Pointing Fingers

By Johanna McGeary

If you believe Specialist Jeremy Sivits, the MPs in his unit caught on camera tormenting Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison did it for sport. In statements he gave to military investigators looking into the allegations of abuse last January, Sivits depicted a sordid camaraderie in which a handful of young soldiers willingly followed the lead of the older Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick and Specialist Charles Graner into perverse revelry. Sivits described nights of violence and debauchery, during which soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company joked and laughed and subjected the prisoners under their control to sexual humiliation and physical pain. When detainees were reluctant to strip, he said, Graner punched one in the temple so hard, he lost consciousness. Sivits said the blow apparently injured Graner's hand, quoting Graner as saying, "Damn, that hurt." After naked prisoners were forced to pile up on the floor, Sergeant Javal Davis jumped into the human heap and stamped on fingers or toes. Frederick seemed "mellow" when he commanded prisoners to masturbate. Once, for no particular reason, said Sivits, Graner beat a prisoner's buckshot wound with a police baton. "The detainee begged Graner, 'Mister, mister, please stop,'" testified Sivits. He said Graner replied, "Ah, does that hurt?''

Even in the midst of the devilry, some of the soldiers knew their behavior was wrong. Although Sivits "was laughing at some of the stuff," he said, "I was disgusted at some of the stuff as well." He was told by others to say nothing. He complied, he said, because "I try to be friends with everyone." Investigators asked him whether anyone up the chain of command was present at those late-night sessions. "Hell no," he answered, "because our command would have slammed us. If they saw what was going on, there would be hell to pay." Sivits--who faces a special court-martial this week on charges revolving around photographing the maltreatment--is expected to plead guilty in exchange for a maximum sentence of a year in jail--and to repeat his testimony against the other accused.

But if you believe the other six soldiers implicated so far--Graner, Frederick, Davis and three female MPs--superior officers not only knew but approved of it all. The accused insist that military intelligence and civilian interrogators told the low-ranking MPs to soften up prisoners before they were questioned and that the unit was just doing the job. Guy Womack, Graner's civilian attorney, gave TIME copies of two photos he intends to use to defend his client, who was formally charged last week on seven counts of maltreatment and committing indecent acts. According to Graner, the photos, taken from a vantage point above graphic scenes previously made public, show two more sergeants from the 372nd and four military-intelligence officers watching with him as a chubby man in fatigues pushes naked Iraqi prisoners into a pile. Graner says the plump man is a civilian intelligence contractor and the military intelligence guys include two high-ranking sergeants. The pictures, attorney Womack told TIME, prove Graner was not giving orders but taking them.

Who's telling the truth? The differing accounts of Sivits and Graner go to the heart of the scandal: How high up does responsibility go? Everyone agrees that the despicable treatment the 372nd inflicted at Abu Ghraib violated the Geneva Conventions, U.S. rules on interrogation and common decency. And no matter what superiors order, soldiers are ultimately culpable for their own actions. But across Capitol Hill, many also fault senior Pentagon civilians and brass for loosening the rules of interrogation in Iraq and the top guns of the Bush Administration for setting a tone of tolerance as far back as Sept. 11 that may have encouraged the abuse. While the Administration maintained that its rules and practices of interrogation adhered to international standards, a broad spectrum of critics argue that the Pentagon adopted harsh methods that played fast and loose with the law. Even if no one ordered these particular incidents, critics argue that the abuses can be read as Administration policy carried to extreme.

In a week of congressional hearings, lawmakers struggled to trace the links in the chain of command. The White House, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and top brass in the Pentagon continued to insist that the abuses were confined to the sadistic impulses of the midnight shift at the prison. Senators and Representatives who crowded secure rooms on the Hill to watch nearly 1,800 unpublished pictures flash by, along with about half a dozen grainy videotapes, got a raw eyeful of just how perverse those particular soldiers had been. One of the videos seems to show a G.I. preparing to sodomize a male detainee. A still shot portrays an anguished female prisoner lifting her shirt to expose her breasts. Another photo zeroes in on the face and torso of a detainee smeared with what appear to be feces. In a picture of a body bag unzipped to reveal the ice-packed corpse of a man with a badly bruised face, a female soldier flashes a wide grin and a thumbs-up. And a host of pictures show the now familiar culprits engaged in raunchy sex acts with one another--convincing some legislators that this was a case of a few unbalanced and undereducated reservists indulging their perversions. "It was hard to think it was done for the disclosing of information," says Democratic Senator Mark Dayton.

Hoping to cauterize the wound there and keep infection from higher-ups, Pentagon officials claimed that the misfits went wrong because of broad failings inside the prison. If anyone up the line was to blame, they said, it was the MP commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who paid too little attention to her rogue company. "My assessment," said Lieut. General Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, "is there was a complete breakdown of discipline on the MP side." He was seconded on that point by Major General Antonio Taguba, author of the scathing Army inquiry, who bluntly defined the problem as a "failure of leadership; lack of discipline; no training whatsoever; and no supervision."

But were the MPs acting alone? Still unclear--and suspect--is the role played by military-intelligence officers at the prison and their bosses at the Pentagon. Alexander revealed that a general from his shop had started a Procedure 15 investigation of military-intelligence ties to the scandal, similar to Taguba's MP inquiry--but it was launched just last month. Alexander insisted that any instructions to prison guards to soften up detainees may have come from a few low-level contractors or intelligence soldiers who didn't have the authority to issue them. But a number of Senators said the nature of the brutality and the emphasis on sexual humiliation particularly offensive to Muslim males made them suspect that intelligence officers provided direction. "It is much too elaborate," said Republican Lindsey Graham, "to not have some input from somebody else."

