Ali Allawi Quotes

If you hold thousands of prisoners, you have to feed them, clothe them, care for them, provide medical attention - and there were no provisions.

And shortly after that, when I try to get access to those soldiers, to ask them what in the world was going on, I was told that they did not work for me and I had no right to have access to any one of them.

What is very troubling to me today are reports from soldiers serving at Abu Ghraib who have very strong suspicions that the abuse continues.

The mission statement was ordered, and it sent the 800th MP Brigade, effective the first of July, up to Baghdad. I joined my brigade to take command at the end of June.

I joined the 800th MP Brigade when they were already deployed.

Military police know what to do, they know the Geneva Conventions, and their objective is to provide a safe, secure, fair environment for prisoners under their control.

If you are charged with this responsibility of enhancing interrogations, or using soldiers to enhance interrogations to find Saddam, and you`re above the law for all practical purposes, you might try some unusual techniques. Now we know that, in fact, they did.

The war was declared over - the end of major combat operations - in May 2003. Release procedures got under way immediately; reducing the population from 8,000 to just over 300, of course, requires fewer military police soldiers.

The day after the prison was transferred to the military intelligence command, they had an entire battalion - 1,200, 1,500 soldiers - arrive at Abu Ghraib just for force protection alone.

I knew how many MPs I had assigned to the brigade, how many military prison operations I would be running, but we needed to evaluate how many criminal prison operations we could support.

There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.

We need to fix this. It hasn`t been done yet because there`s still a reluctance to admit that there was even a problem - anywhere above seven rogue soldiers who got out of control on the night shift.

It`s hard to be happy when you are facing 120 to 140 degree temperatures and nothing seems to be moving in a direction that you think or they think or you`ve been told it`s supposed to be moving in.

In November, they transferred control of Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence command completely; it was, after all, the center for interrogations for Iraq.

That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.

The findings in the report have been largely discredited because he was not an impartial party and because so much more information has come out.

At that time, about July 5, we had no Iraqi corrections officers working for us. It was a responsibility of the CPA, with contractors, to set up a training program.

If they conducted a raid in this room, you`d all be policed up. They`d take all of you to Abu Ghraib and turn you over to the soldiers. Maybe there`s only one or two of you in this group who was a known associate or had any piece of information that they are trying to exploit.

I was ordered not to go out to Abu Ghraib after dark early on, because Abu Ghraib was extremely dangerous.

Shortly after we arrived in Baghdad, we had another conversation with the ambassador. He said that he wanted us to give him the timeline, because we had 90 days to get these prisons operational and transfer responsibility back to the Iraqis.

I had 16 other prisons that I needed to pay attention to, and we did. And I had 3,400 soldiers who were depending on me to take care of them, and I did.

They transfer the prison, and all of a sudden all this money cuts loose, all these people cut loose.

Meanwhile, Coalition headquarters needed more military police support up in Baghdad and to run prison operations in Iraq. A phone call was made to the commander in Kuwait: Don`t let the 800th MP Brigade go home.

I thought that that mission and the mission of taking care of those soldiers were my priorities, and I stand by the same today. There wasn`t a lot of support for those soldiers.

After they killed Uday and Qusay, the focus centered on Saddam: Find him, kill him, capture him, whatever it takes. To me, it was a false sense of security: If we get Saddam, we`re going to win this war.

The vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, even after interrogation, had no further intel value whatsoever.

Military intelligence interrogators, however, their goal is to get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam - whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost.