A piece on the MPs and the prison and it's not a pretty picture. In the Paris NYT this AM might indicate that whoever is responsible for the non-training of MPS is accountable. From the Times

You're a person who works at McDonald's one day; the next day you're standing in front of hundreds of prisoners, and half are saying they're sick and half are saying they're hungry," remembered Sgt. First Class Paul Shaffer, 35, a metalworker from Pennsylvania. "We were hit with so much so fast, I don't think we were prepared." The battalion (see sizes of units below) including insurance agents, checkout clerks, sales people and others ---

Be aware that the Times is a Bush Bashing Machine and everything that paper prints needs to be parsed, nonetheless the piece requires attention. I pointed out earlier that everything possible to blame the grunts will be done by the Army. This piece goes well up into the chain of command. Why the Times can do it and the Army cannot, is a question that could be asked. I hate to say this, but it looks like the Army took its own sweet time with this perhaps hoping it could be contained. The Times also reports that a prison designed to hold 2,000 people was holding 7,000; the prison was under mortar attack; the temps went to 120 degrees; increasing "surprise attacks" on U.S. troops increased the pressure to get intel from the prisoners; the MPs had no gym, no barbershops (explains the long hair) and morale sunk deeper and deeper; the prison was scandalously understaffed.

A word here about battalions and brigades. There are between 3 and 5 thousand men in a brigade and between 5 and 900 men in a battalion. The ratio of men per prisoner according to army rules is: a BRIGADE per 4,000. The prison contained at least 7,000 prisoners and according to the army it would take more than 3,000 men to handle them properly. The actual number of men was a BATALLION of between 500 and 900 people to handle 7,000 prisoners. This is insane. This is a command problem. God only knows how far up it goes.

Further, the report states that prisoners who should have been released were not; the takeover by intel was sudden and they didn't have a clue either. The person who assigned completely untrained and unprepared MP units that were not possibly capable of handling the number of prisoners is accountable too. All the lower level people seem to be telling the same story. I hope you all read the link I posted to the study of "The Pathology of Power" that explained in detail what happens to untrained prison guards after only a few weeks of possessing total power. More and more this looks like an invasion without any MPs ready to back it up, something many observed immediately. This failure to plan goes to Rumsfeld and everyone involved, but to hold them accountable for the despicable acts of a few is "blaming the bottle cap for the contents of the bottle". This IS a systemic problem, of planning in particular, and the Times does a first rate job of spelling it out. Hope you read it. Then there is another, as if we needed it, report from Hersh in the New Yorker that just blows everything out of the water. I don't know if this link will work, but try it. Hersh says basically what I have said but names more names and really focuses on the MI (Military Intelligence) and the complete breakdown in the chain of command. I now think Rumsfeld has to go, the mission in Iraq will not, and cannot work. This disaster has to do with not enough "boots on the ground" but those boots happen to be MP boots, which everybody has known since the capture of Baghdad. Everything our soldiers did well has been destroyed by a chain of command that simply doesn't work at all. This is terrible and I don't know how we will recover from it. 750 + dead for nothing at all. Face reality everybody.