- The United States military has announced that it is pursuing
a widening criminal investigation into allegations that its own soldiers
committed acts of abuse, humiliation and torture against Iraqi prisoners
as photographs of the purported incidents were aired for the first time
on American network television.
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- The CBS network broadcast pictures said to have been
taken last November and December inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad
where coalition forces were holding hundreds of prisoners captured after
the invasion of Iraq. One showed Iraqis naked except for hoods stacked
into a human pyramid.
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- In March, US officials revealed that six soldiers faced
courts martial for possible violations of the rights of Iraqi prisoners
they had been guarding. But at the time, they offered few details.
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- Following the airing of the photographs, they now admit
that the affair has become even more far-reaching.
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- In addition to the criminal charges against the six,
all military police belonging to the 800th Brigade, investigators have
recommended disciplinary action against seven US officers who helped run
the prison, including Brigadier General Jancie Karpinski, the commander
of the 800th Brigade.
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- She and seven other officers implicated in the case face
being relieved of their commands.
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- The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Washington,
which has emphasised repeatedly its record of liberating the Iraqi people
from the inhumane repression of Saddam Hussein. The pictures from inside
the prison graphically show some of the alleged incidents that are at the
heart of the probe.
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- CBS said it had been in possession of the photographs
for two weeks but had held off airing its report for two weeks at the request
of the Pentagon.
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- One picture depicts an Iraqi soldier standing on a box
with wires attached to his hands. He was reportedly left on the box for
a long period of time and told that he faced electrocution if he fell off.
Another shows prisoners kneeling on each other, naked except for hoods
covering their heads, to form the pyramid. A different picture reveals
naked prisoners being forced to pretend to have sex with one another.
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- Moreover, many of the photographs show the American guards,
members of the military police, apparently laughing at the soldiers and
displaying signs of encouragement, smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs
to each other. An English slur was scrawled on the skin of one of the men
in the pyramid.
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- In Baghdad, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy
commander of coalition forces in Iraq, told reporters that the photographs
were among evidence being scrutinised as part of the on-going investigation.
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- The charges against the six range from dereliction of
duty to cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another
person. Twenty Iraqi prisoners were involved.
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- The investigation began when a US soldier from the prison
reported the abuse and turned over the photographs that also found their
way to CBS.
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- "That soldier said, 'There are some things going
on here that I can't live with,'" Gen. Kimmitt said, adding that the
abuse was shameful for the whole US military.
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- "We're appalled," he conceded.
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- "These are our fellow soldiers, these are the people
we work with every day, they represent us, they wear the same uniform as
us, and they let their fellow soldiers down. If we can't hold ourselves
up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect, we can't
ask that other nations do that to our soldiers."
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- On the CBS show '60 Minutes II', news anchor Dan Rather
interviewed one of the American soldiers who have been charged.
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- Sergeant Chip Frederick, who plans to plead innocent,
asserted that he and his colleagues had had no proper guidance from commanders
on how to treat the prisoners. Nor, he said, had they been given access
to provisions of the Geneva Convention on the proper treatment of prisoners.
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- "We had no support, no training whatsoever, and
I kept asking my chain of command for certain things, rules and regulations,
and it just wasn't happening," Sgt. Frederick said.
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- However, the programme also showed a segment of an e-mail
Sgt. Frederick sent home to his family at the time telling how easy it
was to wear the Iraqi prisoners down.
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- "We've had a very high rate with our styles of getting
them to break - they usually end up breaking within hours," he wrote.
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- http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3563
660&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
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