Pentagon Cites Widespread Involvement in Prison Abuses

The abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison last year was widespread and went well beyond a small group of low-ranking U.S. military police, involving more than three dozen military intelligence officers, their commanders, CIA agents and private contractors, a Pentagon investigation concluded Wednesday.

The Defense Department inquiry, which examined the role of military interrogators at the prison, identified 44 separate cases of abuse, some of which were even more brutal than many of the incidents documented in the now-infamous photographs taken on Tier 1A at the compound outside Baghdad. Gen. Paul Kern, who supervised the investigation, said at a news conference Wednesday that some of the practices amounted to “torture.”

The report was the second from the Pentagon in two days on the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal -- and together they debunk the idea of a rogue operation by the prison’s night shift and instead paint a picture of widespread abuses by many more individuals and institutions, with responsibility going all the way up the ladder to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The report released Wednesday cited 41 intelligence officers, CIA officials, contractors, medics and military police officers who either participated in the abuses or knew of them and did nothing to stop them. Seven other military police officers have been charged in the scandal.

Several of the incidents, according to the study, occurred during interrogations, but most involved sadistic acts and game playing in the cellblock.

Newly revealed abuses include cases in which a detainee was struck with a chair until it broke and was then choked until he passed out, a female prisoner was sexually assaulted and another inmate was forced to eat his meals out of a toilet.

In one incident, soldiers used Army dogs to play a bizarre game in which they scared teenage detainees into defecating and urinating on themselves.

The panel’s senior investigators, Army Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Army Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, said the findings were being forwarded to Army investigators for possible criminal charges and other disciplinary actions, a result that could significantly widen the Abu Ghraib scandal past the courts-martial for the initial seven Army reservist prison guards implicated in January.

On Tuesday, a blue-ribbon panel reviewing Pentagon procedures and responses placed the ultimate blame for the abuse at Abu Ghraib on Rumsfeld and other top civilian and military leaders for failing to develop proper interrogation techniques and allowing a confusing command structure to fester. The panel did not call for Rumsfeld’s resignation but did say it backed disciplinary action against military intelligence personnel.

The Jones-Fay report, in spreading blame, appears to support the claims of the seven prison guards now facing charges: that they abused detainees only at the urging of their counterparts in the prison’s military intelligence brigade.

Kern, the head of the Jones-Fay investigation, said it was apparent that a larger number of soldiers working last fall inside the chaotic prison shared responsibility for “serious misconduct and a loss of moral values.”

He added: “This was clearly a deviation from everything we’ve taught people on how to behave. There were failures of leadership, of people seeing things and not correcting them. There were failures of discipline.”

Most incidents involved abusive behavior by investigators, Kern said, but he added that some acts of misbehavior were worse, amounting to torture of the Iraqi detainees.

“It’s a harsh word, and in some instances, unfortunately, I think it was appropriate here,” Kern told reporters. “There were a few instances when torture was being used.”

The Jones-Fay report did not name those intelligence officers, CIA officials and contractors who, along with two medics and three other military police officers, either participated in the abuses or knew of them and did nothing to stop them. It said they should face either criminal or civil action. The full report with appendices is estimated to be several thousand pages long. The Pentagon released 177 pages Wednesday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee is scheduled to take up both new reports in hearings beginning in two weeks. However, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the panel, said at a Capitol Hill news conference that the reports issued this week show that the military “can investigate itself, in an objective and pragmatic and fair way.”

From the earliest stages of the prison scandal, top Bush administration officials have sought to portray the abuse as the work of a renegade band of night-shift MPs.

Rumsfeld, for example, in May testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said, “ ... These terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military.” Wednesday’s report says that many more officers and enlisted personnel -- nearly seven times more than currently charged -- committed or condoned the acts of abuse and humiliation.

The report asserts that 23 military intelligence soldiers were directly involved in the abuse, with 15 of them believing their actions were sanctioned by their Army supervisors.

Four civilian contractors from private companies who worked alongside the military interrogators had a hands-on role in the assaults.

Three military police soldiers, in addition to the seven initially charged last winter, also were found to have abused detainees, the Jones-Fay investigation reported.

Eleven other individuals, comprising six military intelligence soldiers, two contractors, two Army medics and one military policeman, witnessed much of the abuse but failed to report the assaults and were recommended for disciplinary action.

Reaching higher into the ranks, the report indicated that five unnamed individuals who commanded the military intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib should be singled out for career-ending disciplinary punishment. One of those was identified as Army Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.

Both Pappas and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, were cited for failing to fulfill a number of command responsibilities. Karpinski was not singled out for charges or disciplinary action, but Kern told reporters that action could come as a result of similar criticism of Karpinski in a report earlier this year by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba.

