'Two dozen' blamed for Iraqi prisoner abuse

An Army investigation into the abuse of inmates at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison will blame two dozen people, a senior defence official said in Washington.

The official provided no details of the report.

However, The New York Times said the inquiry found no evidence of direct blame above the rank of the colonel who commanded the military intelligence unit at the prison.

Photos of the prisoner abuse, which included beatings and sexual humiliation, created a worldwide scandal when they were published in April.

The Times reported the inquiry found that senior American commanders created conditions that allowed abuses to occur at the prison because they failed to provide leadership and sufficient resources.

The report will also cite military medical personnel who saw or learned of abuse when treating injured detainees but did not report it up the chain of command, the Times said.

Major General George Fay opened the inquiry, which will blame military intelligence personnel, civilian contractors and Central Intelligence Agency officers, the newspaper reported. The report will run to thousands of pages.

Senior officers in Baghdad and in Washington were not found to have played a role in ordering or allowing the abuse.

“There was no direct policy directives out of the Pentagon that caused this,” said an unidentified official quoted by the Times. The official said that Lieut General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, did not issue orders to abuse detainees.

However, the report will say that inadequate oversight and discipline created an environment in which changing guidelines for supervising and questioning 45,000 detainees throughout Iraq could be ignored.

Another official said the report found there were two kinds of abuse: violent or sexual abuse that was intentional and abuse that was a result of misinterpretation of changing procedures.

Seven military police soldiers have been charged, and one pleaded guilty in exchange for his testimony against the others.