The road to Abu Ghraib: the biggest scandal of the Bush administration began at the top

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Phillip Carter

"There was chaos at Abu Ghraib ... there was a very low ratio of military police to the number of inmates, which ranged as high as 8,000," Schlesinger noted in announcing his panels' findings last summer. "At Guantanamo, which is something of a model, the ratio of military police to detainees was one to one. At Abu Ghraib, the ratio of military police was one to 75." Add in the pressure from the Bush administration to produce intelligence, and take away the legal constraints of the Geneva Conventions, and you can appreciate what a pressure cooker Abu Ghraib became. Even had there been no bad apples in the 372nd MP Company, with which Pfc. England served, abuses were almost inevitable.

The second fateful decision was to rush those troops that were allocated to Operation Iraqi Freedom into battle too quickly. During the first Gulf War, military planners set aside months to build a war machine in the Arabian desert, allowing units to stabilize and train together at length before the start of hostilities--time that was especially valuable to the hundreds of thousands of reservists called up for the war. (Indeed, it's worth noting that, although American soldiers rook as prisoners tens of thousands of Iraqis soldiers during the first Gulf War, allegations of abuse were sparse.) But the second Gulf War was launched in a hurry, even before most of the forces assigned to it were in place. Many have pointed out that, had the Bush administration not "rushed to war," U.N. inspectors might have been able to show that Iraq had no WMD capability; at the very least, the White House would have had time to line up more support from our allies. Less widely understood is that a longer delay would have given military police and civil affairs units--most of which come from the reserves--time to arrive, acclimate, and train longer together, bringing them up to readiness levels approaching those of active duty troops.

The situation in Iraq deteriorated rapidly after the United States took Baghdad, with the result that reserve units had to be called up and immediately thrown into the fight. The 372nd MP Company hit the ground in Kuwait in May 2003, and was immediately sent into Iraq to patrol the town of Al-Hillah with Marines and Iraqi police units. Although its soldiers received pre-deployment training in the states after their February 2003 call-up, they received nothing like the pre-war training of their active-duty brethren in the Third Infantry Division, some of whom spent a year in the Kuwaiti desert before actually crossing into Iraq in March 2003. When the 372nd went into combat, it was not ready for war. Perhaps more importantly, the 372nd MP Company's training records indicates that it barely trained at all on handling prisoners of war, let alone managing a maximum-security prison even though "internment and resettlement" operations are a bread and butter MP mission. The Taguba report found that this unit and its parent headquarters--the 320th MP Battalion and 800th MP Brigade, both reserve units--suffered from chronically poor training, resourcing, and leadership. These problems within the MP units combined with atrocious planning and resourcing decisions in Washington to create a formula for disaster.