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Abu Ghraib Prison: A Hell On Earth

By Edward T. Pound and Kit R. Roane

13 July, 2004
US News.com

In October last year, Army Capt. Donald Reese visited the Abu Ghraib prison complex near Baghdad for the first time. He had plenty of reason to be there. He had just been installed as the warden of part of the prison, and as he toured cellblock 1, he was stunned to see a bunch of naked prisoners. He would later tell Army investigators: "My first reaction was, 'Wow, there [are] a lot of nude people here.' " Army intelligence officers assured him, he testified, that "nothing was illegal or wrong about it"--that, in fact, stripping the prisoners was a tried-and-true intelligence tactic used to make the prisoners uncomfortable. By his own account, Reese, a reservist and window-blinds salesman in civilian life, was ill-prepared for the job. He had never before set foot in a prison, even as a visitor, and he knew nothing of the Geneva Conventions, which specify conditions for humane treatment of enemy prisoners of war and others. "I, myself, have never been in a prison," Reese told Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who was assigned to investigate the issue of abuses at Abu Ghraib. "So I had no experience at all as far as a warden or that type of thing."

As things turned out, of course, there was plenty wrong with the treatment that some of Reese's soldiers inflicted on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The Army admonished Reese for failing to supervise his subordinates, but he is not alone: Criminal charges have been brought against seven soldiers in Reese's 372nd Military Police Company, while other military police and intelligence officers have been reprimanded. Several Defense Department investigations are underway, and the Senate is planning a close look.

These various inquiries may answer the most pressing questions: How did the mess at Abu Ghraib happen? Was it, as the Bush administration says, the work of just a few rogue soldiers, a few bad apples? Or did some senior military leaders, despite their denials, know what was going on inside the prison walls late at night? For now, the most compelling evidence of what happened is contained in a report completed in March by General Taguba. He found, the report says, "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses."

Chaos. Over the past two months, many of the classified documents supporting Taguba's findings have emerged in various news accounts, including in U.S. News. But the magazine now has obtained all 106 classified annexes to the report, and the several thousand pages of material provide the most comprehensive view yet of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib and in the Army's management of the teeming prison system in Iraq after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled. Taguba focused mostly on the MP s assigned to guard the inmates at Abu Ghraib, but the classified files in the annex to his report show that military intelligence officers--dispatched to Abu Ghraib by the top commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez--were intimately involved in some of the interrogation techniques widely viewed as abusive.

The abuses took place, the files show, in a chaotic and dangerous environment made even more so by the constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees. Riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, unsanitary conditions, rampant sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents--according to the annex to General Taguba's report, that pretty much sums up life at Abu Ghraib.

It was an environment for which not just Reese's reservists but many regular Army troops were singularly unprepared. Col. Henry Nelson, an Air Force psychiatrist who prepared a report for Taguba on Abu Ghraib, described it as a "new psychological battlefield" and detailed the nature of the challenge faced by the Americans working in the overcrowded prison. "These detainees are male and female, young and old," Nelson wrote; "they may be innocent, may have high intelligence value, or may be terrorists or criminals. No matter who they are, if they are at Abu Ghraib, they are remanded in deplorable, dangerous living conditions, as are the soldiers."


The documents provide new insight into how Abu Ghraib was spiraling out of control even as top military commanders battled behind closed doors over how best to run the facility and obtain more usable intelligence information from detainees. General Sanchez and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a reservist who commanded the 800th MP Brigade, to which Reese's unit was attached, were often at loggerheads over the management of Abu Ghraib. In her secret testimony, Karpinski, who was criticized for leadership failures in the Taguba report, said Sanchez refused to provide her with the necessary resources to run Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Sanchez, she said under oath, didn't "give a flip" about his soldiers, and added: "I think that his ego will not allow him to accept a Reserve brigade, a Reserve general officer, and certainly not a female succeeding in a combat environment. And I think he looked at the 800th MP Brigade as the opportunity to find a scapegoat . . . . "

As the commanders battled it out, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were confused over who was in charge, the documents show. At one point, someone smuggled a handgun to one of the detainees, and Karpinski ordered a report on the incident but was told that Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the senior military intelligence officer in the prison, had issued a gag order to her MP s. Karpinski blew up. "Bullcrap," she replied, according to her interview by General Taguba. " . . . They're still my MP s."

