Nor, he said, had they been given access to provisions of the Geneva Convention on the proper treatment of prisoners.. Behind closed doors and without even a recording being made of what they said, President George Bush and his deputy Dick Cheney were questioned yesterday by the 11 September commission about the administration’s failure to prevent the al-Qa’ida attacks. The only concession to the historical record agreed by the White House was to allow two staff members of the commission to take written notes.Mr Bush had never wanted to face the commission he set up to investigate the circumstances of the attacks. Another shows prisoners kneeling on each other, naked except for hoods covering their heads, to form a human pyramid.

Another shows naked prisoners being forced to pretend to have sex with one another.Many of the photographs show the American guards smiling and flashing thumbs-up signs. A slur in English is scrawled on one prisoner’s skin.The investigation began when a US soldier from the prison reported the abuse and turned over the photographs, which also found their way to CBS.One of the six, Sergeant Chip Frederick, who plans to plead innocent, asserted on CBS that he and his colleagues had had no proper guidance from commanders on how to treat the prisoners. She and seven other officers implicated in the case face being relieved of their commands.The revelations are acutely embarrassing for Washington, which has emphasised repeatedly its record of liberating the Iraqi people from the inhumane repression of Saddam Hussein.The pictures from inside the prison graphically show some of the alleged incidents.One picture depicts an Iraqi soldier standing on a box with wires attached to his hands. He was reportedly left on the box for a long period and told that he faced electrocution if he fell off. Following the airing of the photographs, they now admit that the affair has become even more far-reaching.In addition to the criminal charges against the six – all military police belonging to the 800th Brigade – investigators have recommended disciplinary action against seven US officers who helped run the prison, including Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Brigade.

One showed Iraqis naked – except for hoods – stacked into a human pyramid.In March, US officials revealed that six soldiers faced courts martial for possible violations of the rights of Iraqi prisoners they had been guarding But, at the time, they offered few details. The United States military has announced that it is pursuing a widening criminal investigation into allegations that its own soldiers committed acts of abuse, humiliation and torture against Iraqi prisoners, as photographs of the purported incidents were aired for the first time on US network television.
CBS broadcast pictures said to have been taken last November and December inside the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad where Allied forces were holding hundreds of prisoners captured after the invasion of Iraq. The information that we now have was learned after the charges were filed,” Stott said.If Rowland does not perform the requirements of the probation order, including doing 100 hours of community service, she could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.. The other child, a girl, survived, but suffered from respiratory distress.

“It’s a travesty that we can’t deal with people like Ms Rowland,” he said.Women’s groups were critical of prosecutors for charging the woman with a criminal offence.”The charges of homicide were so far off the mark, if it wasn’t so tragic it would be laughable,” Lorna Vogt, a member of the Utah Progressive Network, a women’s group, who has visited Rowland in prison, said after the hearing took place.Deputy district attorney Robert Stott said prosecutors originally believed the homicide charge was justified.”We were convinced at the time we filed the charges that they were appropriate. She pleaded guilty to those charges earlier this month.The judge also ordered her to take parenting classes and said that, if she ever decided to have more children, he hoped she would do a better job than she did with the twins.But he also took note of her history of behavioural and psychological problems, saying it was a “shame” that people with problems do not receive proper treatment. The girl was later adopted.Prosecutors said that, after they learned of the woman’s history of mental health problems, they reduced the homicide charge to two charges of child endangerment for using cocaine while pregnant. A judge has sentenced a Utah woman to 18 months probation for refusing a Caesarean section that doctors said would have saved her stillborn baby. The city’s sewage used to drain away by gravity towards a far-off outflow in the Gulf of Mexico but now needs to be first pumped uphill before it can be drained.. The listed building now serves as a museum.But collapsing heritage is just the tip of the iceberg. Below street level, the ongoing subsidence is wreaking havoc with the water distribution and drainage systems.