Posted on 05/07/2004 11:02:41 PM PDT by saquin
CUMBERLAND, Md., May 7 — Ivan Frederick was distraught. His son, an Army reservist turned prison guard in Iraq, was under investigation earlier this year for mistreating prisoners, and photographs of the abuse were beginning to circulate among soldiers and military investigators.
So the father went to his brother-in-law, William Lawson, who was afraid that reservists like his nephew would end up taking the fall for what he considered command lapses, Mr. Lawson recounted in an interview on Friday. He knew whom to turn to: David Hackworth, a retired colonel and a muckraker who was always willing to take on the military establishment. Mr. Lawson sent an e-mail message in March to Mr. Hackworth's Web site and got a call back from an associate there in minutes, he said.
That e-mail message would put Mr. Lawson in touch with the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" and help set in motion events that led to the public disclosure of the graphic photographs and an international crisis for the Bush administration.
It is still not entirely clear who leaked the photos and how they got into the hands of a "60 Minutes II" producer. What is clear, however, is that the furor over the photos is unlikely to dissipate any time soon.
And it may only get worse.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed Friday that there were "many more photos" and videos of abuse that have not yet become public. And he acknowledged in Senate testimony that the military might have mishandled the affair by not alerting members of Congress and the public to the growing seriousness of the military's investigation into the abuses before the images became public on "60 Minutes II."
"I wish I had been able to convey to them the gravity of this before we saw it in the media," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
The irony, Mr. Lawson said, is that the public spectacle might have been avoided if the military and the federal government had been responsive to his claims that his nephew was simply following orders. Mr. Lawson said he sent letters to 17 members of Congress about the case earlier this year, with virtually no response, and that he ultimately contacted Mr. Hackworth's Web site out of frustration, leading him to cooperate with a consultant for "60 Minutes II."
"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."
Many of the incriminating photographs appear to have been taken on a digital camera by a soldier in the 372nd Military Police Company who is now facing a court-martial. From there, they appear to have circulated among military personnel in Iraq via e-mail and computer disks, and some may have found their way to family members in the United States.
But there are still numerous unresolved questions about the photographs. One is why they were taken. Some officials suggest that soldiers wanted the photographs as souvenirs, but some relatives said they believed that the photographs were going to be shown to other prisoners to pressure their cooperation.
Then there is the question of how the photographs became public.
Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of forces in the region, testifying Friday before Congress, said he was still unclear how that happened. "It was a surprise that it got out," General Smith said.
Military officials were aware of two disks with photographs on them that were part of continuing investigations, one in Iraq and another in Washington, he said.
"That was the limit of the pictures, and we thought we had them all," General Smith said.
Producers at "60 Minutes II" are not saying exactly how they got the photographs. But Jeff Fager, the executive producer, said, "We heard about someone who was outraged about it and thought that the public should know about it."
Digital cameras have become so ubiquitous in the military that many relatives of personnel in the 372nd and other units in Iraq said they routinely received photographs by e-mail. But the photographs were usually tourist-type photographs of smiling sons and daughters, relatives said.
Officials said that the photographs showing psychological or physical abuse numbered in the hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000, with Mr. Rumsfeld hinting Friday that more may come out.
Among some prison personnel in Iraq, the photographs were apparently an open secret. "Some soldiers in Iraq had them — I'm hearing that soldiers were showing them to everybody," Mr. Lawson said. He said he did not have the original photos and did not turn them over to anyone.
The photographs have now turned soldiers like Mr. Lawson's nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, and Pfc. Lynndie R. England into graphic symbols of military abuse. But for Mr. Lawson, they are evidence of a complete breakdown in training and authority in the Iraqi prison system.
He shared his frustration in his March 23 e-mail message to Mr. Hackworth's Web site, writing: "We have contacted the Red Cross, Congress both parties, Bill O'Reilly and many others. Nobody wants to touch this."
Less than five weeks later, images of his nephew — interviewed on "60 Minutes II" with Mr. Lawson's help — would be shown around the world. Far from untouchable, the story would become unavoidable.
