A Prison on the Brink

"It was worse than you can imagine on days when there was no breeze," said one MP assigned to the camp who requested anonymity because he signed a "nondisclosure" agreement before leaving Iraq. "If there was a hell, I can imagine that's what it smelled like."

The poor conditions had consequences.

"Abu wasn't running, none of the satellite prisons were running, so we had nowhere to send these guys," said one military officer assigned to the camp who has been ordered not to discuss Cropper. ". . . Anytime it got real hot, there were riots."

The uprisings rattled even the most seasoned of soldiers. Detainees would cut themselves on the concertina wire that surrounded the camp and try to smear their blood on MPs. They rushed the wire and threw rocks they had stored up.

"It was unnerving as hell," the officer said.

On June 9, the detainees rioted after one of the prisoners hit an MP. The prisoner was subdued, and one of the MPs took off his camouflage shirt and "flexed his muscles to the detainees, which further escalated the riot," according to the military report.

Rocks started to fly. One soldier was hit in the head. Another was struck by a tent pole. A prisoner pulled an MP through the concertina wire.

"This thing was out of control," the officer said.

The MPs were overwhelmed, and guards opened fire. Five prisoners were wounded. An investigation into the incident concluded that the shooting was justified, and no soldiers were punished. Still, the incident symbolized a severe lack of training, said another officer familiar with the incident.

Officers said they complained about the conditions at Camp Cropper, but no one seemed to listen. They said they were told that the military was preparing to open Abu Ghraib as quickly as possible.

"The challenge was trying to find a place to take them," one officer said.

Setting the Conditions

For 18 months, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller had run the detainee operation at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Aug. 31, he and a team of inspectors arrived in Baghdad to examine prison operations in Iraq. They visited Camp Cropper and the refurbished Abu Ghraib prison, which had opened Aug. 4.

Miller recommended that Cropper be closed. He made another recommendation: that MPs and military intelligence officers work closely to gather information from the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

At Guantanamo, where suspected al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters are kept and interrogated, Miller said, he found that separating MPs, who serve as jailers, from intelligence officers, who conduct interrogations, was counterproductive. He viewed MPs as key players in the process because they could serve as the ears and eyes of military intelligence officers on the cellblocks. Miller recommended that the new commander in charge of the 800th MP Brigade, Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, consolidate the two functions, permitting MPs to set "conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation" of the prisoners.

One month after Miller's team left Iraq on Sept. 9, another inspection team arrived in Iraq. This one was headed by Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, the provost marshal in charge of Army military police. Ryder arrived in Baghdad on Oct. 13, two weeks after Camp Cropper was closed.

Ryder conducted a "comprehensive review of the entire detainee and corrections system in Iraq." He found flawed operating procedures, improper restraint techniques, a lack of training, an inadequate prisoner classification system, understrength units and a ratio of guards to prisoners designed for "compliant" prisoners of war and not criminals or high-risk-security detainees.

But Ryder also found "there were no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement practices."

At Abu Ghraib, the guard-to-prisoner ratio was about one to 15, with one battalion guarding 7,000. Army doctrine calls for one battalion per 4,000 enemy soldiers. In civilian prisons, one guard per three inmates is considered ideal.