Iraqis seek probe of abuse reports

BAGHDAD (AP) — A member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council yesterday demanded that Iraqi authorities investigate reports that American guards abused inmates in the very prison where Saddam Hussein’s regime tortured opponents.

“The Governing Council should investigate this, because it is the legitimate authority responsible for protecting the Iraqis,” council member Sondul Chapouk said. “During Saddam’s time, we rejected such acts, and after the liberation, we still reject them.”

Another council member, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, said the perpetrators must be punished “as war criminals” because “the dignity of an Iraqi citizen is no less than the dignity of an American.”

The scandal broadened as a British newspaper published new photographs of an Iraqi prisoner who it said was humiliated and beaten by British troops.

The Daily Mirror’s front page showed a soldier apparently urinating on the prisoner as he sat on the floor with a bag over his head. Other photos inside appeared to show a soldier jabbing the man — said to have been picked up for theft — in the groin with a rifle, and the prisoner lying on the floor with a soldier’s boot on his head.

The Mirror, the strongest voice of opposition to the war among the British press, reported that the prisoner, aged 18 to 20, was beaten savagely before being thrown from a moving truck. His fate was not known.

The newspaper said that serving soldiers from the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, one of them among the attackers, provided the photos.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said abuse of Iraqi prisoners would be “completely unacceptable.”

“I think anyone would be sickened by any thought that coalition troops had abused Iraqi prisoners,” Mr. Blair told Sky News TV.

Earlier, Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram promised a thorough and independent inquiry by the Royal Military Police.

The Sunday Telegraph said military police were expected to arrest six British soldiers.

Council member Mahmoud Othman, in the pro-U.S. Kurdish minority, warned that the accusations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad harmed the U.S. military’s image.

“The Saddam era was full of executions and torture, and we want the new Iraq clean of such images,” he said.

The six U.S. soldiers criminally charged are members of the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company, said William Lawson, uncle of one of the soldiers — Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II.

The others charged are Pvt. Jeremy Sivits, Spc. Charles A. Graner, Sgt. Javal Davis, Spc. Megan Ambuhl and Spc. Sabrina Harman, Mr. Lawson said. Another soldier, Lynndie England, has been reassigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., where she is being detained, he said. It was not clear whether she will be charged.

Sgt. Frederick’s father told NBC’s “Today” show that he didn’t believe the accusations.

“None of the photos that I’ve seen has shown my son abusing anybody, which I don’t think he ever would,” Ivan L. “Red” Frederick said.

The New Yorker magazine said it obtained a U.S. Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib prison.

Those abuses included threats of rape and the pouring of cold water and liquid from chemical lights on detainees, the internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said. The report said detainees were beaten with a broom handle and one was sodomized with “a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick,” the magazine reported in its May 10 issue.

Col. Jill Morgenthaler, spokeswoman for the U.S. command in Iraq, said Gen. Taguba had prepared an internal report, but she could not comment on its findings because they were classified.

Although the pictures of U.S. troops with Iraqi prisoners have not been widely published by Iraqi newspapers, many Iraqis saw them on Arabic-language satellite television stations.

“After what we saw, all Iraqis will attack them now,” Abdulilah Mohammed, 55, a Baghdad street vendor, said of the Americans.

Some photos, aired first on CBS’ “60 Minutes II,” showed two U.S. soldiers standing near naked prisoners, smiling and clowning for the camera. Another showed a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. CBS said the prisoner was told that if he fell off, he would be electrocuted, although the wires were not connected to a power supply.

Col. Morgenthaler said the six U.S. soldiers facing courts-martial did not receive in-depth training on the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of captives. Charges include dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another person.

The soldiers were reassigned to other duties in Iraq, she said, and their boss, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and at least seven others have been “suspended” from duties at Abu Ghraib.

It was not clear precisely what a suspension entails, or if it is the same as being formally relieved.

President Bush on Friday condemned the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, saying, “Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That’s not the way we do things in America. I didn’t like it one bit.”

A leading human rights group said the military should investigate whether the soldiers’ superiors ordered or tolerated the abuse.

“The brazenness with which these soldiers conducted themselves … suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.