After clashing with Afghan rebels near the village of Miam Do one year ago, US soldiers detained the village's entire population for four days, and an officer beat and choked several residents while interrogating them and trying to identify local militants, according to a Pentagon report that was given to Congress late Monday night.
Although the officer, a lieutenant colonel with the Defense Intelligence Agency, was disciplined and suspended from further involvement with detainees, he faced no further action beyond a reprimand.
The episode, described only briefly in a summary of the report reviewed by The New York Times, was one example of how little control was exerted over the conduct of interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the subject of an exhaustive review just completed by Vice Admiral Albert Church, the naval inspector general.
The report finds that early warning signs of serious abuses did not receive enough high-level attention as the abuses unfolded, and that unit commanders did not get clear instructions that might have halted the abuses.
As a result of this review and others conducted in the past year, the top US military commander in Iraq has ordered the first major changes to interrogation procedures there in nearly a year, narrowing the set of authorized techniques and adding new safeguards to prevent abuse of Iraqi prisoners, officials said.
The new procedures approved by the officer, General George Casey Jr., on Jan. 27, have not been publicly disclosed, but are described in the Church report, a wide-ranging investigation into interrogation techniques used at military detention centers in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq.
"This policy approves a more limited set of techniques for use in Iraq, and also provides additional safeguards and prohibitions, rectifies ambiguities and significantly requires commanders to conduct training on and verify implementation of the policy, and report compliance to the commander," according to a summary of the inquiry's classified report.
Three senior defense officials said on Wednesday that the new procedures clarified the prohibition against the use of muzzled dogs in interrogations, gave specific guidance to field units as to how long they could hold prisoners before releasing them or sending them to higher headquarters for detention, and made clear command responsibilities for detainee operations.
They did not describe the particulars of the changes, which are likely to be a main focus of a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing set for yesterday to review the Church report's findings.
In a brief interview on Tuesday night on Capitol Hill after briefing senators on operations in Iraq, Casey, who took over the Iraq command last summer, said the changes were designed to "tighten up" the interrogation procedures US officials have been using since May 13 last year, and said they reflected the experience military officials have gained since then.
Church's report criticizes senior US officials for failing to establish clear interrogation policies for Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving commanders there to develop some practices that were unauthorized, according to the report summary.
But the inquiry found that Pentagon officials and senior commanders were not directly responsible for the detainee abuses, and that there was no policy that approved mistreatment of detainees at prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
These conclusions track with those in a draft summary of the inquiry's findings that The Times described in an article last December. But the final report contains new details about the scope of the abuses and specific cases of mistreatment.
These findings are in an unclassified 21-page executive summary of the classified report, which runs 368 pages, according to a Senate Republican aide. A copy of the summary was reviewed by The Times.
The report concludes that US officials failed to react to early indications of prisoner abuse and to deal with them.
"It is clear that such warning signs were present, particularly at Abu Ghraib, in the form of communiques to local commanders, that should have prompted those commanders to put in place more specific procedures and direct guidance to prevent further abuse," the summary said.
"Instead, these warning signs were not given sufficient attention at the unit level, nor were they relayed to the responsible CJTF commander in a timely way," the summary said, referring to the commanders in Iraq.
Two senior officials said on Wednesday that the most striking warning signs were reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross to US military officials in Iraq of serious mistreatment of the prisoners, especially a briefing to officials at Abu Ghraib in October 2003. One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that had military officials heeded the Red Cross' warnings, , "some of the abuses might not have happened."
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