"Iraqi Prison Photos Show True U.S. Image"

More Abu Ghraib Prison Photos
It's the "liberation" of the Iraqi people – and it isn't pretty.
www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444

LONDON - Photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners drew international condemnation on Friday, prompting the stark conclusion that the U.S. campaign to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis is a lost cause.

"This is the straw that broke the camel's back for America," said Abdel-Bari Atwan, editor of the Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi. "The liberators are worse than the dictators." www.commondreams.org

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Saturday, May 1st, Ayinde posted:

Shock, outrage over prison photos
President Bush said Friday that he was disgusted.
"I share a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated," Bush said. "Their treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people. That's not the way we do things in America." www.cnn.com

Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
Americans came into the prison: "We had military intelligence, we had all kinds of other government agencies, FBI, CIA ... All those that I didn't even know or recognize." Frederick's letters and email messages home also offer clues to problems at the prison. He wrote that he was helping the interrogators:
"Military intelligence has encouraged and told us 'Great job.' " www.cbsnews.com

Sunday, May 2nd, News Update posted:

'Army intelligence behind Iraqi abuse'

english.aljazeera.net

A US army reserve general, whose soldiers were photographed abusing Iraqi prisoners, has said the prison cellblock involved was under the tight control of military intelligence, which may have encouraged the abuse.

Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski told The New York Times in a telephone interview that the special high-security cellblock at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad had been under the direct control of army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.

Her comments follow a report in The New Yorker magazine, which indicated that abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib may have been ordered by US military intelligence to extract information from the captives.

Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for The New Yorker, said that Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, one of six US military policemen accused of humiliating Iraqi prisoners, wrote home in January that he had "questioned some of the things" he saw inside the prison, but that "the answer I got was: 'This is how military intelligence wants it done'."

Karpinski was formally admonished in January and "quietly suspended" from commanding the 800th Military Police Brigade while under investigation.

Shifting blame

The Times quotes Karpinski as saying she believed military commanders were trying to shift the blame exclusively to her and other reservists and away from intelligence officers still at work in Iraq.

"We're disposable," she is quoted as saying. "Why would they want the active-duty people to take the blame? They want to put this on the MPs and hope that this thing goes away. Well, it's not going to go away."

Karpinski said the special cellblock, known as 1A, was one of about two dozen cellblocks in the large prison complex and was essentially off limits to soldiers who were not part of the interrogations, including virtually all of the military police under her command, the paper said.

She said she was not defending the actions of the reservists who took part in the brutality, who were part of her command.

But she added she was also alarmed that little attention has been paid to the army military intelligence unit that controlled Cellblock 1A, where her soldiers guarded the Iraqi detainees between interrogations, The Times said.

She said military intelligence officers were in and out of the cellblock "24 hours a day," often to escort prisoners to and from an interrogation centre away from the prison cells.

"They were in there at two in the morning, they were there at four in the afternoon," General Karpinski is quoted as saying. "This was no nine-to-five job."

Karpinski also said that CIA employees often participated in the interrogations at the prison complex, according to the report.