Posted on 05/15/2004 5:34:10 AM PDT by conservative in nyc
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ASHINGTON, May 14 — An American-run detention center outside Baghdad known as Camp Cropper was reportedly the site of numerous abuses of Iraqi prisoners several months before the mistreatment of prisoners unfolded last fall at Abu Ghraib prison, according to documents and interviews.
The detention facility, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, appears to have served as an incubator for the acts of humiliation that were inflicted months later on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. At both sites, the mistreatment has been linked to interrogations overseen by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Wiesbaden, Germany.
The alleged abuses at Camp Cropper last May and June were severe enough to have prompted formal complaints to American commanders from visiting officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross. After several visits to Camp Cropper, where they interviewed Iraqi prisoners, officials of the I.C.R.C. in early July 2003 cited at least 50 incidents of abuse reported to have taken place in a part of the prison under the control of military interrogators.
In one example cited to American officers in Baghdad that month by the committee officials, a prisoner said he had been beaten during interrogation, as part of an ordeal in which he was hooded, cuffed, threatened with being tortured and killed, urinated on, kicked in the head, lower back and groin, "force-fed a baseball which was tied into the mouth using a scarf and deprived of sleep for four consecutive days."
A medical examination of the prisoner by the committee's doctors "revealed hematoma in the lower back, blood in urine, sensory loss in the right hand due to tight handcuffing with flexi-cuffs, and a broken rib," said a final report by the Red Cross panel, which was presented to American officials in February 2004.
"Sometimes they treated them good, and sometimes they didn't treat them so good," Staff Sgt. Floyd Boone, a military policeman, said of the military intelligence interrogators from the 205th Brigade at Camp Cropper.
He and other members of the military police were not permitted to watch the interrogations, he says, but he remembers "all the noise, yelling and screaming" from trailers where interrogators from the 205th Brigade took Iraqi prisoners for questioning before returning them to the custody of the military police.
After the I.C.R.C. complaints, the military interrogation site at Camp Cropper where the abuses took place was closed down, senior military officials said, though they declined to discuss the committee's report or to say whether it had prompted that move. "A decision was made to close the camp and consolidate at Abu Ghraib," a senior military officer said.
It remains unclear whether any disciplinary action was taken at the time against members of the 205th Brigade. The brigade commander, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who took command at the end of June 2003, was later put in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib and was implicated by the Army's investigation of abuses as being "either directly or indirectly responsible" for the actions of those who mistreated and humiliated Iraqi prisoners there.
Colonel Pappas and a spokesman for the unit, part of the Army's V Corps in Wiesbaden, have refused to comment on the affair.
To date, the Camp Cropper facility, one of the first opened by the United States military in Iraq, has largely escaped the public scrutiny attached to other facilities in Iraq, particularly Abu Ghraib, which did not open until August and became the site of the most horrific abuses. Since August, Camp Cropper has served primarily as the detention site for about 100 former high-ranking Iraqi officials, who have been held in isolation in concrete cells.
The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade is now the principal focus of an internal Army inquiry that is expected to shed new light on the abuses, according to senior military officers.
In November, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, elevated the brigade to an even more prominent role, assigning it to overall responsibility for Abu Ghraib, over the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army Reserve unit headed Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski.
At Camp Cropper, as at most American-run prisons in Iraq, the military intelligence brigade, which was responsible for interrogations, operated in a structure parallel to the military police, who were in charge of the prison and its prisoners.
Some soldiers assigned to Camp Cropper, including members of the military police and of a military intelligence unit, have said they knew nothing of the abuse.
"I never saw anyone come out of interrogations looking stressed or abused," said Sgt. First Class James Glascox, 44, of Snow Hill, Md. "I never heard complaints about maltreatment. I was never aware of any problem with the M.I. unit that was with us."
Maj. Robert Michnowicz, 43, an Army Reserve officer, commanded the 325th Military Intelligence battalion during its deployment in Iraq. In a telephone interview on Friday, he said some members of his 300-member unit were among elements of three different military intelligence battalions assigned to Camp Cropper between June and September 2003, under the overall supervision of Colonel Pappas.
