Abu Ghraib

From American Gulag

NPR Story on the Pronunciation of "Abu Ghraib"

[edit] America: The Face of Democracy

by Jan Huisman June 2008

The United States of America.

Few terms carry such powerful global cachet as USA, three letters synonymous worldwide with power, freedom and fortune. To many, America represents a beacon of hope, an epic force fighting for good, the icon of democracy and civil rights.

On September 11th, 2001, as horrified Americans watched the constant replay of the carnage in New York, they could draw strength from the outpouring of sympathy from nations worldwide. America faced a terrifying and determined enemy, that was sure, but it had the moral support of millions of people worldwide.

But of all the images flashing across televisions that day, the most disconcerting by far was footage of celebrations among Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Though small, the celebrations revealed the ideological nature of the battle facing America in the post 9/11 world. Among several populations of Muslim nations throughout the Middle East and Southeast Asia, America suffered a poor reputation.

If America was to cut public support for Islamic terror networks, it needed to start winning hearts and minds fast. The wave of post 9/11 sympathy for the U.S. – even from high-profile Islamic clergy – provided a golden opportunity to refurbish American moral hegemony.

Yet 9/11 was also the first ever attack on American soil by a foreign body, leaving both its citizens and government scrambling in panic. As American forces in Afghanistan began capturing combatants, including high-profile Al-Qaida members, they faced a difficult choice. Should America use torture in the effort to uncover terrorist networks and prevent future attacks?

Three years later shocking images emerged of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. Army- run prison near Baghdad. The pictures horrified Americans, embarrassed the Army brass but most importantly, fanned the flames of anti-Americanism across the Middle East. The soldiers featured in the photographs were prosecuted and the government argued justice had been done.

“I want to tell the people of the Middle East that the practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don't represent America,” said President Bush in an interview with an Arab cable news station, just days after pictures of abuse hit the media. “They represent the actions of a few people.”

Seven years after 9/11, as disgruntled former Administration members have come clean and journalists have made headway in breaching Bush’s notorious wall of secrecy, that argument has lost credibility upon every new disclosure. Journalists have chronicled a sequence of events and decisions in the upper echelons of the American government indicating Abu Ghraib resulted directly from the top-level administration policies.

And for many in Iraq and the Middle East, those three letters USA are now also associated with abuse, sadism and malevolent occupation.

[edit] The New Paradigm

The Bush administration recognized that terrorism constituted a novel threat. With no clear army to fight or battlefield on which to fight it, the outcome of this war would stand or fall based on the quality of intelligence garnered by the nation’s security institutions. When in late 2001 U.S. Special Forces began capturing suspected terrorists, the government was determined to extract all the information they could, by any means.

The Executive Branch embarked upon a radical deconstruction of the US and international laws governing the way American operatives treat prisoners and conduct interrogations. John Yoo, then a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), drafted a series of memos narrowing the definition of torture and denying legal rights to prisoners. Though technically in the Justice Department, the OLC serves as legal advisor to the Executive Branch, using its authority to justify in secret legally questionable administration policies.

Torture was redefined as any action causing pain equal to that experienced by someone dying or undergoing organ failure. Everything else, including the now famous technique of waterboarding, was dubbed an “enhanced interrogation technique” and declared legal for use by American operatives.

The Geneva Conventions, the long-standing treaty governing treatment of prisoners captured during war, were deemed “quaint” by then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. The United States is a signatory of the Geneva Conventions and has historically gone above and beyond the standards for humane treatment of prisoners maintained within.

Yet the OLC, encouraged by Vice President Cheney and his legal staff, further ruled that Al-Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan did not meet the requirements for eligibility under the Geneva Conventions and as “unlawful enemy combatants” did not deserve its protections.

Since the prohibitions against torture are enshrined in US law, “enhanced interrogation techniques” could not be carried out on US soil. At the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, a prison facility for prisoners captured in the Global War on Terror was set up. At Gitmo, prisoners have no recourse to lawyers and can be held for years without charge.

Many suspects were kidnapped on the streets of foreign nations besides Afghanistan, by means of the top-secret Defense Department-run Special Access Program (SAP). The program allows for “extraordinary rendition”, whereby suspects are secretly flown to nations allied to the U.S. whose security forces are known to practice torture.

