Word: 372nd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Guarding the thousands of detainees sent to Abu Ghraib by coalition forces across Iraq was a nasty billet for the 800th Military Police Brigade, which includes the reserve 372nd Military Police Company, and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which also operated there. A senior military official who lived at Abu Ghraib says soldiers were underequipped and undermanned. The reservists in particular had virtually no training for their prison-guard jobs. Discipline flagged. In November and December, around the time most of the abuse photos were taken, Abu Ghraib was under constant attack from nightly mortar raids. Basic sanitation...
Between October and December of last year, the poorly trained, demoralized reservists in the 372nd crossed the line. William Lawson, uncle of Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, claims that his nephew and the other guards were following orders when they tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. The MPs told investigators they did it because officers in the military-intelligence unit and civilian contractors working with them told them to "loosen up" men for interrogation. Sabrina Harman, who appears in one photograph grinning behind a pile of naked detainees, told the Washington Post that the MPs were instructed by military-intelligence...
...Aides to Bremer and Secretary of State Colin Powell say that as early as last fall, both men raised the issue in meetings with the rest of the Administration's national-security team. Yet no action was taken until mid-January, when Specialist Joseph Darby, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, got hold of some of the incriminating photographs. He slipped an anonymous note under the door of a superior officer, reporting the misbehavior, and then turned over the photos proving...
...Internet, blames MP commanders for poor leadership and a refusal to enforce basic standards. But it points to plenty of other failings as well. Overcrowded cells held too many prisoners guarded by unsupervised reservists with inadequate training. Left on their own, the soldiers of the 372nd practiced systematic and illegal abuse beyond what appeared in the photos, including forcing prisoners to wear women's underwear, pouring phosphoric liquid on prisoners, sodomizing a man with a chemical light and using dogs, which Muslims consider unclean, to intimidate detainees...
...March 20, the military announced that Frederick, Harman, Davis, Graner, Specialist Megan Ambuhl and Private Jeremy Sivits of the 372nd Military Police Company were being held in Iraq and charged with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, assault, maltreatment and indecent acts. A seventh soldier, Lynndie England, the jaunty G.I. Jane in many of the photos, who is now pregnant, was sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where she was later charged with the same offenses. Six soldiers up the chain of command were given formal reprimands that will end their military careers, and one was less severely admonished. Although Taguba recommended firing...