Congress's hunt for the full story fell victim last week to highly conflicting testimony. At a lengthy Senate session, Taguba clashed on critical points with Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Taguba said an order last November switched authority over military police in the prison to military intelligence, against Army doctrine. Cambone maintained the order put the prison facility under the lesser "tactical control" of military intelligence while the MPs who worked there remained under Karpinski's command. That's not a small distinction. According to Pentagon officers, if military intelligence was in control, then the suggestions, if not the instructions, to loosen prisoners' tongues may have come from superiors in the chain of command. Taguba virtually said as much, arguing that as a result of the new arrangement, intelligence officers wrongly "influenced" the guards to apply pressure for interrogations. But Cambone said the two branches were merely collaborating to get the most out of the detainees. When Senator John Warner asked Cambone "in simple words" how the abuse had happened, he replied, "With the caveat, sir, that I don't know the facts, it's, for me, hard to explain."

The search for an explanation has zeroed in on the pivotal role of the two-star general who recommended a shakeup at Abu Ghraib last fall, Major General Geoffrey Miller, then commandant of the secret detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and now the man assigned to clean up the mess in Iraq. Cambone acknowledged he encouraged Miller to go to Iraq last August, when the U.S. was desperate for information on the burgeoning insurgency, to get better stuff out of Abu Ghraib. Karpinski has said Miller told her he intended to "Gitmo-ize" the prison by bringing in the kind of aggressive methods used to make terrorism suspects in Cuba talk. Miller denies he used the term Gitmo-ize, but it was clear that what he recommended set new rules of the road for Abu Ghraib. On Nov. 19, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, formally ordered control of the prison handed over to military intelligence.

Many legislators, joined by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva Conventions, say these new rules violated the treaty and sowed the seeds for abuse. The Senate Armed Services Committee released a one-page document, "Interrogation Rules of Engagement," which the Pentagon claimed was produced by minor officers in the prison's military-intelligence brigade, that went into effect right after Miller's visit. The right column of the page outlined rough practices that could be used if Sanchez personally approved them. The list included sleep deprivation, stress positions, lengthy isolation, dietary manipulation and the presence of military dogs during questioning. Red Cross officials said most of those methods are banned under the Geneva Conventions.

Administration officials can't seem to agree on much about those rules. During his Hill testimony, intelligence chief Alexander held up an Army field manual that governs interrogation and said the procedures used in Iraq were the ones authorized in the book. Cambone and then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed they knew nothing of the tougher techniques allowing hard-pressure tactics. Though they have uncovered no paper trail, Senators were openly skeptical that Cambone and his bosses would have been in the dark about the procedures, since Miller reported directly to the Pentagon. Other Pentagon officials said Sanchez, at any rate, had never given anyone explicit permission to use such methods. And Rumsfeld told Senators that Pentagon lawyers had checked the rules thoroughly before judging Sanchez's list to be "consistent" with the Geneva Conventions. But according to Scott Horton of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, several senior military lawyers went to him last May and October with concerns that Pentagon civilian attorneys were easing the rules of interrogation to endanger prisoner rights. Finally, an exasperated Senator asked Wolfowitz how he would judge it if foreigners interrogated an American naked and hooded, with his arms in the air for 45 min. "What you've described sounds to me like a violation of the Geneva Convention," Wolfowitz said.

Yet it is exactly those kinds of improper or illegal techniques, say the Red Cross and other human rights experts, that the Bush Administration has systematically applied at U.S. detention centers around the world. When the President declared his no-holds-barred war on terrorism, top officials announced that the Geneva Conventions wouldn't cover prisoners held at Guantanamo. A soldier involved with intelligence at the base told TIME that interrogators there had been formally briefed on how the treaty didn't apply to their captives. "There were no bright lines on what you could and couldn't do," he says. It was clear that in high-priority cases, "all sorts of tactics could be used."

For all their expressions of outrage and regret, Bush officials have stopped short of admitting to high-level wrongdoing. But late Friday, Pentagon officials said the rules for interrogation in Iraq had been drastically tightened--while still insisting the now banned techniques had never been approved for use. The fallout from the scandal may have a far-reaching impact that goes to the core of how the U.S. fights terrorism. Human rights groups have predicted that the Administration might come to rue the extremes to which it pushed the envelope on interrogation. "After 9/11 the government said we couldn't win the war on terror unless we had these kinds of policies," says Wendy Patten, U.S. advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. "Now we may be losing the war on terror because of these policies." Reversing field completely carries risks: U.S. intelligence and military officials believe that some of the repudiated tactics have elicited vital intelligence from detainees, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay. Yet the scandal at Abu Ghraib, however revolting, may turn out to be a valuable corrective if it forces Americans to decide how far we are willing to go in the name of protecting ourselves.

--With reporting by Simon Crittle/New York; Viveca Novak, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington; and Nathan Thornburgh/Hyndman, Pa.

With reporting by Simon Crittle/New York; Viveca Novak, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington; and Nathan Thornburgh/Hyndman, Pa.