New pictures and further allegations deepen the mire for Bush and Rumsfeld

[Alejandro Valle Baeza <valle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Independent www.indenepndent.co.uk
New pictures and further allegations deepen the mire for Bush and Rumsfeld
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
10 May 2004


Shocking new pictures of US soldiers using dogs against naked Iraqi
prisoners emerged yesterday - along with compelling fresh evidence that
the mistreatment and abuse were a widespread practice, extending beyond
the jail of Abu Ghraib.

On the day the Pentagon announced the first court martial of one of the
seven US military police personnel so far charged in the scandal, The New
Yorker magazine published a photograph of a naked prisoner cowering in
terror in front of a pair of German shepherd dogs held on leashes by their
handlers, who are in full combat gear.

The author of the article, Seymour Hersh, says they are part of a series
that shows the dogs snarling at the Iraqi and straining at their leashes,
and then the same prisoner with at least one wound and his leg covered in
blood, apparently the result of a bite.

But even these chilling pictures may not be the end. The Pentagon now has
other photos and videos in its possession, showing acts of rape and the
desecration of a dead body, which it plans to show to various Congressmen
shortly. That alone makes it likely they will become public knowledge.

Officials fear that other damning material could be circulating privately,
and that could go public at any time. The US command in Baghdad said
yesterday that Specialist Jeremy Sivits, of the 372nd Military Police
company, would face a court martial on 19 May.

He will be the first soldier to be tried for his part in the abuse of
detainees that has created global uproar and disgust at the US, and
prompted demands for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence
Secretary, and other senior officials.

Those calls have temporarily abated, though fresh revelations could yet
make Mr Rumsfeld's position untenable. In a sign of how the White House is
circling the wagons around him, Vice President Dick Cheney praised his old
mentor as "the best Secretary of Defence in history," telling critics to
"get off the case". But Spec. Sivits and his colleagues are unlikely to be
the sole scapegoats for an episode that increasingly appears part of a
wider problem. The New Yorker article, and a detailed reconstruction of
the debacle at Abu Ghraib in at least two leading US newspapers yesterday,
blame senior commanders for putting military intelligence in charge of the
prison guards and ordering these latter to "soften up" detainees for
interrogation.

The accounts suggest that the behaviour was fostered by the
well-publicised tough line of the Bush team, which paid little heed to
international norms governing the treatment of prisoners, in its
determination to do "everything it takes" to prevail in the "war on
terror".

The scandal was "deeper and wider than I think most in this administration
understand," Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said, claiming that some 30
Pentagon investigations were under way into prisoner abuse in Iraq and
Afghanistan.

The Washington Post revealed yesterday that, in spring 2003, the Pentagon
approved new techniques for interrogations at Guantanamo Bay prison in
Cuba, including making detainees stand for long periods, depriving them of
sleep and having female interrogators question male prisoners. That
approach may well have been taken to Iraq. The military insists that the
methods did not involve torture - and the paper quoted Mark Jacobson, a
former Pentagon specialist on detainee treatment as saying the US was "not
aggressive enough" in interrogation of suspects: "I think we are too
timid."

The New Yorker cites an internal Pentagon memo urging Mr Rumsfeld "to
break the belt-and-suspenders mindset" within the military, and allow
operators in the field freer rein. Unnamed Pentagon officials accuse Mr
Rumsfeld's top civilian aides, as well General John Abizaid, in charge of
US central command, and General Ricardo Sanchez, the top US commander in
Iraq, of keeping the prisoner abuse under wraps after learning of it in
January, because they foresaw major diplomatic problems. As they kept up
the heat on the Defence Secretary, some Democrats took aim directly at the
President. Carl Levin, the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed
Services which grilled Mr Rumsfeld last Friday, said the problem reached
into the White House.

Mr Bush's aides had argued that whether to observe the Geneva Conventions
[on the treatment of prisoners of war] was "a bunch of legalese. The
President helped create the climate in which this happened," Mr Levin told
NBC's Meet the Press programme. Mr Rumsfeld in 2002 described complaints
about US treatment of prisoners as "isolated pockets of international
hyperventilation".

Publicly, the administration is sticking to its guns, that the decision to
invade Iraq was correct, and that current policies are right. But retired
General Wesley Clark, supreme commander of Nato before running
unsuccessfully for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, warned
that there was now a "two to one chance of a catastrophic outcome" in Iraq
after the latest revelations.