At a U.S. base in Bagram, Afghanistan, a collection point for suspected terrorists – many of whom were later sent to Guantanamo – similar harsh interrogation techniques were pervasive. In December 2002 two detainees died due to complications resulting from repeated peroneal strikes, an incapacitating blow to the knee which had been cleared by Bagram staff. One of the victims was a recently married young father, a taxi driver with no ties whatsoever to insurgent networks.

Orwellian as these innovations sound – kidnappings, secret prisons, torture – these administration policies were motivated by nothing other than protecting American lives and defeating terrorist networks. In the aftermath of 9/11 in all its momentous horror, even high-ranking Democrats failed to object when briefed on the New Paradigm’s methods. America is not accustomed to being attacked and it does not respond with calm; the only other historical example features two Atomic bombs.

[edit] On to Iraq

Iraq soon became the next battleground in the War on Terror, which the Bush Administration falsely accused of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and supporting Al-Qaida. A U.S. led coalition of forces invaded Iraq in late March 2003 and toppled the Saddam Hussein’s regime just three weeks later. On May 1st, in a now infamous ceremony on an aircraft carrier, George Bush praised the war effort in a speech before an enormous banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

Five years later U.S. forces are still in Iraq battling insurgents representing various factions and trying to prevent an all-out civil war. Of the more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers lost in the Iraq War, 97 % perished after Bush declared the mission accomplished. The war is now widely considered to have been a strategic failure, poorly conceived of and haphazardly prepared.

Few aspects of the American effort in Iraq define its blunt incompetence more aptly than the prison system. The U.S. military policemen asked to oversee the prison system were by and large reservists untrained for the demanding and stressful job. MPs were asked to work together with even lesser trained Iraqi policemen of questionable loyalty. Escapes and riots among the prisoners were frequent. Along with the mortar fire these prisons were taking on a daily basis, life for the MPs working the Iraqi system was dangerous and chaotic.

As the insurgency wore on the U.S. army-led Iraqi prison system swelled beyond capacity. Increasingly paranoid and frustrated soldiers made sweeps through entire neighborhoods, picking up all fighting-age males, often imprisoning Iraqi citizens among common criminals and violent insurgents.

Prisoners held in the Iraqi prison system were covered under the Geneva Conventions. Although the media failed to adequately cover the story, human rights agencies closely monitored the conditions in Iraqi prisons through interviews with released prisoners and, in the case of the Red Cross, visits to the prison. As early as June 30, 2003, an Amnesty International report decried “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” conditions at U.S. prison camps. U.S. officials vigorously denied the accusations and pledged adherence to the Geneva Conventions.

Throughout the summer of 2003 the insurgency gained force. Spiraling out of control, Iraq became an embarrassment to the Pentagon, the Army and the administration itself.

[edit] Gitmo-ize Abu Ghraib

As chronicled by Seymour Hersh in his meticulous book Chain of Command, several internal reports lamented the lack of insight and information on the insurgency. In an effort to address the exasperating lack of intelligence coming from interrogations at Iraqi prisons, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller – the head of the detention and interrogation center at Guantanamo – to investigate and recommend changes. In late August 2003, Miller set off for Iraq along with a team of experts.

Upon his return, Miller filed several recommendations that fundamentally reshaped the role of the Iraqi prison system. “Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation,” he wrote, “to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence.” Given the Defense Departments’ demonstrated doctrinal belief that the extraction of intelligence requires hard hands, the quote reads like an oxymoron.

Abu Ghraib, a prison 20 miles of Baghdad, was a notorious torture and execution center during Saddam’s reign. The U.S. army had recently reopened Abu Ghraib after renovations. Tearing the prison down along with ceremonious fanfare would have been a public relations boost, a golden opportunity for an army seeking to brand itself as a liberation force. Instead, writes Seymour Hersh after reviewing Miller’s report, Abu Ghraib was to become “a center of intelligence for the Bush administration’s global war on terrorism.”

Specifically, Miller recommended military intelligence officers responsible for interrogating detainees seek the cooperation of the MPs responsible for guarding them. A later review by an Army officer in charge of MPs strongly objected. Asking MPs to “actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews runs counter to the smooth operation of a detention facility,” he wrote.

