Iraqi jail row dogs White House

By Roy Eccleston, Washington correspondent

TREAT them like dogs. That was the advice Janis Karpinski says she received from the US officer in charge of Guantanamo Bay when he flew to Iraq to advise on the interrogation of the detainees being held at Abu Ghraib prison.

That officer, Geoffrey Miller, denies he said any such thing. But Brigadier-General Karpinski, 51, who commanded the military police who ran the US-controlled prisons in Iraq, told The Australian she clearly recalls his instructions.

"He said during the briefing, ’These terrorists are like dogs, if you allow them to believe any differently, then you’ve lost control of your own operation’," the suspended brigadier-general said.

At Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, terror suspects "never moved from their cells without leg irons, hand irons and a belly chain" to connect them, she says General Miller told her.

General Karpinski is one of few in the US military speaking out about the torture scandal. Now suspended from duty for alleged failures of leadership – although she insists she was unaware of the abuses – she refuses to be silenced.

"I’m telling the truth," she said during an interview near her home in South Carolina, "and I have been all along."

But the full story about what happened at Abu Ghraib from last October to the end of the year – whether it was the result of official US policy or of desperate interrogators under pressure to get results – remains a mystery the Bush administration looks to be in no hurry to solve.

What is clear is that the abuses at Abu Ghraib – revealed in April in shocking photographs of naked and beaten Iraqi prisoners – were not the work of a few "bad apples" as President George W. Bush has claimed. Nor did they occur in isolation.

With each new piece of information, each new leak to the media, it becomes clearer there was a deliberate attempt within the Bush administration to justify and implement more aggressive interrogations in the wake of the September 11 attacks – even though they might cross the line into torture.

That’s not to say Washington ordered abuses to take place in Iraq – but the question remains whether Abu Ghraib was the deformed result of this new approach. And because the Bush team has not made public the policy documents that underpin their approach, nobody knows what limits it set.

With an election due in four months and the Pentagon largely left to investigate itself, there is no sign the full story is going to emerge any time soon – if at all.

A single independent investigation is clearly needed into the extent of the abuses. Instead, the politicised US Senate armed services committee has held just a few public hearings, and George Fay, a major-general, has been conducting a new inquiry for the military.

That has now been delayed because of important new developments. First, in a sign the investigation has turned up the chain of command, General Fay has asked to be relieved to allow a more senior officer to question the US commander in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez. Paul Kern will now head the investigation.

General Sanchez will be replaced, although the Pentagon insists this was just a normal rotation. But there are claims that put him at the centre of the abuse scandal.

Donald Reese, the captain who commanded the seven military police now charged with abuses, has told a lawyer for one of the accused that General Sanchez and other senior US officers knew what was taking place at Abu Ghraib.

Captain Reese would initially only testify in exchange for immunity. But a New York Times report revealing General Fay’s interest in interviewing General Sanchez mentioned that an unidentified witness was newly willing to be interviewed. That might be Captain Reese.

General Karpinski says she asked Captain Reese whether he knew about the abuses, and that he cried with deep sobs, but denied knowing anything. Now he looks to have changed his story.

General Karpinski says General Sanchez told General Miller he could have any prison he wanted to put in place more effective interrogations – and he wanted Abu Ghraib. When General Miller left, military intelligence commander Thomas Pappas, a colonel, sought to take over the interrogation blocks, she says. A month later General Sanchez gave Colonel Pappas tactical control of the jail. He has said General Miller recommended using guard dogs in interrogations and General Sanchez approved it. They deny this.

But the focus is not just on the military at Abu Ghraib. Senior Bush administration officials and lawyers in Washington also took the view that the Geneva Conventions to protect captured prisoners do not necessarily apply to "terrorists", or forbid interrogation methods many people would call torture.

For example, Antonio Taguba, the major-general who undertook the initial investigation into the Abu Ghraib photographs, condemned the practice of hiding detainees from inspectors of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors prison conditions.

General Taguba said this was deceptive, contrary to army regulations and in violation of international law.

But US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted last week he had approved, at the request of the CIA, a decision to keep at least one prisoner in Iraq out of the view of the ICRC, by not putting the man on the prison roll.

Mr Rumsfeld denied he had done anything wrong in keeping the alleged terrorist out of the Red Cross’s view, reportedly to allow uninterrupted interrogations.

The hiding of these "ghost" detainees is central to the prison abuse issue. If the ICRC does not know prisoners exist, how can the US be accountable for their treatment?

The US rights group Human Rights First claimed yesterday that terrorism suspects are being held in more than two dozen US detention centres worldwide, about half of which operate in total secrecy.

Although the Bush adminis tration says it condemns torture, it has legal advice that provides an extremely narrow definition of what torture means, as well as lengthy legal opinions saying torture may be legal.

Alberto Gonzales, the White House lawyer, wrote in early 2002 that the war on terror rendered "obsolete" Geneva Convention restrictions on prisoner interrogations.

Mr Bush has declined to spell out his thinking in detail. His response to the issue when it was raised this month was that Americans should take comfort from the fact the country was a nation of laws, and "we adhere to laws".

But that was not much comfort to anyone who read the March 2003 report from a group of White House lawyers on "detainee interrogations in the global war on terrorism", first reported in the Wall Street Journal.

The analysis, ordered by Mr Rumsfeld after CIA concerns about interrogation tactics, argued that as commander-in-chief, Mr Bush had the authority to approve any technique necessary for national security.

An earlier Justice Department memo of August 2002 claimed it "may be justified" to torture al-Qa’ida suspects. And torture was not just normal pain – it had to be severe, meaning serious pain or suffering would not even qualify as torture. While these legal defences were crafted, the US military began to use coercive methods to soften up the detainees, such as forcing them into painful stress positions, depriving them of sleep and food, hooding and stripping them. Even, it is said, treating them as less than human – like "dogs".

General Karpinski saw 2000 of the photographs showing abuse and insists the seven guards from her unit who have been charged as a result did not wake up one morning and decide to do it.

"I believe those photographs were taken by an official pho tographer, part of the military intelligence brigade, or a contractor, and that they took those pictures with the full intent of using them during interrogations to say to the new detainee, ’This is what happened to your colleagues’."

Where does ultimate responsibility lie? She does not know. She wonders what General Sanchez knew. She believes General Miller is in it "up to his neck, maybe his forehead". And General Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib by Mr Rumsfeld.

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