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."