Senate panel to hold another hearing on abused prisoners
GOP divided on issue
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate Armed Services Committee is poised to hold another hearing Wednesday examining the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, but Republicans are divided over how hard to pursue the issue.
Top generals are expected to testify, including Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the new commander of the Abu Ghraib prison, the focus of the controversy.
Sen. John Warner of Virginia, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has described the hearing as critical to getting to the bottom of the abuse scandal, an assessment shared by another influential Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
But Warner's counterpart in the House, Rep. Duncan Hunter, lashed out at the Senate for its plan to hold another hearing on the matter, saying "people are now being pulled out of those battlefield positions" to testify before Congress.
"That is detrimental to the 135,000 good people who are fighting right now in theater and who need their leadership and need a focused leadership," Hunter, a Republican from California, told reporters.
Hunter is the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and that panel met in private Tuesday with Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, the author of an Army report that cited a "failure of leadership" at the prison outside Baghdad and detailed abuses there. The panel also heard from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The defense secretary also met with 12 senators over breakfast Tuesday morning and, sources said, he criticized the hearings, saying they were becoming a distraction to the war effort in Iraq.
"He did express frustration that, at some point, additional hearings are counterproductive in terms of the optimal use of his time and the time of the combatant commanders in fighting and winning the war on terror," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.
But Warner stood by his decision to hold what will be the third public hearing by his committee on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
He stood before television cameras Tuesday afternoon, reading from a letter he sent to Rumsfeld last week.
"Given that some witnesses may need to remain in Iraq for operational reasons, we are open to exploring the option of teleconference of video for some of the hearings," Warner read from his own letter, saying it shows his desire to accommodate the Pentagon.
"It's all laid out very clearly in here," Warner added.
Photographs of prisoners cowering before guard dogs and being forced to pose naked in sexually degrading positions have generated outrage, especially in the Arab world. Rumsfeld and other Pentagon leaders have described the mistreatment -- which, according to the Taguba report, included punching and slapping prisoners -- as an aberration, the work of less than a dozen lower-level MPs.
But some lawmakers -- Democrats and Republicans -- have questioned whether Pentagon policies on interrogation encouraged guards to rough up prisoners and whether military intelligence personnel played an inappropriate role at the prison.
The Senate Armed Services Committee hearing is scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m.
Written by CNN.com producer Sean Loughlin with reporting from CNN Congressional correspondent Ed Henry.
