Iraq

Waxman questions Cheney's contract role

WASHINGTON - As the government prepared for war in Iraq in the fall of 2002, a senior political appointee in the Defense Department chose oil services giant Halliburton Co. to secretly plan how to repair Iraqi oil fields, and then briefed Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and other White House officials about the sole-source contract before it was granted.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said the new details about the $1.8-million contract, disclosed last week in a Pentagon briefing for congressional staff members, raise new questions about whether the vice president or his office played any role in decisions to give what became billions of dollars worth of government business to Halliburton, where Cheney was chief executive from 1995 to 2000.

Cheney has said several times that neither he nor his office influenced decisions to give contracts to Halliburton.

Waxman wrote to Cheney on Sunday that the circumstances "appear to contradict your assertions that you were not informed about the Halliburton contracts."

"They also seem to contradict the Administration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton," wrote Waxman, senior Democrat on the House Government Reform Committee and one of the sharpest critics of government ties to Halliburton.

Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for Cheney, suggested Waxman's letter was politically motivated.

"Releasing the letter to the press on a Sunday speaks volumes about congressman Waxman's desire to score political points," Kellems said.

FRANKFURT, Germany - Beginning in November, a small unit of interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison began reporting allegations of prisoner abuse, including the bloody beatings of five blindfolded Iraqi generals, in internal documents sent to senior officers, the New York Times reports, quoting unnamed military personnel who it said worked in the prison.

The newspaper reported that it interviewed several military intelligence soldiers in Germany and the United States, and that they asked not to be identified for fear they would jeopardize their careers.

Top military officials have said previously they learned about abuses only in January, after a soldier came forward with photographs.

At least 20 accounts of mistreatment were included in the documents, the New York Times reported, quoting the unnamed soldiers. Some detainees described abuse that occurred at other detention facilities before they were transferred to Abu Ghraib, but the documents cited by the unnamed soldiers say at least seven incidents took place at the prison, four of them in the area controlled by military intelligence and the site of the notorious abuses depicted in a series of photographs.

Col. Jill E. Morgenthaler, chief of public affairs at military headquarters in Baghdad, said Sunday that officials were trying to find the documents. "Until then, there's nothing we can say," she said.

BAGHDAD - As many as 1,400 detainees will either be released or transferred to Iraqi authorities by the June 30 handover of power, the U.S. military said Sunday.

The Americans will continue to hold between 4,000 and 5,000 prisoners deemed a threat to the coalition, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. command will also continue operating the Abu Ghraib prison, focus of the scandal over U.S. abuse of Iraqi prisoners, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said Sunday that all Iraqi prisoners of war and interned civilians should be released when sovereignty is transferred.

A senior spokesman for the insurgent Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said in Najaf on Sunday that Sadr intends to "found a party to participate in political events." The spokesman, Qais Khazali, did not say whether Sadr also intends to disband his militia, the Mahdi Army, and abandon his military resistance to the U.S. occupation.

The suggestion of a political organization was in line with intense efforts by Shiite religious and political figures to persuade the young cleric to end his military challenge and turn instead to politics.

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