www.BPODigest.com i-Vortal

NewsWeek Investigation: Truth About Abu Ghraib Prison

At the Pentagon and in the field, military commanders began to mutter that too many intelligence personnel were engaged in the seemingly fruitless search for WMD and too few assets were assigned to find out who was killing American troops. The word came down from Washington: we need better intelligence. "There was extraordinary pressure being put on MI [military intelligence] from every angle to get better info," says Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former 800th MP Brigade commander, who at the time was responsible for Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons. "Where is Saddam? Find Saddam. And we want the weapons of mass destruction."

So Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the Coalition commander in Iraq, and his top intel officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, asked for a fixer. They got one in Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commandant at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. military had held more than 600 detainees for more than two years without charges. A Texan with a jutting jaw and thinning hair, Miller was nothing if not self-assured, much like his ultimate superior, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. According to a subsequent inquiry by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, Miller's task was "to review current Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence." Translated into English, that meant to beef up interrogation techniques so as to break prisoners more quickly. Or as Karpinski puts it, Miller's plan was to "Gitmo-ize" the place, to teach the soldiers manning Abu Ghraib his best psychological and physical techniques for squeezing information out of detainees. That included using Karpinski's MPs to "enhance the intelligence effort." At a meeting of top military-intelligence and MP commanders last September, Miller bluntly told Karpinski: "You're going to see. We have control, and [the prisoners] know it."

Read more info @ MSNBC - Abu Ghraib and Beyond