United States President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were pushed on to the defensive on Thursday night as the continuing scandal over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners threatened to deepen their political problems.
Bush publicly apologised for the humiliation inflicted on prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad, in a move to insulate his administration from the mounting anger over the abuse by American soldiers.
In Britain, the Daily Mirror, which first published the photographs of members of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment apparently humiliating prisoners, revealed it had secured written testimony from a third soldier who claims to have witnessed members of the regiment beating prisoners on four occasions.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed that the soldier, who had been serving in Iraq, was giving evidence to the Royal Military police on Thursday night.
According to his full testimony, which appears in today’s Mirror, corporals, sergeants and some senior officers were implicated in the abuses.
He saw four beatings where PoWs were punched and kicked, the paper reported.
The Mirror’s editor, Piers Morgan, told BBC News: ”He believes there are already ongoing investigations into a number of people involved in this ring of ‘bad apples’ and that there will be automatic courts martial following.”
Earlier, the prime minister issued his strongest condemnation yet of any abuse. ”Those things are completely and totally unacceptable. They are inexcusable and there can be no possible justification for them,” Blair said.
”We must do everything that we can do and need to do in order to root out such practices and bring to justice those responsible for them.”
In Washington, Bush’s act of contrition, delivered with Jordan’s King Abdullah by his side in the White House Rose Garden, reversed his decision to withhold an apology in his address to an Arab television audience barely 24 hours earlier.
It came amid outrage in the Arab world and deep shame among Americans for the images of US troops gloating over hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners.
The more strenuous efforts at damage control were enacted as Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon chief and architect of the war on Iraq, was fighting for his political survival.
Bush, trying to shore up his defence secretary, said he had conveyed his regrets to King Abdullah.
”I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families,” the president said. ”I told him I was as equally sorry that people seeing those pictures didn’t understand the true nature and heart of America.”
The normally combative Rumsfeld, who today appears before a restive Senate armed services committee to face tough questioning over his decision to withhold information about the abuse, spent the day in retreat, cancelling a speech in Philadelphia.
Today’s session will bring the US defence secretary face to face with his harshest critics. Republicans and Democrats on the committee are outraged that he neglected to tell them about the abuse. His concealment is especially galling because he last appeared before the committee on the same day that damning photos were later shown on CBS television.
”Never a word about it,” the moderate Republican senator and armed services committee member John McCain said on Thursday. ”I think that’s what’s sparked a lot of outrage here.”
Rumsfeld got his first taste of some of that anger on Thursday when he met four Republican members of the committee, who warned him to be prepared for harsh questioning.
He also faces Republican ire for damaging the administration during an election campaign.
Meanwhile, new images of abuse were published in the Washington Post on Thursday, part of a cache of more than 1 000 digital photographs.
The Democratic presidential challenger, John Kerry, expressed disgust at the photos on the campaign trail in California, while others pressed demands for Rumsfeld to step down.
”If he does not resign forthwith, the president should fire him,” said the Democratic senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, adding that Rumsfeld’s departure was ”for the good of our country, the safety of our troops, and our image around the globe”.
On Thursday night, the president defended Rumsfeld, saying that he would stay in his cabinet. ”Secretary Rumsfeld has served our nation well.”
But further embarrassment was heaped on Rumsfeld when the International Red Cross and human rights groups in Iraq said they had warned US officials for months of the ”humiliating” abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, but had failed to get a reply.
Officials from Iraq’s human rights ministry said they told Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, as early as last November of the widespread abuses.
Other human rights activists confirmed that stories of US soldiers abusing Iraqi detainees had been circulating since last autumn.
”We complained to the coalition provisional authority on many occasions,” Jihad Zair, a spokesperson for Iraq’s human rights ministry, said. ”We got no response at all.”
The troubles now faced by Rumsfeld were triggered by the White House on Wednesday when officials told reporters that Bush had privately chastised the defence secretary for his handling of the matter. Aides said Mr Bush was angry not to have been informed before the images appeared on CBS.
Although the focus of the furore was the photographs, much of the anger directed at Rumsfeld is a product of growing misgivings about the war. He was an ardent proponent of the invasion and fought a rearguard bureaucratic campaign to keep the state department out of the postwar administration.
The soldier at the centre of the new revelations in the Mirror, Soldier C, said he saw four beatings where PoWs were punched and kicked, the paper reported. In one, a corporal placed a sandbag over a suspect’s face and poked his fingers in the victim’s eyes until he screamed with pain.
”I’ve seen the state of their faces when they took the sand bags off. Their noses were bent — they looked like haggises,” he told the Mirror.
Soldier C said three ringleaders led the violence, but officers were to blame, as well as corporals and sergeants.
Doubts have been raised about the pictures’ authenticity and Morgan has been accused of endangering the lives of British soldiers.
Soldier C said he believed the pictures were genuine.
Morgan said: ”I have seen not one shred of new evidence which has caused me to doubt their authenticity.” – Guardian Unlimited Â