Iraq: The Scandal's Growing Stain

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Eventually Mohammed, 24, wound up in a cell at Abu Ghraib, where he was beaten for hiding a pack of cigarettes. A woman soldier that he recalled as "so beautiful" pushed his arms through the bars of the cell and cuffed them so tightly he couldn't move. Then, he says, she poked his eye with her finger so hard he couldn't see afterward. Three months after the incident, Mohammed's left eye was gray and glassy, allowing only modest vision of blurry shapes. He says the guards at Abu Ghraib drank whisky and walked the halls with cans of beer. And he says he saw an American guard having regular sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner on the floor above and across the hall from his cell.

WHAT DID THEY KNOW?

The firestorm of outrage provoked by the Abu Ghraib pictures seemed to catch U.S. officials by surprise. Army General John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command that oversees Iraq, told TIME that after learning of the abuses in January, he sent word of it to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though military investigators had been aware for months that graphic photos existed, Pentagon officials showed no particular urgency in finding out how bad they were or informing anyone else about them. When Myers learned several weeks ago that CBS was about to air the pictures, he persuaded the network to delay the broadcast for two weeks. An earlier telecast might jeopardize the safety of Americans held hostage by Iraqi insurgents, he said, and further inflame anti-U.S. tensions in the country. But amazingly, Myers hadn't actually seen the pictures. When he appeared on television four days after they were broadcast, he admitted he hadn't read Taguba's report yet.

Rumsfeld's response was equally clueless. Just hours before the CBS show, says Republican Senator John McCain, Rumsfeld trooped up to S-407, the secure Intelligence Committee room in the Capitol, "and briefed us on how they're armoring the humvees. He never mentioned a word about the story that was to run that evening." Democrats and Republicans alike were furious that the Defense Secretary had kept them in the dark about the looming scandal. "If the answer is, 'He didn't know much and that's why he didn't tell us,'" said Representative John Spratt, a senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, "then the follow-up question is, 'Why didn't he know much?'" When Rumsfeld fielded questions at a press conference early last week, he still hadn't read the entire Taguba report either.

And Rumsfeld neglected to inform the most important person of all: his Commander in Chief. Rumsfeld advised Bush in February of an "issue" involving mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, says a senior White House aide. But he didn't warn anyone that CBS was about to document the abuse with shocking photos.