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| Iraq-Jordan |
| USA Inadequately Planned for Prisoners in Iraq |
| 2004-06-16 |
| From USA Today .... the shortage of trained personnel appears to be one of the keys to what went wrong. Although exactly what led to the abuse remains murky, it is clear that the Pentagon was not ready for the demand for interrogators or prison guards in Iraq. Planners apparently did not foresee the need to control large numbers of hostile Iraqis, and the Army had for years diminished its emphasis on training guards and interrogators. That meant that at Abu Ghraib and other detention sites, commanders had to rely on a patchwork of personnel, including many with little or none of the special training that military experts say is crucial to controlling prisoners. The Army has military police trained to manage prisons, but it doesn’t have many. The Army has even tried to get out of the prison-guarding business, according to former Army secretary Tom White, who says Army officials have explored turning over management of U.S. military prisons to private contractors. Of an active-duty force of roughly 500,000 soldiers, only about 1,000 are certified for prison guard duty, and the vast majority of them are posted in stateside military prisons. These are MPs — "31 Echoes" in military jargon — who have spent four weeks at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri working in a mock prison and learning the basics: how to keep track of inmates, establish rapport with prisoners and quell a riot. Col. George Millan, director of training and leader development at the U.S. Military Police School, says guarding prisoners is a specialized skill that requires careful training. Prospective prison guards are observed by non-commissioned officers who grade them on how they treat "prisoners" under their care and instruct them on the proper way to deal with violent inmates. But the military unit that was put in charge of running prisons in Iraq, the 800th Military Police Brigade, was an Army Reserve outfit that was not trained to run prisons. The vast majority of its troops, including its commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, were part-time soldiers. ... In his report of abuse at the prison, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba noted that two Army MP battalions experienced in handling prisoners of war — though not trained as prison guards — were stationed in the Middle East but were assigned to duties in Kuwait and Afghanistan. .... Meanwhile, the interrogators in charge of questioning prisoners at Abu Ghraib were a patchwork group. The 205th Military Intelligence Brigade’s shortage of trained interrogators meant that U.S. commanders had to scramble to move interrogators in from other outfits to the 205th. They sent teams that had been questioning suspected al-Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They sent people from disparate reserve units in Connecticut, Texas and North Carolina. And they spent millions of dollars to hire interrogators from private contracting firms. .... When the war in Iraq began in March 2003, the Army had fewer than 2,000 interrogators, many of them already deployed in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo ..... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #4 When does this "reporter" get to the comparisons between this war and any other war when it comes to percentages of troops allocated to prison duty etc? When does he get to the part where he talks about the number of local Iraqis who also work in these prisons? Oh wait. It's USA Today. Facts and honest analysis don't matter. |
| Posted by: Chris W. 2004-06-16 12:14:40 PM |
| #3 USA Inadequately Planned for Prisoners in Iraq I'll say. Those guys that are now prisoners should all have died in gunbattles instead. The only Iraqi prisoner that was worth taking alive was Saddam. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-06-16 11:59:45 AM |
| #2 But the military unit that was put in charge of running prisons in Iraq, the 800th Military Police Brigade, was an Army Reserve outfit that was not trained to run prisons. The vast majority of its troops, including its commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, were part-time soldiers. What? No mention that Karpinski failed to get her troops trained? No mention that some of her subordinates -- primarily those NOT under her direct supervision -- got the training for their units anyway? |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-06-16 10:53:52 AM |
| #1 Sooo...it's not working out so well, blaming it on "what Bush knew and when he knew it". So I guess now we have gone from Bush (as a Rumsfeld and Wolfy puppet) giving the orders to the idiots didn't properly plan for enough prisoners. I can live with that. Must really disappoint the bushwackos. |
| Posted by: B 2004-06-16 10:37:52 AM |