Yet the suggestion was implemented – in part by Cpt. Carolyn Wood, previously in charge of the Bagram interrogation unit when two detainees died due to abuse at the hands of soldiers. Two tiers within Abu Ghraib’s main building were relegated to the jurisdiction of Military Intelligence and ‘OGA’ – or Other Government Agencies, the umbrella term under which the CIA and other security agencies protected their cover. In these two tiers, MPs were told, different rules applied.

Intelligence officers of unknown departmental affiliation gave vague instructions to MPs to “loosen this guy up” or “make sure he has a bad night,” said Sgt. Javal Davis, an MP implicated in the scandal.

[edit] A Shocked Nation

On April 28 CBS 60 Minutes II aired pictures from Abu Ghraib depicting U.S. soldiers posing jauntily with naked Iraqi prisoners forced to simulate sex; prisoners held in painful stress positions and in one instance tied to a leash; and, in what become the front-page icon of a media firestorm, a picture of a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his hands.

The following week Seymour Hersh published a scathing article in The New Yorker, quoting extensively a long-completed internal military report compiled by Maj. Gen Antonio Taguba. According to the report – released up the chain of command in February 2004 – U.S. soldiers had been guilty of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” the previous fall.

“He [Spc. Graner] cuffed my hands with irons behind my back to the metal of the window, to the point my foot were off the ground and I was hanging there, for about 5 hours,” Kasim Hillas told US investigators. “Just because I asked for the time, because I wanted to pray.”

“They came in the morning shift with two prisoners and they were father and son. They were both naked,” said Mohamed Juma. “They counted 1,2,3, and then removed the bags from their heads. When the son saw the father naked he was crying.”

On October 25, 2003, three men who raped a 15 yr-old boy were shackled to one another, naked and lying on the ground. The incident captures the operational mess that defined the U.S. Iraqi prison system in general and Abu Ghraib after Miller’s reforms in particular. A fifteen-year old boy was imprisoned in the same area as common criminals who raped him. The criminals in turn were subjected to sadistic humiliations ostensibly reserved for those who failed to cooperate during interrogations.

On November 4, 2003, MPs took photographs of a dead man wrapped in ice inside a body bag. They removed his bandages to reveal bloody wounds on his face. This man was Manadel El-Jamadi, a suspected terrorist who died during an interrogation at the hands of a CIA operative. After beatings left him complaining of shortness of breath, El-Jamadi was hooded and hung by his hands pulled high behind his back. In this position he choked and died, while a frustrated interrogator continued questioning him.

El-Jamadi was a “ghost” prisoner, a term for those detained by OGA and never officially checked into the prison. This allowed deaths to go unreported and evaded Red Cross scrutiny. Previously, the SAP program involved carefully selected and experienced Special Operatives. At Abu Ghraib, MPs whose normal duties called upon them to monitor and detain common criminals were now being involved in the heavy-handed interrogation of suspected terrorists. One photo depicted Spc. Sabrina Harman posing thumbs-up with a wide smile over El-Jamadi’s body. Broadcast across the globe, the image implied a unsettling lack of concern for Iraqi lives among U.S. troops.

Pictures dated December 12, 2003, show a naked detainee being threatened by two snarling, unmuzzled dogs. Minutes later the prisoner is lying on the ground, bleeding from bite wounds on each leg. Again, Harman is pictured flashing an enthusiastic thumbs-up sign as she, untrained as a medic, is stitching the wound.

For the first time the media reacted strongly to reports of prisoner abuse. According to Sherry Ricchiardi writing in the American Journalism Review, the pictures provided the impetus. Previous reports of abuse failed to gain traction, due to a lack of evidence and a complacent patriotism among the media and American public.

But the Abu Ghraib photos demanded attention, particularly once Arab media outlets began airing them along angry headlines decrying the US army. Sadistic humiliation, sodomization, beatings, painful stress positions and the death of el-Jamadi all constituted significant breaches of the international law governing Iraqi prisons. The Bush administration – which had since 9/11 publicly proclaimed the need to get tough with prisoners and privately rewritten the rules – was suddenly backtracking.

[edit] Damage Control

“We will find the truth, we will fully investigate,” President Bush told Middle Eastern cable news viewers. “The world will see the investigation and justice will be served.”

