Iraq Prison Report Details Lax Discipline

[ringmastery]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=2&u=/ap/20040508/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_bumbling_battalion_2

ABU GHRAIB, Iraq - A U.S. Army investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib prison depicts the military police running the penitentiary as a motley lot, overwhelmed by one of the worst assignments in Iraq (news - web sites) and bitter about the military's broken promises of going home.


When Pentagon (news - web sites) investigators arrived at the prison west of Baghdad, they found fatalistic Army Reservists toting weapons while wearing civilian clothes. Also, command authority had been replaced by old friendships, said a report written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba.


"We were stretched thin and (headquarters) continued to assign us more missions far outside of our capabilities," the unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, told The Associated Press in an e-mail.


Taguba's report, which relates the abuses of Iraqi inmates at the sprawling prison, also describes numerous breakdowns within the 800th Military Police Brigade, especially its 320th Battalion, the unit running the prison.


The report blasts Karpinski for giving the 320th, the brigade's most troubled unit, the formidable task of running the huge penitentiary. Battalion members already were stigmatized by their beatings of Iraqi inmates last May at Camp Bucca, a southern Iraq prison.


The report details myriad shortcomings of a unit given enormous responsibility.

[TahitiNut]

1. Somewhat akin to "generational child abuse" ...

... authoritarians (virtually everyone in the military) take abuse and take orders from their 'superiors' and thereby 'earn' the power to be abusive in turn ... within the constraints set by the command structure. Those constraints were deliberately absent. The troops were given the motives, the methods, and the opportunities. Intentionally.

Almost nothing could be clearer.