Rough Justice in Iraq

Exclusive: As alarming details surface in a growing prisoner-abuse scandal, the U.S. general who was in charge talks about what went wrong

May 10 issue - Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski is angry. She says she warned her superiors from the first about the ill-treatment of Iraqi prisoners. As commander of the Army Reserve's 800th Military Police Brigade, she oversaw the guards at U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, including those at Saddam Hussein's former torture center at Abu Ghurayb. The trouble was, Karpinski says, she didn't have enough troops or resources to do the job right, and the men at the top ignored her complaints. "They just wanted it to go away," she told NEWSWEEK last week. In the end, several of her soldiers apparently went out of control. The CBS News show "60 Minutes II" released snapshots last week of grinning guards at Abu Ghurayb forcing naked prisoners to pose in degrading positions. One picture showed a hooded prisoner perched on a box and holding a pair of wires; if he fell, his captors allegedly told him, he would be electrocuted. "There's no excuse for what these people did," says Karpinski. "They're just bad people. But the guys involved in this were new to Abu Ghurayb. It got way out of hand."

No one is ignoring Abu Ghurayb now. Since the scandal broke, Arab satellite channels have barraged their viewers with images of the mistreated Iraqis. President George W. Bush expressed "deep disgust" at the abuse. "That's not the way we do things in America," he said. "I didn't like it one bit." The Army promised to punish the perpetrators. But Karpinski says the scandal was just waiting to happen. "The entire detainee system ... is broken," she says.

Practically everyone involved in the Abu Ghurayb investigation insists that what happened there was an aberration, the work of what Coalition spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt calls "a very small minority of the hundreds and hundreds of guards." Nevertheless, Amnesty International reported as early as last July that former detainees in Iraq said they suffered beatings, prolonged sleep deprivation or deafening noise while in U.S. custody. Others have since told similar stories to NEWSWEEK. Akeel Hassan, 31, was detained last June and later moved to Abu Ghurayb, where criminals freely walked from cell to cell, threatening other inmates, he says. One day a gang from Nasiriya tried to rape a detainee, and a fight erupted. U.S. guards punished everyone by making them sit naked, motionless, for six hours. When Hassan, wracked with diarrhea, tried to remove the sack covering his face, "a female soldier grabbed my head and smashed it against a wall." Detainees rioted in December to protest prison conditions. Hassan says, "The Americans opened fire on us. One person was shot dead." Hassan was freed April 7—without ever being questioned.

The pattern of abuse goes beyond Iraq. A recent report by Human Rights Watch described similar treatment of prisoners at Baghram and other U.S.-run detention centers in Afghanistan. The deaths of at least two prisoners in American custody in Afghanistan were officially declared homicides by U.S. military doctors who performed autopsies on the victims.

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