CHAIN OF COMMAND: How the Department of Defense mishandled the disaster at Abu Ghraib.

In his devastating report on conditions at Abu Ghraib
prison, in Iraq, Major General Antonio M. Taguba
singled out only three military men for praise. One of
them, Master-at-Arms William J. Kimbro, a Navy dog
handler, should be commended, Taguba wrote, because he
’knew his duties and refused to participate in improper
interrogations despite significant pressure from the
MI’-military intelligence-’personnel at Abu Ghraib.’
Elsewhere in the report it became clear what Kimbro
would not do: American soldiers, Taguba said, used
’military working dogs to frighten and intimidate
detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance
actually biting a detainee.’

Taguba’s report was triggered by a soldier’s decision
to give Army investigators photographs of the sexual
humiliation and abuse of prisoners. These images were
first broadcast on ’60 Minutes II’ on April 28th. Seven
enlisted members of the 372nd Military Police Company
of the 320th Military Police Battalion, an Army reserve
unit, are now facing prosecution, and six officers have
been reprimanded. Last week, I was given another set of
digital photographs, which had been in the possession
of a member of the 320th. According to a time sequence
embedded in the digital files, the photographs were
taken by two different cameras over a twelve-minute
period on the evening of December 12, 2003, two months
after the military-police unit was assigned to Abu
Ghraib. An Iraqi prisoner and American military dog
handlers. Other photographs show the Iraqi on the
ground, bleeding.

One of the new photographs shows a young soldier,
wearing a dark jacket over his uniform and smiling into
the camera, in the corridor of the jail. In the
background are two Army dog handlers, in full
camouflage combat gear, restraining two German
shepherds. The dogs are barking at a man who is partly
obscured from the camera’s view by the smiling soldier.
Another image shows that the man, an Iraqi prisoner, is
naked. His hands are clasped behind his neck and he is
leaning against the door to a cell, contorted with
terror, as the dogs bark a few feet away. Other
photographs show the dogs straining at their leashes
and snarling at the prisoner. In another, taken a few
minutes later, the Iraqi is lying on the ground,
writhing in pain, with a soldier sitting on top of him,
knee pressed to his back. Blood is streaming from the
inmate’s leg. Another photograph is a closeup of the
naked prisoner, from his waist to his ankles, lying on
the floor. On his right thigh is what appears to be a
bite or a deep scratch. There is another, larger wound
on his left leg, covered in blood.

There is at least one other report of violence
involving American soldiers, an Army dog, and Iraqi
citizens, but it was not in Abu Ghraib. Cliff Kindy, a
member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a
church-supported group that has been monitoring the
situation in Iraq, told me that last November G.I.s
unleashed a military dog on a group of civilians during
a sweep in Ramadi, about thirty miles west of Fallujah.
At first, Kindy told me, ’the soldiers went house to
house, and arrested thirty people.’ (One of them was
Saad al-Khashab, an attorney with the Organization for
Human Rights in Iraq, who told Kindy about the
incident.) While the thirty detainees were being
handcuffed and laid on the ground, a firefight broke
out nearby; when it ended, the Iraqis were shoved into
a house. Khashab told Kindy that the American soldiers
then ’turned the dog loose inside the house, and
several people were bitten.’ (The Defense Department
said that it was unable to comment about the incident
before The New Yorker went to press.)

When I asked retired Major General Charles Hines, who
was commandant of the Army’s military-police school
during a twenty-eight-year career in military law
enforcement, about these reports, he reacted with
dismay. ’Turning a dog loose in a room of people?
Loosing dogs on prisoners of war? I’ve never heard of
it, and it would never have been tolerated,’ Hines
said. He added that trained police dogs have long been
a presence in Army prisons, where they are used for
sniffing out narcotics and other contraband among the
prisoners, and, occasionally, for riot control. But, he
said, ’I would never have authorized it for
interrogating or coercing prisoners. If I had, I’d have
been put in jail or kicked out of the Army.’

The International Red Cross and human-rights groups
have repeatedly complained during the past year about
the American military’s treatment of Iraqi prisoners,
with little success. In one case, disclosed last month
by the Denver Post, three Army soldiers from a
military- intelligence battalion were accused of
assaulting a female Iraqi inmate at Abu Ghraib. After
an administrative review, the three were fined ’at
least five hundred dollars and demoted in rank,’ the
newspaper said.

Army commanders had a different response when, on
January 13th, a military policeman presented Army
investigators with a computer disk containing graphic
photographs. The images were being swapped from
computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion.
The Army’s senior commanders immediately understood
they had a problem-a looming political and
public-relations disaster that would taint America and
damage the war effort.

One of the first soldiers to be questioned was Ivan
Frederick, the M.P. sergeant who was in charge of a
night shift at Abu Ghraib. Frederick, who has been
ordered to face a court-martial in Iraq for his role in
the abuse, kept a running diary that began with a knock
on his door by agents of the Army’s Criminal
Investigations Division (C.I.D.) at two-thirty in the
morning on January 14th. ’I was escorted . . . to the
front door of our building, out of sight from my room,’
Frederick wrote, ’while . . . two unidentified males
stayed in my room. Are they searching my room?" He was
told yes. Frederick later formally agreed to permit the
agents to search for cameras, computers, and storage
devices.

On January 16th, three days after the Army received the
pictures, Central Command issued a blandly worded,
five- sentence press release about an investigation
into the mistreatment of prisoners. Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was then
that he learned of the allegations. At some point soon
afterward, Rumsfeld informed President Bush. On January
19th, Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the
officer in charge of American forces in Iraq, ordered a
secret investigation into Abu Ghraib. Two weeks later,
General Taguba was ordered to conduct his inquiry. He
submitted his report on February 26th. By then,
according to testimony before the Senate last week by
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, people ’inside our building’ had discussed the
photographs. Myers, by his own account, had still not
read the Taguba report or seen the photographs, yet he
knew enough about the abuses to persuade ’60 Minutes
II’ to delay its story.

At a Pentagon news conference last week, Rumsfeld and
Marine General Peter Pace, the Vice-Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, insisted that the investigation
into Abu Ghraib had moved routinely through the chain
of command. If the Army had been slow, it was because
of built-in safeguards. Pace told the journalists,
’It’s important to know that as investigations are
completed they come up the chain of command in a very
systematic way. So that the individual who reports in
writing [sends it] up to the next level commander. But
he or she takes time, a week or two weeks, three weeks,
whatever it takes, to read all of the documentation,
get legal advice [and] make the decisions that are
appropriate at his or her level. . . . That way
everyone’s rights are protected and we have the
opportunity systematically to take a look at the entire
process.’

In interviews, however, retired and active-duty
officers and Pentagon officials said that the system
had not worked. Knowledge of the nature of the
abuses-and especially the politically toxic
photographs-had been severely, and unusually,
restricted. ’Everybody I’ve talked to said, We just
didn’t know’-not even in the J.C.S.,’ one well-informed
former intelligence official told me, emphasizing that
he was referring to senior officials with whom such
allegations would normally be shared. ’I haven’t talked
to anybody on the inside who knew-nowhere. It’s got
them scratching their heads.’ A senior Pentagon
official said that many of the senior generals in the
Army were similarly out of the loop on the Abu Ghraib
allegations.

Within the Pentagon, there was a spate of
fingerpointing last week. One top general complained to
a colleague that the commanders in Iraq should have
taken C4, a powerful explosive, and blown up Abu Ghraib
last spring, with all of its ’emotional baggage’-the
prison was known for its brutality under Saddam
Hussein-instead of turning it into an American
facility. ’This is beyond the pale in terms of lack of
command attention,’ a retired major general told me,
speaking of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. ’Where were the
flag officers? And I’m not just talking about a
one-star,’ he added, referring to Brigadier General
Janis Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib who was
relieved of duty. ’This was a huge leadership failure.’

The Pentagon official told me that many senior generals
believe that, along with the civilians in Rumsfeld’s
office, General Sanchez and General John Abizaid, who
is in charge of the Central Command, in Tampa, Florida,
had done their best to keep the issue quiet in the
first months of the year. The official chain of command
flows from General Sanchez, in Iraq, to Abizaid, and on
to Rumsfeld and President Bush. ’You’ve got to match
action, or nonaction, with interests,’ the Pentagon
official said. ’What is the motive for not being
forthcoming? They foresaw major diplomatic problems.’

Secrecy and wishful thinking, the Pentagon official
said, are defining characteristics of Rumsfeld’s
Pentagon, and shaped its response to the reports from
Abu Ghraib. ’They always want to delay the release of
bad news-in the hope that something good will break,’
he said. The habit of procrastination in the face of
bad news led to disconnects between Rumsfeld and the
Army staff officers who were assigned to planning for
troop requirements in Iraq. A year ago, the Pentagon
official told me, when it became clear that the Army
would have to call up more reserve units to deal with
the insurgency, ’we had call-up orders that languished
for thirty or forty days in the office of the Secretary
of Defense.’ Rumsfeld’s staff always seemed to be
waiting for something to turn up-for the problem to
take care of itself, without any additional troops. The
official explained, ’They were hoping that they
wouldn’t have to make a decision.’ The delay meant that
soldiers in some units about to be deployed had only a
few days to prepare wills and deal with other family
and financial issues.

