A rchive Date
[ 30-04-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930/
Photographs lead to U.S. shake-up at prison in Iraq
Bush calls pictures disgusting as Arab world reacts in anger, horror
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 6:32 p.m. ET April 30, 2004
The former head of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been sent to Iraq to ensure proper conditions in prisons there after photographs apparently showed U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, the military said Friday.
President Bush said he was deeply disgusted by the apparent abuse and vowed that those responsible would be “taken care of.”
Arabs expressed outrage at the graphic photographs, which were shown on television screens Friday across the Middle East.
The photos appeared to show soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad posing and laughing as naked male prisoners were stacked in a pyramid or made to simulate sex acts with one another.
The U.S. military holds several thousand prisoners at Abu Ghraib, most of them rounded up on suspicion of carrying out attacks against U.S.-led forces. The prison was the most notorious of former President Saddam Hussein’s detention centers, where jailers were alleged to have tortured and killed thousands of Iraqis.
New manager: No ‘moral high ground’
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, agreed that there was “no excuse” for the alleged abuse, which has led to charges against six soldiers.
Kimmitt said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the former head of operations at the Guantanamo base, where detainees from the U.S. military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have been held without charges or legal representation, some for more than 2½ years, had been sent to Abu Ghraib as deputy manager for detention operations.
Kimmitt said Miller would help ensure proper detention and interrogation practices in Iraq. He said Iraq’s U.S. occupiers were training jailers to prevent a repeat of the events that were photographed at Abu Ghraib, which he said did not accurately reflect the intentions of the U.S. military.
Miller told NBC News in an interview last month that the mistreatment of prisoners ate at U.S. credibility.
“If we can’t follow the rules, then we lose all the moral high ground about who we are and what we do,” he said.
Bush expresses ‘deep disgust’
Bush told reporters in Washington after talks with Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, “I shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated.”
I didn’t like it one bit,” Bush added. “But I also want to remind people that those few people who did that do not reflect the nature of the men and women we’ve sent overseas. That’s not the way the people are. It’s not their character, that are serving our nation in the cause of freedom.”
Bush promised that “there will be an investigation” and that any soldiers proven to have mistreated prisoners would “be taken care of.”
White House press secretary Scott McClellan called the abuses “despicable” and said the military would pursue those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law.”
McClellan said Bush has “known about it [the charges] for a while,” but he did not say which images the president had seen.
In March, the Army announced that six members of the 800th Military Police Brigade faced court-martial for allegedly abusing about 20 prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The charges included dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts with another person.
In addition to those criminal charges, the military has recommended disciplinary action against seven officers who helped run the prison, including Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, commander of the 800th Brigade, who could be relieved of her command or blocked from promotion or receive a letter of reprimand after a noncriminal administrative investigation.
Images inflame Arab world
The White House was scrambling to stanch world outrage at the photographs, which Arab television stations led their newscasts with Friday. Al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news channel, said the pictures were evidence of the “immoral practices” of U.S. forces.
The images, first broadcast Wednesday night in the United States on CBS’s “60 Minutes II,” were shown on Al-Jazeera and on Dubai-based Al-Arabiya with the nudity of the prisoners digitally blurred.
The images were potentially inflammatory in an Arab world already angry at the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Arabs generally consider public nudity dishonorable.
Among the images shown by the news channels was that of a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. CBS reported that the prisoner was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted, although in reality the wires were not connected to a power supply.
Both stations also showed a photograph of a female U.S. soldier standing by a naked hooded prisoner. The soldier is pointing at the prisoner’s genitals, which are blurred out, and grinning at the camera.
The stations also broadcast a picture of several naked men intertwined as if they were engaging in a sex act.
“This will increase the sense of dissatisfaction among Iraqis toward the Americans,” said a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Mahmoud Othman. “The resistance people will try to make use of such painful incidents.”
Mustafa Rageh, a prominent Yemeni human rights activist, said “such hideous scenes are severely violating human rights’ basic principles” and added: “I believe lots of similar scenes are still hidden, and what we have seen today is just a sample.”
Amnesty International issued a statement from its London headquarters Friday warning that evidence of torture “will exacerbate an already fragile situation.”
“The prison was notorious under Saddam Hussein,” it said. “It should not be allowed to become so again.”
War dead dominate U.S. coverage
In contrast to media outlets in Europe and parts of the Middle East, where photographs of the reported torture were prominently displayed and decried, newspapers in the United States featured the images of the fallen - which carried their own controversy.
The Washington Post, which ran three full pages of pictures of war dead, offered the prison torture story and photographs deep inside its Friday editions, focusing on the military shake-up caused by the scandal.
Neither of Chicago’s big dailies - the Tribune and the Sun-Times - ran the photographs, although the Tribune published a story on the scandal.
In Detroit, which has the biggest concentration of Arabs outside the Middle East, neither the Free Press nor the News ran the torture photos.
USA Today, the largest U.S. general-circulation daily paper, published thumbnail-size photos of 116 U.S. soldiers killed during April on its front page and bypassed the Iraq photos entirely.
David D. Perlmutter, a historian of war and media at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said the decision showed that U.S. editors understood what kind of war coverage interested U.S. readers.
“The torture pictures are absolutely irrelevant,” said Perlmutter, the author of “Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyberage.”
“Americans care about American soldiers, and only journalistic and political and academic elites fret about pictures of collateral damage,” he said. “... If you start talking to the public, you’ll find people sympathizing with the soldiers.”
MSNBC.com, a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC, is not publishing any of the images because of restrictions imposed by CBS News.
NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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