Just one of the every mounting reports coming out about the US's mistreatment of prisoners.
It is yet to been seen how serious they are about investigating this properly and how far they will take it or if they will just crucify the ones that were stupid enough to get caught and sweep the rest under the carpet.
US forces killed prisoners By Roy Eccleston, Washington correspondent May 06, 2004 THE Pentagon has revealed a US soldier and a CIA interrogator killed prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that at least 20 other deaths or assaults are under investigation in probes that have now been widened to include Guantanamo Bay, where two Australians are held.
The Bush administration is desperately seeking to limit worldwide damage from growing evidence that some US troops have abused prisoners, following publication last week of shocking photographs of naked and humiliated Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad.
As the White House worked to insulate George W.Bush from the scandal, the President was planning interviews with Middle Eastern television networks in an attempt to convince Iraqis and others that the abuses at Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison last November were isolated cases.
Secretary of State Colin Powell compared the breakdown of military discipline with the infamous My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which US troops committed atrocities against civilians.
"I'm shocked," he said, as US diplomats delayed the planned release of a US report critical of other nations' abuses of human rights.
"I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored."
The US Congress -- far from convinced that the problem is not more widespread, and fuming at being kept in the dark -- vowed to publicly grill Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about a crisis that has undercut US goodwill efforts in Iraq, and is likely to escalate violence.
Trouble has been growing daily as more revelations emerge about criminal misconduct at US military jails in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are held.
A stunned Mr Rumsfeld announced yesterday that he had ordered the inquiry into Guantanamo Bay, where some ex-prisoners - including several Britons released in March - have claimed they were beaten and interrogated at gunpoint.
In a new admission yesterday, the Pentagon reluctantly admitted that what appeared to be an alleged rape of a woman prisoner by a US soldier at Abu Ghraib jail would also be investigated.
The US army's top law officer, Major-General Don Ryder, said that since December 2002, criminal investigations had been launched into 10 assaults and 25 deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan military prisons, of which 12 were from undetermined or natural causes.
The other 13 deaths included the killing of an Iraqi prisoner in Iraq by a soldier who was not jailed but was dismissed from the army.
Another case involved a CIA interrogator accused of killing a prisoner in Afghanistan; a third case was deemed justifiable homicide, as the prisoner was escaping; and 10 other cases are incomplete.
Nobody has been jailed.
"Not an hour goes by that there isn't an additional allegation," fumed Republican senator John McCain, a Vietnam PoW, who accused Mr Rumsfeld of neglect of his duties in failing to tell Congress of the scandal.
The scandal blew up after photos of naked Iraqi prisoners being mistreated by US military police were broadcast by CBS in the US last week, followed by The New Yorker magazine's expose of a secret Pentagon report that detailed what it called systematic criminal abuses, possibly done to soften up Iraqis for interrogators.