Yet an impeccably thorough and candid investigation had already been completed in late February by Maj. Gen. Taguba. The report issued a damning interpretation of the role of Army superiors in allowing and in some cases setting the stage for the abuses to occur. Due to his access to classified Army memos and reports, Taguba was able to reconstruct the dire circumstances in which Iraqi prisons were operating in the summer of 2003 – and the series of interventions by high-level staff that resulted in the abuses.

Through interviews with anonymous Pentagon, Defense Department and intelligence community staff, Seymour Hersh was able to reveal the unconcerned and lackadaisical response by the Bush Administration.

After the story broke, the administration immediately began a campaign to represent the abuses as the result of a few ‘bad apples’, immoral and undisciplined soldiers acting on their own accord. In this effort the administration was aided by the sadistic and sexual nature of some of the photographed abuses; no official had ever specifically ordered those tactics.

All the soldiers featured in the photographs were court-martialed, a handful of whom served jail time. Graner, who led many of the abuses and encouraged his younger colleagues to partake was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The administration argued justive had been served.

Yet waves of articles in newspapers quoting from the Taguba report undermined this claim. Taguba accused several officers of responsibility, either directly or due to negligent leadership, yet none have been charged with crimes. Taguba himself has been asked to resign in an apparent retaliation for his zealous investigation.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, in charge of the entire U.S. army prison system in Iraq, was demoted to Colonel due to her negligent command. Karpinski resigned and is now a vocal critic of the administration. In a recent [www.errolmorris.com/film/sop.html documentary on Abu Ghraib] directed by Errol Morris, Karpinski alleges she was deliberately kept out of the loop on interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib after command of the hard site was passed on to Military Intelligence. In one instance, she says, Wood invited her to view an interrogation in process, which was calm, professional and involved a healthy-looking detainee.

The only officer court-martialed over abuses at Abu Ghraib, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, was cleared of charges of directing an interrogation that involved the use of dogs. Jordan was however ruled guilty of violating a high-level order not to discuss the Abu Ghraib investigation. The administration appears committed to punishing not the abuses at Abu Ghraib but those responsible for revealing them to the public.

[edit] Winning the Battle, Losing the War

The reason for the lack of serious accountability over Abu Ghraib appears obvious: responsibility climbs far up the chain of command; any investigation taking the first steps would lead inevitably to men and women with many medals and high positions in the Bush cabinet.

Yet media reports and memo leaks regarding the internal administration deliberations since 9/11 suggest a less conspiratorial but more frightening scenario: some within the administration to this day believe that aside from the sadism, some of the abuses documented at Abu Ghraib are in fact necessary tactics in the global war on terror.

In August 2003 the Pentagon screened the famous movie The Battle of Algiers, which depicts French forces using torture to break a radical insurgency in its colony. The flyer for the film acknowledged that the strategy “succeeds tactically, but fails strategically,” referring to the radicalization of the Arab population and the eventual withdrawal of France from Algeria.

Yet the movie’s blunter message that torture works appears to have settled firmly within the operational framework under which the Pentagon waged the war on terror. Despite decades of evidence demonstrating the futility of torture as a means of extracting truthful information, the Pentagon under Rumsfeld encouraged the use of harsh methods by Special Forces and eventually, untrained reservists in the U.S. Army.

The resulting scandal highlights the dangers of allowing political ideologues like the hawkish neoconservatives – most of whom have no personal military experience – to command the helm in a war that requires deft tactical strikes, sensitive public relations campaigns and efficient intelligence gathering.

In its post 9/11 rejection of decades of U.S. army tradition and international law regarding the treatment of prisoners, the Pentagon faced fierce opposition from many high-ranking officials within the Army and intelligence community. Experienced and professional soldiers warned torture would be ineffective and in the end, counterproductive to the U.S. global war on terror.

These warnings have by and large proven true. The abusive interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib did not lead to the accrual of actionable intelligence that could break the insurgency. In 2008 insurgents are still killing hundreds of Iraqi civilians and dozens of U.S. soldiers each month.

Instead, the abuses at Abu Ghraib damaged American relations with the Iraqi population beyond repair. As early as May 2004, a survey conducted by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq revealed that just 1% of Iraqis believed U.S. forces are the most important providers of security in Iraq. Radical anti-American cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr in turn soared in popularity over the course of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Whereas in November 2003 just 11% of Iraqis said they would feel safer if U.S. forces left Iraq immediately, after the Abu Ghraib scandal this figure rose to 55%. In 2008, seven in ten Iraqis wanted US troops to withdraw within one year, while 6 in 10 supported attacks on U.S. troops.

