Internal Army documents detail poor training

The ACLU is releasing 1,800 pages of internal army documents that were used for the investigation of Army inspector general Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek into incidents of abuse. The documents were obtained as a result of the ACLU's on-going FOIA suit with the US government. According to the LA Times, the documents detail two shooting deaths of prisoners — whose hands were bound — at the hands of US soldiers. Mikolashek's report [pdf] found 94 cases of abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan as of July 2004.

Yet Mikolashek did not find systematic failures or pattern of widespread abuse, even though the newly-released 1,800 pages of evidence accompanying the report tell a different story.

Often, due to lack of trained interrogators, during missions, untrained officers were forced to conduct in-the-field interrogations. Acccording to testimony in the documents, the untrained often resorted to techniques seen in the movies.

According to Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, "Our government has failed, and the blame is on Washington, not Hollywood."