Abuse charge soldier: I was told to 'make it hell'

THE dazzling smile of the US soldier and warm embrace with the Iraqi child presented the image of a liberated Iraq that the US administration wanted the world to see.

But the truth behind the happy image is that the soldier it shows, Sabrina Harman, has been charged in connection with the photographs of appalling cruelty towards Iraqi prisoners that have shocked the world.

Harman is among six US military personnel accused of abusing and humiliating prisoners in a scandal that continues to threaten the career of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The 26-year-old is said to feature in grotesque photographs of naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid in the Abu Ghraib jail in Baghdad.

Harman, who faces a possible court-martial, claimed it was her job to "make it hell" for Iraqi prisoners so they would talk. She claimed in an army report that she had to keep detainees awake, among them a hooded prisoner seen in a photograph, who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers, toes and genitals. She is also accused of telling him that if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted.

Harman said prisoners were stripped, searched and then "made to stand or kneel for hours".

"Sometimes they were forced to stand on boxes or hold boxes or to exercise to tire them out," she said.