Abu Ghraib Intelligence Chief Is Reprimanded

The Army officer in charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners often were abused and sexually humiliated, has been cited for two counts of dereliction of duty, handed a formal reprimand and fined $8,000, Army officials announced Wednesday.

But Army authorities said no decision had been made whether to relieve Col. Thomas M. Pappas of his command as head of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a move that would all but end his 24-year military career.

The administrative penalties, which resulted from a disciplinary proceeding, mark the first time an Army supervisor directly assigned to Abu Ghraib prison has been formally punished.

Others at his rank and below are still being investigated, and it remains to be seen whether more in the Army chain of command will be made accountable beyond the half-dozen sergeants and privates who have been convicted in criminal courts-martial since the abuse became public a year ago.

In citing Pappas for dereliction of duty, authorities said he had failed to ensure that his interrogators were adequately trained and supervised in intelligence gathering. He also did not obtain approval to carry out some non-sanctioned interrogation techniques, such as using military dogs to frighten prisoners into talking, Army officials said.

Pappas, 46, who has been rotated out of Iraq and assigned to duties in Europe, has never spoken publicly about the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

He is a career officer from New Jersey who joined the Army in 1981 after graduating from Rutgers University, eventually climbing the ranks in the intelligence-collection wing of the Army. After postings in South Korea, Europe and around the United States, his assignment to Iraq was one of the most significant draws of his career.

What he found there, he has said, was daunting. Pappas told Army investigators that with the Iraqi insurgency growing and the hunt still on for deposed President Saddam Hussein, he found himself hard-pressed to extract information from detainees. One of his first moves at the prison was to bring military police units under his command, in effect making himself the head of operations at Abu Ghraib.

In a February 2004 interview with Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who first investigated the prison scandal and recommended Pappas for a reprimand, Pappas said that despite trying to unify the military intelligence and police commands, he never felt he had full control over operations at the prison.

He said that military guards were never given specific orders about what they “can and can’t do with interrogations”--a statement that flatly contradicted claims by low-level soldiers that they acted rough with prisoners at the behest of military intelligence officers.

“It would have been helpful,” Pappas told Taguba, “if we had had one [formal] chain of command with regards to both the military police and military intelligence setup.”

Instead, he said, soldiers were confused. “There were dual lines of command with regard to detention operations,” he told Taguba. “I was in charge of operations at [Abu Ghraib], but I did not have a broader perspective on things such as the transport of detainees.”

Pappas said he “had no visibility over the operation” once prisoners left the confines of the interrogation rooms, “nor did I concern myself with it. Perhaps I should have.”

Taguba, in his report, recommended a reprimand for Pappas for three counts of dereliction of duty: failing to properly train his soldiers to follow the rules of engagement, failing to ensure that his soldiers understood and followed the Geneva Convention rules against abuse, and failing to properly supervise his troops at the prison’s Tier 1 site, where much of the abuse occurred.

A second investigation into intelligence failures at the prison, conducted by Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones and Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, found that 23 intelligence soldiers were involved in various ways in the abuse, and that 15 of them believed their actions were sanctioned by Army supervisors.

That report portrayed Pappas and his second-in-command, Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, as overwhelmed at Abu Ghraib. “I will tell you,” Jones said at a news conference in August, “they bear responsibility for those things that happened and the soldiers underneath them.”

Janis Karpinski, an Army reservist who last week was demoted from brigadier general to colonel for her role as head of the military police brigade in Iraq, told investigators last year that she, too, thought military intelligence officers went too far.

“I saw some of the pictures,” she said of the well-publicized photos of naked and humiliated detainees. “I think the MI gave the MPs the ideas,” she said, referring to military intelligence and military police.

Further complicating the command structure was that Pappas and Jordan never got along. Jordan, Pappas told investigators, “was a loner who freelances between MP and MI, and I must admit that I failed in not reining him in.”

Jordan, in a rejoinder during his own interview with investigators, said: “Col. Pappas and I never hit our stride. I don’t think we’re ever going to send Christmas cards to one another.”

Pappas and Jordan were present at the scene about the time one of the detainees died during an interrogation at the prison. Capt. Donald J. Reese of the military police later testified that the man was bleeding from the head, nose and mouth, and yet soldiers were told that he had suffered a heart attack.

Reese said he heard Pappas and Jordan discussing the situation, and Pappas saying he did not want to be held solely responsible. “I’m not going to go down alone for this,” Reese said he overheard Pappas say.

But others have been complimentary of Pappas.

“There were numerous leadership challenges at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003,” Lt. Col. Robert P. Walters Jr., another prison supervisor, told investigators. “The one person that rose to all those challenges and led by example, setting standards, enforcing standards and demanding nothing short of military professional excellence was Col. Tom Pappas.”