“[Abu Ghraib] became a symbol of American hypocrisy, and this idea that America wasn’t really trying to bring democracy,” said Dr. David Patel of Cornell University in an interview by telephone. Dr. Patel was in Iraq when the story peaked in May 2004 and has since done research on islamic institutions in Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Syria.

In Jordan, a staunch U.S. ally but consistent producer of terrorists, 25% of the population professed a favorable opinion of the United States in 2003, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2004, this figure plummetted to just 1%. In Indonesia, the world’s largest Islamic nation, the United Stated enjoyed the approval of a majority 75% in the year 2000. In 2004, this figure stood at 15%.

Authoritarian governments with no regard for human rights rule many of world’s Muslim nations. As self-styled leader of the free world, the US has a long legacy of reprimanding these nations from its high moral ground. But Abu Ghraib “destroyed any US credibility on human rights issues,” said Dr. Patel.

In Iran, the current target of hostile Bush administration rhetoric, Abu Ghraib features often in the sermons of the clerics who rule the country. Abu Ghraib “has been for the regime in Iran a bonanza,” said Professor Abbas Milani, co-director of Stanford’s Iran Democracy Project.

The images of Abu Ghraib and carnage in Iraq, said Milani, have made for powerful propaganda along the following lines: “If you topple us, you think you’re going to get democracy, you are mistaken – you will get what the Iraqis got, war and Abu Ghraib.”

endit.

(CONTRIBUTION BY 2007 STUDENT)

[edit] Conflicting Narratives

Who decides the circumstances under which members of the United States government can legally torture terrorism suspects or enemy combatants? How can journalists tell the difference between government-sanctioned interrogation methods and outright abuse at the hands of a few “bad apples” acting without orders?

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal forced journalists to look at such questions from a variety of angles, first breaking the story, then digging deeper for clues as to how, why and under whose jurisdiction the prisoner abuses occurred. The story challenged journalists on multiple levels: as professionals, as human beings, as citizens of a country engaged in a war declared against a well-camouflaged enemy. This article will examine the role of journalists in uncovering information about the scandal and the military’s response.

[edit] The First Report of Abuses

Video: Abu Ghraib Inmate Speaks Out

The story of detainee abuses committed by Army MPs at prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib (20 miles west of Baghdad), first broke in a November 2, 2003 Associated Press report by Charles Hanley. Hanley described first-hand accounts of prisoner abuses, including the punishment by prolonged exposure to the sun in the 120+ °F summer heat and water deprivation, as well as failure to treat prisoners’ skin diseases resulting from prohibition from proper bathing. Former detainees quoted in the article also described hitting and public humiliations, solitary confinement in a 3’ X 6’ dark, overheated cell, the public shooting deaths of prisoners, and failure to issue any sort of habeas corpus documents to prisoners.

He wrote that prisoners included “curfew-breakers and drivers who tried to evade U.S. checkpoints, suspected common criminals, anti-U.S. resistance fighters, and many of deposed President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party leadership.” Common criminals were included with insurgents under the supervision of the MPs since the “invasion force inherited a legal vacuum” and did not make the effort to distinguish between individuals on the basis of the charges they faced. Even the approximate number of prisoners being held by the U.S. was in dispute among some lawyers, Iraqis, and U.S. officials.

Seymour Hersh corroborated Hanley’s reports in Chain of Command, where he wrote that most of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, “were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the Coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the Coalition forces.” (Hersh, 21). Hanley also mentioned another point that became crucial in the events that followed: the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outsiders permitted to tour prison camps in Iraq, follows a strict policy of not making public statements about the conditions it finds. While the Red Cross has been mum about specific activity inside Abu Ghraib, Hanley noted that spokesperson Nada Doumani stressed that the Geneva conventions forbid “all physical pressure on detainees.” The legal definition of the term “enemy combatant” as used in the Geneva conventions matters in the case of Abu Ghraib because many different types of prisoners were lumped together, contributing to the general confusion that may have existed among Army personnel about the rights of each individual prisoner. Few news organizations followed up on Hanley’s report and it seems that none conducted deeper investigations into the human rights violations alleged by Iraqi former detainees and substantiated by Amnesty International. The story contained no pictures, and the only witnesses to the alleged abuses were former detainees or Red Cross employees who declined to comment in detail about anything going on in the prisons, most likely to avoid losing access to the sites altogether.

