"These images reveal further widespread abuse including new incidents of homicide, torture and sexual humiliation," SBS said. No US troops were identifiable in any of the images seen by AFP.

"The extent of the abuse shown in the photos suggests that the torture and abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib in 2004 is much worse than is currently understood," the broadcaster said.

Other photographs released ahead of the broadcast showed one naked man hanging upside down from a bunk bed and another, hooded and bound in an orange jumpsuit, apparently being threatened by a dog.

Another man displayed what looked to be burn marks on his left forearm. One photo showed a man with serious injuries to his head, covered in blood and lying on a stretcher.

The station claims a "world exclusive", saying the pictures have never before been shown publicly. A spokeswoman would not comment on how the photographs had been obtained.

The photographs, to be shown on the "Dateline" programme at 8:30 pm (0930 GMT) on Wednesday, are the subject of a legal battle to prevent their publication in the United States, SBS said.

"When the original Abu Ghraib photographs were leaked to the press, members of Congress were given a private viewing of photographs, including the images which appear in this Dateline programme.

"They were shocked by what these extra images revealed of the full horror of the abuses taking place at Abu Ghraib," SBS said.

The programme would show "dozens of images -- possibly 40 or more," the spokeswoman told AFP, adding that the broadcaster was "confident in the credibility of the source of these new photographs and videos."

Publication of the original photographs -- showing prisoners being beaten, menaced by dogs and sexually abused -- provoked outrage around the world.

Last month, US President George W. Bush said in an interview about the first Abu Ghraib photos: "There's no question ... we were disgraced."

"I know it caused a lot of people who want to like us to question whether they should," Bush said, adding: "Equally importantly, it gave the enemy an incredible propaganda tool."

The Pentagon launched numerous investigations into the abuse, punishing several, mostly low-ranking guards who had worked at the jail, which was a torture centre under former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard is a staunch ally of Washington and provided troops for the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Around 900 Australian soldiers remain in the violence-wracked country.

The executive producer of the SBS programme, Mike Carey, told AFP the pictures would be broadcast "because it is an important matter of public interest that the full story of abuse at Abu Ghraib be told."

Although the Mohammed cartoons were first published in Denmark, many protesters in the Muslim world have used the opportunity to vent their anger at the United States.

Two people, including a child, were killed and dozens injured Wednesday in protests over the cartoon in Pakistan. Demonstrators also torched a US fast food outlet and other western businesses.

New footage broadcast by the BBC last night suggested a "snatch squad" of British troops had plucked a number of Iraqi demonstrators from a crowd of protesters.

Military police yesterday arrested a corporal from the 1st Battalion the Light Infantry as part of an investigation into the alleged abuse. He was last night named as Corporal Martin Webster. The Ministry of Defence would not confirm whether he had been arrested as a suspect or a witness.

In a statement tonight to announce the two additional arrests, the MoD said the investigation was still in its early stages but significant progress had been made.

"The Royal Military Police have identified several people in the video and investigations are ongoing to identify all those involved in the alleged incident.

"It is important to get these allegations in proportion. Our armed forces have done and continue to do an outstanding job wherever they are serving." Nadhim al-Jabiri, a Basra council official, said the suspension of ties included ending cooperation with the British consulate in Basra. The police chief, Major-General Hassan Suwadi, said Iraqi security forces would cease joint patrols with British forces in the entire region.

The MoD is concerned at the possibility of a backlash against British troops in Iraq now that the video has been widely played on Arab television stations.

The southern province of Basra is the base for the 8,000 British military in personnel who remain in the country.

A British military spokesman, Captain James St John-Price, said that such decisions "merely work to the detriment of the people of Basra". He added it was unclear whether economic ties were also being suspended, and if police under the control of the national government in Baghdad would also cut ties.

'Those troops humiliated us'

Two Iraqis claimed today they had been among those beaten in Amara, saying they would take legal action against the UK military and seek compensation.

The allegations by Bassem Shaker, 27, and Tariq Abdul-Razzak, 14, were presented to the media at the office of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who opposes the coalition forces.

Mr Shaker said he was among more than 200 people demonstrating that day in protest at the lack of jobs. The crowd had been "surprised" to encounter British troops and "started throwing stones at them "because we believed that they were behind all our misery", he said.

Mr Shaker said British troops fired volleys of rubber bullets at the protesters in a bid to disperse them.

Witnesses and officials at the time said British troops and Iraqi police had fired at armed, stone-throwing protesters, killing six people and wounding 11.

