Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher

But three directives in particular have already begun to attract congressional scrutiny: The first is a classified report by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller on Sept. 9, 2003, demanding that the military police at Abu Ghraib be dedicated and trained to set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." The report, which Cambone has testified was presented to his deputy William Boykin, contained five recommendations spelling out how this was to occur and reported it had already begun.

The second is an Oct. 12 classified memo signed by Sanchez that demanded a "harmonization" of military policing and intelligence work at Abu Ghraib for the purpose of ensuring "consistency with the interrogation policies . . . and maximiz[ing] the efficiency of the interrogation."

The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, also states "it is imperative that interrogators be provided reasonable latitude to vary their approach," depending on a detainee's background, strengths, resistance and other factors. It also explicitly demands humane treatment and requires that any dogs present during the interrogations be muzzled.

The third is a Nov. 19 memo from Sanchez's office that formally placed the two key Abu Ghraib cellblocks where the abuses occurred under the control of Pappas and his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. It was 11 days later, after this memo placed the military police responsible for "security of detainees and base protection" in Pappas's hands, that he sought, in his memo to Sanchez, to draw military police explicitly into applying pressure on the Syrian.

The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday, for example, that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted]. . . . It implies too much knowledge. . . . And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved."

Alexander did nothing to steer her away from that idea. "Well, ma'am, your logic is correct. I think that the difficult part is to find out who told whom what to do."

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) expressed similar concerns on May 7. "On the surface, you could portray the 800th MP Brigade as a Reserve unit with poor leadership and poor training," he told top Pentagon officials at the hearing that day. "However, the abuse of prisoners is not merely the failure of an MP brigade; it's a failure of the chain of command."

Military Police

At the heart of the unfolding congressional probe into what happened at Abu Ghraib is the conduct there of two units: the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army reserve unit based in Uniondale, N.Y., and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a regular Army unit principally based in Germany and Italy.

Two months after the end of the war, when members of the 800th brigade were preparing to go home, they were abruptly told they were being assigned to take over the Iraqi prison system. Looting in the weeks after the war ended had reduced Abu Ghraib and virtually every other prison to a shambles, producing acute shortages of supplies and eliminating such amenities as water and electricity.

"It's difficult for people who are not on the ground in Iraq to understand how nonexistent the detention infrastructure was when we arrived," said a senior official with the U.S.-led occupation. "There was no reliable labor force to work in the prisons. . . . It was in total disarray."

Almost immediately, the brigade's chain of command was tangled, as was the case with many military units in Iraq. Its work was directly supervised by the U.S. military's deputy commander in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, but Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski said she also "answered to" L. Paul Bremer and to a regional commander in Kuwait.

The brigade, like its specific components assigned to Abu Ghraib, was trained not to oversee the detention of prisoners in jails, but to resettle prisoners of war. "They were assigned there because there was a shortage of specialty units," Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, testified last week before a House Government Reform subcommittee.

All of the Iraqi prisons were understaffed because promised civilian contractors never appeared, Karpinski said. Unlike the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which has 800 police guarding 640 detainees, Karpinski had one soldier available to guard every 10 detainees in a prison population that included men and women of varying ages, criminals, terrorists and mentally ill persons.