A US Senate committee will look into discrepancies in accounts of how dogs came to be used to abuse detainees at a US prison in Iraq, after a general who testified to the committee then declined to testify in a military court.
US Army Major-General Geoffrey Miller, a key player in the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last month invoked his right not to incriminate himself in the cases of two soldiers charged with using dogs to abuse detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Senator Lindsey Graham said Miller told the Senate Armed Services Committee he discussed the use of dogs for perimeter security. But by another account, Graham said Miller told Army Colonel Thomas Pappas, former top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, how dogs could be used to get information from detainees.
"Shame on us if we allow a story to go forward that is not true and the two dog handlers are paying the price," said Graham, a South Carolina Republican.
At at committee hearing with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Graham said there were "two stories out there that cannot be reconciled in my opinion".
Committee chairman John Warner, a Virginia Republican, said his panel will look into whether there were conflicts in Miller's testimony "because this individual did testify under oath" to the committee.
The US Army last May reprimanded and fined Pappas in the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal, finding him derelict in his duty, in part by authorising interrogators to have military working dogs present during the questioning of detainees and without the approval of superior commanders.
Rumsfeld said there "have been 87 courts-martial and 91 non-judicial punishments" out of the prison abuse scandal, "so there's been extensive functioning of the Uniform Code of Military Justice".
But Carl Levin of Michigan, top Democrat on the committee, said the "lack of accountability for those above the enlisted levels here has been stunning, unacceptable".
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