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from Gitmo came from the very top (Bush, Cheney, Rummy level) ... in response to rising insurgency in the Summer of 2004.
As usual, it was based on an assumption of an organized, centralized resistance (dead-enders, Baathists, name your party -- but still a centralized quasi-state sponsored model) whose representatives were -- it was assumed -- among those rounded up in the course of various military operations (if they weren't guilty of something they wouldn't have been arrested, no???)
Of course, there was no payoff ... the "insurgency" was a many-headed many-bodied monster. Of note, Iraqi prisons were notorious for their torture and abuse long before "we" arrived ... and rumors of the abuse (remember all the protests and allegations about women prisoners and the "other" photographs and videos we never really got to hear about?) and the abuse itself may have sparked some increase in the insurgency ... but I suspect the mass arrests and open-ended incarcerations of THOUSANDS of mostly "innocent bystanders" probably did almost as much as our blind-eye "not our problem" response to the nightly littering of the street with civilian corpses and the lack of security to even commute to and from a job if you were lucky enough to have one.
