- (Reuters) - The United States general in charge of Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq was told by a military intelligence commander that
detainees should be treated like dogs.
-
- General Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for the
military police who ran prisons in Iraq when pictures were taken showing
prisoners being abused, said she and her soldiers were being made scapegoats
for abuse ordered by others.
-
- In the interview with BBC radio, Gen Karpinski said Gen
Geoffrey Miller, who was sent to Iraq from the US prison camp at Guantanamo
Bay in Cuba, had ordered new procedures in cell blocs where Iraqis were
interrogated.
-
- "He said, at Guantanamo Bay we've learned that the
prisoners have to earn every single thing they have," Gen Karpinski
said.
-
- "He said they are like dogs and if you allow them
to believe at any point they are more than a dog then you've lost control
of them."
-
- The United States has charged low-ranking military police
officers commanded by Gen Karpinski with abuse after several of them appeared
in photographs abusing detainees.
-
- The photographs and other reports of abuse have led to
hearings in the US Congress and fuelled international outrage.
-
- Gen Karpinski, who has been suspended from her command
for failings at Abu Ghraib but not charged with any crime, said military
police would not have taken Iraqis out of their cells to pose them for
photographs without being told to do so.
-
- "I was absolutely sickened by those images and I
couldn't even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make
them go so far away from what they had been trained to do.
-
- "I will say I know my military police personnel
... well enough to know they believed they were following instructions
from a person authorised to give them instructions," she said.
-
- "We don't know yet who the individuals were that
convinced them that what they were doing was to enhance the effort overall
to find Saddam."
-
- Gen Karpinski said Gen Miller told her he planned to
"Gitmo-ize" the treatment of detainees, using a colloquial term
for Guantanamo.
-
- "He said every time we remove them from a cell (at
Guantanamo) there's two MPs (military police) that accompany them. They
have ankle chains on, they have wrist chains on and they have a belly chain
on," she said.
-
- "That was the first time I said to Gen Miller, 'Sir,
your conditions at Guantanamo Bay are different from our conditions here
in Baghdad and throughout Iraq.' You have 800 MPs to guard 640 detainees.
We have 1,300 MPs to guard almost 14,000 detainees."
-
- Asked if she was "out of the loop" she said:
"I was in my own loop. I was not in the loop that General Miller was
creating.
-
- "The intelligence operation was directed. It was
under a separate command and there was no reason for me to go out to look
at Abu Ghraib at cell bloc 1a or 1b or visit the interrogation facilities."
-
-
- http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1132556.htm
|
