The Scandal's Growing Stain

Friday, May. 18, 2007 By JOHANNA MCGEARY
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A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld is more shaken than in any previous crisis. "He's not a man of self-doubt," says the official, but he's "questioning himself and others more rigorously than previously." Rumsfeld told Senators that he intends to keep his job, but he betrayed doubts about his future. "If I felt I could not be effective, I'd resign in a minute," he said. Asked by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh whether it "would serve to demonstrate how seriously we take the situation" if he were to step down, Rumsfeld responded, "That's possible." Evidence that further abuses took place under his watch could well raise the pressure on him to resign. To see if more probes should be initiated, Rumsfeld plans to appoint a blue-ribbon panel of retired officials to examine the slew of investigations into prison management and guard training now under way. The Army is studying the deaths of 25 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, including two that have been ruled homicides, while the Justice Department is examining the role of the CIA and contract employees in the deaths of three other detainees.

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So many questions remain unresolved. Were the Abu Ghraib abuses carried out by rogue officers or done on someone's orders? Were they an excessive campaign for intelligence, or humiliation for fun? Did the U.S. get useful intelligence, or was it a nasty waste? As Americans struggle to make sense of the news, they want to understand: Why did this happen? And what is being done about it?

A HOUSE OF HORRORS

The trouble at Abu Ghraib was a long time brewing. The 260-acre prison complex lies behind tall walls off a highway 20 miles west of Baghdad. In the days of Saddam it housed thousands of criminals and political prisoners who were subjected to unspeakable torture at the whim of the regime. The U.S. military decided to reopen the prison last August for all Iraqis being detained and renamed it the Baghdad Correctional Facility. But reminders of the prison's grim history were inescapable. From the ceiling of each 10-ft.-by-12-ft. cell still dangled a large hook, which had been used to hang inmates from their hands or feet. Waleed Sabih al-Delami, detained after soldiers found suspicious wires near his house, tells TIME the Americans picked up where Saddam left off. He says he was suspended from such a hook three times during his five-month stint in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib. His feet were tied, and his arms were bound behind his back. "They would take a stick and put it through the rope and pull me off the ground," he says. While he was bound and suspended, a military translator stood by him, shouting: "You are a terrorist! You are a terrorist!" But no real questioning took place.