Rush for intelligence 'catastrophe' in the making

WITHIN hours of the images of US soldiers beating and humiliating Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison being revealed in April 2004, President Bush was confronted with the most damaging public relations disaster of his presidency.
Since then, and despite the President’s apologies, Abu Ghraib has, for critics, become a byword for American hypocrisy and brutality. They saw the abuse committed there as the result of an Administration that condoned torture, and it greatly impeded Mr Bush’s aim to stabilise Iraq and spread democracy in the Arab world.

The scandal continues to haunt the White House. Its seeds germinated in the middle of 2003, when the prison, located on the outskirts of Baghdad, was turned over to US control to house the growing number of Iraqis rounded up in the early days of what was to become a deep-rooted insurgency. Desperate to glean intelligence from the prisoners, the Administration sent Major-General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to travel to Abu Ghraib in August 2003 to make recommendations. His team included CIA officers, who were to oversee interrogations in some of the high-security cell blocks.

In charge of prisoners in one of these blocks was a military police unit commanded by Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, a reservist. Between October and November 2003 a group of her soldiers took photographs as they subjected dozens of Iraqis to abuse. On April 29, 2004, some of the photographs were televised, triggering worldwide condemnation. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, called the photographs a catastrophe.

Nine US reservists have been convicted of abusing detainees. No officers have been prosecuted, despite claims by the reservists and human rights groups that the abuse was implicitly condoned by authorities at the prison and the result of ambiguous guidelines from Washington.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2078861,00.html