Inside the Iraq Prison Scandal
Evidence suggests command foul-ups and, maybe, collusion
Late last August, the Pentagon dispatched Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and a team of some two dozen staffers to Iraq on a mission of the utmost urgency. Months had passed since the United States began its uneasy occupation of Iraq, but a lethal rear-guard insurgency was still claiming the lives of American soldiers almost every day. Saddam Hussein was still on the run, and U.S. commanders had precious little intelligence about who was behind the spate of deadly attacks like the destruction of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. Inside the Pentagon, war planners had come to the conclusion that human intelligence was the key to ending the insurgency. And Miller got the task of helping to extract that intelligence from the thousands of prisoners detained inside U.S. military facilities across Iraq.
What Miller discovered when he got there was chaos. Unlike the Pentagon's terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which Miller had commanded since the fall of 2002, U.S. oversight of the Iraqi prisons was almost nonexistent, and it showed. Exhausted military police were guarding overcrowded cellblocks in the 120-degree summer heat. Morale and discipline within the military police units were at rock bottom. And, most important, there were no established guidelines for interrogating low-level detainees captured during raids in places like Baghdad and Fallujah.
Miller did his homework. Then he submitted his recommendations about how to overhaul the U.S. military prison system. His report went to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. These conclusions, largely adopted by Sanchez, led to a dramatic change in how Iraqi prisons were run and how detainees were interrogated. What investigators want to know now is whether these recommendations also set in motion a chain of events that may have led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
Despite thousands of grisly photographs and hours of congressional testimony, the questions about who should pay for the abuses carried out by the 372nd Military Police Company still far outnumber the answers. Legal procedures have begun for seven low-level soldiers, but what is increasingly clear is that ultimate responsibility doesn't rest solely with a handful of poorly trained troops. The much-awaited testimony of the mild-mannered Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba last week pointed the finger squarely at the MP s'top commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, but there is growing evidence that some degree of culpability may reside further up the chain of command.
The repercussions of the prison scandal are already far more serious than the usual Washington parlor games about who gets to keep his job and who gets the boot. Inside an anonymous room shown on a snippet of grainy video, five hooded men stood above abducted American Nicholas Berg and proclaimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib "will be redeemed by blood and souls" and that the United States "will see nothing from us except corpse after corpse and casket after casket of those slaughtered in this fashion." Moments later, one of the hooded men shoved the 26-year-old Pennsylvanian to the floor and cut off his head.
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