Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

In Doing Evil Incompetently There Can Be Neither Honor Nor Profit

Greg Jaffe and David Cloud write that the command of Combined Joint Task Force 7 was informed of what was going on in Abu Ghraib last November:

WSJ.com - Officials in Iraq Knew Last Fall Of Prison Abuse: Senior U.S. military officials in Iraq, including two advisers to the top commander there, reviewed a strongly worded Red Cross report detailing the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison last November -- but the Army did not launch an investigation into the abuses until two months later. The senior legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, helped draft a formal response to the Red Cross's November repor.... Gen. Karpinski said that she also discussed the report with Gen. Sanchez's top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, in a late November meeting. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Karpinski said officials at first generally disbelieved the Red Cross report. One military intelligence officer at the meeting in late November drew laughs, she said, when he joked, "I've told the Commander to stop giving the Victoria's Secret catalogues to detainees" -- a reference to the Red Cross's complaint that some prisoners were being forced to wear women's underwear on their heads....

The late November events show that top military commanders were alerted to the abuses by the Red Cross earlier than they so far have publicly acknowledged. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified before the Senate recently that officials at the Pentagon learned of the abuses after a soldier alerted them in mid-January. The Defense Department then launched an internal investigation....

The Red Cross report came during the same period in which Gen. Sanchez transferred control of Abu Ghraib from Gen. Karpinski to an Army military intelligence commander, in part to improve the collection of intelligence on the growing Iraqi insurgency. According to Gen. Karpinski, the Red Cross report was addressed to her but was "intercepted" by more senior officials. She said the first time she learned about the report was when she was summoned to the late November meeting with Gen. Wojdakowski and Col. Marc Warren, the top legal adviser to Gen. Sanchez, to discuss a response. Gen. Karpinski said at that meeting she was told by Col. Warren "not to worry about the response because his officers were working on the response for my review." That was the meeting at which officers expressed disbelief in the allegations, Gen. Karpinski says.

Gen. Karpinski and another officer who attended some meetings in Iraq about the report also said that instead of focusing on the abuses being reported, some military intelligence officers argued that they needed to limit the Red Cross's future access to cell blocks where interrogations were taking place...