The abuse of Iraqi prisoners reflected a failure of leadership in the US armed forces, the general who investigated the mistreatment said on Tuesday, but he said he found no evidence that American soldiers had acted on the direct orders of higher-ups.
Asked directly in "your own soldier's language" what had caused the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison, once the feared symbol of Saddam Hussein's dictatorial rule, US Army Major General Antonio Taguba recited a litany of ills.
"Failure in leadership, sir, from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever and no supervision. Supervisory omission was rampant," Taguba, the author of a Pentagon report on the abuse, told the latest Senate hearing on the scandal, which has drawn world-wide outrage.
But Taguba told the Senate Armed Services Committee he did "not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did. I believe that they did it on their own volition."
The hearing followed an all-day grilling of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday, at which Rumsfeld apologised for the abuse but said he would not step down simply to appease his political enemies.
At the Pentagon's insistence, Under Secretary of Defence Stephen Cambone, who is in charge of intelligence, and other Pentagon officials also appeared with Taguba to testify on the scandal that has sparked international outrage and calls for Rumsfeld's resignation.
Coalition military intelligence officers estimated that about 70 percent to 90 percent of the thousands of prisoners detained in Iraq had been "arrested by mistake," according to a report by Red Cross given to the Bush administration last year and leaked this week.
The report said the mistreatment of prisoners apparently tolerated by US and other coalition forces in Iraq involved widespread abuse that was "in some cases tantamount to torture."
Democrats on the committee were irked that the Pentagon balked at plans for Taguba to testify by himself, calling it an "attempt to dilute Taguba's testimony," a Democratic aide said. "Taguba is known as a straight-talker."
Taguba's report and photographs shown around the world of naked prisoners stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts at the prison near Baghdad have shocked Americans and set off an international furore that has posed a serious setback to US efforts to stabilise Iraq.
In his report, completed in March, Taguba cited the "systematic and illegal abuses of detainees," and said between October and December 2003, "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees."
While his 53-page report castigated the prison operation, Taguba told the committee he did not see evidence it resulted from a deliberate policy on extracting information from detainees.
"I think it was a matter of soldiers with their interaction with military intelligence personnel who were perceived or thought to be competent authority ... influencing their action to set the conditions for successful interrogations," he said.
But Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's top Democrat, said "the despicable acts" shown in the report "not only reek of abuse, they reek of an organised effort and methodical preparation for interrogation."
Levin said the abuses "were not the spontaneous action of lower ranking enlisted personnel," but "attempts to extract information from prisoners by abusive and degrading methods were planned and suggested by others."
Congress is now preparing to see a new set of photographs and a video that Rumsfeld warned may be even more shocking.
Comments
Comments are closed.