Army told of pitfalls at prisons

WASHINGTON -- An internal Army report warned last November that Iraqis were being detained too long and without appropriate review in an immense U.S.-run prison system that failed to keep track of them, did not provide proper sanitation and medical care, was understaffed and mixed juveniles and adults inappropriately.

The confidential survey by Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder highlighted numerous prison shortcomings that stoked friction between detainees and their U.S. guards last year, which led in turn to riots and other protests that prison guards put down with abuses documented in photographs and a subsequent damning Army report.

Ryder, a criminal investigator for the Army who was appointed provost marshal general last October, was asked as one of his first assignments to survey the prison system. It was then being deluged by thousands of new detainees, many arrested in U.S. military sweeps aimed at finding or learning about Iraqis who were targeting American forces.

Although Ryder concluded in a Nov. 5 report that international norms for military prisoners were being met "with room for improvement," he also found in particular that the Army was not respecting its own rules for regular review and timely release of the detainees it held.

Soldiers often took as long as two weeks to deliver them to prisons where the screening was conducted, sometimes in a perfunctory manner, Ryder said in his report, which was appended to a classified report in March by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba about abuses by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Ryder also said that the process by which Iraqis were classified as "security detainees" -- those who posed a threat to U.S. forces and were held in special cellblocks and subjected to aggressive interrogation for long periods -- "requires more oversight and discipline." He said the release process "is not following DOD (Department of Defense) policy for the global war on terror."

Taguba drew a direct connection between these errors and abuses that occurred in cellblocks where security detainees were held and interrogated, noting that "many of the systemic problems that surfaced during (Ryder's) ... assessment are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation."

Ryder's concerns about the pace of prisoner releases during this period were later confirmed by other Army officers and by enlisted personnel who testified during the Army's abuse investigation.

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