British soldiers from the 1st Battalion Light Infantry, based in Amara at the time, were seen moving in with armoured vehicles to support the police, according to witness reports at the time.

Assailants in the crowd lobbed three explosive devices at them, believed to be hand grenades, the British military reported later that day. Today Mr Shaker said: "A group of British soldiers then rushed out from their base and arrested nine of us, dragging us for about 30 metres to the governor's office.

"They were beating us with fists and batons and were kicking us. Then they cuffed our hands and also dragged us to their base, which is about 15 metres from the governor's office, where they also beat us and frightened us with dogs before releasing us before sunset."

Mr Shaker said he did not report the abuse initially because he did not believe any officials would deal with their complaints because they involved British troops.

"But when we saw this tape and the amount of anger it caused inside and outside Iraq, we decided to come today to the al-Sadr office because we need them, after God, to help us to sue the British forces and compensate us.

"Those troops humiliated us and violated our rights to demand jobs."

One of Mr Sadr's officials said Mr Shaker and Tariq Abdul-Razzak both claimed they had been beaten, and had requested help to sue the British military and seek compensation.

Although a US judge last year granted the union access to the photographs following a freedom-of-information request, the US Administration has appealed against the decision on the grounds their release would fuel anti-American sentiment.

Some of the photos are similar to those published in 2004, others are different. They include photographs of six corpses, although the circumstances of their deaths are not clear. There are also pictures of what appear to be burns and wounds from shotgun pellets.

The executive producer of Dateline, Mike Carey, said he was showing the pictures leaked to his program because it was important people understood what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

Seven US guards were jailed following publication of the first batch of Abu Ghraib photographs in April 2004.

Mr Carey said he could not explain why the photographs had not yet been published, as he thought it was likely that some journalists had them.

"It think it's strange, maybe they think its more of the same."

Copyright © 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald

We met for lunch at a restaurant on Canon Perdido in downtown Santa Barbara. Jeff was focused, articulate and as handsome as a movie star. He was quite wound-up, but utterly lucid.

There was no way I could have known that day the depths of Jeff's unhappiness, no way I could have predicted the tragedy that would follow. I listened closely to his story and, while I was surprised by what I heard, I had no particular reason to disbelieve him.

He had joined the Marines enthusiastically, he told me, and served as a flight mechanic for eight years. Not long after 9/11, he began helping to fly materials into Afghanistan with the first wave of U.S. troops.

In the beginning, Jeff supported the administration's policies in the region. But over time, that began to change. As we talked, Jeff brought out an album of photos from Afghanistan. He pointed to a series of photographs of a trailer and several huts behind a barbed-wire fence; these were taken, he said, outside a U.S. military camp not far from the Kandahar airport. He told me that young Afghans — some visible in blue jumpsuits in his photos — had been rounded up and brought to the site by a CIA special operations team. The CIA officers made no great secret of what they were doing, he said, but were dismissive of the Marines and pulled rank when challenged.

Jeff said he had been told by soldiers who had been present that the detainees were being interrogated and tortured, and that they were sometimes given psychotropic drugs. Some, he believed, had died in custody. What disturbed him most, he said, was that the detainees were not Taliban fighters or associates of Osama bin Laden. "By the time we got there," Jeff said, "the serious fighters were long gone."

Jeff had other stories to tell as well. He said the CIA team had put detainees in cargo containers aboard planes and interrogated them while circling in the air. He'd been on board some of these flights, he said, and was deeply disturbed by what he'd seen.

Was Jeff telling me the truth? As a reporter who writes investigative articles, I get calls frequently from people with unusual stories — sometimes spot-on accurate ones, sometimes personal vendettas and sometimes paranoid, crazy stories. Jeff seemed truthful, and he had told the same stories almost verbatim to several friends and family members. But I was worried because at the time, I hadn't heard about such abuses in Afghanistan, and Jeff's stories were hard to verify.

More worrisome, Jeff was seeking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, and I wondered whether he could withstand the scrutiny his allegations would generate.

PTSD's symptoms can include anxiety, deeply frightening thoughts, a sense of helplessness or flashbacks. Jeff's case apparently stemmed, according to Jim Nolan, a fellow veteran and a friend from Jeff's PTSD support group, from witnessing the "unspeakable," and from his inability to stop what he knew to be morally wrong.

