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But were the MPs acting alone? Still unclear--and suspect--is the role played by military-intelligence officers at the prison and their bosses at the Pentagon. Alexander revealed that a general from his shop had started a Procedure 15 investigation of military-intelligence ties to the scandal, similar to Taguba's MP inquiry--but it was launched just last month. Alexander insisted that any instructions to prison guards to soften up detainees may have come from a few low-level contractors or intelligence soldiers who didn't have the authority to issue them. But a number of Senators said the nature of the brutality and the emphasis on sexual humiliation particularly offensive to Muslim males made them suspect that intelligence officers provided direction. "It is much too elaborate," said Republican Lindsey Graham, "to not have some input from somebody else."
Congress's hunt for the full story fell victim last week to highly conflicting testimony. At a lengthy Senate session, Taguba clashed on critical points with Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Taguba said an order last November switched authority over military police in the prison to military intelligence, against Army doctrine. Cambone maintained the order put the prison facility under the lesser "tactical control" of military intelligence while the MPs who worked there remained under Karpinski's command. That's not a small distinction. According to Pentagon officers, if military intelligence was in control, then the suggestions, if not the instructions, to loosen prisoners' tongues may have come from superiors in the chain of command. Taguba virtually said as much, arguing that as a result of the new arrangement, intelligence officers wrongly "influenced" the guards to apply pressure for interrogations. But Cambone said the two branches were merely collaborating to get the most out of the detainees. When Senator John Warner asked Cambone "in simple words" how the abuse had happened, he replied, "With the caveat, sir, that I don't know the facts, it's, for me, hard to explain."
The search for an explanation has zeroed in on the pivotal role of the two-star general who recommended a shakeup at Abu Ghraib last fall, Major General Geoffrey Miller, then commandant of the secret detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and now the man assigned to clean up the mess in Iraq. Cambone acknowledged he encouraged Miller to go to Iraq last August, when the U.S. was desperate for information on the burgeoning insurgency, to get better stuff out of Abu Ghraib. Karpinski has said Miller told her he intended to "Gitmo-ize" the prison by bringing in the kind of aggressive methods used to make terrorism suspects in Cuba talk. Miller denies he used the term Gitmo-ize, but it was clear that what he recommended set new rules of the road for Abu Ghraib. On Nov. 19, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, formally ordered control of the prison handed over to military intelligence.