The same deliberate indifference to bad news was
evident in the past year, the Pentagon official said,
when the Army conducted a series of elaborate war
games. Planners would present best-case, moderate-case,
and worst-case scenarios, in an effort to assess where
the Iraq war was headed and to estimate future troop
needs. In every case, the number of troops actually
required exceeded the worst-case analysis.
Nevertheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civilian
officials in the Pentagon continued to insist that
future planning be based on the most optimistic
scenario. ’The optimistic estimate was that at this
point in time’-mid-2004-’the U.S. Army would need only
a handful of combat brigades in Iraq,’ the Pentagon
official said. ’There are nearly twenty now, with the
international coalition drying up. They were wildly off
the mark.’ The official added, ’From the beginning, the
Army community was saying that the projections and
estimates were unrealistic.’ Now, he said, ’we’re
struggling to maintain a hundred and thirty-five
thousand troops while allowing soldiers enough time
back home.’

In his news conference last Tuesday, Rumsfeld, when
asked whether he thought the photographs and stories
from Abu Ghraib were a setback for American policy in
Iraq, still seemed to be in denial. ’Oh, I’m not one
for instant history,’ he responded. By Friday, however,
with some members of Congress and with editorials
calling for his resignation, Rumsfeld testified at
length before House and Senate committees and
apologized for what he said was ’fundamentally
un-American’ wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. He also warned
that more, and even uglier, disclosures were to come.
Rumsfeld said that he had not actually looked at any of
the Abu Ghraib photographs until some of them appeared
in press accounts, and hadn’t reviewed the Army’s
copies until the day before. When he did, they were
’hard to believe,’ he said. ’There are other photos
that depict . . . acts that can only be described as
blatantly sadistic, cruel, and inhuman.’ Later, he
said, ’It’s going to get still more terrible, I’m
afraid.’ Rumsfeld added, ’I failed to recognize how
important it was.’

NBC News later quoted U.S. military officials as saying
that the unreleased photographs showed American
soldiers ’severely beating an Iraqi prisoner nearly to
death, having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner, and
acting inappropriately with a dead body.’ The officials
said there also was a videotape, apparently shot by
U.S. personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young
boys.’

No amount of apologetic testimony or political spin
last week could mask the fact that, since the attacks
of September 11th, President Bush and his top aides
have seen themselves as engaged in a war against
terrorism in which the old rules did not apply. In the
privacy of his office, Rumsfeld chafed over what he saw
as the reluctance of senior Pentagon generals and
admirals to act aggressively. By mid-2002, he and his
senior aides were exchanging secret memorandums on
modifying the culture of the military leaders and
finding ways to encourage them ’to take greater risks.’
One memo spoke derisively of the generals in the
Pentagon, and said, ’Our prerequisite of perfection for
actionable intelligence’ has paralyzed us. We must
accept that we may have to take action before every
question can be answered.’ The Defense Secretary was
told that he should ’break the belt-and-suspenders’
mindset within today’s military . . . we over-plan’ for
every contingency. . . . We must be willing to accept
the risks.’ With operations involving the death of
foreign enemies, the memo went on, the planning should
not be carried out in the Pentagon: ’The result will be
decision by committee.’

The Pentagon’s impatience with military protocol
extended to questions about the treatment of prisoners
caught in the course of its military operations. Soon
after 9/11, as the war on terror got under way, Donald
Rumsfeld repeatedly made public his disdain for the
Geneva conventions. Complaints about America’s
treatment of prisoners, Rumsfeld said in early 2002,
amounted to ’isolated pockets of international
hyperventilation.’

The effort to determine what happened at Abu Ghraib has
evolved into a sprawling set of related investigations,
some of them hastily put together, including inquiries
into twenty-five suspicious deaths. Investigators have
become increasingly concerned with the role played not
only by military and intelligence officials but also by
C.I.A. agents and private-contract employees. In a
statement, the C.I.A. acknowledged that its Inspector
General had an investigation under way into abuses at
Abu Ghraib, which extended to the death of a prisoner.
A source familiar with one of the investigations told
me that the victim was the man whose photograph, which
shows his battered body packed in ice, has circulated
around the world. A Justice Department prosecutor has
been assigned to the case. The source also told me that
an Army intelligence operative and a judge advocate
general were seeking, through their lawyers, to
negotiate immunity from prosecution in return for
testimony.