His case was compounded, his friends said, by strong feelings of "survivor's guilt" involving the crash of a KC-130 transport plane into a mountain in January 2002 — killing eight men in his unit. He'd been scheduled to be on the flight and had been reassigned at the last minute. As part of the ground crew that attended to the plane's maintenance, he blamed himself. Afterward, he went to the debris site to recover remains. He found his fellow soldiers' bodies unrecognizable. He also told me he was deeply shaken by the collateral damage he saw to civilians from U.S. air attacks — especially the shrapnel wounding of so many Afghan children.

Jeff told me that he often couldn't sleep at night, thinking about what he had seen and heard. He had gone to Afghanistan a social drinker but came home, like so many veterans, a problem drinker. And he admitted self-medicating with drugs. He was seeking help — and just days after we met, he drove 100 miles to enter a treatment program in Los Angeles. But the Veterans Affairs hospital's PTSD ward was full, he told me, so he was placed in a lockdown ward for schizophrenics, which only aggravated his isolation and despair.

Jeff left the hospital after a day. He got in touch with Dr. Sharon Rapp, who is the only psychologist trained in treating post-traumatic stress for all returning veterans who live between L.A. and San Francisco, according to the Santa Barbara VA office. Rapp, who is by all accounts a gifted and dedicated therapist, placed him in a PTSD group with about 10 Vietnam veterans who took Jeff under their wing. But it became increasingly clear that he, like so many veterans, needed far more than outpatient and group therapy.

At the time Jeff told me his story, I didn't quite know what to do with it. Such allegations were not yet being reported — and many Americans would probably have found his accusations unimaginable. For multiple reasons, I put his story on the back burner. I continued to stay in touch with Jeff — and occasionally spoke with his father, Ed, who invariably answered the phone — as I ruminated on his troubling tale.

However, late last year, details about secret prisons began to appear. Human Rights Watch, for instance, reported that a number of men being held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had given their lawyers "consistent accounts" of being held and tortured at a secret American-run prison in Afghanistan. I decided it was time to call Jeff and meet again.

It was early December. Jeff was still living in his father's home off Old San Marcos Road. He'd broken up with my friend and another woman to whom he had been briefly engaged, and he was struggling to stay sober.

But by the time I called, it was too late. The day I phoned, Jeff had quarreled with his father. That afternoon, they held an unscheduled counseling session with Rapp. According to the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department, Rapp was so concerned after their meeting that she phoned the Lehner house about 6 p.m. Ed answered, spoke with her and then called his son to take the phone. At that point, the line suddenly turned to static. Fearing the worst, Rapp called the police.

The worst proved to be the case. The police found two bodies, and quickly labeled the case a murder-suicide. Ed Lehner, they said, had died from multiple gunshot wounds, and Jeff from a single, self-inflicted wound to the head.

The irony was that after eight years in the military, the first and only person Jeff Lehner killed was his father.

Nolan, who said he returned from Vietnam in emotional tatters, was not entirely surprised by the turn of events. According to Nolan, Jeff's relationship with his father, a soft-spoken man with diabetes, had strains predating his Marine years, and it had deteriorated as Jeff's dependency on him deepened. "He had talked about suicide a couple of times during our meetings," Nolan said, "as all of us had at one time or another. It's about a loss of respect. When you lose respect between family members, there's nothing but anger left, and that's how the rage works in you."

There are ways to deal with the rage, of course, but treatment of returning veterans is woefully inadequate, owing to a lack of funding. Although the VA acknowledges PTSD as a serious problem for returning veterans, VA hospitals around the country have sharply reduced their inpatient psychiatric beds, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Suicide, meanwhile, is an enormous and growing concern. Statistics are hard to come by, but some estimate that although 58,000 veterans died in combat in Vietnam, more than that took their own lives after returning home. In a 1987 CDC study, the suicide rate for Vietnam vets was 65% higher than that of civilians. The Army estimates that the suicide rate among Iraq veterans is one-third higher than the historical wartime average, owing to the psychological strains of no-holds-barred insurgency warfare. That means we're looking at a future blizzard of suicides without an adequate VA program in place to address the crisis.

Without Jeff and the further details he could have provided, I doubt I will ever know for certain whether all his Afghanistan stories are true. But no matter what you believe when you read this, the story of Jeff's life and death raises issues we must grapple with if we're going to continue sending troops into insurgencies and guerrilla war zones. Thirty years after Vietnam, we seem to have learned very little.

Of course, I feel badly now that I didn't spend more time with Jeff or try harder to get his story published while he was alive.

He had such a dazzling smile — the type you knew was destined for great things.

ANN LOUISE BARDACH writes the Interrogation column for Slate and is the author of "Cuba Confidential, Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana." Her article on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ties to the tabloids was a finalist for last year's PEN USA journalism award.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times