MIKE FRANCIS

Of the 400,000 or so

to the public this month is one that addresses a question that has been bothering some of us for six years. Why did higher-ups in the Army order a detachment of Oregon National Guard soldiers to turn around and leave an Iraqi government facility where Iraqi officials were beating and torturing a group of African immigrants?

It was a troubling episode in a war so full of them that many have forgotten it. But it's a clear memory for the group of Oregon Army National Guard soldiers who barged into the compound at the Ministry of Interior to stop Iraqis from maiming or killing the Sudanese and others they had rounded up.

It was Tuesday, June 29, 2004, in Baghdad, scorching hot as usual, when Scouts Kevin Maries and Keith Engle realized what was happening inside the compound, which they could see into from their hidden vantage point. When they saw Iraqis drag a bound prisoner into the sunlight, then pummel him with a metal rod, they understood that they were getting a glimpse of a larger scene of systematic torture. They snapped pictures through their spotting scope, and Maries radioed in increasingly tense messages, explaining that Iraqis were beating helpless people. Finally, he warned his superiors, "I'm going to take a shot."

Hearing this, Battalion Cmdr. Dan Hendrickson rounded up a detachment of Oregon soldiers and raced to the compound, bringing their Humvees to a stop inside the ministry's walls. They disarmed the Iraqis, went inside a building and found dozens of prisoners, dehydrated, bruised, scarred and, in one case, suffering from a recent bullet wound. They started tending wounds and providing fluids, angrily demanding answers from the Iraqi who seemed to be in charge.

It was a scene, remembered two of the soldiers who were there, out of a concentration camp. One of them, Tyson Bumgardner, said in an e-mail that when he found a hundred or so prisoners crowded into a small, sweltering room, "I almost threw up from the smell of urine and vomit, mixed with the sour smell of fear-induced sweat." Bumgardner, at one point, threw an Iraqi cop against the wall by the neck to stop him from using a lamp to electrocute a teenage boy. A master sergeant pulled him away.

Amid such scenes, an order came over the radio from higher command: Leave the compound and return to your base.

The Americans were incredulous. They argued. They even pretended they couldn't hear the radio. "In my nearly 24 years of service, it was the only order I have ever seriously contemplated disobeying," Hendrickson says today. "There's no denying that this abuse wasn't happening."

But in the end, Hendrickson and his soldiers obeyed the orders, giving the Iraqis back their weapons and wheeling resentfully out of the compound. Later, Oregon officers were ordered not to acknowledge the incident to anybody.

About a week later, Oregonian photographer Benjamin Brink and I arrived in Baghdad as embedded journalists. And by the time we left a month later, we had assembled enough information to tell the story, which seemed to embarrass some in the Army's higher command. After news of the episode spread and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden demanded an explanation, the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, said on the record that no Oregon soldier would be disciplined for leaking information about the episode to the public. The Oregon soldiers, he said, had done the right thing by intervening to stop the torture.

But left unexplained was why the soldiers who did the right thing were ordered to leave and remain silent, even though it meant turning the captives back over to their captors.

The answer, as reported last week by The Guardian in London and other outlets, was FRAGO (fragmentary order) 242, which apparently was issued to U.S. troops in Iraq a few days before the intervention at the Ministry of the Interior.

What's chilling about that is that it shows that top U.S. officials expected to encounter a sufficient number of cases of Iraqi-on-Iraqi abuse to adopt a formal, countrywide policy about how to deal with it. And when confronted with such cases, the policy was to take only preliminary steps to intervene.

As stated in a WikiLeaks document dated May 16, 2005, the order means: "provided the initial report confirms U.S. forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation."

Hendrickson, the Oregon commander, said he never heard about the FRAGO until this month. But he said it explains why his troops were ordered out of the compound.

Defense Department officials said last week the order meant that U.S. troops could make "reasonable" efforts to stop abuse they saw, then were to report it. But they were not empowered to conduct investigations of Iraqi officials, as the country was, supposedly, under their authority.

June 2004 was a particularly volatile time in Iraq for a couple of reasons. Caretaker governor L. Paul Bremer surprised many by "transferring sovereignty" of Iraq to a hastily formed Iraqi government and bolting the country June 28, two days ahead of schedule. Perhaps more significantly, the world was still trembling with shock and anger over the release of photographs taken inside Abu Ghraib prison, showing U.S. troops humiliating Arab prisoners.

For both reasons, the intervention at the Ministry of Interior resonated with the troops. Abu Ghraib had tarnished the credibility of U.S. troops by graphically showing the cruelty and cultural disrespect practiced by some U.S. soldiers. Images from inside the prison were still being shown on news broadcasts blaring into the military mess halls and on to the Arab world. But the intervention by Oregon soldiers at the Interior Ministry on June 29 was a case of the opposite -- American troops preventing abuse of helpless people at the hands of Iraqis.

And because the effort to intervene happened on the first official day of Iraqi sovereignty, the outcome raised troubling questions about what kind of country the new Iraq would prove to be. As subsequent events and the WikiLeaks documents show, it was a place where torture was a common tool for Iraqis able to exercise a little power.

"Certainly, Iraqis tortured prisoners," Bumgardner said. "There's no doubt about that."