Poor Leadership Blamed for Abuse at U.S. Prison in Iraq

Overcrowded cellblocks, sadistic guards abusing and humiliating prisoners, inmates shot dead trying to escape down dark alleys, and detainees being spirited around the prison compound to avoid Red Cross workers.

All this happened as guards made up their own rules and superiors condoned their actions.

This was not Saddam Hussein’s gulag but a devastating portrait of the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad described by a U.S. Army investigator.

The abuses occurred last year, after the U.S. military took over Hussein’s old prison and filled it with more than 5,000 people -- some insurgents, many common criminals, others innocent of any crimes.

What emerges from an internal Army investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, a 260-acre complex 20 miles west of the capital, is a prison that was out of control.

The investigation showed that there were too many inmates and not enough guards. Training was inadequate and superiors rarely made rounds. The U.S. guards’ morale was flattened when their hopes of returning home soon were disappointed.

Officers lost track of inmates. Escapes went unrecorded. Top commanders could not agree on who should run the cellblocks -- military police or military intelligence. In this general breakdown, some soldiers sank to “blatant and wanton criminal abuses” of detainees. The worst of the abuses have been reported over the past week, with the revelation of graphic and sexually explicit photographs of some of the incidents.

Those abuses occurred, according to the March investigative report written by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, in the area of the prison where inmates suspected of terrorist activities were interrogated.

But Taguba’s report found that underlying the most horrific abuses was a prison in which mismanagement and unprofessional behavior had become routine.

The classified report, which was not intended for public dissemination, revealed a prison system so insecure that more than 27 prisoners escaped or tried to in less than a year. It was so casually managed that civilian contractors wandered around without supervision and U.S. soldiers consistently failed to fulfill even the basic duty of counting the prisoners in their charge.

Standards were so inconsistent that Taguba found that treatment of prisoners varied from shift to shift and compound to compound. The report concluded that soldiers guarding prisoners probably wrote off some escapes without reporting them.

Taguba’s report said that 60% of Abu Ghraib inmates were “not a threat to society.”

For months, the treatment of detainees in Iraq has been denounced by human rights groups, which expressed new revulsion at the latest revelations. Amnesty International has called for an outside investigation of the detention system in Iraq. On Monday, the group said the new report supported its call.

“Sadly, this report vindicates concerns we’ve been raising since June of last year,” said Alistair Hodgett, an Amnesty spokesman. “This is evidence of a larger failure.”

Joe Stork, Washington director for the Middle East division of Human Rights Watch, said the group expressed “horror” at the findings, declaring that they would be harmful to U.S. foreign relations.

Stork said “investigations are needed in all places” where Americans detain others, especially involving the U.S.-declared war on terrorism. The group noted that President Bush had pledged less than a year ago to renounce the use of torture and abuse in Iraq.

“People who conducted these acts need to be held accountable as well as those who condoned the activities,” Stork said.

It was startling that the abuses surfaced at Abu Ghraib, widely known as a place of torture under Hussein and where people had disappeared by the thousands.

When the regime collapsed last year, Abu Ghraib was looted. Its former prisoners and others smashed walls, floors and windows, taking anything they could carry.

Needing a military prison, the U.S.-led coalition cleaned up Abu Ghraib, added a medical facility and moved in several thousand prisoners.

A Times reporter who visited the prison last July with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was shown the refurbished facility with newly painted, white cinder-block walls within the heavily walled prison compound. Prisoners were still being housed in tents in a central courtyard in 120-degree heat.

Gone were the machines designed to shred hard plastic in which guards fed prisoners who angered them, former inmates told the Americans. Still intact was the cell in which, a military officer explained, prisoners were routinely executed.

Some Iraqis apparently considered much of the prison well run by the Americans. Family members waiting outside the rolls of barbed wire surrounding the prison said so to a Times reporter in April. Some prisoners were allowed to visit with family members, who waited for days for the uncertain chance to see them and bring them food and clothing.

But the relatives said other parts of the prison were off limits.

It was in those areas where several intelligence officers, private contractors, and members of the 372nd Military Police Company, attached to the Army’s 800th Military Police Brigade, are alleged to have taken part in the documented abuses.

The MPs were in charge of security at Abu Ghraib and reported to the 800th Brigade, which was charged with managing that military prison and several others in Iraq run by the coalition.

The members of the 372nd, Taguba found in his report, lived under persistent attack by mortar shells, small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.

Members of the unit, a reserve company based in Cresaptown, Md., believed they would be allowed to return home in May 2003. Instead, they were asked to stay on and manage the new penal system.

The unit was consistently understaffed, and soldiers regularly reported numbers of detainees that were “grossly different” from other official tallies, Taguba reported. Inmates were so poorly screened that innocent civilians were often detained indefinitely, according to the report.

There were also demands by military intelligence officials to “loosen up” inmates before questioning. The investigation found that the commanders had allowed MPs to be used by military intelligence officials for that purpose, contrary to Army regulations.

Army commanders could not agree whether military intelligence officials should be allowed to give orders to MPs.

One Army official investigating the prison last year said they should. A second said they should not. Then, in November, an order was handed down by U.S. military commanders in Iraq placing the prison under the control of an Army military intelligence brigade.

That order, Taguba said, only compounded the ambiguity under which the MPs of the 800th served.

As for the soldiers stuck with their Iraqi charges in Abu Ghraib, they just wanted to go home.

“Morale suffered” after they learned they were to stay in Iraq for longer than they had expected, Taguba wrote, “and over the next few months there did not seem to be any attempt by the command to mitigate this morale problem.”

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Times staff writers John Hendren and Ashleigh Collins in Washington and Alissa J. Rubin in Amman, Jordan, contributed to this report.