Army reveals wider abuses

WASHINGTON — In the last 16 months, the Army has conducted more than 20 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 in recent days of acts of humiliation, sexual and otherwise, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last November.

In somber tones at his first Pentagon news conference since the reports of abuse surfaced, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Americans should not believe that the behavior captured in the photographs of grinning U.S. soldiers posing with naked Iraqi prisoners is tolerated.

"The images that we've seen that include U.S. forces are deeply disturbing, both because of the fundamental unacceptability of what they depicted and because the actions by U.S. military personnel in those photos do not in any way represent the values of our country or of the armed forces," Rumsfeld said.

The defense secretary rejected suggestions that part of the Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq — to remove a ruthless government that tortured its own people — had been undermined by the behavior of U.S. soldiers responsible for detention facilities.

"The pattern and practice of the Saddam Hussein regime was to do exactly what you said, to murder and torture, and the killing fields are filled with mass graves. And equating the two, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding of what took place" at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld said.

But on Capitol Hill, members of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed anger after a closed 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 U.S. intelligence officers from the military or other agencies were involved.