Records Detail Treatment of Iraqi Captives

Army officers in Iraq told their superiors last year that soldiers often lacked the training to handle detainees, did not always understand what constituted abuse and sometimes used techniques against prisoners that they “remembered from movies,” according to military records made public Thursday.

In two incidents described in the reports, bound detainees were shot and killed by soldiers. Although the circumstances were unclear, officers or Army lawyers said afterward that the killings could have been prevented with better training, facilities and understanding by soldiers of the rules of engagement.

The episodes were described last year to Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general who conducted one of more than a dozen reviews in the aftermath of the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. In reporting his findings to top Army commanders in July 2004, Mikolashek concluded there were no systemic failures or widespread patterns of detainee abuse.

But according to documents generated for his report, including 1,800 pages of evidence that were obtained and released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a lawsuit to learn more about prisoner treatment, Mikolashek was told of many incidents in which poor training and inadequate facilities created an atmosphere that fostered abuse.

Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the documents represented “Army reports and Army information, where the Army was looking into allegations and sorting out the situation about detainee mistreatment.”

But he said they did not show widespread abuse. “The Army has looked carefully at each allegation and addressed it very thoroughly,” he said.

Boyce added that there had been more than 400 investigations into allegations of Iraqi detainee mistreatment -- many involving individual incidents -- since the earliest revelations of sexual abuse and physical mistreatment at Abu Ghraib in January 2004. Thus far, he said, allegations against more than 200 soldiers have led to court-martial proceedings, nonjudicial punishment and other administrative penalties.

Mikolashek concluded in his report that incidents of abuse did not result from deficiencies within the Army. “The Army’s leaders and soldiers are effectively conducting detainee operations and providing for the care and security of detainees in an intense operational environment,” he wrote. “Based on this inspection, we were unable to identify system failures that resulted in incidents of abuse.”

But Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the documents suggested that Mikolashek had brushed aside evidence that there was abuse and significant training problems.

“Our government has failed, and the blame is on Washington, not Hollywood,” Romero said.

Romero was referring to an account of a platoon leader who said interpreters were often taken along on raids to pick up insurgents. But there often were not enough interrogators to go with the interpreters, and that meant other officers were thrust into the job of interviewing detainees -- even though they had no training to do so.

The unidentified platoon leader, who was with the 4th Infantry Division from Ft. Hood, Texas, said they had to improvise. “Officers and [noncommissioned officers] at point of capture engaged in interrogations using techniques they literally remembered from movies,” he said.

The platoon leader did not elaborate on the nature of the techniques used. But he added: “Soldiers need to be trained in basic tactical interrogation techniques. It’s going to be done one way or the other. Why not the right way?”

Another report to Mikolashek described one of the fatal shooting incidents that emerged from the documents. In the report, an unnamed officer said a soldier “killed a detainee he was guarding” at a collection point, prior to the prisoner being sent to a prison.

“The detainee’s hands were tied ... and the soldier shot and killed the detainee,” the officer said. “This incident could have been prevented if he had better training.”

The officer said the soldier did not understand the Army’s rules of engagement, and noted that the soldier was discharged. No other details were provided in the heavily redacted reports released Thursday.

A second incident was detailed in an account by a member of the judge advocate general’s office from the 4th Infantry Division. The officer, a lawyer, described a guard who shot and killed a prisoner he believed was trying to escape. The officer said the detainee’s hands were cuffed and he was standing behind a prison wire.

“The investigating officer determined the detainee was not trying to escape,” the officer said. “He said the incident could have been prevented with better facilities, and training for the guard force.”

It was unclear whether the soldiers involved in the two cases mentioned in the reports had been punished.

In his report last year, Mikolashek mentioned an incident in which a bound prisoner was shot and killed by a U.S. soldier, but it appeared to differ from those described in Thursday’s documents in that the soldier in question had bragged about wanting to kill an Iraqi.

In other instances of potential abuse, two officers reported that a detainee was forced to sit on the floor while a bottle of water was poured over his head by a civilian U.S. interrogator who “just seemed to be having a good time, because [the] detainee was not talking and never did talk,” an unnamed officer said.

Others also took part in abusing the detainee, the officer said. But the incident was not reported to superiors because it was not considered a violation. A staff sergeant interviewed for Mikolashek’s investigation complained of a lack of guidance on what soldiers were allowed to do. In interviews about other incidents, officers said commanders had never explained what constituted abuse.

With soldiers overworked in dealing with a crush of detainees, one first lieutenant said that there was no requirement to report abuse, only a “moral obligation” to do so.