IMPEACH BUSH

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House on Sunday insisted that President George W. Bush first learned about abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison from media reports, contrary to assertions by a former top general that Bush likely knew about the scandal before it broke.

"The President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on television," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the weekend at his ranch.

Stanzel was responding to questions about a New Yorker magazine report quoting the top military investigator of the Abu Ghraib scandal, retired Army Major General Antonio Taguba, as saying "the president had to be aware" of the abuse of prisoners by US military guards at the facility.

In the magazine interview, Taguba also said former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld had initially denied knowledge of the lurid photographs of prisoner abuse, when he met him on May 6, 2004, two months after the scandal broke.

At best, Taguba said, "Rumsfeld was in denial ... The photographs were available to him -- if he wanted to see them."

Referring to Rumsfeld's May 7, 2004 testimony before Congress in which he said he had no idea of the extent of the abuse, Taguba said Rumsfeld was "trying acquit himself and a lot of people who are lying to protect themselves.

The photographs taken by US jailers humiliating prisoners who were naked or hooded, on leashes or piled in a pyramid, rocked the world, becoming one of the few things Bush has said he regretted about the Iraq war.

Taguba said that he described to Rumsfeld what he termed the "torture" of "a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum," the magazine reported.

The ex-general, who retired in January, spoke of other, undisclosed material on the Abu Ghraib abuse, including descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees.

He also told the magazine he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee," adding that the video was never made public or mentioned in any court or in public.

Taguba said that all high-level officials had avoided scrutiny while the jail keepers at Abu Ghraib were tried in courts-martial.

"From what I knew, troops just don't take it upon themselves to initiate what they did without any form of knowledge of the higher-ups," Taguba told the New Yorker, adding that his orders were to investigate the military police only and not their superiors.

"These (military police) troops were not that creative," he said. "Somebody was giving them guidance, but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority," he told the magazine.

Aware his remarks would open him to criticism from his military peers, Taguba said, "the fact is that we violated the laws of land warfare in Abu Ghraib.

"We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values.

"The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable."

Seymour Hersch, who interviewed Taguba for the New Yorker, told CNN television Sunday that officials tried to dissuade Taguba from disclosing the enormity of the scandal.

"He was discouraged, from the very beginning, to go all the way with the report. But he kept on doing it," Hersh said.

"The question you have to ask about the president is this: No matter when he learned -- and certainly he learned before it became public, and no matter how detailed it was -- is there any evidence that the president of the United States said to Rumsfeld, what's going on there, Don? Let's get an investigation going," Hersh told CNN.