New Abu Ghraib abuse photos emerge

SYDNEY - An Australian television station last night broadcast what it said were previously unpublished images of abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, fuelling more Arab anger against the United States.

The Special Broadcasting Service's "Dateline" current affairs programme said the images were recorded at the same time as the now-infamous pictures of US soldiers abusing Abu Ghraib detainees which sparked international outrage in 2004.

Some of the newly broadcast pictures suggest further abuse such as killing, torture and sexual humiliation, Dateline said.

The grainy, still photographs and video images show prisoners, some bleeding or hooded, bound to beds and doors, sometimes with a smiling American guard beside them.

They include two naked men handcuffed together, a pile of five naked detainees photographed from the rear, and a dog straining at a leash close to the face of a crouching man wearing a bright orange jumpsuit.

The images were swiftly re-broadcast by Arab satellite television stations and several news organisations, including American ABC News television, showed them on their websites.

They stirred up more anger among Arabs, already incensed by the publication on Sunday of images of British soldiers apparently beating Iraqi youths and by cartoons satirising the Prophet Mohammad printed in European papers this month.

"This is truly American ugliness that no other country in the world can compete with," journalist Saleh al-Humaidi told Reuters in Yemen.

"The Americans ought to apologise to mankind for their government's lie to the world that it is fighting for freedom and that it came to Iraq to save it from Saddam Hussein's oppression," he said.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the abuses at Abu Ghraib had already been fully investigated.

"The department believes that the release of all of these images will further inflame and cause unnecessary violence in the world," Whitman said.

"...In Abu Ghraib specifically, there have been more than 25 individuals -- officer and enlisted -- that have been held accountable for criminal acts and other failures."

The American Civil Liberties Union in New York said the United States must aggressively investigate the abuses.

"The important question now is how the government is going to respond and whether the government is finally going to make a serious effort to hold senior policy makers responsible," said Steven Shapiro, legal director with the ACLU in New York.

Shapiro urged Washington to appoint an independent counsel to investigate "who is responsible and do we have safeguards in place to be sure that it doesn't happen again."

Dateline executive producer Mike Carey said the programme had obtained a file containing hundreds of pictures -- some that have been seen before and others that show new abuses.

He declined to say where or how the station had got hold of the images, but said he assumed other journalists or media also had access to them.

Several pictures appear to show US soldier Charles Graner, who was jailed for 10 years for his leading role in the Abu Ghraib abuse and who featured in the earlier batch of photographs.

In Iraq, anger grew as more television stations broadcast the images.

"It makes you feel humiliated as an Iraqi," said Mehdi Jumbas, a technician in Baghdad. "The government should act, not let this pass. They should do something about these jails... Last time what happened? Nothing."

Some of the video footage apparently shows one prisoner bashing his own head against a wall, while some photographs appear to show corpses, said Carey.

The programme said some prisoners at Abu Ghraib were killed when US soldiers ran out of rubber bullets as they tried to quell a jail riot, and resorted to using live rounds.

One picture showed what looked like cigarette burns on a man's buttocks.

Carey said other images featured prisoners in sexually humiliating acts that were deemed too graphic to broadcast.

The ACLU has been granted access to the images under US Freedom of Information provisions, but the US government is appealing the decision, Dateline said. Shapiro said the ACLU was not the source of the images and said the group had not seen them before the broadcast.

The United States also faces pressure over treatment of detainees at its naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Five UN human rights experts urged Washington this week to shut down the Guantanamo jail after concluding that force-feeding of prisoners and some interrogation techniques there amounted to torture.

- REUTERS