Documents Provide New Details of Abuse
WASHINGTON — Military investigators who combed through the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq this year were told that one detainee was slammed head-first into a wall and later died, and that another was dunked in urine.
They also encountered intelligence officers who said they never saw the abuse and humiliation that was occurring.
Only one intelligence team member acknowledged seeing any of the thousands of photographs and videos that were floating through the complex -- images of naked detainees so accessible that some were visible on computers at an Internet cafe in the prison.
Six military prison guards are awaiting courts-martial on charges of abusing prisoners and a seventh has pleaded guilty. As they seek to determine how far up the chain of command responsibility lies, agents of the Army's Criminal Investigative Command are turning their attention to intelligence officers, civilian contractors and linguists who routinely had contact with detainees.
But their insistence that they were in the dark about prisoner abuse could make it difficult for investigators to seek criminal charges against intelligence unit members who the guards claim encouraged them to get rough with detainees in the first place.
Revelations about the intelligence squads and new forms of abuse are found in more than 100 pages of case files compiled by Army investigators. The material includes questionnaires, agents' handwritten notes, victim statements and prison flow charts. It is not clear how much of the material was seen by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who investigated the abuse and issued a highly critical report that became public this month.
The documents obtained by The Times also provide new details of the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Detainees were forced to participate in contests in which military police tried to see how many detainees they could make cry or urinate on themselves. Happy faces were drawn across the bare chest of one detainee, who was nicknamed "Happy Nipples."
Some of the documents are notes taken by an investigator as he worked his way down the cellblocks interviewing detainees. One prisoner told him he smelled alcohol on guards "many times." Another said he was whipped, beaten and held for 40 days in isolation. A third said "they beat me with a broom and stepped on my head with their feet."
