09 May 2004	Sunday	18 Rabi-ul-Awwal 1425

WASHINGTON, May 8: United States military intelligence requested army police officials assigned to Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to "change facility procedures" to make detainees more cooperative during interrogation sessions, according to a secret army report.

The document also suggests that members of the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade running the prison have never seen the Geneva Conventions that establish rules for treating prisoners of war.

A copy of the report was made available to newsmen on Friday _ shortly after Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to the Congressional armed services committees about the raging political scandal threatening his career.

Pictures of naked Iraqi prisoners in sexually explicit and degrading poses, forced to wear women's underwear over their heads, one held on a dog leash by a female prison guard, have gravely damaged US standing and credibility, particularly in the Arab world, US officials acknowledge.

The secret report, written by Maj Gen Antonio Taguba, still remains classified and carries the footnote, "no foreign dissemination". It indicates that brutal treatment was part of an elaborate strategy to prepare prisoners for interrogation by military intelligence specialists and possibly the CIA _ anxious to glean information of interest to Washington.

"I find that ... military intelligence (MI) interrogators and other US government agency's (OGA) interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favourable interrogation of witnesses," the general points out.

The "other US government agency" is a military euphemism reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency.

"I find that personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed to change facility procedures to 'set the conditions' for MI interrogations," Gen Taguba observes.

While the United States recognizes the Geneva Conventions, Gen Taguba found that members of military police had practically no training in the application of these accords.

"I find that few, in any, copies of the Geneva Conventions were ever made available to MP personnel or detainees," he points out.

WORSE YET TO COME: Mr Rumsfeld told Congress in his testimony that worse was yet to come as the Defence Department had in its possession more damaging pictures and even videotapes he had found "hard to believe".

The defence secretary did not offer any details. But Gen Taguba's report offers a glimpse of what these brutalities were.

In Iraq, a country whose religious traditions require women to cover even their heads, US guards took pictures not only of naked men but also of naked women among the detainees, according to the document.-AFP