The relationship between military policing and
intelligence forces inside the Army prison system
reached a turning point last fall in response to the
insurgency against the Coalition Provisional Authority.
’This is a fight for intelligence,’ Brigadier General
Martin Dempsey, commander of the 1st Armored Division,
told a reporter at a Baghdad press briefing in
November. ’Do I have enough soldiers? The answer is
absolutely yes. The larger issue is, how do I use them
and on what basis? And the answer to that is
intelligence . . . to try to figure out how to take all
this human intelligence as it comes in to us [and] turn
it into something that’s actionable.’ The Army prison
system would now be asked to play its part.

Two months earlier, Major General Geoffrey Miller, the
commander of the task force in charge of the prison at
Guantanamo, had brought a team of experts to Iraq to
review the Army program. His recommendation was
radical: that Army prisons be geared, first and
foremost, to interrogations and the gathering of
information needed for the war effort. ’Detention
operations must act as an enabler for interrogation . .
. to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that
supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,’
Miller wrote. The military police on guard duty at the
prisons should make support of military intelligence a
priority.

General Sanchez agreed, and on November 19th his
headquarters issued an order formally giving the 205th
Military Intelligence Brigade tactical control over the
prison. General Taguba fearlessly took issue with the
Sanchez orders, which, he wrote in his report,
’effectively made an MI Officer, rather than an MP
officer, responsible for the MP units conducting
detainee operations at that facility. This is not
doctrinally sound due to the different missions and
agenda assigned to each of these respective
specialties.’

Taguba also criticized Miller’s report, noting that
’the intelligence value of detainees held at . . .
Guantanamo is different than that of the
detainees/internees held at Abu Ghraib and other
detention facilities in Iraq. . . . There are a large
number of Iraqi criminals held at Abu Ghraib. These are
not believed to be international terrorists or members
of Al Qaeda.’ Taguba noted that Miller’s
recommendations ’appear to be in conflict’ with other
studies and with Army regulations that call for
military-police units to have control of the prison
system. By placing military-intelligence operatives in
control instead, Miller’s recommendations and Sanchez’s
change in policy undoubtedly played a role in the
abuses at Abu Ghraib. General Taguba concluded that
certain military-intelligence officers and civilian
contractors at Abu Ghraib were ’either directly or
indirectly responsible’ for the abuses, and urged that
they be subjected to disciplinary action.

In late March, before the Abu Ghraib scandal became
publicly known, Geoffrey Miller was transferred from
Guantanamo and named head of prison operations in Iraq.
’We have changed this-trust us,’ Miller told reporters
in early May. ’There were errors made. We have
corrected those. We will make sure that they do not
happen again.’

Military-intelligence personnel assigned to Abu Ghraib
repeatedly wore ’sterile,’ or unmarked, uniforms or
civilian clothes while on duty. ’You couldn’t tell them
apart,’ the source familiar with the investigation
said. The blurring of identities and organizations
meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or,
significantly, the military policemen on duty, to know
who was doing what to whom, and who had the authority
to give orders. Civilian employees at the prison were
not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but
they were bound by civilian law-though it is unclear
whether American or Iraqi law would apply.

One of the employees involved in the interrogations at
Abu Ghraib, according to the Taguba report, was Steven
Stefanowicz, a civilian working for CACI International,
a Virginia-based company. Private companies like CACI
and Titan Corp. could pay salaries of well over a
hundred thousand dollars for the dangerous work in
Iraq, far more than the Army pays, and were permitted,
as never before in U.S. military history, to handle
sensitive jobs. (In a briefing last week, General
Miller confirmed that Stefanowicz had been reassigned
to administrative duties. A CACI spokeswoman declined
to comment on any employee in Iraq, citing safety
concerns, but said that the company still had not heard
anything directly from the government about
Stefanowicz.)

Stefanowicz and his colleagues conducted most, if not
all, of their interrogations in the Abu Ghraib
facilities known to the soldiers as the Wood Building
and the Steel Building. The interrogation centers were
rarely visited by the M.P.s, a source familiar with the
investigation said. The most important prisoners-the
suspected insurgency members deemed to be High Value
Detainees-were housed at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad
airport, but the pressure on soldiers to accede to
requests from military intelligence was felt throughout
the system.

