Iraq prisoners "like dogs": US official told general

A US general once in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has told the BBC that a US military intelligence official told her last autumn that Iraqi prisoners should be treated "like dogs".

US Major General Geoffrey Miller, the current head of the US prisons in Iraq, said Iraqi prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them," US one-star general Janis Karpinski told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Tuesday.

Karpinski was in charge of the military police unit that ran US prisons in Iraq when Iraqi prisoners were abused by US troops in the Abu Ghraib prison, also told the BBC that she had been made scapegoat for the abuse which was ordered by others.

The US Army investigators ruled that Karpinski paid too little attention to the prison's operations and did not act strongly enough to discipline her soldiers.

However, she was only suspended but not charged with any crime.

"I was absolutely sickened by those images. And I could not even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make them go so far away from what they have been trained to do so," Karpinski said.

"But I will say I know my military police personnel...well enough to know they believed they were following instructions from a person authorized to give them instructions," Karpinski added, stressing that interrogations at the Abu Ghraib were not under her command but were run by a military intelligence unit.

Karpinski also blamed the abuse of Iraqi prisoners on the introduction of Guantanamo-style interrogation methods.

Miller, who was in charge at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told her during a visit to Baghdad that "at Guantanamo Bay, we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have," Karpinski said.

Miller suggested that he planned to "Gitmo-ize" the interrogations of Iraqi detainees, making them more like what was happening in the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, which is nicknamed as "Gitmo", she added.

Photographs showing naked Iraqi detainees being humiliated and maltreated first started to surface in April, sparking shock and anger across the world.

After the revelation of the abuse, one US soldier involved in the abuse has been sentenced and six others are awaiting courts-martial over the abuse claims.

Source: agencies