BREAKING NEWS: Prison soldier of sadistic torture says he was following orders from superiors
Military investigating possibility of abuses at other Iraqi prisons
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NBC News and news services
Updated: 10:24 a.m. ET May 04, 2004
A lawyer for one of the servicemen accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners told NBC News on Tuesday that his client's superiors should be on trial, not "the soldier who was following orders."
Spc. Charles Graner was ordered to take pictures of prisoners in sexual positions and even to pose with them, Guy Womack said on NBC's "Today" show.
"They were obviously staged, they were part of the psychological manipulation of the prisoners being interrogated," he added, and were ordered by intelligence and CIA officials in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
Womack agreed that the photos were "abhorrent," but insisted that the soldiers who took them were doing so in the context of interrogation procedures.
Asked if he thought the treatment of the prisoners warranted courts-martial, Womack said it could "but you court-martial the right person, you don't court-martial the soldier who was following orders."
Graner is among six military police who face criminal charges. Seven others have been reprimanded in the alleged abuse.
The investigation was continuing at Abu Ghraib, which came to attention last week when CBS’s “60 Minutes II” broadcast images showing Iraqis stripped naked, hooded and being tormented by their U.S. captors.
But officials told NBC News that at least five other investigations were under way to determine whether similar mistreatment was taking place at other U.S. facilities.
In an interview with NBC News, a former Iraqi prisoner at a separate detention center said he was held down by six U.S. soldiers, who he said beat the bottoms of his feet with steel rods.
The former prisoner, who spoke only on condition that he not be identified, said he had cheered the ouster of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but that after his treatment at the hands of his U.S. captors, he considered the Americans to be as bad as “10 Saddams.”
Secret Army report
Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for the Defense Department, acknowledged that five military investigations had been launched as a result of the Abu Ghraib cases. The nature of the sixth investigation could not immediately be determined.
Publicly, the Defense Department blamed the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, for a breakdown in command at Abu Ghraib, slapping her with an “admonishment” after she left Iraq earlier this year as part of a rotation of U.S. forces.
The New Yorker via AP
U.S. soldiers pose with Iraqi prisoners, naked and hooded, at Abu Ghraib prison in an undated photo.
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But U.S. officials noted that Karpinski — who was not suspended or relieved of her command, her lawyer, Neal Puckett, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” — oversaw 25 other detention centers in addition to Abu Ghraib.
A confidential Army report obtained Monday by NBC News found that at least some irregularities in the treatment of Iraqi prisoners extended beyond Abu Ghraib, noting that “the various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention.”
The report, whose existence was first disclosed by The New Yorker magazine, has not been completed, Di Rita said. He said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had not yet seen it.
The 53-page document is devoted primarily to the alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib, where, it says, Iraqi detainees were subjected to “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses.”
Military intelligence officers and civilian interrogators encouraged soldiers to abuse prisoners to “soften them up” for interrogation, the report said, adding, “This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated.” It said its conclusions were supported by written confessions by some of the suspects, among other evidence.
Seven soldiers were reprimanded for the alleged abuse at the facility, six of whom — all of them military police officers and noncommissioned officers — received the most severe level of administrative reprimand, a military official said on condition of anonymity. The seventh officer was given a more lenient admonishment.
The official said he believed that the investigations of the officers were complete and that they would not face further action or court-martial. However, the reprimands could spell the end of their careers.
Prisoners told U.S. investigators that their military guards beat them with broom handles and chairs, threatened to rape male prisoners, and sodomized them with chemical light sticks and broom handles.
There was no independent corroboration of the prisoners’ charges, but the chief military investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, wrote, “I find these witnesses to be credible.”
‘32 boots’
Karpinski accepted some responsibility for the treatment Monday on “Good Morning America,” but she said she did not know about the abuse as it was happening, and she accused other officers of condoning what was going on.
“They were despicable acts,” Karpinski said. “Had I known anything about it, I certainly would have reacted very quickly.” But she insisted that the cell blocks where some of the alleged abuses occurred were “under the military intelligence control.”
Karpinski said that in one photograph from the prison, there appeared to be more Americans involved in the alleged abuse than the six MPs who have already been charged.
“Absolutely. One photograph showed — it didn’t show faces completely, but the photograph showed 32 boots,” Karpinski said on ABC. “I’m saying other people than the military police.”
Bush calls for punishment of perpetrators
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said President Bush called Rumsfeld Monday to make sure that U.S. soldiers involved in “these shameful and appalling acts” were punished.
The U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council joined the international criticism of the apparent abuse, terming it a violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions.
In a statement Monday, the council demanded that U.S. authorities allow Iraqi judges to take part in the interrogations of prisoners and open the detention centers to inspections by Iraqi officials.
The military reportedly was briefing troops on how to discuss the issue in conversation with Iraqis.
“We’ve made it very clear to commanders and all the way down to the lowest soldier, ‘You’ve got to get out there and explain what happened here,’ ” one official said.
Senate hearing Tuesday
Members of Congress also pushed for swift action. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, R-Va., summoned defense officials to face his panel Tuesday.
“These allegations of mistreatment, if proven, represent an appalling and totally unacceptable breach of military conduct that could undermine much of the courageous work and sacrifice by our forces in the war on terror,” Warner said.
Another Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, said she feared that photos depicting abuse could incite more violence against U.S. troops in Iraq.
Sens. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and Jeff Bingaman, N.M., said the concern goes beyond the actions of a few soldiers.
“There is a bigger issue here,” Hagel said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today.” “Was there an environment, a culture that not only condoned this, but encouraged this kind of behavior? We need to look well beyond just the soldier. Who was in charge? Was there a breakdown in command here? ... We need to understand all the dynamics of this.”
Bingaman, also on “Today,” said he was concerned about “an attitude that the ends justify the means: We need to get this information out of these prisoners. Whatever you have to do to accomplish that, we’re not going to ask you a lot of questions.”
CIA conduct under microscope
Separate from the Army investigation, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that at least two of the other probes of alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners were looking specifically at CIA personnel.
The officials said on condition of anonymity that one investigation by the agency’s inspector general had been under way for several months and that the second involved an instance in which a prisoner allegedly was abused in the field, not at Abu Ghraib.
Amnesty International said it had uncovered a “pattern of torture” of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq. The group called for an independent investigation into the claims and said it had received “scores” of reports of ill treatment of detainees.
But a U.S. defense contractor whose employees are alleged to have led some of the abuse said Monday that it had not been informed of any such accusations by the government.
J.P. London, president and CEO of CACI International Inc., issued a statement saying, “In the event there is wrongdoing on the part of any CACI employee, we will take swift action to correct it immediately, but at this time we have no information from the U.S. government of any violations or wrongful behavior.”
Di Rita, the Defense Department spokesman, said he could not comment on the contractors. |
