Panel faults top military officials for Iraqi prison oversight errors

WASHINGTON — A high-level outside panel reviewing American military detention operations has concluded that leadership failures at the highest levels of the Pentagon, Joint Chiefs of Staff and military command in Iraq contributed to an environment in which detainees were abused at Abu Ghraib prison and other facilities, defense officials said Monday.

The report, set to be released Tuesday, does not explicitly blame Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for the misconduct or for ordering policies that condoned or encouraged it. But the panel implicitly faults Rumsfeld, as well as his top civilian and military aides, for not exercising sufficient oversight over a confusing array of policies and interrogation practices at detention centers in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq, officials said.

The military's Joint Staff, which is responsible for allocating military resources among the various combatant commanders, is criticized for not recognizing that military police at Abu Ghraib were overwhelmed by an influx of detainees, while the ratio of prisoners to guards was much lower at the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And the report criticizes the top commander in Iraq at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, for not paying close enough attention to worsening conditions at Abu Ghraib, delegating oversight of prison operations to subordinates.

In contrast to the half dozen military inquiries into aspects of the Abu Ghraib scandal, including the roles of military police and military intelligence officials, the four-member panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense, was appointed by Rumsfeld to identify gaps in the reviews and offer a critique of senior officials' roles that uniformed military officers might be reluctant to level against their superiors.

The Schlesinger panel's report and a high-level Army investigation into the role of military intelligence officials in the misconduct, which is also expected to be released this week, are expected to offer important new details and context that may help explain the causes of a scandal that came to the military's attention last January, but only became public in April with the disclosure of photographs of prisoner abuse.

The panel said in a statement on Monday said it would brief Rumsfeld, who is traveling this week, by video-teleconference on Tuesday about the conclusions, and then present its findings at a news conference at the Pentagon. Panel staff members have kept aides to Rumsfeld apprised of their work, though the defense secretary was not expected to respond until the briefing on Tuesday. The Army is expected to release the findings of its own review later this week, probably on Wednesday.