White House Apologises for Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners Amid Increasing Outrage

Producer: Bharati Jagdish
First broadcast: 6 May 04, Radio Singapore International

US credibility in the war in Iraq has taken another beating amid growing outrage over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said today that it had repeatedly urged the US to take corrective action at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Meanwhile, US daily, the Washington Post has released new graphic images of abuse in the Iraqi jail.

One of the images showed a soldier flashing thumbs-up sign beside a decomposing corpse.

In a bid to quell a global outcry, US president George W. Bush went on Arabic television and vowed to punish any US troops behind the abuse.

While Bush did not apologise personally, a White House spokesman has said that Bush is "deeply sorry" about the abuse.

For more on this, Bharati Jagdish (BJ) spoke to Dr Michael McKinley (MM) from the Australian National University.

MM: "It's one of those things which really is catastrophic for the United States because the photographs have been seen all around the world and they're usually accompanied by text which says that these aren't the worst photographs. The International Committee of the Red Cross says that it has photos that are even worse than the ones that have been shown to date. This means that the proud claims which the United States is still talking about - about them having the high moral ground with regard to replacing Saddam Hussein's brutal regime - are undermined. I don't think they're undermined completely, but the report which has been done, also by the US military, says that these abuses are systematic and widespread and that's very, very worrying."

BJ: US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, is expected to testify in the Senate on Friday, about these abuses. What questions do you think will be asked of him? He is facing a lot of political pressure and according to some analysts, he could even be forced to resign.

MM: "Rumsfeld has been under pressure anyway because it is thought that his architecture of the war hasn't been particularly successful, but when it comes to this particular instance where it is doubtful whether if Seymour Hersh hadn't publicised it, anybody would know about it. There would be questions about whether Rumsfeld tried to knowingly conceal the abuses from the public. There would be questions about what he intended to do about it had it not been made public."

BJ: Would this revelation brought about by the photographs strengthen the Iraqi resistance movement?

MM: "I don't know whether it will strengthen it, but it will certainly add nothing to the American position. It undermines that and it could be that if the Iraqi resistance movement actually publicised this - whether it encourages people to actually take up arms, I'm not quite sure - but it would be much easier rather than harder to encourage people to take up arms."

BJ: The pictures of the abuse have shocked countries all over the world. How do you expect them to respond in terms of troop deployment and rebuilding efforts while the US is still occupying Iraq?

MM: "Countries that were considering deploying their own troops to help the coalition will be persuaded by broadly-expressed national interests and by what they hope to be able to gain from the United States in return. Perhaps, this will be embarrassing, domestically, because people in their own countries will ask whether troops should be sent into this sort of an environment, but overall, I suspect the photographs won't dissuade countries that were quite firmly convinced that they needed, for one reason or another, to assist the coalition."

BJ: Now, Bush says that those responsible for the abuse will be punished and criminal charges have reportedly already been filed against six soldiers, but as you said earlier, it is suspected that the abuse is systematic and widespread. So do you expect the Bush administration to come clean about this and perhaps, we could be seeing a larger scale of punishments being meted out?

MM: "Not at all. The precedent that a lot of people will go back to is the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. There was no massacre in Iraq, although something like 25 deaths in custody are being investigated by the US military justice system at the moment. But at the time of the My Lai massacre, the first report that was done about it simple said that the United States military was not generally responsible for what took place. That report, by the way, was written by Colin Powell who was a young major at the time. What we need to understand is that the United States will as always - and it wouldn't be the only country in the world that has done this - will say that there were certain elements inside the military who let down the greatest traditions of the United States army, but the military in general is clean. They would say that this was just an aberration."

BJ: Do you think that some sort of international mechanism to monitor the behaviour of US and coalition soldiers is in order in Iraq?

MM: "It's probably in order, but I don't think it's going to happen. After all, the US has required a very large number of countries to sign a declaration saying that US forces are not going to be subject to the International Criminal Court. The US itself will discipline those people that are found guilty of charges brought against them. I don't think we're going to see anything much better than that."