Generals Acknowledge Bureaucratic Problems in Iraq

The U.S. Army has always tried to be an institution run by the book, with clear lines of authority. But in the unfolding Iraq prison abuse scandal, the Army’s rule book has been shown to have pages missing and lines blurred.

Top field commanders appeared before a congressional committee Wednesday and painted a picture of faulty communications and bureaucratic snafus, with orders issued but not seen and guidelines written but not posted. They detailed an overwhelmed, sometimes unprepared staff struggling with a poorly defined detention mission. And they showed how they, as top commanders, were still trying to determine what was going on.

It’s a new layer of the fog of war, in which rampant problems may be simply a sign of the military’s continuing difficulties in adjusting to the Iraq counterinsurgency mission that was thrust on it last year.

“This is really a symptom of the much larger problem we’re having fighting this counterinsurgency in Iraq,” said Michael Vickers, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington and a former Special Forces and CIA officer.

The Army is struggling because it had so little reliable intelligence on Iraq at the beginning, and the mission is so different from its longtime Cold War posture.

“We went in cold,” Vickers said.

In their appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the generals freely acknowledged their problems, while insisting they were working to correct them.

They conceded that reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which offered the first warnings of detainee abuse, had been held up in the military bureaucracy. The reports were often sent to lower level officials rather than further up the chain to commanders who could act on them.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, the Central Command chief, said the military had “a real problem” with the handling of such reports, noting that one from February had reached him only in May.

The generals conceded that they had not been able to fully develop procedures for using military police and military intelligence units, and how to coordinate their activities in drawing information from detainees. They acknowledged that this year, two generals issued conflicting reports on how such personnel should be used.

“Our doctrine is not right. It’s just not right,” Abizaid said. “And this ... issue has got to be fixed if we’re ever going to get our intelligence right to fight this war and beat this enemy.”

The generals said Abu Ghraib prison was grossly understaffed, with only about one-seventh the number of guards called for in the Army rule book.

They said that many of the detainees were probably common criminals who shouldn’t have been locked up with military prisoners.

The military was under pressure because so many Iraqis were being drawn into the system, deprived of contact with relatives and held too long.

At the same time, the military often failed to pass on intelligence from detainees to the U.S. military units that could use it.

The generals could not explain how it was that the detainee abuse had happened in October and November, even as Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, the Army provost marshal, was in Iraq investigating conditions in the prisons.

Abizaid could say only that when he travels around, “I don’t always get the whole truth and nothing but the truth.... I get a lot of ‘Everything is OK,’ ‘Everything is fine’ and ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That’s one of the problems we have in the armed forces.”

The hearing revealed that even generals disagreed with generals over what was happening at Abu Ghraib.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top military commander in Iraq, said that Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army’s top intelligence officer, had misinformed the committee May 11 when he provided a list of guidelines he said Sanchez issued for the interrogation of prisoners. In fact, Sanchez said, though the guidelines were posted on the walls of Abu Ghraib, they were drafted by an Army captain and he had never approved them.

Sanchez also disputed findings by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who in an investigation this year blamed Sanchez for confusing the prison’s command structure by handing tactical control of the prison to an Army intelligence brigade in an order in November. Sanchez insisted that he had given the military intelligence a broader role only to improve physical protection of the prison and troops.

The generals were asked by senators whether they could state that problems at the prison had been fixed by the commanders’ prescriptions. The answer, however, sounded almost as uncertain as predicting the next move by Iraq’s insurgents.

“Sir, I don’t think we know,” Col. Marc Warren, Sanchez’s chief attorney, told Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), an Air Force reserve judge.

“I have never seen a more dysfunctional command relationship,” Graham said a moment later.