Word: prisoners
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...September 2003, Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the secret U.S. detention center for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Iraq to straighten out the prison. He recommended that the MPs should act not just as guards but as "enablers for interrogation." In November, a second visiting general advised the exact opposite, saying MPs should have nothing to do with interrogation. The conflict had apparently not been resolved by the prison's top brass when the photographed abuses occurred...
...Cross (ICRC) brought serious allegations of abuse--which they are bound to keep confidential--to U.S. attention beginning in October. Pierre Gassman, head of the ICRC delegation in charge of Iraq, told TIME that his team found credible, disturbing evidence of mistreatment after interviewing virtually all the prisoners during that visit. The Red Cross reported its findings to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the overall prison commander, and to staff officers attached to the office of Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad. In February, after more prisoner interviews, Red Cross officials sent a comprehensive report directly...
Beginning the next day, the Army launched a discrete investigation. Sanchez immediately admonished Karpinski for "serious deficiencies" and quietly suspended her from command. In January Sanchez ordered a full-scale probe of prison practices under the charge of Major General Antonio Taguba, who completed his "Secret/No Foreign Dissemination" report in early March. The report, first obtained by the New Yorker two weeks ago and now on the 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...
...have scores of horror stories to tell. Though most of the accounts have not been corroborated, the scandal makes anything seem possible. Nabil Shakar Abdul Razaq al-Taiee, 54, a retired electrical worker who was arrested last December, told TIME that as recently as March, he witnessed soldiers beating prisoners, including a mentally unstable man who was thrown in a shipping container and pummeled and taunted for days. Another former prisoner, Mohammed Unis Hassan, was arrested by U.S. forces for looting a bank last July. He told TIME of a seven-month odyssey through the prison system that included beatings...
Once all the apologies were spoken, a battered Administration was searching for more tangible ways to repair the damage. Major General Miller has been hustled back to Baghdad to fix the prison system. He promised to halve the number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and end the practice of hooding captives. But he refused to entirely rule out the use of other tactics, like sleep deprivation and "stress positions," if they were approved by a senior officer. A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in coming up with a dollar figure to compensate Iraqis who have...