General Blames Poor Guidance for Prison Abuse

WASHINGTON — The top U.S. military commander in Iraq told Congress on Wednesday that a lack of clear rules from the highest levels of his command may have created the climate for abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.

It was the U.S. military’s most explicit acknowledgment to date that command failures may have contributed to conditions giving rise to the abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Since the scandal broke last month, the Bush administration has blamed the abuse on a small number of rogue prison guards. But at a tense hearing, Army Gen. John Abizaid and some of his top commanders in Iraq went further, detailing an array of flaws in the prison system that went undetected by commanders for months while incidents of physical and sexual abuse and humiliation of prisoners apparently flourished.

Abizaid said reports by the International Committee of the Red Cross in July and November that warned about abuses at the prison were not seen by senior U.S. commanders until months later.

Rules on treatment of detainees were so misunderstood that low-level officers devised their own, with no oversight from superiors, said Col. Marc Warren, the top legal counsel for Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq.

Abizaid, Warren, Sanchez, and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the new head of U.S. prison facilities in Baghdad, sat elbow to elbow in an unusual array of military brass before members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The committee has scheduled weeks of hearings to try to determine who was responsible for the abuse of Iraq prisoners.

Abizaid denied that a “culture of abuse” existed at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq or that military intelligence interrogators were given too much authority at Abu Ghraib.

Questioned about interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, Sanchez said he had approved a list of controversial methods that allowed U.S. jailers to request his permission to use harsh techniques such as sleep and sensory deprivation, stressful positions, the presence of military guard dogs, dietary manipulation, and isolation for more than 30 days.

Isolation Approved

Sanchez said he signed off on requests to isolate 25 prisoners for extended periods, but never approved the use of the more severe measures. Last week, Sanchez issued an order banning jailers from seeking permission to use any coercive method except isolation.

Abizaid told Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) that it was the responsibility of commanders in the field to approve interrogation rules for prisoners. Byrd asked whether that meant that nobody at the Pentagon approved these rules.

“No, I’m not saying that, sir,” Abizaid said. “Policies do flow from the top of the Defense Department, and I don’t want to give any impression that they do not. But standard operating procedures are our business, and we work them.”

Cautioning lawmakers that investigations of the abuses are continuing, Sanchez said that American military personnel who received reprimands or similar administrative sanctions for their roles in the abuse of prisoners may yet face criminal charges.

The entire chain of command responsible for Abu Ghraib prison will be investigated, Sanchez said. “And that includes me,” he added.

Halfway through the nearly four-hour hearing, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the committee chairman, disclosed that the Pentagon had found another computer disc containing photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison.

In a letter sent to Warner, Powell Moore, assistant secretary of Defense for legislative affairs, said the disc contained 24 photos, 11 of which had been identified in previous investigations.

The remaining 13 photos, Moore wrote in the letter, “may not be original or true photographs” but were given to military investigators in Baghdad “under circumstances that warranted investigation, including forensic computer evaluation.”

A senior defense official said the photos “depict apparently abusive acts.” The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that more than half of the photos already had appeared in newspapers and on television, largely outside the United States.

ABC News reported Wednesday that it had obtained two new photos showing smiling prison guards posing over the body of a detainee it reported had been “allegedly beaten to death by CIA or civilian interrogators” in the showers of Abu Ghraib. The detainee was identified only as Manadel Jamadi.

ABC reported that a solider identified as Spc. Jason A. Kenner told military investigators that Jamadi was in good health when U.S. Navy SEALs brought him to the prison. Kenner said he saw extensive bruising on the detainee when his body was brought out of the showers, which served as a makeshift interrogation center, the network reported.

Kenner said the body was packed in ice during a “battle” between CIA and military interrogators over who should dispose of the remains.

‘Failures of a Few’

During the congressional hearing, Abizaid said he accepted responsibility for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and for any “mistakes” that may have helped give rise to them. But he characterized the physical and sexual intimidation of Iraqis at the prison -- notorious as a torture center under deposed dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime -- as the “failures of a few.” Asked how the abuses could have gone on for so long without senior commanders being aware, Abizaid said that “there were failures in systems.”

“It’s clear that there were some breakdowns in procedures, in access, in standards of interrogation, and confusion between the roles of what the military intelligence people were doing versus the military police,” Abizaid said. “ ... And we should have known and we should have uncovered it and taken action before it got to the point that it got to.”

Abizaid said preliminary findings of an investigation by the Army’s inspector general in February of detention and interrogation practices in Iraq and Afghanistan found no “pattern of abuse of prisoners.”

The investigation uncovered “problems in training, problems in organization, very specific changes that will need to be made in doctrine,” Abizaid said. Overcrowding and inadequate staffing at Abu Ghraib “contributed to systemic failures” that may have created conditions for the abuse to take place, he said.

Asked why he didn’t respond immediately to Red Cross warnings of abuses at the prison, Abizaid said, “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.

“I won’t make any excuses for it,” Abizaid said. “I’ll just say that we don’t all see them. Sometimes it works at a lower level. Sometimes commanders at the lowest level get the report and they work on it confidentially.”

The commanders denied reports that the Red Cross had been restricted from conducting spot checks of prisons.

Senators questioned Sanchez about his November 2003 order putting the Abu Ghraib prison under the command of a senior military intelligence officer.

Sanchez said the order was meant to better defend the facility against attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

He said the order did not put military intelligence officers in control of operations at the prison, just in charge of “force protection” there.

The order has been controversial ever since some military police guards at the prison told an Army investigator that military intelligence personnel instructed them to “soften up” prisoners for interrogation.

Sanchez said his order meant that military police were to observe prisoners’ daily routines and report on them to military intelligence personnel, but that military police were never permitted to conduct interrogations or use interrogation techniques.