Weak leadership in the prison meant soldiers couldn't accomplish basic tasks, like feeding their detainees. Without a clear chain of command, especially after Sanchez informed Karpinski that military intelligence authorities would assume responsibility for running a key area of Abu Ghraib where Iraqis were detained for interrogation, some soldiers just ran wild. "One of the tower guards was shooting prisoners with lead balls and a slingshot," a company commander testified. Karpinski, in her interview with Taguba, said some soldiers likened the place to "the wild, wild West." Soldiers ran around in civilian clothes and covered latrines with so much graffiti a commander had them painted black. An Army captain photographed female subordinates showering in outside stalls while private contractors smuggled beer into the prison.

"A hodgepodge." The place, the documents suggest, was bedlam. Colonel Jordan, when questioned by General Taguba about how out of hand the camp had become, said: "I mean every time I turned left, sir, there was all this stuff coming up." The intelligence officer noted that in one 18-hour period he had had to deal with two soldiers abusing a prisoner, another soldier being sexually propositioned by an officer, and a third sick and vomiting in her room after drinking too much alcohol. He also worried, he testified, that "hookers" were living in some bunks.

Abu Ghraib wasn't the only prison where abuses took place. The problems there, the newly available documents show, had their roots months earlier at another U.S.-run detention center in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca. Evidence showed that MP s viciously attacked prisoners there, including one who had his nose smashed in. Four soldiers were given less than honorable discharges but were not prosecuted. "I'm convinced that what happened [at Abu Ghraib] would never have happened if" the Camp Bucca cases had been prosecuted, Maj. Michael Sheridan, who worked at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba.

Abu Ghraib housed several thousand detainees of all kinds, in the "hard site" and in two tent encampments, Camp Vigilant and Camp Ganci. "We had juveniles, we had females, we had the crazy," Reese told Taguba. "I don't want to call them crazy, but the psych ward was also dumped on Wing One [of Abu Ghraib]. So we had quite a hodgepodge of people in there." Included in the hodgepodge were hardened criminals, plus security detainees who might be of "intelligence value" in terms of identifying those responsible for the Iraqi insurgency and attacks on American and allied forces. An intelligence officer who testified in the Taguba inquiry said he felt the pressure: "Sir, I was told a couple times . . . that some of the reporting was getting read by [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, folks out of Langley [the Central Intelligence Agency], some very senior folks."

But at the same time, soldiers complained in testimony, there seemed little interest from the top brass in providing the prison facility with what it needed to get the job done. None of the top commanders wanted to hear about the lack of prison guards, lack of guns for MP s or floodlights to bathe the compounds at night and prevent escapes, almost a constant threat at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers complained that there weren't enough of them to properly man guard towers or patrol perimeters. The detainees were often separated from freedom by little more than a few strands of wire and were always on edge because of the dismal living conditions and the shortage of edible food. Six prisoners, including the suspected murderer of an American soldier, escaped from Abu Ghraib during Ramadan. None was caught.

Rioting was also a constant problem. In one instance, prisoners at Camp Vigilant tossed "baseball-size rocks" at MP s, complaining about the lack of "basic needs, such as showers, shampoos, blankets, and toilets," an Army review shows.

The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 24, when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush" and 'Bush is bad,' " another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers along the wire. . . ." Guards feared for their lives--"the sky was black with rocks," the report said--and a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn't know whether they were using lethal or nonlethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns.

"Simple fixes." The review, which also evaluated a shooting incident inside tier 1 of the "hard site" prison building, found that MP s there were confused over whom to report to--their own commanders or military intelligence officers who controlled the interrogation wing. "Clear-cut chain of command," the Army review found, "does not exist in the prison."


Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Company. "I don't know how there's not rioting every day," he testified.

Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Maj. David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Maj. William Green of the 800th MP Brigade and copied to the higher chain of command, show a frantic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Ghraib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn't make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt. "As each day goes by, tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. " . . . Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs, or whatever in the food?" Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners, I would take that with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MP s, medics, and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the company holds other contracts with the military.

The problems at Abu Ghraib were exacerbated by the friction between the intelligence and military police commanders--not surprising in light of General Sanchez's decision to have military intelligence officers assume control of the facility from Karpinski's MP s in November. Sanchez also gave the military intelligence officers more resources--something he didn't do for the 800th MP Brigade, according to Karpinski and others--in his drive to obtain more intelligence from detainees.

Breaking tables. The Taguba report shows that the major abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred between October and December, almost all of them in the early hours of the morning, when senior officers were not present. Most of the abuses were committed by members of the 372nd MP Company, but others were committed by personnel under the control of Col. Thomas Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and Colonel Jordan, one of his top aides, the annexes show.

