Lawyer wants Bush on witness stand over Iraq abuse

US President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld should take the witness stand at the trial of a US soldier charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq, the soldier's lawyer said yesterday.

Policies adopted in Mr Bush's "war on terror" created a climate encouraging cruelty, said lawyers for US soldiers accused of subjecting detainees to sexual humiliation and physical abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

"No one can suggest with a straight face that the MPs (military police) acted alone," said defence lawyer Guy Womack, representing Specialist Charles Graner, who faces the most serious charges of the soldiers to be court martialed.

"They were directly under the supervision of military intelligence officers," he told reporters after a pretrial hearing.

Pretrial hearings were held yesterday for Specialist Charles Graner - who faces the most serious charges of all the Abu Ghraib accused - and Sergeant Javal Davis.

Davis's defence counsel Paul Bergrin said Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld sidestepped the Geneva Convention, encouraging abuse that stretched down the chain of command to the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, notorious as a torture centre under Saddam Hussein.

He said his client - accused of jumping on a pile of prisoners and stomping on their feet - was instructed on a daily basis to soften up Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence.

"(Mr) Bush gave a speech declaring his war on terror and said the Geneva Convention no longer applied," he told reporters after an impassioned address in the court room.

Mr Bergrin said he would seek to put both Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld on the stand as witnesses.

A scheduled hearing for Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick was postponed to July 23 after his civilian defence counsel, Gary Myers, failed to turn up in court, despite the judge's earlier rejection of his request to represent his client by telephone to avoid the violent chaos gripping Iraq.