted while others would be limited, and he invited the Red Cross to open an office there. Even as Miller led reporters around, inmates shouted complaints about undignified treatment and random arrests. Because of the scandal, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage decided to delay until next week the release of the State Department’s annual report on human rights around the world, which had been scheduled for Wednesday, a senior State Department official told NBC News. “It’s important to demonstrate” that the United States was responding to its own human rights abuses “before we stand up and tell the world” to fix its human rights problems, the official said in Washington on condition of anonymity. Other senior government officials braced for investigations into the scandal to widen. “I expect that as these investigations track down all the possible leads that there will be more things that will need to be looked at very, very carefully,” Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Wednesday on CBS’s “The Early Show.” Secretary of State Colin Powell said that he was shocked by the revelations but that a “fairly small number of soldiers” was involved. “In war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they’re still to be deplored,” he said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” The high-level effort at damage control is the result of an Army investigation of alleged abuse that found that soldiers at Abu Ghraib and another prison committed “grave breaches of international law” because of a “pervasive” lack of leadership from officers in charge. A senior defense official told NBC News this week that the investigation was likely to extend to the top reaches of the military command in Iraq and predicted that “heads will roll.” Rumsfeld called the abuse “deeply disturbing” Tuesday and promised that “we will take these charges and allegations most seriously.”
Several soldiers confess
The investigation, one of at least six that are under way, came to attention
last week when CBS’s “60 Minutes II” broadcast images showing Iraqis stripped
naked and hooded and being tormented by their U.S. captors.Six military police
officers were charged with criminal violations March 20. Seven other officers,
all of them military police, have been given noncriminal punishment — in six
of the cases, letters of reprimand. The Army’s report on the investigation,
which was begun in January by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, condemns a “pervasive
atmosphere” of laxness at Abu Ghraib. It describes the abuses depicted in the
photographs as “horrific” and “wanton acts of soldiers in an unsupervised and
dangerous setting.” The report, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News,
revealed that several suspects had confessed to their involvement and had
described the involvement of other soldiers. It detailed a stunning range of
violations last November and December, from psychological treatment designed
to humiliate the Iraqi detainees to direct physical abuse.
According to the report:
- Prisoners were punched, slapped and kicked. In some cases, soldiers jumped on their naked feet.
- Male and female detainees were left naked for days at a time. Some were videotaped and photographed, an especially degrading experience for Muslims who regard being photographed as a sin. Some were forcibly arranged in various sexually explicit positions for the photographs.
- Naked male prisoners were forced to wear women’s underwear. Others were forced to perform sexual acts upon themselves while being photographed.
- One naked prisoner was forced to stand on a box with a sandbag on his head. Wires were attached to his fingers, toes and penis to simulate electric torture.
- A male military police guard had sex with a female prisoner
End of the article.