SYDNEY, 28 May 2004 — An Australian officer stationed in Baghdad learned about allegations of prisoner abuse at the US-run Abu Ghraib jail last October, months before government officials say they became aware of the issue, a newspaper reported yesterday.
The Sydney Morning Herald said Maj. George O’Kane, a legal officer in the Australian Defense Force, heard the allegations from the Red Cross and passed details on to his superiors.
The revelation contradicts repeated statements by Australian government and defense officials that they first heard of alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib early this year.
The abuse scandal and continuing violence in Iraq has undermined the conservative government of Prime Minister John Howard just months ahead of national elections.
An opinion poll published earlier this week showed 63 percent of voters now feel the Iraq war, and Howard’s decision to commit Australian troops to the conflict, were unjustified.
The same survey found the opposition Labor Party with an election-winning 12 point lead over Howard’s coalition, which is seeking a fourth term in office.
The Sydney Morning Herald said O’Kane worked at US military headquarters in Baghdad with the office of the US staff judge advocate, Col. Marc Warren, the senior legal officer in Iraq, for six months to February.
He was in the post when the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib jail first circulated in the US military headquarters in Baghdad.
O’Kane knew of the photographs but did not see them, unidentified sources told the newspaper.
He was also reportedly aware of the central thrust of US Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report in February outlining “sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses” at the jail.
O’Kane was also involved in drafting a letter responding to the concerns of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which argued that some prisoners were not subject to the full protection of the Geneva conventions.
He filed regular weekly reports to his Australian military superiors, the paper said. The Defense Department responded to queries from the paper by saying only that “no ADF member witnessed any mistreatment of detainees.”
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer reiterated in an interview this week that he did not hear of the abuse allegations until they became public in January.
“The first I heard — the first anybody knew publicly about this, which was the first time I could reasonably have heard about it was in January, the middle of January ... it was made public then,” he said.
The Labor Party foreign affairs spokesman challenged the government view in light of yesterday’s newspaper report.
“These (allegations) raise fundamentally new questions about what the Howard government knew and when about the prisoner abuse in Iraq,” Kevin Rudd said.
The report came a day after Amnesty International held Australia and Britain responsible for rights abuses in Iraq alongside the United States.
Chinese in Guantanamo
In Beijing, the Chinese government yesterday dismissed an Amnesty International report accusing its officials of abusing Chinese Muslim detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison, saying the human rights watchdog had ulterior motives.
The London-based group accused members of a Chinese government delegation of mistreating ethnic Uighur detainees from China’s restive northwestern region of Xinjiang during interrogations at the US military prison in Cuba in 2002.
“This kind of report saying this kind of thing is totally slandering the Chinese side,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a news conference.
“Amnesty International making this kind of accusation against China is totally unreasonable and it has ulterior motives.”
Amnesty said there were 22 Uighur detainees in the Guantanamo Bay prison, but Liu declined to confirm or deny the figure.
“The Chinese and US sides have maintained contact all along” on the issue, Liu said without elaborating.
Beijing has backed the US-led war on terror, but called for international support for its own campaign against separatists from its Uighur ethnic minority, whom it has branded terrorists.
China says Uighurs seeking an independent Islamic state called East Turkestan in their homeland have killed 162 people and injured 440 others. Beijing has accused the Uighur detainees in Guantanamo of having links to Osama Bin Laden and receiving training in camps in Afghanistan. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is in the US list of terrorist organizations.
