BREAKING NEWS: Army abuse report alleges numerous violations of international law; ‘Grave breaches’ found at two Iraqi prisons
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Updated: 8:28 p.m. ET May 04, 2004
WASHINGTON - Soldiers at two U.S. prisons in Iraq committed “grave breaches of international law” because of a “pervasive” lack of leadership from officers in charge, the Army’s investigation of alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners found.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld condemned the abuse Tuesday as “totally unacceptable and un-American” and said the Defense Department would take all necessary steps to bring those responsible to justice.
The military said it would cut in half the number of Iraqi prisoners held in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad and eliminate humiliating interrogation techniques, such as the practice of hooding prisoners. A senior defense official told NBC News that the investigation was likely to extend to the top reaches of the military command in Iraq and predicted that “heads will roll.”
Outraged by the sexual humiliation and abuses of Iraqis by U.S. military personnel, senators called for Rumsfeld to explain the situation in an open congressional hearing as soon as possible.
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 photographs of detainees at the facility 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 in the abuse at Abu Ghraib 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:
Detainees 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 detainees were forced to wear women’s underwear. Others were forced to perform sexual acts upon themselves while being photographed.
One naked detainee 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 detainee.
Taguba said he had also found several other allegations lodged by detainees to be “credible,” including claims soldiers broke chemical lights and poured phosphoric liquid on the detainees, threatened them with guns, beat them with broom handles and chairs, sodomized one with a chemical light and allowed military working dogs to bite them.
More than one prison
The report, the existence of which was first reported by The New Yorker magazine, found that the lax atmosphere that contributed to the abuses may have been fostered by senior officers’ failure to enforce regulations put in place after several detainees were beaten in May 2003 at the Camp Bucca facility in Umm Qasr, in southern Iraq.
In addition to the abuses reported at Abu Ghraib, severe irregularities in the handling of detainees continued at Bucca from last August to as late as February, Taguba found.
Taguba quoted the testimony of a sergeant at Abu Ghraib who said U.S. military intelligence officers had lobbied guards to abuse the detainees to “loosen them up” for interrogation. “Make sure he has a bad night,” the sergeant said he was told in regard to one inmate. “Make sure he gets the treatment.”
Other unit members testified that inmates of high interest to military intelligence officers were segregated into a separate cellblock, where guards were expected to “break them down.”
Both the Abu Ghraib and Bucca facilities are operated by the 800th Military Police Brigade, commanded until recently by Reserve Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski. Karpinski was “admonished” after she left Iraq earlier this year as part of a rotation of U.S. forces. Taguba recommended that she be reprimanded and relieved of her command.
Both camps remain significantly over their maximum capacity, while the guard force is undermanned and short of resources, said Taguba, who found that procedures for tracking and identifying detainees were a shambles. At least 27 escapes were documented at the 26 facilities under Karpinski’s command, said Taguba, who said there were likely several others that were probably “written off” as administrative errors or otherwise undocumented.
Rumsfeld vows full accounting
At a news conference at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld called the abuse “deeply disturbing” and promised that “we will take these charges and allegations most seriously.”
Senators demanded to know why Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had not yet read the 2-month-old document, as Rumsfeld acknowledged Tuesday.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., emerged from a closed-door hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee to say Rumsfeld should answer questions in public. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said he feared that allegations made public so far were “the beginning rather than the end” of the abuse claims.
Rumsfeld did not directly respond to the senators’ demands that he testify, but he disputed congressional critics who have said the Defense Department moved too slowly, and he asserted that correct military procedures were followed.
“These things are complicated. They take some time,” he said of the investigations. “The system works. The system works.”
The Defense Department did send several lower-level uniformed military officials to Capitol Hill after being summoned by the committee. Gen. George Casey, the vice chief of the Army, told reporters afterward that the actions of a few represented “a complete breakdown of discipline.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee scheduled another closed hearing for Wednesday to hear from senior representatives from the intelligence community and the Army.
Major changes at prison
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the new head of the Abu Ghraib facility, said Tuesday that he had ordered a halt to the use of hoods to blindfold prisoners. Instead, the detainees’ eyes are covered by a blindfold or goggles taped over with duct tape, Miller said.
In addition, said Miller, who was appointed as deputy commanding general of prison operations after the scandal erupted last month, U.S. authorities will cut the number of prisoners at the prison in half and require that some interrogation techniques, such as sleep deprivation or stressful positions, be approved by a commander.
