Wider Abuse Inquiry Sought

Members of Congress from both political parties called Sunday for additional investigations into the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal to determine whether responsibility lies higher up the chain of command than with the seven Army reservists who are facing criminal charges.

“We need to take this up as far as it goes, and we need to do it quickly,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

He and other lawmakers were responding to two magazine reports suggesting that top-level administration officials made recommendations on interrogation policy that may have contributed to abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The New Yorker is reporting in its May 24 edition that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld secretly approved a plan to use harsh interrogation methods on prisoners in Iraq. Members of Congress said they wanted to inquire further into the report, even though the Pentagon has labeled it “outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.”

The May 24 edition of Newsweek says that a memo written by White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales after the Sept. 11 attacks may have established the legal foundation that allowed for abusive treatment.

Newsweek reported that in January 2002, Gonzales wrote to President Bush that in his judgment, the post-Sept. 11 security environment “renders obsolete [the Geneva Convention’s] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.”

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell “hit the roof” when he read the memo, according to the magazine, and fired off his own note to the president, warning that the new rules “will reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice” and have “a high cost in terms of negative international reaction.”

Powell, interviewed Sunday on “Meet the Press,” said he did not recall the Gonzales memo, but added: “I have always said that the Geneva accord is an important standard in international law and we have to comply with it.”

At the White House, spokesman Allen Abney offered a general response to the Newsweek report.

“We are a nation at war and we are a nation of laws,” he said. “Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people, and we act in an appropriate manner to protect that responsibility. It is the policy of the U.S. to comply with all of our laws and treaty obligations.”

Abney said the United States was bound by the Geneva Convention in Iraq.

The New Yorker article, written by Seymour Hersh, suggests that the roots of the prisoner abuse scandal lie in a decision approved last year by Rumsfeld to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations that was originally approved for use with suspected Al Qaeda operatives.

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice told the German television network ARD on Sunday that “as far as we can tell, there’s really nothing to the story.”

Seven reservists in a military police unit face criminal charges in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, a high-security facility outside Baghdad. Allegations of abuse were first reported in October but received little attention until late last month, when CBS’ “60 Minutes II” broadcast photographs including grinning U.S. troops beside nude detainees in humiliating poses.

Some of the reservists are arguing that they were carrying out orders from superiors. The first court-martial is scheduled to begin Wednesday in Baghdad.

The New Yorker article says the interrogation methods were part of a secret “special access program” that gave approval to capture, interrogate or kill “high-value targets.”

A former intelligence officer is quoted in the article as saying its rules were “Grab whom you must. Do what you want.”

As the Iraqi insurgency grew, Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, expanded the scope of the program to include prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the article said. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, knew about that expansion, according to the article.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement late Saturday ridiculing the report.

“No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos,” he said. “This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.”

In addition to the Pentagon denial, an intelligence official in Washington disputed Hersh’s account. “If there’s any truth to the article, I haven’t found it,” he said Sunday.

Members of Congress interviewed Sunday said the Hersh report needs to be investigated on Capitol Hill.

“I think there’s been a lack of accountability up the chain,” Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “All the focus has been on the few at the bottom that we’ve seen pictures of. It goes way further up than that, both on the military and the civilian side.”

Levin said the allegations in the magazine articles raise the issue to “a whole new level” that will be reviewed by the Armed Services Committee in planned hearings on Iraq prison abuse.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told “Meet the Press” that the administration appeared to have used techniques in Iraq that it was using against suspected Al Qaeda operatives.

“There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment,” Biden said. “We can treat Al Qaeda this way, and we can’t treat prisoners captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope.”

On his return to Washington on Sunday from the World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan, Powell declined to comment on the New Yorker article, telling reporters he hadn’t read it.

But he said he was skeptical of suggestions that the resignation of Rumsfeld or other top Pentagon officials would be valuable in winning back confidence the United States has lost because of the controversy over the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

“We don’t need something dramatic or theatrical,” he said. “We need to get at the truth” about how the prisoner mistreatment took place.

Powell praised Rumsfeld, who is considered to be one of the secretary of State’s chief rivals in debates within the administration.

“Don Rumsfeld is doing a terrific job under the most difficult of circumstances,” he said.

*

Times staff writers Greg Miller in Washington and Paul Richter in Shannon, Ireland, contributed to this report.