Antonio Taguba and his report, May 2004

11.  The purpose of General Taguba’s report was to investigate the allegations of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison facility. The training and procedures of the military personnel charged with providing security to the detainees of Abu Ghraib. Taguba was limited in his investigation in that he was only allowed to focus his investigation on the 880^th Military Police Brigade. Taguba would rapidly locate signs of the involvement by the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, commanded by Colonel Thomas Pappas, and the CIA early in his investigation. Taguba reported that several of the Military Police implicated involvement of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, who served as liaison officer for intelligence to Army headquarters in Iraq, as a principal leader that was providing the guidance for the tactics used on the detainees at Abu Ghraib. As Taguba began to report the factual findings of his investigation thru the military command structure, it became apparent to him, that many of the officials reading his reports where aware of the abuses a practices that occurred at Abu Ghraib. Taguba would report, and testified to Senate Armed Services Committee on May 11^th, that senior military officials had sent Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, to Iraq to make suggestions on how to use military police personnel in the per-interrogation process. Taguba never directly implicated high level official involvement but suggested that they had knowledge of the activities and that they may have been sanctioned. With the advent of the public release of the photos and Taguba report, High ranking officials from the president downward would downplay or denied any knowledge of the activities that occurred at Abu Ghraib until news reports released to information.

Antonio Taguba