A U.S. military official says new pictures showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners will be undoubtedly be used to tarnish the entire U.S. military.

Gen. Mark Kimmitt, who is now based at U.S. Central Command's Qatar headquarters after working in Iraq, described the photos Saturday to the al-Jazeera satellite news station as the work of an isolated few.

While in Iraq, Kimmitt was a spokesman for the U.S. military during the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal that erupted in the spring.

Months of investigation have found very few U.S. troops to be involved in prisoner abuse, he said.

Kimmitt's apprehension about the photos being "tools" for use in the battle for public opinion, however, could be well-founded.

"The two scandals confirm the image about the Americans known in the Middle East: That the Americans are not a charity or a humanitarian organization that is leading an experiment of democracy," Sateh Noureddine, managing editor of the Lebanese leftist newspaper As-Safir, told The Associated Press.

"Rather, (the U.S. government) is leading a retaliatory operation following the Sept. 11 attacks."

Some militant Islamist websites have also posted the latest photos.

The new photos showing possible abuse of Iraqi prisoners predate the huge Abu Ghraib scandal.

They involve military personnel who appear to be members of the elite Navy SEALs commando team.

In the photos, SEALs are shown sitting on hooded and handcuffed prisoners. One prisoner has an automatic weapon pointed at his head and a thumb on his throat.

Date stamps on some photos indicate they were taken in May 2003, or roughly a month after the fall of Baghdad after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib, itself used as a torture centre by the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, were far worse and occurred months later.

An Associated Press reporter discovered the photos in an album posted on an Internet photo-sharing site called smugmug.com.

A woman who said her husband brought them back from Iraq following his tour of duty there was responsible for posting them.

They have since been taken off-line, with the woman saying she was upset a reporter was able to find them. They were mixed in with family photos.

A search using the Google search engine turned them up.

"I think it's fair to assume that it would be very hard for most consumers to know all the ways the search engines can discover Web pages," said Smugmug spokesman Chris MacAskill told AP.

The U.S. Navy was furnished with copies of the photos and said it is investigating them.

"These photographs raise a number of important questions regarding the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) and detainees," Navy Cmdr. Jeff Bender, a spokesman for the Naval Special Warfare Command in Coronado, told AP in a written response to questions. "I can assure you that the matter will be thoroughly investigated."

Some experts contacted by AP said the conduct of the SEALs was more stupid and juvenile than criminal, but could violate Navy regulations that forbid the photographing of prisoners for reasons other than identification or intelligence-gathering.

Other Iraq news:

• 14 people were killed and 59 injured in car-bombing attacks against Iraqi policemen
• Two U.S. soldiers were killed by roadside bombs, with another killed Friday near Jordan by a suicide bomber.
   
  A NATO commander expressed surprise that Iraq's security situation was so much worse than Afghanistan's. "At the beginning I would have projected the opposite, with Iraq coming along faster," said U.S. Gen. James Jones, the supreme allied commander in Europe.
• The killing of an Iraqi by U.S. troops at a checkpoint near Kirkuk is being investigated. The man failed to stop. A liquor store had been attacked earlier with a rocket-propelled grenade.

With files from The Associated Press