Major Michnowicz, who was based elsewhere in Iraq, said he visited Camp Cropper about once a week, and had not sat in on interrogations. But he said he had never heard any reports from his soldiers about abuses there. "Nobody came out and said anything," he said. "There was nothing like what has been written about in the papers."
Still, by July 2003, alleged abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Camp Cropper were among problems that had prompted loud and repeated warnings, not just from the I.C.R.C. officials, but from others focused on human rights, including Amnesty International, and a top deputy to the United Nations high commissioner for human rights.
In May of 2003, according to the I.C.R.C. report, officials from that organization hand-delivered to officers of the United States Central Command in Doha, Qatar, a memorandum "based on over 200 allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners of war during capture and interrogation" during the period of major combat that followed the American invasion in March.
But it remains unclear how seriously those complaints were taken by American officials, and to what extent they were even addressed by American commanders in Iraq, by the American civilian authorities there, or by their superiors at the Central Command, the Pentagon and the State Department.
American military spokesman in Baghdad and at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., said they would not be able to comment by Friday night on any action that might have been taken in response to the Red Cross reports.
The abuses at Camp Cropper in those early months were largely outside the scope of the most detailed investigation to date, completed by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, which focused on the conduct of the 800th Military Police Brigade. But even in that report, submitted in March, General Taguba cited the 205th Brigade for possible wrongdoing, identifying Colonel Pappas, Lt. Col. Steve L. Jordan and two civilian contractors who worked for the unit as having been "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib."
To date, the only American soldiers charged in connection with the Abu Ghraib abuses are seven members of the 800th Brigade, all from the 372nd Military Police Company, from Cresaptown, Md. But in addition to those abuses, the Taguba report identified others, including "abuses committed by members of the 325th M.I. Battalion, 205th M.I. Brigade, and Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center," which all reported to Colonel Pappas.
On the basis of the Taguba report, General Sanchez immediately "directed the suspension of a military intelligence officer and the initiation of a separate investigation into allegations of possible military intelligence involvement in the abuse of detainees," a senior military official said last week.
The official would not identify the officer who was suspended, saying he was a subject of the new investigation, which began late last month under Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the deputy chief of Army intelligence. The inquiry is focusing on the conduct of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade and civilian contract interrogators who were working with the unit, Army officials have said.
The I.C.R.C. report cites a "working paper" submitted to the occupation authorities in early July 2003 that was based on at least two visits by the group's representatives to the site. The working paper detailed "approximately 50 allegations of ill treatment in the military intelligence section of Camp Cropper, at Baghdad International Airport," including "a combination of petty and deliberate acts of violence aimed at securing the cooperation of persons deprived of their liberty with interrogators," according to the final report.
Camp Cropper, opened by the 115th Military Police Battalion at the end of April 2003, held as many as 1,000 Iraqi prisoners at one time, most of them rounded up after a wave of looting and crime in Baghdad that followed the main phase of the war. The Taguba report cites three different Army investigations conducted by the 115th Battalion in response to riots, shootings and other events at Camp Cropper, but it does not cite any disciplinary action taken by the unit.
A second, much smaller section of the prison was set aside for so-called high-value prisoners, primarily the former Iraqi officials on the military's top-55 wanted list, according to military officials. Those prisoners, most of them held in isolation beginning in May 2003, were interrogated by a different group, principally by members of a Defense Intelligence Agency unit under the Iraq Survey Group, whose main goal was to obtain intelligence related to illicit weapons and war crimes under Saddam Hussein.
But the prisoners reported to have been abused during interrogations were from the larger group, the final I.C.R.C. report said. Shortly after the July working paper was submitted, "the military intelligence internment section was closed" and detainees were transferred elsewhere, some to Abu Ghraib and some to the high-value detainees section, under the military police, the report said.
"From this time onwards," the report said, "the I.C.R.C. observed that the ill treatment of this category of persons deprived of their liberty by military intelligence declined and even stopped, while their interrogation continued through to the end of the year 2003."
Michael Janofsky contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Stacey Stowe from Hartford.
Some one should tell them that this one has blown out to see. Time to get cracking on the next scandal. The author must not have read his email late last week.
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