The Verdict on Abu Ghraib

• Share

A report released last week places a share of the responsibility for the mistreatment of inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison on the shoulders of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Though the report didn't single him out by name or call for his resignation, it concludes that a combination of too many prisoners and too few guards — as well as a confusing chain of command — generated a climate ripe for trouble that the Pentagon's leadership should have anticipated. In the report, Rumsfeld's own specially appointed panel, headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, blames Rumsfeld's lean and haphazard deployment orders for overtaxing troops in Iraq. It points out that when the commander in charge of Abu Ghraib, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, said she needed more forces, she was told to "'wear her stars' and reallocate personnel among her over-stretched units."

Schlesinger's report and a separate internal Army probe lay out a series of dubious decisions that fostered the abuses, starting with President Bush's 2002 order suspending the Geneva Conventions for captured al-Qaeda and Taliban members. Rumsfeld then doubled the number of harsh strategies U.S. forces could employ in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan, allowing measures like stripping prisoners and using dogs to terrify them. Pressured by Pentagon lawyers, the Schlesinger report said, Rumsfeld ultimately banned the worst techniques. But some slipped back into use at Abu Ghraib after those who had used them in Afghanistan and Guantanamo arrived in Iraq. "They were neither limited nor safeguarded" in their application, the panel said.

Faced with these embarrassing assessments, Rumsfeld kept a low profile last week, staying away from the capital. "I don't think anyone with any judgment expects the person in my position to know what's going on in the night shift 6,000 miles away," he said in a Phoenix, Ariz., radio interview.

Rumsfeld's problems seemed to mount over the weekend with reports that the FBI is investigating Larry Franklin, a Defense Department analyst, for allegedly passing classified information to Israel.