On the same day of their testimony in Congress, the ICRC director of operations, Pierre The ICRC’s 24-page report, leaked Friday in The Wall Street Journal, “described prisoners Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and U.S. military commanders were given this
\nwarned many high officials in the U.S. government last January and earlier that it had observed
\nwidespread abuse of Iraqi prisoners “tantamount to
\ntorture.”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> The ICRC characterized this treatment not as the aberrant
\nbehavior of a few but “a pattern and a system,” which, like the
\ngives the lie to Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and his boss, Chairman of the Joint
\nChiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Meyers.
Schoomaker claimed as recently as yesterday in
\nhis Senate testimony that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison was the “inexcusable behavior of a
\nfew.”<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> He was hewing to the line set by Meyers, who, you may
\nrecall, spent last weekend on the morning talk shows blaming a mere “handful” of low-ranking
\nsoldiers and complaining about inaccurate reporting by the press.<\/P>
\n
\nKraehenbuehl, said the abuse represented more than isolated acts, and the problems were not
\nlimited to the Abu Ghraib prison. “We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts.
\nThere was a pattern and a system,” he told a news conference
\nin Geneva<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A>.<\/P>
\n
\nkept naked in total darkness in empty cells at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison and male prisoners
\nforced to parade around in women’s underwear. Coalition forces also fired on unarmed prisoners
\nfrom watchtowers, killing some of them.”<\/P>
\n
\nreport, which summarizes previous ICRC investigations, in February. (The ICRC, based in
\nSwitzerland, is a neutral organization. Under the Geneva Conventions it visits prisoners of war
\nand others detained by an occupying power, to see that countries fulfill their obligations under the
\n1949 accords.)<\/P>
\n