Prison Abuse Panel Faults Leaders

Nonetheless, the group harshly criticized Rumsfeld and other senior civilian leaders for failing to lay down consistent, specific policies on the treatment of detainees. And it chastised Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former top commander of ground forces in Iraq, and other military leaders for not properly training and staffing units to guard and interrogate prisoners at the facility outside Baghdad.

The panel, headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, also backed the conclusions of a separate investigation that today will recommend disciplinary actions against military intelligence personnel. So far, seven military police troops have been criminally charged in the abuse.

Calling the night shift on Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib a scene of "brutality and purposeless sadism," the Schlesinger group said that "we now know these abuses occurred at the hands of both military police and military intelligence personnel."

The panel said the failures generally were caused by officers' deciding to adopt interrogation practices used at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and taking them much further than they should have, especially at overcrowded Abu Ghraib, where the Army was never fully in control.

"There was chaos at Abu Ghraib," Schlesinger said at a news conference at the Pentagon that was called to release the report, one of several investigations launched after photographs of prisoner abuse surfaced last spring, stunning the world.

Though Schlesinger said the interrogators and prison guards were "directly responsible" for the abuse, the report, for the first time, directly blames senior Defense Department management for problems at Abu Ghraib.

The panel faulted top generals, including Sanchez, for misinterpreting higher orders and issuing a series of contradictory and confusing interrogation policies. And it criticized Rumsfeld for failing to adequately assemble legal and military experts to set interrogation parameters early in the Iraq occupation.