The United States is expanding the Abu Ghraib prison, over a year after a promise from President George W. Bush to demolish the prison. Major General William Brandenburg, who oversees US-run prisons in Iraq, had planned to leave the prison by this spring, but a timeline calls for the US to leave by February of 2006. The US military says that the detention capacity in Iraq needs to be upgraded to hold 16,000 detainees at a time, as insurgent attacks increase and the average daily number of people detained exceeds 10,000. In a speech 13 months ago, Bush made the following unfulfilled promise about Abu Ghraib:

A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values. America will fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison. When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then, with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning. (Transcript)

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has nominated for promotion Colonel Marc Waren, the former top military lawyer in Baghdad and is considering nominating Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former senior commander in Iraq, both of whom oversaw the abuse at Abu Ghraib They were initially faulted for their role in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, but were later cleared after the military determined that senior military leadership was not responsible for the abuse. Instead, the military has prosecuted lower ranking service members and failed to prosecute the military leadership.