Warnings were issued on prisons
Abu Ghraib chief says report ignored
By Vivienne Walt, Globe Correspondent | May 9, 2004
boston.com
BAGHDAD -- The new US commander of the Abu Ghraib prison said yesterday that his predecessors apparently had disregarded his lengthy recommendations calling for "humane detention" and better training at the facility last September -- seven months before the abuse scandal exploded.
"The alleged abuses appear to be due to leaders and soldiers not following authorized policies, and [to] a lack of leadership and supervision," said Major General Geoffrey Miller, whose September report to prison and coalition officials in Iraq listed numerous shortcomings in the detention and interrogation practices of Iraqi detainees.
"This was absolutely wrong, and we will not allow that circumstance to happen again," Miller, who is in charge of all US prison operations in Iraq, said at a news conference in Baghdad. He also provided details of a plan to revamp Abu Ghraib that calls for bringing in a new training team for military police and interrogators and sharply reducing the number of inmates, but rejected the idea of razing the facility.
Miller defended a recommendation in the September report that guards take a more active role in interrogations. Miller emphasized that his language should be interpreted only as urging "passive intelligence collection."
"By passive intelligence collection, it means that they observe the detainees on a 24-hour-a-day basis" and relay information on their "mental attitude," he said.
As US officials struggled to contain the scandal, military commanders faced an expanding battlefield against militia fighters aligned with radical Shi'ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
British forces fought pitched battles in the southern cities of Basra and Amara. Several Iraqi fighters were reported killed in Basra, and two British soldiers were wounded.
US soldiers, meanwhile, rolled tanks into the holy Shi'ite city of Karbala to confront Sadr's fighters, known as the Mahdi Army. In Baghdad, US troops also stormed Sadr's office in the Shi'ite district of Sadr City, a militia stronghold, and detained three people, witnesses told the Associated Press. Sadr was not at the office; he is thought to be holed up in the southern city of Najaf.
The dual problems confronting US officials -- the prison scandal and the ongoing insurgency -- seem to have merged, complicating the military strategy.
Fighters mobilized yesterday over Iraqis' outrage at the prison abuses. Photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib have been broadcast almost hourly during the past week on Arabic satellite channels. The fighting, which raged in previously calm areas of southern Iraq, broke out a day after clerics in several cities invoked the images of humiliated detainees in sermons at Friday noon prayers. They issued a call to arms for Iraqis to reclaim their honor. In Basra, Sheik Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, who is aligned with Sadr, told hundreds of worshipers at the Hawi mosque Friday that he would pay $150 for each dead coalition soldier. He offered $350 for each captured soldier, perhaps calculating that live prisoners could be traded for Iraqi detainees. Bahadli also said in his sermon that "any Iraqi who takes a female soldier can keep her as a slave or gift to himself."
Less than 24 hours later, Bahadli led yesterday's charge into the heart of Basra, a large, bustling city near the Kuwait border. Under British military control since the war, the city has been relatively quiet during the surging violence this past month in Iraq. Basra's Shi'ite population was persecuted during Saddam Hussein's rule and was long regarded by the US administration as a reliable source of support for the coalition.
Bahadli and dozens of armed militia seized a key intersection in the city and fought British soldiers for hours, according to the AP. Other fighters battled British soldiers downtown near the offices of the Iraqi Central Bank.
North of Basra, US soldiers drove tanks into Karbala, blocking roads that lead to the Imam Hussein shrine, one of the sect's most sacred sites of worship, as they fought a gun battle with Sadr's militia. Skirmishes in southern Iraq have killed dozens of Iraqi fighters in the past week, including 23 Friday.
As fighting raged yesterday, L. Paul Bremer III, the top US administrator in Iraq, again appealed to Iraqis in a television interview not to blame all coalition forces for the abuse of prisoners. "It's clear that we should not condemn all the American soldiers in this country on the basis of the behavior of these few people in the prison," he said.
Miller , said he had outlined specific guidelines in September for interrogation and detention practices. The 215-page document was carefully explained to the military intelligence and military police commanders who were overseeing the prison, he said. The report said officers at Abu Ghraib needed better training and a clearer chain of command.
Miller had been dispatched from his post as commander of the US military's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to examine Abu Ghraib. After a nine-day visit last August and September, he told coalition officials in Iraq that Abu Ghraib's military police should be kept apart from the interrogation process.
Miller said he also outlined the standard operating procedures for detention and intelligence-gathering at Guantanamo, which he says adheres strictly to the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war.
It is unclear how far up the chain of command Miller's report reached. In comments before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said he and President Bush had been "blindsided" by the scandal, which broke publicly on the CBS news program "60 Minutes II" on April 28.
Rumsfeld told the Senate committee that about 12,000 Iraqis are in detention across the country, a slightly higher figure than coalition officials in Iraq had disclosed.
In an effort to reorganize the massive prison bureaucracy, Miller has brought in 31 "experts in detention," largely MPs, to train soldiers in specialized skills of detention. The training was built around "19 critical tasks," he said. In addition, Miller said he would reduce the population in the crowded prison, from about 3,800 detainees to between 1,500 and 2,000. About 350 would be released this week, he said.
"We are ashamed and embarrassed by a very small number of our soldiers. On my honor I will ensure that this does not happen again," he said in the hourlong briefing, during which several Iraqi reporters sought assurances of rapid change at Abu Ghraib. He stopped short of supporting calls from some Iraqi politicians for US officials to tear down the huge facility, which he said was "very effective" for mass detentions.
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