As many as fifty thousand men and womenβno accurate count is possibleβwere jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.
The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U. Most of the prisoners, howeverβby the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agersβwere civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq.
General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners. General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job.
In an interview last December with the St. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.
The nd was attached to the th M. Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
