This is the first US news source I've seen pick up the story. It was on the BBC and CBC websites yesterday.
New York Times
May 5, 2004
Army Discloses Criminal Inquiry on Prison Abuse
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, May 4 — In the last 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 30 criminal investigations into misconduct by American captors in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 10 cases of suspicious death, 10 cases of abuse, and two deaths already determined to have been criminal homicides, the Army's vice chief of staff said Tuesday.
To date, the most severe penalties in any of the cases were less-than-honorable discharges for five Army soldiers, military officials said. No one has been sentenced to prison, they said.
The disclosure of the investigations, by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army's second-highest ranking general, was the strongest indication to date of a wider pattern of abuse at American prisons beyond the horrific descriptions and photographs that have emerged recently of acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in November.
At the Pentagon on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld condemned the abuses at Abu Ghraib as "totally unacceptable and un-American," but sought to minimize the significance of incidents elsewhere and insisted that the military had acted swiftly in cases in which misconduct was alleged. "The system works," he said.
But on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed anger after a briefing in which they were told of the details and potential scope of the misconduct for the first time.
The Senate Intelligence Committee said it would hold a closed session on Wednesday to determine whether American intelligence officers from the military or other agencies were involved.
The Bush administration dispatched top officials, including Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to contain the fallout over the widening story of abuse at the prisons, which Mr. Powell said had "stunned every American." Administration officials have acknowledged that the episode had caused enormous damage to the American image around the world.
To date, only Army military police officers assigned to Abu Ghraib prison have been disciplined in abuses committed in November in a secure cellblock. But a March 9 report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba said two military intelligence officers and two private contractors who oversaw interrogations may have been "either directly or indirectly responsible."
It was not until April 24 that the Army began to investigate possible involvement by military intelligence units and contractors working with them in Iraq in any abuse, including the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade; employees of CACI, a private contractor; and the Iraqi Survey Group, a unit of the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to Defense Department officials.
The worst abuses at Abu Ghraib took place in November, after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then in charge of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, recommended changes in procedures intended "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence," according to General Taguba's report.
In Iraq on Tuesday, General Miller said he had recommended that military police be given a more active role in gathering intelligence, but said the abuses had not been the result.
In providing a detailed accounting of other Army investigations into accusations of abuse, General Casey said the military had conducted a total of 25 criminal investigations into deaths and 10 into allegations of misconduct involving detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Of the cases involving death, the cause in 12 was natural or undetermined.
Of the 13 other deaths, one — a prisoner killed while trying to escape — was ruled a justifiable homicide, General Casey said.
Of the two cases determined to have been criminal homicides, defense officials said, one was in Iraq, and has resulted in a dishonorable discharge but not the jailing of the American soldier responsible, whose actions were judged to have been provoked by rock-throwing Iraqi prisoners.
The other case was in Afghanistan and involved a person working with the Central Intelligence Agency who has not yet been charged with a crime, the military officials said. A C.I.A. official disputed the idea that any determination had been made in that case about possible agency involvement. "The investigation is still under way," the official said.
The other 10 deaths are still under investigation.
The accounting by Army officials of the deaths of Iraqi prisoners apparently did not include a case in which two marines from Camp Pendleton, Calif., are set to stand trial this summer on charges of abuse involving an Iraqi prisoner who died in their custody in June 2003.
It was not clear whether the cases listed by the military as being under investigation included the deaths of two prisoners in Iraq that C.I.A. officials have said are being reviewed because of the possible involvement of agency personnel.
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a telephone interview that the impact of the abuse cases in the Middle East would extend "beyond what we can imagine today on our troops and our nation's security. It will just fuel the anger and ill-feeling in the region."
Senator John McCain of Arizona, a top Republican on the panel, called for a public hearing "as soon as possible" in which the committee would ask Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials to explain "how this whole situation evolved, what action is being taken, and what further actions needs to be taken to prevent a recurrence of this terrible situation."
Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing at a midafternoon news conference, identified six separate broad reviews that he said had started since January, when the first reports of the abuse at Abu Ghraib reached Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq.
"We're taking and will continue to take whatever steps are necessary to hold accountable those that may have violated the code of military conduct and betrayed the trust placed in them by the American people," he said.
Among Americans conducting interrogations in Iraqi prisons, members of the Iraq Survey Group, under the command of Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had primary responsibility for the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners designated as "high-value targets," according to senior intelligence officials.
But a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said the agency had "not heard of any allegations involving our people."
C.I.A. officials also took part in some interrogations involving high-value targets, including as many as two dozen prisoners in Abu Ghraib, an agency official said.
But intelligence officials said the primary role in interrogating Iraqi prisoners appeared to have been played by Army intelligence units, under the overall command until recently of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which answered to Col. Thomas Pappas, who was among those singled out for particular criticism in the report by General Taguba.
Ralph Williams, a spokesman for the Titan Corporation in San Diego, said Tuesday that John Israel, one of the contract employees implicated in the prison abuse scandal, worked for a Titan subcontractor that he would not name.
The Army's classified report on the abuse at Abu Ghraib identifies Mr. Israel as a translator who was, with others, "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses" at the prison and recommended "immediate disciplinary action."
