Probes of Detainee Deaths Reported
Bush to Appear On Arab TV; Rice Apologizes
By Bradley Graham and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page A01
Two Iraqi prisoners were killed by U.S. soldiers last year, and 20 other detainee deaths and assaults remain under criminal investigation in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of a total of 35 cases probed since December 2002 for possible misconduct by U.S. troops in those two countries, Army officials reported yesterday.
The tally emerged on a day U.S. military officials, struggling to contain growing outrage over the handling of detainees, insisted they had been quick to respond to allegations of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. But Gen. George Casey, the Army's vice chief of staff, acknowledged that the actions there of military guards and interrogators had amounted to "a complete breakdown in discipline."
Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, publicly apologized to the Arab world for the mistreatment, and White House officials said President Bush would appear on Arab television in an effort to counter the damage.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered public assurances that those responsible for the misconduct would be held accountable and announced a further widening of Pentagon investigations into the military's treatment of detainees. He said he had ordered the Navy to look into operations at two prisons outside Iraq and Afghanistan holding terrorist suspects -- the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the naval brig at Charleston, S.C.
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld appeared on the defensive as he was peppered with questions about why he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had taken days to read an internal Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison. Pentagon leaders also faced a sharp rebuke from Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress, who accused them of not having been forthcoming earlier about the problems at the prison.
"We need to know why we weren't told what went on," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after a closed-door briefing by Army officials to the Armed Services Committee.
Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) complained that when Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials came to Capitol Hill last week -- hours before CBS's "60 Minutes II" first aired photographs of Iraqi prisoners being physically abused and sexually humiliated -- they neglected to mention the coming disclosure.
"Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all?" he asked. "That is inexcusable; it's an outrage."
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) agreed when asked whether he also was concerned that the administration had not alerted Congress before the CBS program. "If we're going to be part and a partner in this war on terror, then we ought to be completely briefed, not just briefed on things they want us to hear," he said.
But while condemnation of the reported abuses came from both sides of the political aisle, members split along party lines over the question of whether Congress should conduct special hearings into the allegations. Several Democrats urged such a move, but Republicans DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee opposed the idea, saying regular congressional committees could provide sufficient oversight.
"I'm sure that our committees are going to be asking the right questions," DeLay said. "But a full-fledged congressional investigation -- that's like saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street."
Human Rights Watch, a leading human rights organization, called yesterday for a broad public investigation of all detention centers around the world run by the U.S. military and CIA. The CIA operates an unknown number of small prisons for suspected terrorists overseas.
"The brazenness with which the U.S. soldiers involved conducted themselves suggests they thought they had nothing to hide from their superiors," they wrote in a letter to Rice. A probe of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison "does not nearly go far enough to reverse the extraordinary harm these abuses have caused."
Of the 35 criminal investigations into specific cases of possible mistreatment of detainees begun by the Army in the past year-and-a-half, 25 have involved deaths and 10 resulted from allegations of assault, said Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the Army's provost marshal and head of the service's Criminal Investigation Division. The large majority of the cases occurred in Iraq.
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