WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s administration strongly denied a British report yesterday that images of apparent rape and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners are among photographs that it is trying to prevent being made public.
In unusually forceful terms, the Pentagon attacked the report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper while the White House went so far as to cast doubt on the accuracy of the British press in general.
The Telegraph quoted retired US Army Major General Antonio Taguba as saying the pictures showed “torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.” Taguba conducted an investigation in 2004 into abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Telegraph had shown “an inability to get the facts right.”
“That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images,” he told reporters. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.”
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs went further.
“I think if you do an even moderate Google search you’re not going to find many of these newspapers and truth within, say, 25 words of each other,” he said.
“Let’s just say if I wanted to read a write-up today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper. If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not entirely sure it’d be the first stack of clips I picked up,” Gibbs said.
The Obama administration has been on the defensive over its refusal to release the pictures, which were gathered as part of US military investigations into prisoner abuse.
