Posted on 07/22/2004 11:11:27 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
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ASHINGTON, July 22 - A new Army report concludes that military detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from poor training, haphazard organization and outmoded policies, but that those flaws did not directly contribute to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
The report, by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general, differs from conclusions in an earlier inquiry by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, an inquiry that uncovered abuses in what became a major scandal over American military treatment of prisoners in Iraq.
Unlike General Taguba's report, General Mikolashek's inquiry found no evidence that systemic problems caused any of 94 alleged abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan from September 2002 to June 2004. Instead, his five-month inquiry attributed the abuses to the "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate monitoring, supervision and leadership over those soldiers."
When presented at a hastily called hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, the inspector general's findings set off a partisan clash. Some Democrats virtually accused General Mikolashek of a whitewash. "It seems to me that this is just again reinforcing the conclusion that there are five or six aberrant soldiers," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat. "I don't think you've done the job that you have to do."
Republicans rushed to defend the Army, and the Pentagon's longstanding argument that a handful of rogue jailers were responsible for the misconduct at Abu Ghraib.
"People are being charged criminally who have abused their privileges," said Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. "We want our soldiers right up to the limit of what they legally can do to obtain good intelligence, to help save lives." The 321-page report, the first of at least seven pending military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan to be released in the next few months, left many contentious issues still to be addressed by the other inquiries and Army criminal investigators.
Nonetheless, it is likely to inflame the debate over how far up the chain of command culpability extends. It provided a contrast to the conclusions of General Taguba, who found that the military police at Abu Ghraib conducted "systemic and illegal abuse of detainees."
A report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in February found that "methods of ill treatment" were "used in a systematic way" by the United States military in Iraq.
Some Democrats privately accused the Army of delaying the release of the report until Thursday so that it would be overshadowed by news coverage of the final report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Army officials denied that accusation. The Army did not post a copy of General Mikolashek's report in a prominent position on its Web site until early on Thursday afternoon, and even Army public affairs personnel said they had difficulty gaining access to it.
Moreover, the inspector general report appeared to contradict its central conclusion at various points. It found that poor training in the handling of detainees and ambiguous instructions in dealing with prisoners increased the risk of abuse. Investigators determined that both conditions existed in American-run detention operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The report said the potential for abuse increased when interrogations were conducted in "an emotionally charged environment by untrained personnel who are unfamiliar with the approved interrogation approach techniques." A major finding of the report was that the military suffers from a shortage of experienced interrogators and interpreters. Finally, it concluded that "a command climate that encourages behavior at the harsher end of the acceptable range of behavior towards detainees may unintentionally increase the likelihood of abuse." In his testimony to the committee on Thursday, General Mikolashek said that at many detention centers, "it was a less than ideal command climate."
Taken together, the report's 23 major findings and 52 recommendations underscore how ill prepared the Army's training, policies and organizational structure were for the volatile and dangerous mission of rounding up and detaining 50,000 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last two and a half years.
The report, based on interviews with 650 officers and enlisted soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq and the United States, cites inadequate training for military jailers and interrogators. It criticizes poor leadership and overcrowded prisons. And it describes how Army policies were unprepared to screen and interrogate large numbers of captured people of undetermined combatant status. It found that commanders had held detainees at battlefield collection points - which typically lacked adequate medical care and security - for up to 54 days. Army doctrine calls for commanders to hold prisoners for only 24 hours, then move then to larger detention centers.
The report criticized a lack of interrogators and interpreters in military intelligence units. Many of those intelligence officials were poorly trained in gathering and analyzing intelligence from detainees, resulting in backlogs and potential loss of information. "Valuable intelligence - timely, complete, clear and accurate - may have been lost as a result," it said. It also recommended overhauling Army policies to deal with detainee operations in counterinsurgencies. Army doctrine, for instance, has yet to catch up with the need for a partnership between the military police and interrogators in questioning captured insurgents in places like Iraq, officials said.
Investigators examined 125 reports of abuse, including deaths, sexual assault and theft. Of the 94 cases in which misconduct was confirmed or deemed possible - including 20 deaths - 45 occurred when the detainee was captured, typically the most uncertain and dangerous period for soldiers. Twenty-one of the cases took place at detention centers, like Abu Ghraib. Nineteen occurred at collection points in the field, and the location of nine cases could not be determined.
Investigators found that commanders stressed the importance of treating prisoners humanely, and understood their duty to report abuses. "In those instances where abuse occurred, individuals failed to adhere to basic standards of discipline, training or Army values," the report found. "In some cases, individual misconduct was accompanied by leadership failure to maintain fundamental unit discipline, failure to provide proper leader supervision of and guidance to their soldiers."
But human rights advocates joined Democrats in casting doubt on this conclusion. "There is a serious gap between the facts presented in this report and the conclusions of its authors," said Michael Posner, executive director of Human Rights First, formerly the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "It's hard to see how you can document 94 cases of abuse or other violations and not recognize that there is a systemic problem here."
The debate among the senators at one point swept up one of the witnesses, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, who gave a passionate warning against overreacting to the prison-abuse scandal.
"We've got to be darn sure that we are not overreacting in a way that is removing lawful tools or setting conditions that would cause people to be hesitant and to second-guess and to think that we would not stand behind them if they're acting in good faith to do what is proper in this situation," General Schoomaker said.
The release of the inspector general's findings foreshadow what will soon be a flurry of investigative reports. A far-reaching inquiry into the role of military intelligence specialists at Abu Ghraib, now overseen by Gen. Paul J. Kern, is expected to be completed late this month and released in mid-August. The head of another investigation, former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, said his inquiry's four-member panel met Thursday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and would issue its report on Aug. 18. That report is intended to review all the other reports and identify any gaps in coverage.
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