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Redcross asked for investigation for prisoner abuse Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2886258http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2886258
11:25am (UK)
Red Cross Had Warned U.S. over Prisoner Abuse
"PA"
The international Red Cross said today it had repeatedly asked US authorities to take action over prisoner abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison before recent revelations about the way detainees were treated.
“We were aware of what was going on, and based on our findings we have repeatedly requested the US authorities to take corrective action,” said Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, speaking from Amman, Jordan.
“We’ve been visiting Abu Ghraib prison since last year,” Doumani said. “We are of course aware of the situation since we talk with the detainees privately.
“We get testimony from them. We visit all the premises in this place. We crosscheck information we receive from different detainees. Definitely we were aware of what was going on in Abu Ghraib.”
The scandal over the treatment of prisoners began when CBS television broadcast pictures of smiling American guards with Iraqi prisoners in humiliating positions. That unleashed a huge international outcry.
More pictures of Iraqi prisoners apparently being humiliated and abused by US soldiers were published by a newspaper in the United States today.
One image appears to show a soldier holding a leash tied around the neck of a naked man lying on the floor of an Iraqi prison.
It is just one of 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post which it claims were taken during last summer and winter.
The newspaper says the pictures were passed around military police who served at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad and some of them are similar in content to those shown in the US media which shocked the world last week.
The newspaper reported that among the photographs are images of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of each other with soldiers standing round; a naked hooded man handcuffed to a door; another naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed with a pair of women’s underwear over his face.
The pictures were reportedly seized by military investigators probing conditions at the prison.
A number of US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are already facing criminal charges.
Yesterday US president George Bush condemned any abuse as “abhorrent”, but insisted that it did not represent “the America that I know”, during an address on Arab television.
US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was called before Congress as the number of prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan under US criminal investigation or already blamed on Americans rose to as many as 14.
Rumsfeld will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose chairman, John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said he had confidence in the secretary. But some Democrats seemed less sure.
Senator Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, said that if adequate answers to questions about the abuse of prisoners were not forthcoming, then top officials, including Rumsfeld, should step down.
“If it goes all the way to Rumsfeld, then he should resign,” Biden told NBC’s Today programme. “Who is in charge?”
Coupled with the Iraq war’s mounting death toll and rising financial costs of the war, the prisoner abuse story has become a major political burden for the White House during an election year.
The US Army disclosed on Tuesday that its criminal investigation division was probing 10 prisoner deaths and that two other deaths already had been ruled as homicides. Yesterday, an intelligence official said the CIA inspector general was examining two additional deaths involving agency interrogators.
It was not clear if there was overlap between what the CIA and Army announced, and officials said they could not clarify the numbers.
A central question yet to be answered by the Army is whether Military Policemen were directed by military intelligence to ”soften up” Iraqi prisoners before their interrogations to make them more compliant.
Gen Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said MPs were not trained for that task.
The Army said on Tuesday that in addition to the reported cases of abuse, its criminal investigations division had examined 25 prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002.
Twelve of those were ruled to have resulted from undetermined or natural causes, and one was ruled a justifiable homicide.
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