System Failures Cited for Delayed Action on Abuses

Poor coordination of U.S. operations in Iraq and persistent divisions among Bush administration policymakers contributed to the failure of President Bush and his national security team to address an array of serious detention issues, U.S. officials and analysts said.

Long before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq and a number of American diplomats warned that aggressive roundups and indefinite captivity were endangering U.S. success.

Officials now acknowledge that those warnings did not prompt urgent action from the White House or the Defense Department, which was focused on containing an increasingly violent insurgency. Nor did action follow early reports about the Abu Ghraib abuses by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, acknowledged yesterday that he knew of broader problems in the way U.S. troops arrested and imprisoned Iraqis, from rough treatment at the time of capture to delays in evaluating evidence against them. He also conceded "systemic problems" at Abu Ghraib.

But Abizaid and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee that they knew nothing about events at Abu Ghraib until January -- three months after the Red Cross alerted lower-level military officers to abuses they would later say were "tantamount to torture."

"We have a real problem with ICRC reports and the way that they're handled and the way that they move up and down the chain of command," Abizaid said. ". . . We've got a problem there that's got to be fixed."

"How did it happen so long and so deep and we not know?" asked Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).

Abizaid pointed to "failures in people doing their duty" and "failures in systems."

"And we should have known," he said. "And we should have uncovered it and taken action before it got to the point that it got to."

While the broad outline of the administration's handling of detention issues began to emerge soon after the abuse scandal erupted, interviews, testimony and a review of documents provide a fuller portrait of how persistent troubles within the Iraq prison system failed to capture the administration's attention.

The administration's response was tempered by the huge demands on U.S. troops, as well as by differences among military commanders and civilian U.S. authorities in Iraq about the importance of the detainee issue. Those differences were mirrored in Washington in jockeying between the departments of State and Defense, officials said.

Recent testimony by military and civilian Defense Department leaders indicates that U.S. commanders transmitted through the ranks a demand for more aggressive interrogations, but reacted less quickly when the Red Cross and others questioned their methods of arrest and detention.

Even when the Red Cross uncovered abuses in October, it took three months and Spec. Joseph M. Darby's tip for the Pentagon to open an investigation.

"It should have been obvious to anyone who spent 15 minutes on this problem, and who knew of the severity of the allegations last winter, that it was a very big deal that required immediate remedial action," Brookings Institution analyst Michael E. O'Hanlon said.