Military Memos: Documents Are Said to Show Earlier Abuse at Iraq Prison

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Military Memos: Documents Are Said to Show Earlier Abuse at Iraq Prison:
"American military officials in Baghdad said this week that military lawyers and some colonels had received internal documents that reportedly cited complaints of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison starting in November, about two months before top military officials say they were alerted to the abuse."

The disclosure of the documents has raised new questions about whether top military officers knew about the abuse before January, when a soldier alerted them to photographs of abused prisoners at the facility just west of Baghdad.

At least 20 complaints of abuse were reported in the routine memos, according to interviews of military intelligence personnel, including the beating of five former Iraqi generals in November who were blamed for causing prisoner riots. After reviewing 106 of the memos this week, the military officials said they found only one complaint, in which a prisoner said he had been handcuffed too long, but said that thousands of additional files had not been reviewed.…

According to former workers at the prison, a small unit of interrogators and analysts known as the Detainee Assessment Branch reported complaints of abuse in weekly memos that were sent to top officers who voted on whether to release detainees.

Military officials confirmed that the memos were sent to the prison's Review and Appeal Board, but said the officers on the board — Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top Army intelligence officer in Iraq, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Military Police Battalion — had stepped down from the board in early November. Col. Marc Warren, a top legal officer to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the highest-ranking American commander in Iraq, left the board on Nov. 12, the officials said.

General Fast, General Karpinski and Colonel Warren were replaced by several colonels, as well as other military intelligence and military police personnel, to speed up the release of detainees, the officials said. They did not identify those people by name.

"In November we deleted the general officer members and put colonels on the board so as to provide more opportunity for the meetings," said an allied military official in Baghdad. The new board members started meeting twice a week, officials said.

One of the memos cited a man who was made to stand naked, holding books on his head, while a soldier poured cold water on him, according to the military personnel. At least four of the reported incidents of abuse had occurred in the high-security section of the prison, where the worst abuses happened, and six of the complaints were cited in the documents before January, according to the interviews.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/middleeast/19ABUS.html