Published: August 21 2004 10:39
The US treatment of its detainees is set to return to the centre of national political debate next week when a damaging new US army report is released to Congress. It is likely to show a level of complicity by top levels of the military in the prisoner abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that a US army investigation said abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison resulted from failures of leadership at the highest levels of US command, according to unnamed senior defence officials.
The report is expected to cast aside assertions by the White House and the Defense Department that abuses at Abu Ghraib were the fault solely of low-ranking soldiers who acted on their own initiative.
A combination of failures in leadership, lack of discipline, and absolute confusion at the prison led to the abuse, the Post reported. The report is likely to examine the role of Gen Ricardo Sanchez, who was replaced as the top commander in Iraq last month.
When the notorious photographs of US soldiers brutalising prisoners at Abu Ghraib emerged in May, they sparked public outrage and several high-profile hearings on Capitol Hill.
This investigation, led by Maj Gen George Fay, is expected to widen the scope of culpability from seven military policemen who have been charged with abuse to include nearly 20 low-ranking soldiers who could face criminal prosecution in military courts.
Four US soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison are to attend pre-trial hearings at a US base in Germany on Monday.
The latest revelations are likely to be part of the discussion when Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, meets President George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, on Monday.
During a heated presidential campaign Mr Bush has strived to convince an increasingly sceptical American public that invading Iraq was the right decision. But the findings, in addition to the US military commission proceedings at Guantánamo Bay which is to start next week, are likely to be a thorn in Mr Bush's side in coming weeks.
Fifteen Guantánamo detainees, out of a total of 585, are the first to face the preliminary hearings of the military commission on Mr Bush's decision that there is reason to believe they committed war crimes. Four of these are expected to claim that the government obtained confessions and evidence through coercive techniques, including torture. The commission hearing is different from the review hearings aimed at determining whether detainees are rightly classified as enemy combatants.
Meanwhile, an American physician and bio-ethicist has contended, in an article published on Friday in The Lancet, a British medical journal, that doctors working in the US military in Iraq had collaborated with US interrogators in the abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison.
Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota, called for an official investigation into the role physicians and other medical staff may have played at the prison, saying the US military medical system failed to protect the human rights of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay.