HEARTS AND MINDS

Abuse may have been 'order'

Seymour Hersh, investigative reporter for The New Yorker, said that Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, one of six US military policemen accused of humiliating Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Gharib prison outside Baghdad, wrote home in January that he had 'questioned some of the things' he saw inside the prison, but that 'the answer I got was, 'This is how military intelligence wants it done'.'
The UK Guardian reported the treatment may have been ordered by US military intelligence to extract information from the captives, and was possibly more cruel than officially acknowledged.

CIA behind Iraqi prisoner abuse: Brigadier General Janis Karpinski told The New York Times in a telephone interview that the special high-security cellblock at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad had been under the direct control of army intelligence officers, not the reservists under her command.
Torture commonplace, say inmates' families: Photos of US soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi detainees may have provoked outrage across the world. But for Hiyam Abbas they merely confirmed what she already knew - that US guards had tortured her 22-year-old son Hassan.