A Combustible Mix at Iraq Prison

WASHINGTON —  Army Spc. Joseph Darby returned to work at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad in early January and wanted to hear more about a prison yard brawl. So Spc. Charles Graner Jr., a fellow reservist and prison guard, gave him a CD that included dozens of photographs.

Darby began copying the photos onto his computer: images of prisoners naked and piled on the floor, of detainees masturbating, one in a dog collar, one chained to bars, one with his face wrapped in women’s panties. In the background stood U.S. military policemen, smiling and chomping on cigarettes, flashing the thumbs-up.

Deeply troubled, Darby slid an anonymous letter under the door of the office of the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, the unit charged with looking into soldier misconduct at the prison. On Jan. 13, he came forward and gave investigators a sworn statement.

At 2:30 the next morning, agents knocked on the bedroom door of Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” L. Frederick II, another prison guard and reservist. “Freddy,” he was told as he was shaken awake, “the CID is here and wants to talk to you.”

Months later, seven prison guards have been charged with abusing prisoners and are awaiting possible courts-martial in Iraq. Half a dozen prison supervisors have been sharply reprimanded. Several military interrogators are under criminal investigation. The brigadier general who ran the prison has been relieved of her command.

Yet the investigations have raised as many questions as they have answered. Were these rogue soldiers, or was there a systemic problem through the huge prison -- or even throughout the U.S.-run prison network across Iraq? Was this handful of prison guards simply meting out their own punishment to half a dozen prisoners who were brought to Tier 1A for brawling in the prison yard? Or were they acting at the behest of military intelligence officers who encouraged them to play rough with prisoners and “loosen them up” to provide critical information about the Iraqi insurgency?

From interviews with military interrogators, MPs and Army officers who worked inside the sprawling facility when the abuses took place, some answers are beginning to emerge.

All described Abu Ghraib as remarkably chaotic and dangerous. Outnumbered and poorly trained MPs struggled to maintain control of a facility where escape attempts and violent eruptions inside open-air cages were common.

Meanwhile, interrogators were under increasing pressure to extract information that would help crack the insurgency and locate deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In this wrenching environment, relations between the military intelligence troops and their MP counterparts often frayed. Interrogators relied on MPs to help “soften” prisoners for questioning by depriving them of sleep or placing them in so-called stress positions to weaken their resolve. The signals and instructions could be confusing, and in a number of cases, discipline and regard for the rules of engagement broke down.

But all of those interviewed for this article -- intelligence troops and MPs alike -- said they were stunned and sickened by the sadistic behavior of the MPs who were in charge of the overnight shift at what was known as the prison “hard site.” They strenuously rejected claims by the accused MPs that they were directed or encouraged to mistreat prisoners.

When investigators “showed us these pictures, it made us feel like we’d failed,” said an Army intelligence officer who supervised interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib. “We were all saying, ‘How in the world did this happen?’ It was like something horrible had happened in our neighborhood.”

In the immediate aftermath of the ground campaign in Iraq a year ago, the U.S. military was reluctant to use Abu Ghraib because of its dark history as a place of torture and execution under Hussein. But as the insurgency spread, it became clear U.S. forces would need a major facility near Baghdad to hold and interrogate large numbers of prisoners. On Aug. 5, bearing some new paint and makeshift facilities, the sprawling detention center 25 miles west of Baghdad was reopened as “Baghdad Central Penitentiary.”

The day-to-day running of the facility was handled by an overwhelmed patchwork of military police from active duty and reserve units scattered across the country. Among them were members of the 372nd Military Police Company, who were from West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

Some were saving money for college; some had left jobs at home doing things like resealing driveways. Most had enlisted before the Sept. 11 attacks and never expected to find themselves in a combat zone, let alone Abu Ghraib. Many in the 372nd were activated for duty in Iraq in February 2003. Others were deployed in April 2003. Almost all saw their tours of duty extended -- twice.

Guards from the unit say that they were given little or no training in handling detainees, were not instructed regarding the Geneva Conventions prohibiting prisoner abuse and that they often felt they were given little supervision.

Spc. Matthew Carl Wisdom, a prison guard with the 372nd, testified in a military court hearing last month in Iraq that he “had very little training” in how to work inside the prison. “They only told us how to do counts and how to handle certain situations,” he said. “

Lloyd Wade of Mount Savage, Md., whose son, Sgt. Lawrence Wade, is a 372nd prison guard, described the unit as fresh-faced weekend soldiers. “They’re mostly kids,” he said.

But at least two members of the unit had considerable experience running a prison. Frederick, a senior member of the unit and an ex-Marine, was a prison guard in Virginia. Graner had worked as a guard at a prison in North Carolina.

Because of their experience, they were given important assignments helping to manage cellblocks used to isolate some of the most hardened and “high-value” prisoners. Known as Tier 1A and Tier 1B, the rows of barred cells were strictly for prisoners thought to have valuable intelligence or too dangerous to group with other prisoners in the large outdoor cages.

By all accounts, the prison was a hellish place to work.

Two Army intelligence soldiers were killed in a mortar attack Sept. 20, and more than a dozen others were injured. But even weeks after that attack, the prison was still a porous target.