So are you saying given the chance you would have taken the same course of action? That is releasing the photo's while an ongoing investigation is in progress and during a time of War?
I seriously doubt it. The pictures are being released because we are in a culture that doesn't read the whole story. Yes, those of us that actually still read did know about this earlier. I remember reading an article or two on it. However, even after reading the report, I don't think I visualized exactly what was going on. I don't think I grasped the full aspect of the story. And after seeing the pictures, no story released back in January, or any time before the pictures were released, did justice to exactly what these people did to the prisoners
By Mark Mazzetti
During Saddam Hussein's brutal reign, the dank cells and grim interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib prison were notorious chambers of torture and murder. When U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad last April, long-suffering Iraqis had reason to believe such horrors would finally be over. But now, it turns out, in the same cells where Saddam's sadistic executioners once plied their trade, a new team of wardens spent much of the past year carrying out their own brand of torture and humiliation.
The abuses inflicted by soldiers of the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade may pale next to those inflicted by Saddam's henchmen, but they are a blow to the solar plexus of a nation that scolds even allies for human-rights crimes. What happened at Abu Ghraib had, by the end of last week, severely damaged several military careers, threatened the tenure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and dealt yet another crippling blow to America's reputation around the world.
The impact of the scandal was amplified by the grisly but now familiar photographs. Rumsfeld warned that more photos and videos may yet surface. Exactly who took the photos and how they surfaced remained a mystery, but there was no doubt about what they portrayed--a variety of gratuitously cruel and humiliating behavior by U.S. military personnel toward Iraqi prisoners, many of them naked.
Breakdown. But the sordid tale wasn't without a few heroes. Spc. Joseph Darby, an Army reservist from rural Pennsylvania, drew back the curtain of secrecy at Abu Ghraib to expose the abuses. Darby's actions led ultimately to a stinging report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, and the Pentagon has launched a series of investigations into the treatment of prisoners at military detention facilities. At Abu Ghraib, much of the blame for the atrocities seemed to rest on the dysfunctional relationship between the prison's guards and its interrogators. But what happened there is also causing the harsh light of scrutiny to be cast on the ways that prisoners of the U.S. military are detained and interrogated worldwide. That line of inquiry is revealing systemic flaws that may begin to help answer the most basic of questions: How could this possibly happen?
The easy answer is that no senior U.S. official was paying close attention to what was occurring behind the concrete walls and razor wire at Abu Ghraib. Repeated warnings by the International Committee of the Red Cross about the conditions there brought no significant changes. The Pentagon office handling detainee policy spends most of its time overseeing the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, leaving the handling of the Iraqi prisons to U.S. theater commanders. "There was no oversight of the Iraqi prisons the way there was at Guantanamo Bay," says Mark Jacobson, who until last fall was in charge of detainee policy at the Pentagon.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib also represent a wholesale breakdown of military leadership and discipline. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th MP Brigade, was admonished in January. She later took a personal leave. But Karpinski didn't have direct authority over the prison, which was run by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. In an interview arranged by her lawyer, Neal Puckett, General Karpinski said that interrogators began "turning up the heat" on detainees after a visit to Abu Ghraib from a team led by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller back in August. Miller, then commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, traveled to Iraq to assess the interrogation and detention facilities. He took charge of the military prisons in Iraq last month. Karpinski, in the interview, said she sees "a linkage" between Miller's visit and the abuse of prisoners. A U.S. spokesman in Iraq said Miller would have no comment. Asked at a congressional hearing last week about a report Miller's inspection team produced, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith said that the evaluation did not support any abusive treatment of prisoners.
Pressing inmates for intel
Filling the gaps. During congressional testimony last week, Rumsfeld said all U.S. detainees are supposed to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. But the order, which Rumsfeld said came from President Bush, apparently was not communicated down to the lowest ranks. According to one military lawyer with experience in Iraq, interrogators would sometimes sit on detainees during questioning, pour water on them, or shut them in lockers for hours. "There are no comprehensive guidelines put out to interrogators," says the military lawyer.
