Report blames leadership failure for prison abuses

An official report on the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal on Tuesday blamed a failure of leadership at the Pentagon for negligence over prison conditions and confusion over interrogation rules which led to sadism in the Iraqi jail.

The report, by a four-member panel of Pentagon advisers, did not pin direct responsibility on US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by name, nor did it find any top officials legally culpable.

The worst abuse at Abu Ghraib, it said, was carried out by night shift guards.

But the report represented an implicit indictment of the defense secretary's management of the defense department.

"We believe there is institutional and personal responsibility right up the chain of command as far as Washington is concerned," James Schlesinger, a former defense secretary who chaired the panel, told reporters on Tuesday.

For the first time since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in March, the Schlesinger report officially made a connection between the actions or omissions of the Bush administration and the brutal treatment of prisoners in US military prisons, and could deepen the damage already done by the affair to the president's re-election effort.

"I think this is going to be more of a problem than they anticipated when they appointed this panel," said Scott Silliman, an expert on military law at Duke University in North Carolina.

The Schlesinger report depicts the torture scandal as one of the unseen circumstances of poor planning by the Pentagon leadership.

"In Iraq, there was not only a failure to plan for a major insurgency, but also to adapt to the insurgency that followed after major combat operations," the report found, adding that the war plan assumed a period of "relatively benign stability" would precede transfer of power to new Iraqi authorities.

More damning details of the use of torture against Iraqi prisoners are expected to surface today with results of a separate army investigation into the role of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib.

Leaks from that report, published in The Washington Post on Tuesday, included a finding that some guards used dogs to terrify prisoners as young as 15, in a sadistic game aimed at making their victims wet themselves in fear. The report will also mention evidence that at least one Iraqi male detainee was raped.