US denies prior knowledge of abuse

Daily Telegraph
Jun. 19, 2007

THE White House today insisted that President George W. Bush learned about abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison from media reports, refuting a former top general's assertion that Mr Bush likely knew about the scandal before it broke.

"The President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on television," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel in Crawford, Texas, where Mr Bush is spending the weekend at his ranch.

Mr Stanzel was responding to questions about a New Yorker magazine report quoting the top military investigator of the Abu Ghraib scandal, retired Army Major General Antonio Taguba, as saying "the president had to be aware" of the abuse of prisoners by US military guards at the facility.

In the magazine interview, Maj-Gen Taguba also said former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had initially denied knowledge of the lurid photographs of prisoner abuse, when he met him on May 6, 2004, two months after the scandal broke.

At best, Maj-Gen Taguba said: "Rumsfeld was in denial ... The photographs were available to him - if he wanted to see them".

Referring to Mr Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony before Congress in which he said he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Maj-Gen Taguba said Mr Rumsfeld was "trying acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves".

The photographs taken by US jailers humiliating prisoners who were naked or hooded, on leashes or piled in a pyramid, rocked the world, becoming one of the few things Mr Bush has said he regretted about the war.

Maj-Gen Taguba said that he described to Rumsfeld what he termed the "torture" of "a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum", the magazine reported.

The ex-general, who retired in January, spoke of other, undisclosed material on the Abu Ghraib abuse, including descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees.

He also told the magazine he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee", adding that the video was never made public or mentioned in any court or in public.

Maj-Gen Taguba said that all high-level officials had avoided scrutiny while the jail keepers at Abu Ghraib were tried in courts-martial.

"From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Maj-Gen Taguba told the New Yorker, adding that his orders were to investigate the military police only and not their superiors.

"These (military police) troops were not that creative," he said.

"Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority," he told the magazine.

Aware his remarks would open him to criticism from his military peers, Maj-Gen Taguba said, "the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib".

"We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values.

"The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."