WASHINGTON - One of six US soldiers charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq said she acted under direct instructions from military intelligence that wanted the prisoners softened before interrogation, The Washington Post reported in its Saturday edition.
The newspaper said that military police officer Sabrina Harman, who was stationed at Abu Ghraib prison, said in interviews that she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation.
"They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman was quoted as saying in the interviews by email this week from Baghdad. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."
She said her military police unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the facility and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations, according to The Post.
She did not discuss the abusive treatment of prisoners, who ordered that treatment, or any questions about the charges against her, the paper said.
Harman posed in a widely published photograph showing naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid.
On Friday, another female soldier who appeared in a widely published photograph leading a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash, Private First Class Lynndie England, 21, was charged with maltreating a detainee.
Harman’s statement coincides with a leaked report confirming the kind of abuses Iraqi detainees suffered.
US military intelligence requested army police officers assigned to Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad to "change facility procedures" to make Iraqi detainees more cooperative during interrogation sessions, according to a secret army report.
The document also suggests that members of the 800th Military Police Brigade running the prison have never seen the Geneva Conventions that establish rules for treating prisoners of war.
A copy of the report was made available to AFP late Friday shortly after US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to the Congressional armed services committees about the raging political scandal threatening his career.
Pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners in sexually explicit and degrading poses, forced to wear women's underwear over their heads, one held on a dog leash by a female prison guard, have gravely damaged US standing and credibility, particularly in the Arab world, US officials acknowledge.
Rumsfeld told Congress that worse was yet to come as the Defense Department had in its possession more damaging pictures and even videotapes he had found "hard to believe."
The defense secretary did not offer any details. But the report written by Army Major General Antonio Taguba that still remains classified and carries the footnote "no foreign dissemination" offers a glimpse of what these brutalities were.
In Iraq, a country whose religious traditions require women to cover even their heads, US guards took pictures not only of naked male but also of naked female Iraqi detainees, according to the document.
Male inmates were often forced to wear women's underwear, while groups of detained men were forced to masturbate in front of photo and video cameras.
A now infamous picture of a hooded prisoner balancing on a cardboard box with wires attached to his figures apparently has a less explicit detail. According to the report, the inmate also had a wire stuck to his penis to simulate electric torture.
A male US military police guard had sex with a female Abu Ghraib detainee. Military dogs without muzzles were used to intimidate inmates, and in at least one case bit and severely injured one of them, Taguba writes.
There were "credible" complaints from Iraqis, he continues, that phosphoric liquid from broken chemical lights was poured on detainees and at least one of them was sodomized with a chemical light or perhaps a broom stick.
The findings indicate this brutal treatment was part of an elaborate strategy to prepare prisoners for interrogation by military intelligence specialists and possibly the CIA anxious to glean information of interest to Washington.
"I find that ... military intelligence (MI) interrogators and other US government agency's (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses," the general points out.
The "other US government agency" is a military euphemism reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency.
"I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to 'set the conditions' for MI interrogations," Taguba concludes.
The report documents at least one instance of abuse allegedly committed by a military intelligence specialist. Last November, Luciana Spencer sought to degrade a detainee by having him strip and return to his cell naked, according to the probe.
The findings echo conclusions made earlier this year by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which said coercion was used by military intelligence at Abu Ghraib "in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information."
Sergeant Javal Davis, one of six US troops charged in the prisoner abuse case, said in a sworn statement that he had often received oral instructions from intelligence officers to make sure that a detainee "has a bad night" and "gets the treatment."
But these instructions never came in writing, Davis notes.
While the United States recognized the Geneva Conventions, Taguba found that members of military police had practically no training in the application of these accords.
"I find that few, in any, copies of the Geneva Conventions were ever made available to MP personnel or detainees," he points out.
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