IRAQ ATROCITIES AND ABUSE: US NORMAL POLICY OR ANOMALY?

Claims of accused

Evidence that it is all part of policy has come from one of the soldiers seen in the photos. Specialist Sabrina Harman of the Military Police was pictured smiling behind a pyramid of naked prisoners. She is quoted in the Washington Post as saying in an e-mail that the aim was to break down the prisoners for interrogation. "If the prisoner was co-operating, then the prisoner was able to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided," she wrote. "The job of the MP [military police] was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." The whole issue of interrogation is now under examination by yet another investigation, this time led by Maj Gen George Fay. And as US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself said during Friday's Congressional hearings into the alleged abuse, there is more to come. During the hearings Republican Senator Lindsey Graham warned that the further revelations might concern "rape and murder".

It was striking that only one senator, the senior Democrat Carl Levin, asked Mr Rumsfeld about this. Many others chose to use most of their time making speeches, as often happens in Senate hearings. Mr Levin identified the problem. The photos, he suggested, did not show a few "bad apples" infecting the rest of the barrel, but the application of a policy.

PR disaster

One is reminded of the calamitous effect of the British treatment of IRA suspects during internment without trial in the early 1970s. The British army put into practice so-called "sensory deprivation" techniques designed to break down a prisoner's resistance before and during interrogation. Those techniques involved isolation, subjection to white noise, hooding, sleep deprivation and physical hardship, such as being kept standing or keeping arms spread out. When news of these methods came out, as they did quite quickly, there was an uproar and the IRA was handed a new recruiting sergeant. The CIA and the US military developed similar coercive techniques. An American manual describing some of them and called "Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual - 1983" was released under the US Freedom of Information Act in 1997. The methods included the threat of force on relatives, blindfolding and the stripping of prisoners naked. The methods used in Abu Ghraib have added in sexual humiliation, presumably regarded by the guards as particularly effective in the Arab world. US and British soldiers are regularly subjected to the techniques themselves to help enable them to resist interrogation. It is known in the trade as R2I - resistance to interrogation. -Paul Reynold.