Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher

"It's like being in Dodge City in the 1870's without speaking the same language," said a newsletter home last summer from the 372nd Military Police Company, the Cresaptown, Md., unit assigned in October to guard Abu Ghraib. "The prison 'detainee' climate is becoming more strained as the months drag on," the December newsletter said. "We take each day as it comes, do our jobs, and wait for the day when we all get to go home."

Discipline among the soldiers slumped over time, according to internal Army reports. Military police were permitted to wear civilian clothes to boost morale, but it contributed to sloppiness about other rules, investigators concluded; platoon leaders encouraged some of their soldiers to carry concealed weapons while walking among the detainees, a violation of regulations. Punishments for minor offenses were rare; a climate of leniency developed.

Army investigators have concluded that the brigade's low familiarity with Islamic culture provided a breeding ground for racism and a widespread conviction that Muslims were terrorists. One of its dog handlers insisted that the animals simply disliked Iraqis because of their appearance and smell.

One of the most notorious photos to emerge from the prison -- of naked and cuffed Iraqi men pushed together on the prison floor in a simulation of sex -- originated in a decision by guards to punish two Iraqis for raping a 14-year-old male detainee, the participants said. On another occasion, a guard attacked, beat and hung a handcuffed Iraqi by his wrists -- dislocating his shoulders -- in a fit of anger over the Iraqi's role in smuggling a pistol into the prison.

When Karpinski brought up a Red Cross complaint that intelligence officers had demanded recalcitrant prisoners be escorted back to their cells wearing women's underwear, a deputy to the chief intelligence officer joked about it.

"I told the commander to stop giving them Victoria's Secret catalogs," the deputy said in a roomful of officers, Karpinski recalled. She said she replied that the Red Cross would not appreciate that response.

Military Intelligence

The decision to place the prison's key cellblocks -- 1A and 1B, which held "security detainees" suspected of threatening U.S. forces or knowing about such threats -- under the direct control of the 205th MI Brigade came shortly after Miller visited Iraq in late August and early September at the request of Cambone, according to Cambone's congressional testimony last week.

Miller, a combat officer with no training in prisons or intelligence-gathering, had won accolades inside the Pentagon and attracted controversy outside it earlier in the year, when he oversaw a transformation of the military's long-term detention center at Guantanamo Bay from a disorganized bundle of tents into an efficient prison that routinely produced what officials have called "moderately valuable" intelligence for the war on terrorism.

Miller's signature achievement at the Cuban center was to implement a system of rewards and punishments in detainee housing, food, clothing and other treatment that provided incentives for use as leverage during interrogations. Cambone testified last week that he sent Miller to Iraq to help ensure "there was a flow of intelligence [from the jail] back to the commands and [that it was] done in an efficient and effective way."

Shortly after Miller's return, new rules were written for interrogation sessions involving detainees in cellblocks 1A and 1B, which stressed a collaboration between military police and intelligence officials while also providing safeguards such as legal reviews of the interrogation plans and scrutiny of how they were carried out. The rules were signed by Sanchez, but it remains unclear who -- if anyone -- in Washington may have seen them in draft or final form.

The reality in the field, Army investigators quickly learned, was an absence of any supervision or monitoring. Pappas, for example, told them that no procedures were in place for the independent monitoring of the interrogations and no personnel were available to do it, officials familiar with his testimony said. Moreover, most of the Army soldiers accused of abuse have said they were encouraged to undertake it by military intelligence officials in the prison, who sometimes merely observed and sometimes took part in it themselves.

"MI has . . . instructed us to place prisoners in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days," Army Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II said in a diary he wrote after being accused of wrongdoing.

One of the soldiers "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth," said Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, a military intelligence officer who testified during a military court proceeding against one of the military policemen on May 1. "This was not to be discussed. It was kept 'hush-hush.' "

Although at least four Army lawyers were assigned to the military intelligence brigade and its offices at Abu Ghraib, it remains unclear whether they played a meaningful role in trying to block abuses. Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, the service's judge advocate general, testified last week that the Army is reviewing their "resourcing and training" in the wake of the scandal.

Karpinski said in an interview last week that if the interrogation plan put forward by Pappas had been presented to her, "I would have said, 'Absolutely not. Not on my watch. Take your procedures somewhere else.' " If such a plan can be made, she said, "this whole thing is more offensive than I thought. That does sound like abuse and torture."

Robert K. Goldman, an American University law professor who teaches a course on the law of war, commented about the interrogation plan that, "in my view, a good deal of it crosses the line. . . . They are talking about breaking the detainee, and exercising extreme moral and possibly physical coercion."

Why is the dog there? he asked. "This is very coercive. It cannot be justified by any lawful interrogation technique." The strip searching of someone already being held in detention is clearly "to humiliate him. There is no question. . . . This is violative of the spirit if not the letter of the Geneva Conventions. It's like a B-grade movie."

Foreign correspondents Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Sewell Chan in Baghdad contributed to this report.