Bush sickened, but suspects still at work

[whosinpower]

By Marian Wilkinson, Herald Correspondent in Washington
May 8, 2004

snip - Standing in the Rose Garden at the White House, President George Bush declared that the graphic photographs of US military guards abusing Iraqi prisoners "made us sick to our stomachs".

Apologising for the first time to the prisoners and their families, he promised that "the wrongdoers will be brought to justice".

Yet as he spoke, two of the central figures named in a US Army report two months ago as most likely responsible for the abuses were still in their jobs. They are the head of the army's military intelligence unit in Baghdad, Colonel Thomas Pappas, and a shadowy private defence contractor who worked as an interrogator with that unit at the Abu Ghraib prison, Steven Stephanowicz.

"I can't believe that," said one of the lawyers defending a junior officer charged in the scandal when told by the Herald. But the Pentagon confirmed this week that Colonel Pappas was still commanding his unit even though he has been reprimanded over the scandal and there are reports he may soon be criminally charged

Mr Stephanowicz's employer, a military contractor to the Pentagon, said he too had not been removed from his job. The Pentagon had not even asked his company, CACI, for his resignation. "We have not received any information to stop any of our work, to terminate or suspend any of our employees," said CACI's chief executive, Jack London.

General Taguba's report clearly stated that Mr Stephanowicz, a private contractor to US Army military intelligence, was heavily implicated and recommended that he never be employed by the army again and be stripped of his government security clearance. The report found that he had instructed the military guards at Abu Ghraib to help set up conditions to "facilitate" interrogations knowing that "his instructions equated to physical abuse".

Yet no one in the US command in Iraq or at the Pentagon has removed Mr Stephanowicz, a highly prized interrogator, or penalised his employer, CACI. Since the report, CACI has won more lucrative contracts with the Pentagon including one worth $US650 million ($906 million) announced just weeks after General Taguba's damning findings.

The former commander of the military police guards in Iraq, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, says the behaviour of the guards became more abusive after the intervention of senior military commanders last September.

Her claim is borne out by General Taguba's report. It found that soon after the suicide bombing of the United Nations headquarters last August the US military commander from Guantanamo Bay, Major-General Geoffrey Miller, led a team of interrogation experts to Baghdad to meet the senior US commander there, General Ricardo Sanchez. Their job was to review his ability "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence".

In early September General Miller gave General Sanchez his recommendations, including getting military guards at the detention centres "actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of internees".

A few weeks later General Sanchez issued a new policy on "interrogations and counter-resistance". The content of that policy is unknown but within weeks, General Tabuga's report says, the worst of the sexual abuses began at the jail.

Mr Rumsfeld now says he did not read General Taguba's report. Neither did his senior aides. It appears that at the most senior levels the Pentagon hoped to pin the main blame for the abuses on the lower-ranking military guards.