Not everybody went along. A company captain in a
military-police unit in Baghdad told me last week that
he was approached by a junior intelligence officer who
requested that his M.P.s keep a group of detainees
awake around the clock until they began talking. ’I
said, No, we will not do that," the captain said. ’The
M.I. commander comes to me and says, What is the
problem? We’re stressed, and all we are asking you to
do is to keep them awake.’ I ask, How? You’ve received
training on that, but my soldiers don’t know how to do
it. And when you ask an eighteen-year-old kid to keep
someone awake, and he doesn’t know how to do it, he’s
going to get creative." The M.I. officer took the
request to the captain’s commander, but, the captain
said, ’he backed me up.

’It’s all about people. The M.P.s at Abu Ghraib were
failed by their commanders-both low-ranking and high,’
the captain said. ’The system is broken-no doubt about
it. But the Army is made up of people, and we’ve got to
depend on them to do the right thing.’

In his report, Taguba strongly suggested that there was
a link between the interrogation process in Afghanistan
and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A few months after
General Miller’s report, Taguba wrote, General Sanchez,
apparently troubled by reports of wrongdoing in Army
jails in Iraq, asked Army Provost Marshal Donald Ryder,
a major general, to carry out a study of military
prisons. In the resulting study, which is still
classified, Ryder identified a conflict between
military policing and military intelligence dating back
to the Afghan war. He wrote, ’Recent intelligence
collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom
posited a template whereby military police actively set
favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.’

One of the most prominent prisoners of the Afghan war
was John Walker Lindh, the twenty-one-year-old
Californian who was captured in December, 2001. Lindh
was accused of training with Al Qaeda terrorists and
conspiring to kill Americans. A few days after his
arrest, according to a federal-court affidavit filed by
his attorney, James Brosnahan, a group of armed
American soldiers ’blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took
several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr.
Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled shithead’ across
Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him. . . . Another
told Mr. Lindh that he was going to hang’ for his
actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would
sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian
organization.’ Some of the photographs later made their
way to the American media. Lindh was later stripped
naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, and placed
in a windowless shipping container. Once again, the
affidavit said, ’military personnel photographed Mr.
Lindh as he lay on the stretcher.’ On July 15, 2002,
Lindh agreed to plead guilty to carrying a gun while
serving in the Taliban and received a twenty-year jail
term. During that process, Brosnahan told me, ’the
Department of Defense insisted that we state that there
was no deliberate’ mistreatment of John.’ His client
agreed to do so, but, the attorney noted, ’Against
that, you have that photograph of a naked John on that
stretcher.’

The photographing of prisoners, both in Afghanistan and
in Iraq, seems to have been not random but, rather,
part of the dehumanizing interrogation process. The
Times published an interview last week with Hayder
Sabbar Abd, who claimed, convincingly, to be one of the
mistreated Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib
photographs. Abd told Ian Fisher, the Times reporter,
that his ordeal had been recorded, almost constantly,
by cameras, which added to his humiliation. He
remembered how the camera flashed repeatedly as
soldiers told to him to masturbate and beat him when he
refused.

One lingering mystery is how Ryder could have conducted
his review last fall, in the midst of the prisoner
abuse at Abu Ghraib, without managing to catch it.
(Ryder told a Pentagon press briefing last week that
his trip to Iraq ’was not an inspection or an
investigation. . . . It was an assessment.’) In his
report to Sanchez, Ryder flatly declared that ’there
were no military police units purposely applying
inappropriate confinement practices.’ Willie J. Rowell,
who served for thirty-six years as an agent of the
C.I.D., told me that Ryder was in a bureaucratic bind.
The Army had revised its command structure last fall,
and Ryder, as provost marshal, was now the commanding
general of all military-police units as well as of the
C.I.D. He was, in essence, being asked to investigate
himself. ’What Ryder should have done was set up a
C.I.D. task force headed by an 0-6’-full colonel-’with
fifteen agents, and begin interviewing everybody and
taking sworn statements,’ Rowell said. ’He had to
answer questions about the prisons in September, when
Sanchez asked for an assessment.’ At the time, Rowell
added, the Army prison system was unprepared for the
demands the insurgency placed on it. ’Ryder was a man
in a no-win situation,’ Rowell said. ’As provost
marshal, if he’d turned a C.I.D. task force loose, he
could be in harm’s way-because he’s also boss of the
military police. He was being eaten alive.’

Ryder may have protected himself, but Taguba did not.
’He’s not regarded as a hero in some circles in the
Pentagon,’ a retired Army major general said of Taguba.
’He’s the guy who blew the whistle, and the Army will
pay the price for his integrity. The leadership does
not like to have people make bad news public.

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