May 10, 2004
US soldier to face hearing in Baghdad over prisoner abuse
The first American soldier to be court martialled for prisoner abuse in Iraq is to face a public hearing in Baghdad next week.
Specialist Jeremy Sivits, 24, is a military policeman who was working at Abu Ghraib prison, where most of the evidence of abuse has been collected.
Sivits, who faces three charges, including one of maltreating detainees, is one of seven military police to be charged with abusing prisoners in the prison.
Sivits took many of the photographs, military sources say.
The coalition military spokesman in Baghdad, Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, announced the details of the court martial.
"The court martial, US v Specialist Jeremy Sivits, is docketed for May 19th, and subject to final coordination and approval, the trials will be held at a location within this convention centre here in Baghdad," he said.
May 11, 2004
One of the employees involved in the interrogations at Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International, a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted, as never before in U.S. military history, to handle sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety concerns, but said that the company still had not heard anything directly from the government about Stefanowicz.)
Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the investigation said. The most important prisonersthe suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value Detaineeswere housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to requests from military intelligence was felt throughout the system.
Not everybody went along. A company captain in a military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees awake around the clock until they began talking. "I said, 'No, we will not do that,'" the captain said. "The M.I. commander comes to me and says, 'What is the problem? We're stressed, and all we are asking you to do is to keep them awake.' I ask, 'How? You've received training on that, but my soldiers don't know how to do it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep someone awake, and he doesn't know how to do it, he's going to get creative.'" The M.I. officer took the request to the captain's commander, but, the captain said, "he backed me up.
"It's all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were failed by their commandersboth low-ranking and high," the captain said.
May 13, 2004
MRumsfeld visits Abu Ghraib prison
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has visited the US-run prison at the centre of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
Hours after US lawmakers viewed "sadistic" new photographs of abuse, Mr Rumsfeld arrived at what was Saddam Hussein's most notorious prison, where seven US military police reservists are charged with sexually and physically tormenting detainees.
Mr Rumsfeld had told reporters he wanted to hear from those involved in the day-to-day work of detainee operations.
As international anger at US conduct in Iraq and at its Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba mounts, General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who visited with Mr Rumsfeld, said: "We absolutely have the high moral ground".
Once notorious as Saddam Hussein's torture chamber, Abu Ghraib has become a symbol of the United States' failure to win over many Iraqis despite ridding them of Saddam a year ago.
With just seven weeks to go until Washington hands sovereignty back to an Iraqi government, it is a serious problem for Mr Rumsfeld.
He denied on the secret 15-hour flight from Washington that the Pentagon was trying to cover up the scandal which emerged when proceedings were opened in January against the seven military police, who have now been charged, but exploded into a global issue with the release of soldiers' photographs two weeks ago.
"If anybody thinks that I'm (in Iraq) to throw water on a fire, they're wrong," Mr Rumsfeld told reporters on board.
"We care about the detainees being treated right. We care about soldiers behaving right. We care about command systems working."
The embattled secretary, travelling under tight security to a country where more than 700 US troops have died since last year, earlier landed at Baghdad airport and held meetings with senior US military officers in the capital.
US Defence officials said the sudden trip by Mr Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, was triggered by the recent publication of photographs of US military guards humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners.
"This is a terrible tragedy. We're not going to ever say it's not," Gen Myers said.
But "I think we absolutely have the high moral ground" in Iraq, he told reporters.
Mr Rumsfeld met Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new US military commander of US-run prisons in Iraq, who said he had totally reorganised the operation of Abu Ghraib, partly by separating the units responsible for overseeing incarceration from those responsible for intelligence and interrogation.
"I am absolutely convinced that we laid down the foundations of how you detain people in a humane manner. And it is unequivocal in its explanation," said Miller, who previously ran the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Global outrage
Mr Rumsfeld and Gen Myers have appeared numerous times in recent days before congressional panels to answer tough questions about whether humiliation, sexual assault and violence were part of methods used to "soften up" prisoners ahead of interrogation.
Mr Rumsfeld has warned more damaging photographs, which members of Congress reviewed on Wednesday, have yet to be made public.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, whose committee had a closed-door hearing on the issue, said in addition to Abu Ghraib, two other US prisons in Iraq were mentioned in the new material.
So far three courts martial for US military personnel accused of abuse have been scheduled.
Four other military police, including two women, have also been charged and may be sent for court martial later.
-- Reuters