“They had a wall that wasn’t even guarded so people could just walk right into our perimeter,” said an Army intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Meanwhile, the prison population mushroomed, as U.S. forces swept across the Sunni Triangle, scooping up Iraqis by the hundreds in raids. The number of detainees went from 500 in early August to 7,000 in a matter of months.

Most of the detainees were kept in open-air pens -- Army tents surrounded by razor wire. Interrogations took place in booths made out of empty shipping containers or built from plywood. U.S. forces also used the old Iraqi cellblocks for holding prisoners of particular interest.

Escape attempts were routine, and prisoners frequently launched riots so violent that guards had to fire both live and nonlethal rounds to restore order, military investigators said.

The MPs said they also faced additional pressure from their counterparts in military intelligence. Eager to get a better handle on the insurgency, the Pentagon dispatched Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who had run the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, to Abu Ghraib to advise the command there on how to get better information from the prisoners. Among his recommendations was that MPs be “actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees.”

Spc. Sabrina Harman, one of those reportedly charged in the abuse case, told investigators that she was instructed by military interrogators “to keep detainees awake” so they would be willing to talk.

Another reported defendant, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, told authorities that he heard intelligence officers say such things as “loosen this guy up” or “make sure he has a bad night.” He said that military intelligence officers later complimented guards. “Good job,” he said they told them. “They’re breaking down real fast.”

Intelligence soldiers and officers acknowledge that they were under mounting pressure to produce better information.

“The commanders were never satisfied with the intelligence,” said one Army intelligence officer who oversaw interrogation operations at the prison. “Everybody, including [Lt. Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez, was saying, ‘Hey, you guys aren’t giving us enough.’ ” Sanchez is the top ground commander in Iraq.

But that officer and three interrogators who worked at the prison said in interviews that they operated under strict rules of engagement. They were required to submit interrogation plans before they went into the interrogation booth, they said. They were given refresher courses on the Geneva Conventions. Every time they left the main office to go to the booths, they passed under a large sign listing the permitted interrogation “approaches,” and those they couldn’t use without permission from Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence brigade commander.

The interrogators said the pre-approved approaches included milder means such as the “we know all” approach, designed to convince a detainee that his interrogator already knows so much about him that the information he is imparting is of little consequence.

Harsher techniques that required prior approval included so-called fear-up approaches designed to frighten a prisoner by yelling or throwing chairs. “There was no hitting. No touching,” said one interrogator, a reservist with a unit in Utah.

The Red Cross and the Pentagon have said that prisoners were abused throughout the prison, and that new photographs and video, apparently of other incidents, have yet to surface publicly. But it is what happened on Tier 1 one night in early November after the prison brawl that is at the heart of the matter.

In one photo, a detainee stands atop a box with wires attached to his fingers and penis. For some reason, the guards called him “Gilligan.” Another inmate earned a crude nickname because he had spread feces over himself.

Most jarring in the pictures is the giggling face of Pfc. Lynndie England, a diminutive woman with chipmunk cheeks, a railroad worker’s daughter raised in Fort Ashby, W.Va.

She had joined the reserves to earn money for college. Now she is pregnant and said to be engaged to Graner, the reservist who first gave whistle-blower Darby the photographs. She has been reassigned to a base at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Darby turned the photos over to Special Agent Scott Edward Bobeck with the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, who started putting together the military’s case against the seven soldiers charged so far. Along with Frederick, Harman and Davis, also reportedly charged are England, Graner, Spc. Megan Ambuhl and Pvt. Jeremy C. Sivits. Harman, Davis and Sivits have given sworn statements in the case, as has England. Frederick, Graner and Ambuhl declined to talk to investigators. All are expected to plead not guilty.

The most detailed account of the events in Tier 1A come from Wisdom, a specialist who was assigned to the cellblock the night after the fight. At a court hearing on Frederick’s case, Wisdom said that the seven prisoners subjected to physical and sexual abuse were brought into the cellblock “because they tried to start a riot” in the outdoor cages.

They were ordered held in isolation for 10 days, he said, and were brought in with their hands tied behind their backs and with sandbags on their heads.

He said that the prisoner he was escorting was suddenly shoved by another guard into a pile on the ground with other detainees and that Frederick, Graner and Davis began “walking around the pile hitting the prisoners.” He said they were stripped and beaten. Some were tied together and stacked atop one another. Wisdom said he was disturbed by the events and left the area. When he returned later, “I went down to Tier 1, and when I looked down the corridor, I saw two naked detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open,” Wisdom said.

“I thought I should just get out of there,” Wisdom said. Frederick, who had noticed Wisdom approach, said, “Look what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.”

Like Darby, Wisdom was troubled. He said that he reported the incidents to his team leader and that Frederick was transferred to guard tower duty.

Frederick did not speak in his own defense at the hearing. But privately he began a handwritten diary on the day of his arrest. In it, he seems to be searching for a way to explain his actions.

He lamented his lack of training, though he had worked as a prison guard in Virginia. Describing the harsh treatment of prisoners, he wrote that “military intelligence wants it done.”

*

Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.