General: Some Abu Ghraib abuse was torture
Latest report finds ties to military intelligence personnel
 |  Maj. Gen. George Fay |
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|  VIDEO |
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The latest investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal found 44 instances of abuse by soldiers and civilian contractors at the prison in Iraq, some of which amounted to torture, one of the two generals who led the Army effort said Wednesday.
"There were some instances where torture was being used," Maj. Gen. George Fay told reporters at a Pentagon news conference about the investigation.
"We discovered serious misconduct and a loss of moral values," said Gen. Paul Kern, who as the overseer of the effort presented an executive summary of the investigation report at the news conference.
The report followed the release Tuesday of an independent investigation headed by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger that blamed a failure of leadership throughout the chain of command for abuses at Abu Ghraib and others in the military detention system.
The Army report cited 27 people who are accused of being associated with abuses at Abu Ghraib, 23 soldiers from a military intelligence unit and four civilian contractors working with them, Kern said.
The soldiers were members of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which oversaw interrogations at the prison outside Baghdad.
Investigators also found three military police who participated in abuse, Kern said, in addition to seven soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit that provided guards for the cellblocks, already charged in the scandal.
Kern said six other members of the military intelligence brigade, one military police, two medics and two civilian contractors were cited for not reporting abuse.
The report did not name most of the people it cited. The soldiers will be referred to military authorities for possible charges and the civilians to the Justice Department, Kern said.
Five others with command responsibilities -- including Col. Thomas Pappas, the 205th's commander, and Lt. Col. Stephen Jordan, who directed the prison's interrogation center -- were not directly involved in abuses but were being referred for possible disciplinary action for contributing to the conditions that led to abuse, The Associated Press reported officials as saying.
Republican Sen. John Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters the Kay report and Tuesday's Schlesinger report represented a "serious issue of military misconduct."
Warner said his committee will convene September 9 for hearings to determine whether it should recommend further investigations by Congress or the executive branch.
He said he hoped Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will have studied the reports by then and can provide reactions. Warner said he expects no legislation this year based on the reports.
Fay, who along with Lt. Gen. Anthony Jones led a team of 28 investigators, analysts and legal advisers, said the probe showed 15 of 23 personnel were doing things that were abusive, but they thought they were acting within the scope of their duties.
"We found that the pictures you have seen, as revolting as they are, were not the result of any doctrine, training or policy failures, but violations of the law and misconduct," Kern said.
"We learned there were leaders who knew about this misconduct, knew better, and did nothing."
Kern said the investigation also found that at least eight "ghost detainees" were kept at Abu Ghraib. They were not registered on official logs and were moved around the facility and hidden from representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Kern said.
"Now, were there more? We don't know, because what we found is without records. It's difficult to document," Kern said.
One of the ghost detainees died shortly after being brought to Abu Ghraib, Fay said. He said he could not reveal more about the incident because it was the subject of an active criminal investigation by the Army's Criminal Investigative Division.
The report, which was based on 170 interviews and reviews of 9,000 documents, detailed 44 incidents of abuse ranging from unlawful stress positions to using dogs in the course of interrogations.
One of the most horrific incidents of abuse, according to Kern, took place when dog-handling teams menaced two Iraqi teenage detainees in a kind of contest to see who could make them foul themselves in fear.
Fay said the CIA, whose operatives were implicated in the report as having influenced abuses, had promised to investigate the report's findings.
The report also criticized Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq when the abuse took place.
"We did not find Sanchez culpable, but we did find him responsible for the things that happened," Kern said.
He said Sanchez put great emphasis on getting intelligence from prisoners to stop insurgent attacks against U.S.-led coalition forces.
'Animal House' atmosphere
Schlesinger told a news conference Tuesday that the four-member independent panel he chaired found that abuses photographed at Abu Ghraib represented "deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline" at the facility.
He said the panel, appointed by Rumsfeld in May, found that the higher chain of command held direct and indirect responsibility for those acts and others elsewhere.
The prison's weaknesses were no secret, and they should have been fixed, said Schlesinger, a former defense secretary for Presidents Nixon and Ford.
"We believe that there is institutional and personal responsibility right up the chain of command as far as Washington is concerned," Schlesinger said.
"There was sadism on the night shift at Abu Ghraib, sadism that was certainly not authorized," Schlesinger said. "It was kind of 'Animal House' on the night shift.
The American film "National Lampoon's Animal House" is a 1978 comedy about an unruly fraternity whose wild antics run afoul of the campus establishment.
Schlesinger noted, however, that there was "no policy of abuse."
"Quite the contrary," Schlesinger said. "Senior officials repeatedly said that in Iraq, Geneva regulations would apply."
Schlesinger said abuses were widespread throughout the military detention system, which was set up after hostilities began in Afghanistan.
Of the 300 allegations of abuse that have been made from the 50,000 people detained in Iraq and Afghanistan and at the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 155 investigations have been completed and 66 cases of abuse substantiated, the report said.
Eight took place at Guantanamo, three in Afghanistan, and 55 in Iraq, the report said. "Only about one-third were related to interrogation, and two-thirds to other causes," it said.
Five detainees died from abuse during interrogations, it said. Twenty-three cases of detainee deaths were still under investigation -- three in Afghanistan and 20 in Iraq -- the report said. (Full story)
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
