A year ago, spirits ran
high in the Army's 800th Military Police Brigade. Operation
Iraqi Freedom had gone smashingly, and the men and women
of the brigade thought they would soon be heading home.
Then, in late May, came the news: The brigade was assigned
to run the military prison system in Iraq, including the
infamous Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the place where
Saddam Hussein killed his enemies with abandon. "They
told them they were not going home soon," says Col.
Ralph Sabatino, an Army lawyer deployed to Iraq, "and
there was a palpable drop in morale."
Now, some of the soldiers then assigned to the brigade
are in a real jam, accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners,
including "punching, slapping, and kicking detainees"
and photographing them naked in sexually explicit positions,
according to an Army investigation. More inquiries are
underway, and the questions are many. Among them: What
prompted the abuse? Did the soldiers act on their own?
Did senior officers know what was going on?
Those answers will probably tumble out in the coming months,
as investigators scrub the Abu Ghraib mess and criminal
and disciplinary proceedings move forward. Army investigators
have determined that the abuses occurred late last year,
when military intelligence officials, anxious for information
on the whereabouts of Saddam and his cohorts, took control
of the facility.
Softened up. Abu Ghraib, 260 acres of hell on Earth, sits
due west of Baghdad. Built by the British in the 1960s,
the facility includes cellblocks 1A and 1B, where the
abuses allegedly occurred. Two tent encampments outside
the prison building, Camp Vigilant and Camp Ganci, also
house some prisoners. Detainees questioned by military
intelligence officers were moved from the encampments
to cellblocks 1A and 1B, where they were guarded by military
police, who allegedly "softened them up" for
interrogations. Hoods were placed on the inmates' heads,
and they were escorted to a nearby "interrogation
building," according to Army officers. The building
has six interrogation rooms, each with a one-way glass
window that allows outsiders to observe the questioning.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th MP
Brigade, says she once observed an interrogation but saw
nothing amiss. "It was conducted professionally,"
she says, adding that she never saw any prisoners abused.
Running the prison with limited manpower and resources,
Karpinski says, was a tough job. She had only about 300
MP s to manage the facility, whose population reached
as high as 8,000 prisoners.
Abu Ghraib is one of 16 military detention facilities
in Iraq, including the High Value Detainee complex, where
many of Saddam's cronies--the so-called Deck of Cards--are
still being housed. Individuals held at Abu Ghraib include
common criminals, others who committed crimes against
the U.S-led coalition, and individuals advocating insurrection
against the coalition.
But other types of prisoners--off-the book "ghosts"--were
also held at Abu Ghraib. In a sworn deposition obtained
by U.S. News, Colonel Sabatino, who worked on detainee
issues, told Army investigators in February that "other
governmental agencies," perhaps including the CIA
(news - web sites), often "stored" these ghosts
in Abu Ghraib. He described a case in which the Saudi
government sought, through diplomatic channels, to learn
the whereabouts of three Saudi nationals. "All we
could say was that we didn't have them," Sabatino
testified, "because we had no idea where they were.
They weren't on any database; they weren't anywhere."
But, he continued, "it turns out that they had been
held at Abu Ghraib in cellbock 1 for seven weeks and ultimately
were released. We had a lot of egg on our face."
In his testimony, Sabatino, who often visited Abu Ghraib,
recalled that on one visit he saw the name of a famous
porn star, Ron Jeremy, written in chalk on a cell door.
He didn't understand at the time why the MP s had given
that nickname to the prisoner. "It didn't strike
me at the moment, but after hearing the allegations,"
he testified, "I understand very clearly why they
perhaps used that nomenclature to describe that particular
prisoner."
Sabatino also told investigators he was not aware of widespread
abuse at Abu Ghraib. But, he testified, he dressed down
an MP after seeing two Iraqi detainees stripped to their
shorts last January, standing on a damp floor in the prison.
Iraqi correctional guards were sitting around a heater,
and the MP was nearby. "Doesn't this strike you as
being wrong?" he says he asked the MP. The MP agreed
it was, Sabatino continued, but added that the Iraqi guards
were disciplining the prisoners. Sabatino was stunned.
"I said, 'That's not why you're here. You're here
to show them the better way. You're not here just to be
witness to their abusive behavior toward prisoners; you're
here to make sure the abuses don't occur.' "
