US, UK seek to limit abuse damage
Red Cross asked to drop confidentiality policy on dealing with Iraqi prisoners
Agencies, Washington/London
The United States and its main Iraq war ally, Britain, sought Monday to limit fallout from the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal as a leaked report said the Red Cross alerted them months ago to such mistreatment. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, facing calls he resign over the scandal that has outraged the Arab world and shaken US prestige, got a resounding vote of support from President Bush, after a one-hour meeting at the Pentagon. Bush also viewed more graphic photographs of prisoner abuse, which the Pentagon was considering making public British Prime Minister Tony Blair, already under pressure at home for backing the Iraq war, followed Bush in apologising for the mistreatment. "We express our total condemnation and disgust at any abuses that have been carried out," he said, while his government said some soldiers implicated in the mistreatment could soon face prosecution. A February 4 Red Cross report that appeared on the Wall Street Journal Web site on Monday said delegates of the international relief agency saw US troops keeping Iraqi prisoners naked for days in darkness at the Abu Ghraib jail in October, and were told by the intelligence officer in charge it was "part of the process." The report also described British troops forcing Iraqi detainees to kneel and stomping on their necks in an incident in which one prisoner died.
| 
