Officials Clash on Roles at Prison

The Army general who investigated abuse at a U.S. military prison in Iraq and a Pentagon official in charge of military intelligence disagreed sharply Tuesday over who controlled the prison when Iraqi war prisoners were stripped, humiliated and threatened with attack dogs.

Responding to questions for the first time since his secret report to Army officials became public, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba told Congress that intelligence officials had taken authority from military police, whose job it was to guard prisoners. But Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said military police had remained in charge of handling detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.

The hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee was seen as a key opportunity to clear up questions about the murky command structure over Abu Ghraib. Instead, lawmakers from both parties said they were left frustrated that the testimony did little to dispel the confusion surrounding the control over soldiers who committed the abuse.

“How do you expect the MPs to get it straight if we have a difference between the two of you?” asked Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

Senior committee members said later that they would continue to investigate, holding additional hearings on whether officials higher up the chain of command -- possibly at senior levels in the Pentagon -- bear responsibility for the abuse, which has triggered an international scandal. Seven soldiers face criminal charges in connection with the abuse, and seven others have been reprimanded.

The scandal could widen this afternoon when hundreds of new photographs and some video images of the abuse and misconduct are shown to senators. Also today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is scheduled to appear before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, where he is expected to face additional questions. Some members of Congress have called for his resignation over the abuse.

Taguba, a high-ranking Army official born in the Philippines who emerged from obscurity when the 6,000-page investigation report on the abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, also differed with Cambone over the overall import of the scandal. Taguba called the abuses outlined in his report “very grave.” Cambone testified that he had not been convinced that the accusations against military intelligence personnel were very serious.

“I still don’t know that there is a significant issue here,” Cambone told the committee.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after the hearing that the testimony raised questions about whether interrogation techniques approved by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who is in charge of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, complied with the Geneva Convention.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command, testified that they complied, but he acknowledged in an interview after the hearing that Sanchez had permitted the use of muzzled dogs with prisoners in interrogation rooms and long-term isolation of some detainees at the prison.

In answer to a question from Levin, Taguba testified that coercive practices such as holding prisoners naked for long periods were systematic at Abu Ghraib.

“That doesn’t square with the statements by the witnesses that the Geneva Convention provisions and principles were supposed to be followed ... since they don’t allow for such practices,” Levin said.

Also left unresolved were questions on the role of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who visited Iraqi prisons in September at Cambone’s behest, shortly before the reported abuses took place. In the report from his visit, Miller suggested that military police become actively involved in “setting the conditions” to reap more intelligence from prisoner interrogations.

Cambone told the committee that Miller wanted to increase cooperation between interrogators and prison guards. He acknowledged that detainees at the detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, often referred to as “Gitmo,” were not subject, according to U.S. government policy, to the norms of the Geneva Convention.

But Cambone said a suggestion in Miller’s report that prison authorities “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib referred only to Miller’s desire to establish better order at the Iraq prison.

“With respect to the issue of Gitmo-izing, if I may return to that, Sen. Kennedy, let’s go back to the conditions that were in Abu Ghraib,” Cambone said. “They were disorderly, as the general just points out. And the notion, it seems to me, that Gen. Miller had was that order needed to be established in the processes and procedures.”

Cambone said neither he nor his deputies authorized guards or interrogators to use extreme tactics, including sexual humiliation and intimidation.

Smith testified that Miller did not import the interrogation techniques employed at Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib without regard to international law. Miller made it clear, he said, that all prisoners were to be treated humanely.

“We were operating under the Geneva Conventions in Iraq,” Smith said. “We clearly understood that.”

Taguba told lawmakers that although he believed soldiers acted “of their own volition” in abusing prisoners, intelligence officers in charge of interrogations at the prison exerted influence over tactics adopted by the guards.

Involving military police in “setting the conditions” for interrogations violated Army regulations and could have created confusion among the MPs about their role, Taguba said.

“I think it was a matter of soldiers with their interaction with military intelligence personnel who they perceived or thought to be competent authority that were giving them or influencing their action to set the conditions for successful interrogations operations,” Taguba said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was skeptical that the young guards would choose to inflict “bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be particularly offensive to Muslim men.” They would be more likely, she said, to beat them up. This made her suspicious that someone else directed them, she said.

“That really troubles me because it just doesn’t -- it implies too much knowledge of what would be particularly humiliating to these Muslim prisoners. And that is why even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved,” Collins said.

In testimony to the committee, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, agreed with Collins’ logic that the guards were told to abuse the prisoners in a certain way.

“That’s really where we need to get to. Who told them to do this?” Alexander said. “And who was that individual? That is the key to all of this.”

Taguba testified that his investigation did not turn up evidence that “top down” direction from Washington led to the abuses at the prison. But he said he was “puzzled” as to why knowledge of detainee abuse was not reported to senior-level commanders.

“It was apparent in our investigation that these things were happening, but we were puzzled also with the fact, sir, that none of this stuff was going above the battalion commander level,” Taguba said. “And that’s what we concluded, that none of this stuff was going above the battalion commander level.”

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Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this report.