Bush apologises

WASHINGTON: US President George W Bush told Jordan’s King Abdullah II yesterday that he was sorry for the humiliation suffered by Iraqi prisoners and their families because of abusive American jailers. “I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,” the Republican president said during a Rose Garden appearance with the Jordanian monarch. “I told him I was equally sorry that people who had seen those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America. I assured him that Americans like me didn’t appreciate what we saw.”

Bush’s remarks ech-oed apologies offered in recent days only by his top aides, including national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Up to now, the president has not offered his own apology during public appearances, including a pair of Wednesday interviews with Arab-language television channels intended to quell international outrage over prisoner abuse. The president instead had condemned the mistreatment and vowed that those responsible for misdeeds would be punished.

Probes of detainee deaths

Two Iraqi prisoners were killed by US soldiers last year, and 20 other detainee deaths and assaults remain under criminal investigation in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of a total of 35 cases probed since December 2002 for possible misconduct by US troops in those two countries, Army officials reported yesterday. The tally emerged on a day US military officials, struggling to contain growing outrage over the handling of detainees, insisted they had been quick to respond to allegations of abuse at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. But Gen George Casey, the Army’s vice chief of staff, acknowledged that the actions there of military guards and interrogators had amounted to “a complete breakdown in discipline.”

Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld offered public assurances that those responsible for the misconduct would be held accountable and announced a further widening of Pentagon investigations into the military’s treatment of detainees. He said he had ordered the Navy to look into operations at two prisons outside Iraq and Afghanistan holding terrorist suspects — the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the naval brig at Charleston, SC. At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld appeared on the defensive as he was peppered with questions about why he and Gen Richard B Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had taken days to read an internal Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison.

Human Rights Watch, a leading human rights organisation, called for a broad public investigation of all detention centres around the world run by the US military and CIA. The CIA operates an unknown number of small prisons for suspected terrorists overseas. “The brazenness with which the US soldiers involved conducted themselves suggests they thought they had nothing to hide from their superiors,” they wrote in a letter to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. A probe of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison “does not nearly go far enough to reverse the extraordinary harm these abuses have caused.” Of the 35 criminal investigations into specific cases of possible mistreatment of detainees begun by the Army in the past year-and-a-half, 25 have involved deaths and ten resulted from allegations of assault, said Maj Gen Donald J Ryder, the Army’s provost marshal and head of the service’s Criminal Investigation Division. The large majority of the cases occurred in Iraq.

Twelve of the deaths were attributed either to a natural cause, such as a heart attack or illness, or to undetermined factors because the bodies had been buried quickly by relatives. The death of an Iraqi detainee, who was shot last year trying to escape from the Abu Ghraib prison, was declared a justifiable homicide. In the death of another detainee at another Iraqi prison, who was shot while assaulting a US soldier with rocks, the soldier was found guilty of using excessive force. He was demoted to the rank of private and discharged from the Army in place of a court-martial. The CIA inspector general is investigating three deaths of detainees involving CIA interrogators. One took place at Abu Ghraib last November, and a second at another detention facility in Iraq. The third death, which an Army investigation refers to as a homicide, involves a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan.