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Iraqi ghost detainees could number 100 { September 10 2004 }

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   http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1301713,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1301713,00.html

Iraqi 'ghost detainees' could number 100

Staff and agencies
Friday September 10, 2004

A US senate committee has been told that up to 100 "ghost detainees" could have been held at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq because the CIA did not register all prisoners, it was reported today.
Two US army generals who oversaw an internal investigation into detention facilities in Iraq originally found eight cases of prisoners being kept off official lists to hide them from the Red Cross. However, they yesterday said the true figure could be much higher.

"The number is in the dozens, to perhaps up to 100," General Paul Kern told the senate armed services committee. General George Fay put the figure at "two dozen or so", but both officers said they could not give a precise number because no records were kept on most of the CIA detainees.

Under the Geneva conventions, the temporary failure to disclose the identities of prisoners to the Red Cross is permitted under an exemption for military necessity. However, the generals said they were certain the practice used by the CIA in Iraq went far beyond that.

"The situation with [the] CIA and ghost soldiers is beginning to look like a bad movie," the Republican Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said.

The presence of the "ghost detainees" - prisoners held by the CIA outside the military's usual system of registration and care - was a key finding of the generals' investigation into abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Gen Kern told the senators that when the military permitted the CIA to bring detainees to Abu Ghraib there was an expectation "the agency would abide by our rules in our facilities, not create another set".

"But somehow that didn't happen?" asked Senator McCain. "That's correct, senator," Gen Kern replied.

The generals' report, and a separate investigation led by the former US defence secretary James Schlesinger, found that abuses of prisoners went beyond the cases shown in photographs of naked Iraqis piled on top of each other and forced into sexually humiliating poses.

Around 300 allegations of detainee deaths, torture or other mistreatment were uncovered, but neither report found evidence that the abuse had resulted from military policies.

Gen Fay said he had made several requests to the CIA station chief in Iraq for information about the detainees while compiling the report, but had received no cooperation. "I was informed that the CIA was doing its own investigation," he told the senators. "And they said that they would not provide me with the information that I requested."

Chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said the senate committee could hold a hearing on the "ghost detainee" issue.

A CIA spokesman, Mark Mansfield, declined to comment on the number of cases. "We take these matters very seriously and are determined to examine thoroughly any allegations of abuse," he told the Associated Press.

The disclosure has added to questions about the CIA's practices in Iraq, including why the agency took custody of certain Iraqi prisoners, what interrogation techniques it used, and what became of the "ghost detainees".

Harold Brown, the US defence secretary under Jimmy Carter and a member of the Schlesinger commission, told a separate committee that the entire Bush administration bore some responsibility for the abuses.

He said these included failing to send enough troops to handle the large prison population, and sowing confusion over whether the Geneva conventions applied to prisoners.

"Clearly, responsibility for failing to plan for what actually happened after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein extends all the way to the top - obviously [to] the office of the secretary of defence," he said. "But it goes beyond that. It's true of the whole administration."

He did not call for resignations, but said voters needed to deliver their verdict on US conduct in Iraq. "When it comes to overall performance, there's another way of dealing with it - and that's called an election," he added.

The US vice president, Dick Cheney, campaigning in Ohio yesterday, again repeated allegations that Saddam Hussein had harboured al-Qaida and other terrorists, and connected the Iraq war to the September 11 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

He said the US had a "similar situation" in Iraq to the one it encountered in Afghanistan when the Taliban were sheltering al-Qaida, and insisted Saddam had "provided safe harbour and sanctuary for terrorists for years".

A US commission that investigated the September 11 attacks cited contacts between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida, but said there was no "collaborative operational relationship" before the terror strikes.



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