By Bradley Graham and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, May 5, 2004; Page A01

Two Iraqi prisoners were killed by U.S. soldiers last year, and 20 other detainee deaths and assaults remain under criminal investigation in Iraq and Afghanistan, part of a total of 35 cases probed since December 2002 for possible misconduct by U.S. troops in those two countries, Army officials reported yesterday.

The tally emerged on a day U.S. military officials, struggling to contain growing outrage over the handling of detainees, insisted they had been quick to respond to allegations of abuse at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. But Gen. George Casey, the Army's vice chief of staff, acknowledged that the actions there of military guards and interrogators had amounted to "a complete breakdown in discipline."

Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, publicly apologized to the Arab world for the mistreatment, and White House officials said President Bush would appear on Arab television in an effort to counter the damage.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld offered public assurances that those responsible for the misconduct would be held accountable and announced a further widening of Pentagon investigations into the military's treatment of detainees. He said he had ordered the Navy to look into operations at two prisons outside Iraq and Afghanistan holding terrorist suspects -- the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the naval brig at Charleston, S.C.

At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld appeared on the defensive as he was peppered with questions about why he and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had taken days to read an internal Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison. Pentagon leaders also faced a sharp rebuke from Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress, who accused them of not having been forthcoming earlier about the problems at the prison.

"We need to know why we weren't told what went on," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) after a closed-door briefing by Army officials to the Armed Services Committee.

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) complained that when Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials came to Capitol Hill last week -- hours before CBS's "60 Minutes II" first aired photographs of Iraqi prisoners being physically abused and sexually humiliated -- they neglected to mention the coming disclosure.

"Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all?" he asked. "That is inexcusable; it's an outrage."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) agreed when asked whether he also was concerned that the administration had not alerted Congress before the CBS program. "If we're going to be part and a partner in this war on terror, then we ought to be completely briefed, not just briefed on things they want us to hear," he said.

But while condemnation of the reported abuses came from both sides of the political aisle, members split along party lines over the question of whether Congress should conduct special hearings into the allegations. Several Democrats urged such a move, but Republicans DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee opposed the idea, saying regular congressional committees could provide sufficient oversight.

"I'm sure that our committees are going to be asking the right questions," DeLay said. "But a full-fledged congressional investigation -- that's like saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street."

Human Rights Watch, a leading human rights organization, called yesterday for a broad public investigation of all detention centers around the world run by the U.S. military and CIA. The CIA operates an unknown number of small prisons for suspected terrorists overseas.

"The brazenness with which the U.S. soldiers involved conducted themselves suggests they thought they had nothing to hide from their superiors," they wrote in a letter to Rice. A probe of conditions at Abu Ghraib prison "does not nearly go far enough to reverse the extraordinary harm these abuses have caused."

Of the 35 criminal investigations into specific cases of possible mistreatment of detainees begun by the Army in the past year-and-a-half, 25 have involved deaths and 10 resulted from allegations of assault, said Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the Army's provost marshal and head of the service's Criminal Investigation Division. The large majority of the cases occurred in Iraq.

Twelve of the deaths were attributed either to a natural cause, such as a heart attack or illness, or to undetermined factors because the bodies had been buried quickly by relatives. Investigations into 10 other deaths and into the 10 assault cases remain unresolved.

The death of an Iraqi detainee who was shot last year trying to escape from the Abu Ghraib prison was declared a justifiable homicide. In the death of another detainee at another Iraqi prison, who was shot while assaulting a U.S. soldier with rocks, the soldier was found guilty of using excessive force. He was demoted to the rank of private and discharged from the Army in place of a court-martial, an Army spokesman said.

The CIA inspector general is investigating three deaths of detainees involving CIA interrogators. One took place at Abu Ghraib last November, and a second at another detention facility in Iraq, a CIA spokesman said yesterday. The third death, which an Army investigation refers to as a homicide, involves a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan.

Questions about just how seriously top Pentagon officials had initially taken the allegations about conditions at Abu Ghraib were fanned by Myers's admission Sunday that he had not yet read the highly critical report on the prison completed in March by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Rumsfeld's spokesman reported Monday that Rumsfeld had not yet read it, either.

Rumsfeld said yesterday that he had since reviewed an executive summary of Taguba's report and denied any foot-dragging by the Defense Department. Providing a chronology of Pentagon actions, he said an investigation into abuses at the Abu Ghraib facility was announced Jan. 16, three days after military authorities had received a tip about misconduct there.

In February, he noted, the Army directed its inspector general to review the doctrine and training associated with detention operations throughout the U.S. Central Command area. And in March, the head of the Army Reserves ordered an assessment of the training given to military police and intelligence personnel on handling prisoners. Two weeks ago, commanders in Baghdad began an investigation into military intelligence practices in Iraq.

"These things are complicated; they take some time," Rumsfeld said of the investigations.

The explanation of why it had taken so long for Taguba's report to reach top Pentagon officials was left to Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who joined Rumsfeld at the news conference. Pace said that to ensure rights are protected and avoid command influence, investigations must proceed "in a very systematic way" up the chain of command, with officers at each level taking time to read all documents, receive legal advice and make decisions.

Nonetheless, he said, senior Pentagon officials had been aware of the charges filed against the guards at Abu Ghraib. "There has been no attempt to hide this," he said.

Taguba's investigation portrayed an extremely sloppily run unit of military police that lacked in the most basic discipline, leadership or operating procedures. The report noted that no one seemed to have had a clear idea of how many escapes had occurred from the facility, in part because of shoddy record-keeping.

The investigation found that Army military police soldiers at the prison sometimes took photographs of naked female detainees. Also, among what Taguba said were "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses," a male guard was reported to have had sex with a female detainee, and male detainees were threatened with rape or sodomized with a chemical light or broomstick. Also, guard dogs with their muzzles removed were used to threaten detainees.

Transgressions were pervasive and intentional, Taguba's report said. In an incident it described as a violation of international law, detainees were moved around the prison to hide them from a visiting survey team from the International Red Cross.

A number of lawmakers lamented yesterday the damage to U.S. efforts in Iraq and the U.S. image abroad resulting from the disclosure of the abuses. Rumsfeld, asked about the impact on U.S. standing in the world, called the revelations "unhelpful in a fundamental way." He condemned the alleged abuses as "totally unacceptable and un-American" and said he had been "stunned" by the evidence.

At a later news conference, Casey, the Army's vice chief of staff, recounted measures taken in recent weeks to avoid a recurrence. The military police and intelligence units at Abu Ghraib have been replaced, and a single two-star general has been put in charge of detainee operations in Iraq, he said.

All U.S. military guards and interrogators in Iraq have received additional instruction in international rules governing treatment of detainees, Casey added. And a team of 24 specialists in prison operations has been sent to Iraq to bolster training. Longer term, the Army is forming several new units with specialized training in prison management, Casey said.

Staff writers Helen Dewar, Dana Priest and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.