Defense officials and interrogation experts say there's enormous pressure to wring actionable intelligence out of detainees in order to fight the deadly insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another broad problem, Pentagon officials point out, is that the pool of soldiers used for detention operations is both ill-trained and far too small to handle the growing demands at U.S. military facilities. Few soldiers view detention work as a desirable career path, and out of 38,000 military police soldiers, fewer than 1,000 have undergone specialized training for work at correctional facilities. Moreover, the post-Cold War drawdown of the U.S. military cut significantly the number of MP units the Pentagon can dispatch to war zones, taking the units out of the active duty force and putting them into the reserves. Last year, the Pentagon began converting seldom-used Army Reserve artillery units into military police battalions.
The military also suffers from shortages of seasoned interrogators. Says Jacobson: "I don't know if there is a shortage of interrogators. There is definitely a shortage of skilled interrogators." Consequently, the Pentagon has had to fill the gaps with civilian contractors like the two named in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Which is why Steven Stephanowicz, a civilian contractor employed by CACI International and assigned to Abu Ghraib, is now in the middle of the abuse scandal. Of the four intelligence operatives (two contractors, two military personnel) suspected by General Taguba of being "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses" at the Iraqi prison, Stephanowicz alone is believed to have given instructions to the young, inadequately trained MP s "that clearly equated to physical abuse," Taguba's report said.
Stephanowicz's involvement in the scandal raises complex legal issues for investigators. Civilians are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and "commanders have no penal authority to compel contractor personnel to perform their duties or to punish any acts of misconduct," according to the military's official doctrine governing contractors. Worse, says a military intelligence officer, "we can't even force CACI to fire [Stephanowicz]" should the allegations prove true.
As the horrors of Abu Ghraib make painfully clear,the demand for intelligence has vastly exceeded the supply of qualified people to gather it. But the episode is also an example of how ill-prepared the Pentagon was to shoulder the burdens of occupation after the statues of Saddam fell. "There is all this pressure on guys to get intel without the acknowledgment that the system [in Iraq] was overwhelmed by the number of detainees and lack of resources and lack of a plan," says one military lawyer who worked in Iraq. "No one ever expected to be occupying Iraq and be there past last summer, so no one gave much thought on how to do this stuff."
2) YOur beef should be with the idiots who did the acts...not with the guys who have brought the pictures to light.
redrock
Red the idiots that did the acts brought the pictures to light. They gave them to Hack.
BUt,unlike many here it seems, I would NOT have forgotten that when I become a soldier...I do NOT put aside the responsibilites of the citizen (there IS a quote by George Washington about that).
And one of the responsibilites of the citizen is to make sure that those who represent our Nation...do so with Honour.
...and Honour is something that those MP's at the Prison seem to lack.
redrock
Bump.
But this whole affair needs to be about the MP's who did the abuse.
Neither Hackworth or CBS DID any of the abuse's.
...and I much prefer to live in a Nation that is NOT afriad of looking at the abuses carried out in it's name...and deciding that it does NOT want it to happen again.
We, as a Nation, WILL ride out this mess...and when we get out the other side will be a better people..and have a better military BECAUSE of the openness.
We can handle it...
redrock
Maybe not. Openness (Glasnost) has its own power. It is easier to perish in the dark.
For one....I REALLY am beginning to understand what went on.
...and I don't like it.
We can see (and you know what they say about pictures being worth more than words)..in very graphic detail...what has been carried out in our Name.
NOW we need to look at wether the United States is sending out units that do NOT have the training....or if it's just some weird people in that unit.
The latest report seems to gravitate to the unit NOT being properly trained...and the problems with the Chain of Command...i.e. a Intelligence unit being put in charge of the MP's.
redrock
Unfortunately, one of his attempts at character assassination, against an officer that he had never even met, resulted in a death...and HACKworth had been wrong yet again.
There is more then one person that would love to discuss that with him, up close and personal.
According to one of the MP's attorney this evening on Heartland, MIs are in the picture that was released yesterday, the one with multiple guys walking around nonchalantly while 3 naked Iraqis entertwined on the floor.
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