The investigators portrayed Pappas and his second-in-command, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, as overwhelmed at Abu Ghraib, unable to keep up with the pressure to wring more information from detainees while also working in an understaffed, physically dangerous environment.

They also seriously criticized the two officers for poorly training their interrogators and for not instructing them on the rules of the Geneva Convention and other policies prohibiting prisoner abuse.

“I will tell you,” Jones said at the Pentagon news conference called to release the report, “they bear responsibility for those things that happened and the soldiers underneath them.”

Of the seven prison guards charged, one has pleaded guilty and another said he plans to plead guilty to some of the charges.

The five others, meanwhile, are continuing to assert that they “softened up” detainees at the behest of military interrogators who hoped the harsh tactics would break them down and force them into giving up crucial intelligence information.

Jones and Fay determined that there was some truth to that assertion.

“The MPs being prosecuted claim their actions came at the direction of MI,” the report said, referring to military intelligence. “Although self-serving, these claims do have some basis in fact.”

The investigators concluded that because the abuse went on for several months, and was not stopped until another low-level guard blew the whistle, the laid-back atmosphere established by Army supervisors gave the guards a sense that abuse was condoned.

“The environment created at Abu Ghraib contributed to the occurrence of such abuse and the fact that it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time,” the report said.

“What started as nakedness and humiliation, stress and physical training exercise, carried over into sexual and physical assaults by a small group of morally corrupt and unsupervised soldiers and civilians.”

The 44 cases of abuse outlined in the report provided fresh details on assaults that have been captured in photographs of naked detainees piled in pyramids on the cell house floor, chained naked to cell bars, or forced to simulate acts of sexual degradation. The report also provided shocking details of additional abuse.

Among the cases for which new information is provided is that of the death of a prisoner who was being interrogated by a CIA officer in November 2003. The prisoner, who had been hit on the head with a gun by a Navy SEAL for resisting arrest, was placed in a shower room during interrogations and found dead hours later, according to the report..

In one case, the generals found, two intelligence soldiers “beat and kicked a passive, cuffed detainee” suspected of a role in a mortar attack on the prison by insurgents that wounded Jordan and killed two soldiers.

When a military policeman intervened and tried to stop the abuse, he was told by the intelligence soldiers that “we are the professionals; we know what we are doing,” according to the report.

As it turned out, the prisoner probably was not involved in the attack and was released later that day.

In another incident, three military intelligence soldiers “allegedly sexually assaulted” a female detainee, the report found. The soldiers escorted her out of her cell, where one held her hands behind her back and another “forcibly kissed her.”

She was shown a naked male detainee and “told the same thing would happen to her if she did not cooperate.”

Then, the report said, “she was taken back to her cell, forced to kneel and raise her arms while one soldier removed her shirt. She began to cry, and her shirt was given back as the soldier cursed at her and said they would be back each night.”

As it turned out again, the detainee had little intelligence value and “no record exists of MI ever conducting an authorized interrogation of her.”

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Prison inquiries

A series of reviews and investigations have examined U.S. detention operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. Here are some of the major probes:

Completed

* An investigation released Wednesday by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay and Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones into the role of military intelligence soldiers and officers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. It recommends new charges against 41 people.

* A report issued Tuesday by a panel led by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger reviewing the role of top Pentagon officials in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

* An investigation completed in July by the Army’s inspector general, Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, into Army doctrine and procedures that led to abuses. It concluded the abuses were “aberrations” and not the result of systemic problems.

* A report on the Abu Ghraib abuses by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, completed in March, revealing command failures and wrongdoing by several military police troops. It recommended further investigations and provided the first details behind the scandal.

* An analysis by Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the Army’s provost marshal, on U.S. prison operations in Iraq, completed in November.

* A review of interrogation procedures in Iraq by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, completed in September, before the revelations of abuse. It recommended better detention and interrogation practices.

In progress

* A review by the Navy’s inspector general, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church, of the operations and interrogation procedures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. It is expected to be completed next month.

* A delayed review of conditions at U.S. jails in Afghanistan by Brig. Gen. Charles Jacoby, a deputy to the top general in Afghanistan.

* An Army Reserve inspector general assessment of training of reserve units in military intelligence and military police functions.

* A Pentagon administrative investigation into the treatment of detainees by Army Special Forces units.

* Various investigations into the abuses at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being conducted by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command.

* Justice Department reviews of several investigations referred by other agencies, including the CIA, into wrongdoing by individual civilians. So far one case has resulted in charges against a contractor.

Source: Times reporting

Los Angeles Times