US soldiers alleged to have tortured Iraqi prisoners

1.00pm - From DAVID USBORNE in New York

The United States military has announced that it is pursuing a widening criminal investigation into allegations that its own soldiers committed acts of abuse, humiliation and torture against Iraqi prisoners as photographs of the purported incidents were aired for the first time on American network television.

The CBS network broadcast pictures said to have been taken last November and December inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad where coalition forces were holding hundreds of prisoners captured after the invasion of Iraq. One showed Iraqis naked except for hoods stacked into a human pyramid.

In March, US officials revealed that six soldiers faced courts martial for possible violations of the rights of Iraqi prisoners they had been guarding. But at the time, they offered few details.

Following the airing of the photographs, they now admit that the affair has become even more far-reaching.

In addition to the criminal charges against the six, all military police belonging to the 800th Brigade, investigators have recommended disciplinary action against seven US officers who helped run the prison, including Brigadier General Jancie Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Brigade.

She and seven other officers implicated in the case face being relieved of their commands.

The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Washington, which has emphasised repeatedly its record of liberating the Iraqi people from the inhumane repression of Saddam Hussein. The pictures from inside the prison graphically show some of the alleged incidents that are at the heart of the probe.

CBS said it had been in possession of the photographs for two weeks but had held off airing its report for two weeks at the request of the Pentagon.

One picture depicts an Iraqi soldier standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. He was reportedly left on the box for a long period of time and told that he faced electrocution if he fell off. Another shows prisoners kneeling on each other, naked except for hoods covering their heads, to form the pyramid. A different picture reveals naked prisoners being forced to pretend to have sex with one another.

Moreover, many of the photographs show the American guards, members of the military police, apparently laughing at the soldiers and displaying signs of encouragement, smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs to each other. An English slur was scrawled on the skin of one of the men in the pyramid.

In Baghdad, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the deputy commander of coalition forces in Iraq, told reporters that the photographs were among evidence being scrutinised as part of the on-going investigation.

The charges against the six range from dereliction of duty to cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another person. Twenty Iraqi prisoners were involved.

The investigation began when a US soldier from the prison reported the abuse and turned over the photographs that also found their way to CBS.

"That soldier said, 'There are some things going on here that I can't live with,'" Gen. Kimmitt said, adding that the abuse was shameful for the whole US military.

"We're appalled," he conceded.

"These are our fellow soldiers, these are the people we work with every day, they represent us, they wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down. If we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect, we can't ask that other nations do that to our soldiers."

On the CBS show '60 Minutes II', news anchor Dan Rather interviewed one of the American soldiers who have been charged.

Sergeant Chip Frederick, who plans to plead innocent, asserted that he and his colleagues had had no proper guidance from commanders on how to treat the prisoners. Nor, he said, had they been given access to provisions of the Geneva Convention on the proper treatment of prisoners.

"We had no support, no training whatsoever, and I kept asking my chain of command for certain things, rules and regulations, and it just wasn't happening," Sgt. Frederick said.

However, the programme also showed a segment of an e-mail Sgt. Frederick sent home to his family at the time telling how easy it was to wear the Iraqi prisoners down.

"We've had a very high rate with our styles of getting them to break - they usually end up breaking within hours," he wrote.

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Herald Feature: Iraq