A Prison on the Brink

Phillabaum's boss was Karpinski, the reservist general in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade. She rarely visited Abu Ghraib, Taguba's report found. Karpinski was based at the Baghdad airport.

Karpinski, a corporate management consultant from Hilton Head, S.C., was called to active duty in June. She said she tried to regularly visit each of the detention facilities under her command. But she scaled back as the insurgency stepped up attacks. She was responsible for 3,400 soldiers at 16 facilities, including Abu Ghraib.

Soon after the 372nd arrived at Abu Ghraib, it became clear that there was a problem at the top of the prison's chain of command: Karpinski sent Phillabaum, a 1976 West Point graduate, to Kuwait for two weeks to "give him some relief from the pressure he was experiencing," the report states. Phillabaum later told The Post he was gone from Oct. 18 to Oct. 31.

Also during this period, military intelligence made a focused push on interrogations in Tiers 1A and 1B, Karpinski would later say.

"The MI said -- they specifically came to me in the September-October time frame, and said, 'Man, could you talk to those prison guys and ask if we could have those cells?' " she later told The Post. "They explained why. I said, 'I will go down and campaign for you because I understand.' "

Taguba's report and interview with MPs and their attorneys reveal what happened next.

Spec. Sabrina D. Harman, 26, of Alexandria told Taguba's investigators that Graner and Frederick were responsible for getting "these people to talk." She told The Post that military intelligence officers "made the rules as they went."

Sgt. Javal S. Davis, 26, also with the 372nd, supported that account.

"In Wing 1A we were told that they had different rules," Davis, a college dropout from New Jersey, told investigators. He said intelligence officers frequently said things such as "loosen this guy up" and "make sure he has a bad night." Davis said he was told: "Good job. They're breaking down real fast."

Davis said Graner told him agents and military intelligence personnel "would ask him to do things, but nothing was ever in writing," the report states.

The methods moved from the unorthodox to the perverse.

They "handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by insuring that the bottom guys penis will touch the guy on tops butt," Adel L. Nakhla, a U.S. civilian contract translator, told military investigators.

The Post obtained a series of digital photographs that were taken by MPs. Scattered among the hundreds of travelogue images of Iraq were some depicting prisoner abuse, most of them stamped with dates. The earliest of the abuse pictures, stamped Oct. 17, shows a naked man handcuffed to a cell door. A photograph of a naked man handcuffed to a cot with women's underwear stretched over his head was stamped Oct. 18. A photograph of Pfc. Lynndie R. England holding a chain or strap that is wrapped around the neck of a naked man outside a cell was stamped Oct. 24. A picture of a pile of naked men was stamped Oct. 25.

England, 21, who grew up in a West Virginia coal town, worked as a processing clerk in the cellblock and is reportedly engaged to Graner.

Military investigators said prisoners endured many other forms of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Soldiers kept some detainees naked for days and forced others to masturbate in front of female soldiers. They attached wires to the fingers and genitals of a man and threatened him with electrocution. One male MP had sex with female detainees. In one case, a detainee was severely injured during a dog attack. MPs broke chemical lights and poured the phosphoric liquid on detainees. One prisoner was sodomized with a chemical light.

Karpinski later said she was unaware of the abuse and blamed much of it on military intelligence personnel, who she said gave the MPs "ideas" that led to the abuse.

The Taguba report found that command of the prison was placed under military intelligence on Nov. 19, well after the abuses began. But Karpinski says that order formalized changes made earlier. The report also says that although there was not a clear order that the MPs were to "set conditions" for military intelligence interrogations, "it is obvious . . . that this was done at lower levels."

Phillabaum also said he did not know what was going on and blamed it on a few rogue soldiers, particularly Frederick.