In a sworn statement, Torin Nelson, a civilian interrogator at Abu Ghraib, told investigators that they should look into two other interrogators who he believed were roughing up detainees. One of the men, he said, "has a reputation for breaking the tables in the room" while interrogating prisoners. He described an incident in which one of the men allegedly threw a prisoner from a vehicle, then "started dragging . . . the detainees by the cuffs."

The annexes show that most detainees were questioned, many times naked, in interrogation booths near the hard-site prison, though some interrogations were conducted in tier 1. In some cases, military dogs were used to intimidate prisoners, the classified annexes show; sometimes they were muzzled, and sometimes they were not. Interrogators also used sleep deprivation--sometimes keeping prisoners awake for all but four hours in a 24-hour period, according to the testimony of Steven Stephanowicz, a civilian interrogator. In his report, Taguba said he suspected that Stephanowicz; another civilian interrogator, John Israel; Pappas; and Jordan "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib."


In his 80-page interview with Taguba's investigators, Captain Reese, the warden, said he relied on Jordan for guidance that everything being done in the prison was permissible. He recounted this conversation with Jordan: "Why does everybody have their clothes off? And he just said, 'It's an interrogation method that we use,' and from that point on I said, 'OK.' "

Pappas, interviewed three times last February by Taguba's staff, insisted that he sought to curtail abuses. "There once was an incident where the detainees . . . were naked," Pappas said. "I told them to have the detainees put their clothes back on and that it was inappropriate." He knew of only two instances of detainee abuse by his interrogators, he said, and disciplinary action was taken in each case. He also said General Sanchez had given him approval to use dogs in interrogations, as long as they were muzzled. As for the Geneva Conventions, Pappas said, they were "not specifically posted in any of the facilities where the detainees were being held."

Pappas's role at Abu Ghraib did not sit well with Karpinski, who had originally taken control of the facility, along with 15 other Army prisons in Iraq, last summer. The classified annexes show that tensions ran high. Simply put, one hand did not know what the other was doing. Informed by another officer of Sanchez's decision to have Pappas assume control at Abu Ghraib, Karpinski said, according to her statement to General Taguba: "If Colonel Pappas is going to take charge of the MP Battalion . . . I still want them to send me information. I want to know what's going on with my MP s. Because I'm the one that's going to be asked the questions [about any problems]." The officer, Karpinski recounted, said, "Ma'am, I don't think so." Making matters worse, Karpinski said, was the fact that Sanchez and his deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wodjakowski, consistently ignored her pleas for more resources. "They did not want to be bothered by me," she testified. "And--were they blowing me off because I was a reservist? Yes. . . . We asked, and we got nothing."

She laid out a litany of complaints: When she asked for force protection at Abu Ghraib to suppress incoming mortar fire, Sanchez gave her no troops. Worried about the safety of her soldiers, she complained loudly "up the line," including to Wodjakowski, about how military intelligence was using a former Iraqi soldier--who had been a prisoner--as a translator. "Nobody seemed to care that this guy was out there and had full access to everywhere on the compound," she testified. Karpinski said she had reason not to trust the Iraqi: He had fought against U.S. forces as a member of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.

Bathrooms. At one point, Taguba asked Karpinski if she recalled a memo issued by General Sanchez requiring prisoners to be treated with "respect and dignity." Karpinski said she did. Known for her sharp tongue, she then described the lousy food, lack of showers, and violations of prisoner rights--all issues she had taken up with Sanchez. "Soldiers recognize that the person [Sanchez] who signed that policy letter about dignity and respect," she testified, "has about as much interest in dignity and respect for prisoners as he does about the cleanliness of bathrooms."


Sanchez formally admonished Karpinski last January for leadership failures. A spokeswoman in Iraq says Sanchez and Wodjakowski both have been strong supporters of their troops and suggested that Karpinski wasn't all that worried about problems at Abu Ghraib. Karpinski, the spokeswoman said, "chose not to participate" in twice-weekly meetings with Wodjakowski where she could have discussed problems at Abu Ghraib. Wodjakowski, she says, was "very distressed by the conditions of the troops" at the prison and sent other general officers there to "assess and improve the living conditions."

Whatever battles there were between the top generals, many soldiers felt abandoned by their chain of command. In testimony, they complained about the lack of toilet facilities, unsanitary conditions, and their unnecessary vulnerability to frequent mortar attacks when they slept out in the compounds. "If you are talking about soldier life support, it's been horrible," Capt. Mark Hale, an MP at Abu Ghraib, told Taguba's staff last February. He added: "The only guidance my guys got was the guidance I gave them. . . . When you tried to go up, you basically got blown off."