WASHINGTON, 5 May 2004 — Overcrowded cell blocks, sadistic guards abusing and humiliating prisoners, inmates shot dead trying to escape down dark alleys, and detainees being spirited around the prison compound to avoid Red Cross workers.
All this happened as guards made up their own rules and superiors condoned their action.
This was not Saddam Hussein’s gulag but a devastating portrait of the US-run Abu Gharib prison near Baghdad described by a US Army investigator.
The abuses occurred last year after the US military took over Saddam’s old prison and filled it with more than 5,000 people — some insurgents, many common criminals, others innocent of any crimes.
What emerges from an internal Army investigation into the abuses at Abu Gharib, a vast, 260-acre complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, is a prison that was out of control.
The investigation showed there were too many inmates and not enough guards. Training was inadequate and superiors rarely made rounds. The American guards’ morale was flattened when their of hopes of returning home soon were disappointed.
Officers lost track of inmates. Escapes went unrecorded. Top commanders could not agree on who should run the cellblocks — military police or military intelligence. In this general breakdown, some soldiers sank to “blatant, wanton and criminal abuse” of detainees. The worst of the abuses have been reported over the past week, with the revelation of graphic and sexually explicit photographs of some of the incidents.
Those abuses occurred, according to the March investigative report written by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, in one area of the prison, where prisoners suspected of terrorist activities were interrogated.
But Taguba’s report found that underlying the most horrific abuses was a prison in which mismanagement and unprofessional behavior had become routine.
The classified report, which was not intended for public dissemination, revealed a prison system so insecure that more than 27 prisoners escaped or attempted to escape in less than a year. It was so casually managed that civilian contractors wandered around without supervision and US soldiers consistently failed to fulfill even the basic duty of counting the prisoners in their charge.
Standards were so inconsistent that Taguba found that treatment of prisoners varied from shift to shift and compound to compound. The report concluded that soldiers guarding prisoners probably wrote off some escapes without reporting them.
