The US general in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was told by a military intelligence commander that detainees should be treated like dogs, she said in an interview broadcast today.
Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for the military police who ran prisons in Iraq when pictures were taken showing prisoners being abused, said she and her soldiers were being made scapegoats for abuse ordered by others.
Handcuffs hang in a tent window in the Abu Ghraib prison yard as detainees line up. (AP Photo/Hussein Malla)
In the interview with Britain's BBC radio, Brig Gen Karpinski said Gen Geoffrey Miller, who was sent to Iraq from the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, had ordered new procedures in cell blocs where Iraqis were interrogated.
"He said, at Guantanamo Bay we've learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing they have," Brig Gen Karpinski said.
"He said they are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them."
Brig Gen Janis Karpinski
But Brig Gen Karpinski, who has been suspended from her command for failings at Abu Ghraib but not charged with any crime, said military police would not have taken Iraqis out of their cells to pose them for photographs without being told to do so.
"I was absolutely sickened by those images. And I couldn't even fathom a guess as to what happened to these people to make them go so far away from what they had been trained to do.
"But I will say I know my military police personnel . . . well enough to know they believed they were following instructions from a person authorised to give them instructions," she said.
Asked if she was "out of the loop" she said: "I was in my own loop. I was not in the loop that General Miller was creating."