System Failure

Some of the leadership failures that allowed military personnel to abuse detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison complex west of Baghdad are well-known.

Weak and ineffective officers there failed to supervise personnel involved in detention and interrogation operations. Over the course of many months, senior officers all the way up the chain of command and civilian leaders at the Pentagon failed to recognize or act on clear warning signs-including appeals from the International Committee of the Red Cross-that the detention system was broken, and that Abu Ghraib, the largest prison in Iraq, was in chaos.

Numerous investigative reports have concluded that the events at Abu Ghraib were in one sense an aberration. The violent and sexually humiliating behavior indelibly preserved in gruesome photographs might have stemmed from the criminal predilections of a handful of individuals working the night shift at the prison-military courts-martial will weigh the evidence and decide.

But the inclinations and actions of a few soldiers do not explain how such behavior was permitted, or how it continued unchecked. Nor do they explain how soldiers were given missions without clear guidance or proper training, or how military police working in a combat zone, which was the case at Abu Ghraib, were utterly unprepared for combat. Nor does wrongdoing by soldiers explain how civilian interrogators, with neither the skill nor the experience necessary for the job, were put in positions of authority at the prison.

"The abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce proper discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels," concluded the independent panel chaired by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger that reviewed Defense Department detention operations.

The seeds of failure at Abu Ghraib were sown long before U.S. troops deployed to Iraq, the panel found. Military personnel cuts in the 1990s, reserve call-ups following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and deployment planning decisions made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his senior civilian staff all contributed to problems found at the prison, according to the panel. Consequently, the two units that shared responsibility for running Abu Ghraib-the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army Reserve unit, and 205th Military Intelligence Brigade-both were unprepared for the job. Officers in key positions within both brigades lacked the requisite leadership skills to recognize and cope with their units' lack of preparedness.

Among the issues affecting the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade was the fact that the unit had no organic interrogation elements-those positions had been eliminated in the military force reductions of the 1990s. Soldiers from Army Reserve units and civilian contractors were brought in to fill out the ranks of the brigade with the result that many of those working with the brigade never had worked or trained together before they were deployed to Iraq.

Investigators discovered that interrogators assigned to the brigade, including civilian contract employees, were relying on an out-of-date version of military interrogation doctrine. The Army inspector general found that 35 percent of the contractors employed to work as interrogators and interpreters at the prison did not receive formal training in military interrogation techniques, policy or doctrine, nor were contractors adequately supervised by military personnel.

In an attempt to improve the collection of intelligence at Abu Ghraib, military commanders in Baghdad created the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the facility, which "introduced another layer of complexity into an already stressed interrogations environment," the Schlesinger panel reported. The center was an ad hoc organization made up of six different units, and lacked the normal command and control structure inherent in most military organizations.

The 800th Military Police Brigade was in worse shape. The reserve unit was called up about a year before it deployed to Iraq, but a training exercise scheduled for the summer of 2002 was canceled because too many members were mobilized for homeland defense operations following Sept. 11.

In addition, Rumsfeld decided to scrap the Time Phased Force Deployment plan, the classified and meticulously crafted plans military commanders typically use to choreograph deployment of troops and equipment. Instead, Rumsfeld wanted commanders to "think outside the box," in the words of one Army staff officer involved in planning the deployment of forces to Iraq. Thus, the Defense Secretary required military planners to submit specific requests for troops, a laborious process of requesting units and their supporting elements in a piecemeal fashion.

It meant that "staffs that should have been focusing on the fight or postwar Iraq were instead focused on assembling justifications for the forces that they'd previously taken for granted they would get," says another Army officer who characterized the decision as a "debacle." Scrapping the TPFD had enormous repercussions for the 800th Military Police Brigade. The flow of equipment and personnel was uncoordinated, and troops waited weeks for equipment to catch up after they arrived in Kuwait, losing valuable training time.

As a matter of expediency, units were cobbled together, regardless of prior command and training relationships. The result was that military police assigned to Abu Ghraib were not prepared for the mission and had no time to train for it. Army manuals and publications that might have helped them were available only online, but few personnel had access to computers or the Internet.

By October 2003, there were 92 military police assigned to guard about 7,000 detainees at Abu Ghraib, a ratio of 1-to-75. By contrast, in Guantanamo, Cuba, where officials weren't coping with an insurgency, the ratio of military police to mostly compliant detainees was 1-to-1.