The Scandal's Growing Stain

Friday, May. 18, 2007 By JOHANNA MCGEARY
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Reports of scandalous U.S. behavior inside Abu Ghraib have circulated in Iraq since the day it reopened. Amnesty International raised questions back in July, but coalition forces blamed any trouble on the general disorganization of the occupation's early months. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) brought serious allegations of abuse--which they are bound to keep confidential--to U.S. attention beginning in October. Pierre Gassman, head of the ICRC delegation in charge of Iraq, told TIME that his team found credible, disturbing evidence of mistreatment after interviewing virtually all the prisoners during that visit. The Red Cross reported its findings to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the overall prison commander, and to staff officers attached to the office of Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad. In February, after more prisoner interviews, Red Cross officials sent a comprehensive report directly to the staffs of Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority. Later that month, Gassman met with Bremer and Sanchez. Gassman says he had the impression that the officials were aware of the allegations of prison abuses before he entered the room.

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They were. For months Bremer's authority had been hearing complaints from released prisoners and families of those still in detention. The State Department knew enough to realize, says a senior official, "this was going to be a problem." Aides to Bremer and Secretary of State Colin Powell say that as early as last fall, both men raised the issue in meetings with the rest of the Administration's national-security team. Yet no action was taken until mid-January, when Specialist Joseph Darby, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, got hold of some of the incriminating photographs. He slipped an anonymous note under the door of a superior officer, reporting the misbehavior, and then turned over the photos proving it.

Beginning the next day, the Army launched a discrete investigation. Sanchez immediately admonished Karpinski for "serious deficiencies" and quietly suspended her from command. In January Sanchez ordered a full-scale probe of prison practices under the charge of Major General Antonio Taguba, who completed his "Secret/No Foreign Dissemination" report in early March. The report, first obtained by the New Yorker two weeks ago and now on the Internet, blames MP commanders for poor leadership and a refusal to enforce basic standards. But it points to plenty of other failings as well. Overcrowded cells held too many prisoners guarded by unsupervised reservists with inadequate training. Left on their own, the soldiers of the 372nd practiced systematic and illegal abuse beyond what appeared in the photos, including forcing prisoners to wear women's underwear, pouring phosphoric liquid on prisoners, sodomizing a man with a chemical light and using dogs, which Muslims consider unclean, to intimidate detainees.