WASHINGTON — In the film "Apocalypse Now," an American soldier and would-be assassin, Capt. Willard, is in a hellish corner of Vietnam known as the Do Lung Bridge during his hunt for a rogue colonel named Kurtz.
Mortars explode and Jimi Hendrix music blares as Willard ducks into a besieged bunker, where he finds a soldier firing his machine gun manically into the darkness. "Who's the commanding officer here?" Willard asks. "Ain't you?" the bewildered soldier replies. Willard asks another soldier if he knows who is in command. "Yeah," the man responds, then turns away.
American difficulties in Iraq may not compare with those of Vietnam, but military investigators trying to pinpoint responsibility for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad are asking the same question: Who was in command there? And they seem to be getting the same perplexing hash of answers.
The Army Reserve general nominally in charge of the prison, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, contends the cellblock where abuses occurred was controlled by military intelligence officers who may have encouraged the misdeeds. But military intelligence officers have argued that military police officers are responsible for the abuse. And military police officers say they were following orders from the intelligence officers, who were assisted by CIA interrogators and private contractors.
In war, confusion is inevitable and improvisation is expected. But for several reasons, the conditions at Abu Ghraib seemed uniquely tailored to creating ambiguities in the command structure that allowed abuses to occur, military experts said.
The prison had many movable parts, none of which seemed to work well together and whose missions often clashed.
There were intelligence officers whose goal was to squeeze information from detainees, even if it meant placing them under mental or physical duress. There were guards whose job was to safeguard prisoners, theoretically under the guidelines of international law. Then there were shadowy CIA officers and private contractors who assisted in interrogations but whose roles and responsibilities were never clear to the military police officers.
"When you mix up all of those things and make it up as you go, you increase the probability that things aren't going to go well," said Lawrence J. Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who is now at the Center for American Progress.
Indeed, an internal Army investigation concluded that a virtual collapse of the prison's command hierarchy allowed mid-level intelligence officers to issue questionable, perhaps illegal, orders to enlisted soldiers, most of them reservists with limited training and experience. Poor communication, weak leadership and an "ambiguous command relationship" among units at the prison created an atmosphere where abuse could flourish, the report, by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, said.
Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Army lieutenant colonel who is now executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, said the unusual aggregation of private contractors, CIA operators, intelligence officers and military police at Abu Ghraib probably helped blur the lines of responsibility. But confusion about who was in charge should not have deterred soldiers from reporting or even refusing to obey orders they considered wrong, he asserted.
"The old Nuremberg defense of just following orders doesn't hold," he said. "I find a lot of these explanations to be mighty weak tea."
Thomas Powers, who has written extensively on intelligence issues, said that the abuses at Abu Ghraib may have stemmed less from confusion about the command structure than from soldiers' frustrations with their inability to slow the spreading Iraqi insurgency.
Such frustration, he said, is common in guerrilla warfare, where enemies cannot be easily distinguished from allies and progress on the battlefield always seems incremental at best. In such wars, from Vietnam to Algeria, soldiers have always felt added pressure to extract information from prisoners to prevent terrorist attacks against their colleagues, he said. "This is not too different from Vietnam," he said of Abu Ghraib.
Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said a small number of undisciplined soldiers were probably to blame for much of the abuse. But he also asserted that the abuses probably would not have occurred without a broader breakdown in leadership.
"That is the point of military chains of command: to make sure bad actors do not behave badly," he said, "even if the guilt lies with just a few people."