Prisoner deaths linked to Americans rises to as many as 14
WASHINGTON (AP) – The number of prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan known to be under U.S. criminal investigation or already blamed on Americans rose to as many as 14 on Wednesday. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was called to testify before Congress Friday on the prisoner abuse and its ramifications. And new focus was put on the question of possible deeper problems within the military police unit running the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Rumsfeld will testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose chairman, John Warner, R-Va., said he had confidence in the secretary. But some Democrats seemed less sure.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said that if adequate answers to questions about the abuse of prisoners were not forthcoming, then top officials, including Rumsfeld, should step down.
“If it goes all the way to Rumsfeld, then he should resign,” Biden told the “Today” program on NBC. “Who is in charge?”
Coupled with the Iraq war’s mounting death toll – it rose to 758 U.S. troops on Wednesday, according to the Pentagon’s count – and rising financial costs of the war, the prisoner abuse story has become a major political burden for the White House during an election year.
The Army had disclosed on Tuesday that its Criminal Investigation Division was probing 10 prisoner deaths and that two other deaths already had been ruled homicides. On Wednesday, an intelligence official said the CIA inspector general was examining two additional deaths involving agency interrogators.
It was not clear if there was overlap between what the CIA and Army announced, and officials said they could not clarify the numbers.
It also was not clear Wednesday whether the June 6 death of an Iraqi prisoner at a U.S. military detention facility near the city of Nasiriyah, for which two Marines face a court-martial, is among the cases cited by the Army.
There was considerable evidence that the abuse incidents were not isolated occurrences.
When Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, ordered an investigation in January into reports of prisoner abuse and other issues at Abu Ghraib prison, he said there appeared to be systemic problems within the military police unit running the prison.
The commander of that unit, the 800th Military Police Brigade, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, has said since returning to the United States that she knew nothing of the abuses. She said U.S. military intelligence actually controlled the facility where interrogations took place.
Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army provost marshal, went to Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq last fall to assess their operation.
He told a Pentagon news conference on Tuesday that he saw “tension” at Abu Ghraib between the military police, under Karpinski’s command, and the military intelligence people, who were commanded by a lower-level officer.
A central question yet to be answered by the Army is whether the MPs were directed by military intelligence to “soften up” Iraqi prisoners before their interrogations to make them more compliant.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said MPs are not trained for that task.
“Their job is to provide a safe and secure environment for those that we detain,” he told Fox News.
In the report he compiled after his visit, Ryder said military police should not, according to Army Regulation 190-8, be involved in “setting favorable conditions” for interrogations. The “conditioning” of prisoners is a euphemism for breaking down their resistance.
The Army regulation says, “All persons captured, detained, interned or otherwise held in U.S. armed forces custody during the course of conflict will be given humanitarian care and treatment from the moment they fall into the hands of U.S. forces until final release or repatriation.”
The Army said on Tuesday that in addition to the reported cases of abuse, its Criminal Investigations Division had examined 25 prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since December 2002.
Twelve of those were ruled to have resulted from undetermined or natural causes, and one was ruled a justifiable homicide.
Ten of the 25 are still under investigation and two were ruled homicides. One of the homicides resulted in a soldier being dismissed from the Army but not jailed or court-martialed, and the other homicide was referred to the Justice Department because it involved a CIA interrogator, the Army said.
On Wednesday, an intelligence official said that the CIA inspector general is investigating two other deaths involving CIA interrogators. One took place at an Afghan prison near the Pakistan border in June 2003 and involved an independent contractor working for the CIA. The other death occurred at an unspecified location in Iraq and involved a CIA interrogator.