Washington — Additional photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq brought increasing pressure Thursday on U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after U.S. President George W. Bush tried to calm the anger of the Arab world.
The International Red Cross said Thursday that it had repeatedly asked U.S. authorities to take action over reported abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison before the recent revelations.
Noting that Red Cross representatives had been visiting the prison and talking privately with detainees, spokeswoman Nada Doumani said in Geneva, “We were aware of what was going on, and based on our findings we have repeatedly requested the U.S. authorities to take corrective action.”
Citing what it called “the botched handling” of the abuse investigation and a his overall decisions about the Iraq war, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said in a Thursday editorial that “Rumsfeld should resign and take his top deputies with him.”
Related Articles
Asked on CBS's The Early Show whether Mr. Bush should fire Mr. Rumsfeld, Senator John McCain declined Thursday to “presume to tell the president what he should do.” The Arizona Republican added, however, that “it's obvious that there's a lot of explaining that Secretary Rumsfeld and others have to do, including why Congress was never informed as to this.”
White House aides said Mr. Bush had chastised Mr. Rumsfeld for failing to tell him about pictures of prisoner mistreatment.
Mr. Bush's administration asked Congress on Wednesday for an additional $25-billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while also dealing with the army's acknowledgment that at least a dozen deaths at prisons and detention camps remained under scrutiny by criminal investigators.
The CIA's inspector-general also was looking into three deaths that may have involved agency officers or contractors, intelligence officials said. It was unclear how many of these CIA investigations involved the same prison deaths as the military's investigators, although army officials said at least one did.
In Iraq, the new general in charge of prisons apologized for the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, and troops launched a new offensive against the followers of a rebel cleric.
Mr. Rumsfeld was summoned by angry legislators to testify on Capitol Hill on Friday, while senators — Republicans and Democrats alike — discussed a resolution to condemn the abuses.
Mr. Bush went on Arabic TV on Wednesday and said Americans were appalled by the abuse and deaths of Iraqi prisoners at the hands of U.S. soldiers. He promised that “justice will be delivered.”
“The people in the Middle East must understand that this was horrible,” Mr. Bush said. He appeared on two Arabic television networks to take control of the administration's damage-control efforts.
Mr. Bush said that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was “more than an allegation, in this case, actual abuse — we saw the pictures. There will be a full investigation.” He said he retained confidence in Mr. Rumsfeld.
White House aides, however, said Mr. Bush let Mr. Rumsfeld know in recent days that he was “not satisfied” with the way he was informed about the unfolding scandal.
In particular, Mr. Bush was unhappy about learning of the pictures only when they were broadcast, the aides said, insisting that they not be identified.
Mr. Rumsfeld also did not know about the images of naked prisoners and gloating U.S. soldiers until CBS-TV broadcast them, a senior White House official said.
The Washington Post, in its Thursday editions, said it had obtained a new batch of more than 1,000 digital photos from Iraq. The newspaper said the photos ranged from snapshots depicting everyday military life to graphic images of various kinds of abuse. One posted on the paper's Internet showed a female soldier holding a leash that goes around a naked man's neck at Abu Ghraib prison. Friends and relatives of the soldier with the leash said the photo must have been staged, the Post said.
Reaction in the region to Mr. Bush's remarks on Wednesday was generally skeptical.
“Bush's statements today will not restore the dignity which the tortured detainees lost,” said Sari Mouwaffaq, a Baghdad mechanic. “Bush's apology, or his attempt to find excuses, has no value to us.”
But Raad Youssef, a 49-year-old teacher in Baghdad, said that during Saddam Hussein's rule, “there were many genocides that were committed and nobody dared to reveal them at that time and now officials of the former regime did not try to apologize. Bush's attempt to repair the damage is a good thing in my opinion.”
