A Prison on the Brink

In his report submitted on Nov. 6, Ryder recommended that military police not "participate in military intelligence supervised interrogation sessions." He concluded that allowing MPs to "actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews runs counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility."

But even as Ryder was writing his report, Abu Ghraib was descending into chaos and worse.

Taguba's report detailed numerous lapses:

Standard operating procedures and copies of the Geneva Conventions were not distributed to the guards handling the prisoners. No one knew for sure how many prisoners were being kept at Abu Ghraib. It took MPs four days to document transfers of detainees within the prison, making it nearly impossible to determine who was where at any given time. Roll calls were supposed to be conducted twice a day. Instead, they were conducted twice a week.

When MPs did count prisoners, there was no standard method. Sometimes MPs lined up detainees in rows of 10 and counted them in bulk. Other times, the soldiers moved prisoners to one end of a cellblock, ordered them to walk and counted them as they passed by.

Sometimes, "Other Government Agencies," a common expression for the CIA, would bring prisoners to Abu Ghraib. MPs were kept in the dark about the prisoners' identities and the reasons behind their captures. On at least one occasion, MPs moved these captives around the Abu Ghraib complex to keep them away from inspectors with the International Committee of the Red Cross. MPs called the prisoners "ghost detainees." Military investigators called that practice an apparent "violation of international law."

Prisoners learned to exploit the chaos. Military investigators said they discovered one report that documented at least 27 escapes from the facility. Karpinski said 32 had escaped. No one knew for sure because oversight was so poor.

"It is highly likely that there were several more unreported cases of escape that were probably 'written off' as administrative errors or otherwise undocumented," military investigators later wrote.

After escapes, follow-up and accountability were lacking. Investigations into escapes were "rubber-stamped" and approved by Karpinski, but there was no evidence that any of the general's orders for changes were followed, Taguba found.

If the recommendations had been followed, investigators concluded, "many of the subsequent escapes, accountability lapses and cases of abuse may have been prevented."

Not Trained to Be Guards

The real trouble started after Oct. 15, when the 372nd Military Police Company, a segment of the 320th Battalion based in Cresaptown, Md., took over Abu Ghraib from a military police company based in Henderson, Nev. The 372nd soldiers, reservists from small-town America, were not trained to be prison guards. An MP officer from another unit at Abu Ghraib said he was struck by their unprofessionalism.

"It was lots of things, from the way they wore the uniforms to the way they interacted with each other," said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ". . . They didn't carry themselves like soldiers."

And their ranks were thinly stretched. Savage, the Florida corrections officer, said soldiers were far outnumbered by the prisoners, most of whom were common criminals. For the guards, the sense of a siege was ongoing. At night, the soldiers on the towers squeezed off hundreds of rounds into the darkness in response to the incoming mortar and small-arms fire.

The 372nd company commander was Donald J. Reese, 39, a salesman from New Stanton, Pa. His unit was given perhaps the most sensitive mission: control of Tier 1A, where "high priority" detainees were held for interrogation by civilian and military intelligence officers. The 203 cells of Tiers 1A and 1B were in a two-story cinderblock building known as the "hard site" at Abu Ghraib, so called to distinguish it from the many tent compounds on the prison grounds. 1B held "high risk" or trouble-making detainees.

With little experience in corrections to fall back on, the unit deferred to MPs who had civilian prison backgrounds.

"Detainee care appears to have been made up as the operations developed with reliance on, and guidance from, junior members of the unit who had civilian corrections experience," Taguba later found.

Those members included Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II, 37, who had worked as a correctional officer at Buckingham Correctional Center in Virginia, and Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, a divorced father of two who worked as a prison guard in Greene County, Pa. Frederick was the top enlisted man in charge of 1A, where he and Graner worked closely with intelligence officers, their colleagues said.

The officer in charge of the prison was Lt. Col. Jerry L. Phillabaum, a reservist who commanded the 320th Military Police Battalion. Taguba found that Phillabaum was "an extremely ineffective commander and leader" who did little after the Camp Bucca beating incident five months earlier to put his soldiers on notice about proper detainee treatment.