Bringing new order to Abu Ghraib

The conditions at Abu Ghraib prison when Mike Pannek became a warden there in March 2004 were daunting.

What had once been one of the world’s most infamous prisons under Saddam Hussein became an embarrassment to the United States after it was disclosed that members of the 372nd Military Police Company had abused prisoners there the year before Pannek arrived.

Abu Ghraib, actually four prisons on 280 acres between Baghdad and Fallujah, was under the joint control of the U.S. military and Department of Justice.

Pannek left Spokane and his job as director of the Geiger Corrections Center in 2004 to work for a private company under contract with the Justice Department. The company was hired to run Iraqi prisons and train Iraqi corrections officers.

He found an overcrowded and squalid garbage-strewn facility where an overflowing septic system flooded an exercise yard and some prisoners had not seen the sun in months. At one point during his tenure, Abu Ghraib was rocketed or mortared daily by insurgents.

“I got rocketed more in Iraq than I was in Vietnam,” the 58-year-old former Marine platoon commander said during an interview in Spokane.

On May 8, 2004, while Pannek was warden, a 120 mm mortar round hit an area of the complex where prisoners were sheltered in tents, killing 96 detainees. In April of that year, riots broke out at the prison and had to be quelled with the assistance of the U.S. military.

That month, building 1A-1B, where U.S. guards abused prisoners during the last three months of 2003, was turned over to Pannek’s control. He used it as a segregation unit. Pannek’s prison accommodated 2,035 beds for prisoners being held for civil crimes; some were former insurgents. Pannek lived in a tent inside a warehouse at the prison for seven of the 15 months he worked in Iraq.

By the time Pannek left Abu Ghraib in September 2004, he had brought the situation in his prison under control. Inmates were given exercise time outside. They were allowed to keep a prayer rug and a Quran. They were given visitation rights, and female corrections officers were trained to search women visitors. An Iraqi warden trained by Pannek assumed his duties.

He was later promoted to warden at large and then program manager for the Justice Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training and Assistance Program, which trained Iraqi security and corrections personnel.

Pannek moved into the Al-Sadeer Hotel, which housed 70 U.S. corrections officers and 300 police officers in a green zone in Baghdad.

On March 9, 2005, he woke up “to a hellacious firefight right outside my window.”

As he lay in bed, an orange flash enveloped his room. He saw the flash, and then heard the explosion. Insurgents had detonated a 2,000-pound truck bomb outside the hotel.

“Had I been sitting up or standing up, I would have been seriously hurt,” Pannek said.

As it was he was cut by flying glass from his window. The window frame left an imprint where it had been thrown against the wall facing it. In fact, every window and door in the hotel had been blown off by the force of the blast, which left a crater 20 feet across and 9 feet deep between the Al-Sadeer and the Agriculture Ministry building.

Al-Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for the firefight and bombing, which killed four persons and injured 48 others. None of Pannek’s staff was seriously injured.

At the time, Pannek’s wife, Sherry, said the bombing “reminds me how vulnerable Americans are over there.” Her husband was not allowed to leave the green zone, the area under military protection, unless his convoy was accompanied by U.S. soldiers or South African security contractors. When he did travel outside the zone, he was armed with both rifle and sidearm.

Pannek, who believes the good the United States has done in Iraq often gets lost in the U.S. media, said he had no firsthand knowledge of torture or abuse in the Iraqi prison system. He said recent accounts of the discovery of malnourished and tortured Sunni prisoners were the result of lack of supervision in the Iraqi Interior Ministry.

“Iraqi police would come to get prisoners before we put a stop to it,” he said of his first days at Abu Ghraib.

Now corrections officers escort inmates to and from court. He said the focus of Iraqi security forces, which have seen 15,000 officers killed in the last 18 months, has been on survival. The reforms he helped implement in Iraqi prisons are expanding to jails, including those controlled by the Interior Ministry.

Pannek called his experience in Iraq challenging, but, “I came back feeling like we made a difference.”

He plans to return to Iraq after the first of the year as a U.S. government employee.