Currently, about 3,800 prisoners are held at Abu Ghraib, which some officials have warned is dangerously overpopulated and understaffed. Miller did not say how the reduction in the prison population would be carried out, whether by freeing prisoners or by transferring them to other facilities.
Senators also demanded to know why President Bush was not informed of the report earlier. White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday that Bush learned of the allegations sometime after the Defense Department began its investigation and first saw graphic pictures of the alleged abuse when they became public last week.
An attorney for one of the six military police officers against whom criminal charges were filed questioned the credibility of the photographs Tuesday, charging on NBC’s “Today” show that they “were obviously staged” to manipulate the prisoners into cooperating with intelligence officials.
“They were part of the psychological manipulation of the prisoners being interrogated,” said the lawyer, Guy Womack, who represents Charles Granier, a corrections officer from Greene County, Pa., who was activated to the military in March 2003.
Womack echoed the testimony of some soldiers that the interrogation procedures were orchestrated by military intelligence officers.
“It was being controlled and devised by the military intelligence community and other governmental agencies, including the CIA,” Womack said. The soldiers, he said, were simply “following orders.”
According to one witness, Granier was in charge of the separate wing at Abu Ghraib where many of the abuses occurred. “We were told that they had different rules and different SOP [standard operating procedures] for treatment,” said the witness, a sergeant. “I never saw a set of rules or SOP for that section — just word of mouth.”
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.
New photos may have emerged
Iraq’s U.S.-appointed human rights minister, Abdul-Basat al-Turki, said Tuesday that he had resigned to protest the reported abuses. He told the Arab television station Al-Jazeera that he had complained in December about human rights violations to the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, but he did not say whether his complaints got any results.
The U.N. Human Rights Commission, meanwhile, said Tuesday that it had opened an investigation into civil rights in Iraq, and it urged the U.S. military to prosecute any soldiers alleged to have committed abuses.
New questions about U.S. troops’ conduct came to light Tuesday when the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd published four photographs appearing to show U.S. soldiers raping at least two women and forcing them to give oral sex, one of them at gunpoint.
The newspaper, an opposition publication whose reliability has been questioned in the past, ran the photos under a banner headline reading, "The Democracy of the American Empire of Evil and Adultery: Gang Rape by Occupation Soldiers of Iraqi Women Under Gunpoint."
The newspaper did not comment further on the photographs or report how it received them, and there was no way to independently confirm their authenticity.
By MSNBC.com’s Alex Johnson with NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, Andrea Mitchell, Lisa Myers and Ken Strickland in Washington. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Fact File Probing the military
At least seven investigations have been launched into allegations of abuse by U.S. personnel at military prisons. Click below for details:
• Guantanamo Naval Base
• Bagram, Afghanistan
• Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Criminal investigation
• Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Taguba report
• Worldwide
• Army reserve: Training
• Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Military intelligence
Guantanamo Naval Base
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asks Navy inspector general in May to investigate the prisons at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at the Charleston, S.C., Naval Station Brig, where war-on-terror detainees are being held.
Follow-up: Ongoing
Bagram, Afghanistan
Investigation into the deaths of two inmates in December 2002, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan after complaints by human rights groups. Military coroners rule the deaths homicide.
Follow-up: Ongoing, although the military says that procedures have been modified at the Afghan facility.
Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Criminal investigation
Criminal investigation into the treatment of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad after complaints made by a soldier in January 2004.
Follow-up: Six Army soldiers from the 800th Military Police Brigade charged in March with various offenses including dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts.
Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Taguba report
Gen. Ricardo Sanchez orders an investigation in January into abuses at Abu Ghraib to be conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.
Follow-up: In a lengthy report, Taguba concludes in March that "several U.S. Army soldiers have committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law." Six noncommissioned and commissioned officers receive letters of reprimand.
Worldwide
Army’s inspector general office in February launches an investigation of "detention operations around the world" to ensure humane, normal policies are followed.
Follow-up: Ongoing
Army reserve: Training
Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, orders an investigation in May into the state of training of Army Reserve units. The 800th is an Army Reserve unit based at Fort Totten, N.Y.
Follow-up: Ongoing
Abu Ghraib, Iraq: Military intelligence
Army Maj. Gen. George Fay, the service's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, launches an investigation in May into the possible involvement of military intelligence personnel in the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.
Follow-up: Ongoing
Sources: Department of Defense, Associated Press • Print this |