[edit] The Discovery of Pictures

The topic of Hanley’s story finally became front-page news in April, when CBS chose to air the story, complete with the newfound pictures, on 60 Minutes II (4/28/2004), followed by Seymour Hersh’s New York Times piece (4/30/04). Hersh also received a copy of Major General Anthony M. Taguba’s partially classified report written in late February of the same year, indicating that Army investigators had possessed copies of the photos since January (Chain of Command, 22).

Charles Hanley's AP Story

New Yorker Published Pictures

Salon.com Photos

[edit] Joe Darby

After the story broke and MPs were charged, tried, and sentenced, CBS 60 Minutes did a follow-up on the Abu Ghraib story by interviewing Specialist Joseph M. Darby, the former MP whistleblower who gave Charles Graner’s photo CDs to his supervisors. Darby discovered the photos of prisoner abuse after Graner gave him the CDs to look at some unrelated photos that Darby had asked to see. He came across the incriminating evidence by accident and made the choice to hand the CDs to his superiors on January 13, 2004, pretending that he had received them from an anonymous source. After his superiors took a look at the pictures and confronted him about the origin of the CD, Darby explained to them what had really happened.

Journalists did not have immediate access to Darby because he was unable to speak publicly about the Abu Ghraib case during ongoing court proceedings. After he received permission to speak publicly, Darby gave his very first post-trial interview to GQ’s Wil S. Hylton (“Prisoner of Conscience”). He has since spoken with several journalists, including Michelle Norris of NPR’s All Things Considered (August 15, 2006) and Anderson Cooper for the CBS 60 Minutes special (December 7, 2006). After his turning in the photos and witnessing the trial of members of his close-knit unit, he and his wife Bernadette had to have constant bodyguards, provided by the Army. Darby received a transfer from his Cumberland, Maryland post because commanding officers felt that his safety was in danger. He has received mixed amounts of support, as well as condemnation and death threats.

[edit] The Lucifer Effect

As Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford University psychologist and author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, has explained, seemingly well-trained and disciplined people could chose to torture and abuse prisoners.. His 1971 Stanford prison experiment demonstrated that even students who passed a variety of psychological tests and were pronounced “normal” before the experiment began still abused prisoners when given anonymity and power. Zimbardo recently said in an interview, in reference to his prison experiment, “more often than not, somebody doesn't have to tell you to do something. You're just in a setting where you look around and everyone else is doing it. Say you're a guard and you don't want to harm the prisoners—because at some level you know they're just college students—but the two other guards on your shift are doing terrible things. They provide social models for you to follow if you are going to be a team player,” (Edge.org, 1/19/2005). Most agree that the alleged cruelty certainly could have occurred, but it took some concrete evidence—gruesome pictures—to force everyone to take a serious look at the Abu Ghraib allegations.

[edit] Reactions to the photos

Once the international community saw the pictures of Abu Ghraib, American journalists became part of what Sherry Ricchiardi describes as a “catch-up frenzy” (in her August/September 2004 American Journalism Review article). Now that the shocking photos covered newspapers and magazines, everyone wanted to write the next story about torture, prison abuse and scandal in the Global War on Terror. Ricchiardi emphasizes the questions that arose as people began reacting to the reports of abuses. No one could prove whether or not the Bush Administration sanctioned the specific torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib, or the MPs simply served as an example of a few bad apples who received no orders to act as they did.

Once the story broke, the media generally fell into two camps: those who explored the story and strived to get more information and those who either whole-heartedly accepted or rejected the story’s facts. Some television commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, accused liberal-leaning journalists of using the torture pictures to sabotage the Bush Administration’s efforts in the Global War on Terror. Others did not do much investigation, but rather showed the photos for what they were and let readers make up their minds.

[edit] Systematic abuse or an isolated set of incidents?

In Chain of Command, Seymour Hersh writes of the earlier abuse reports about Guantánamo, “The public talk from the Pentagon and the White House when contrasted with what was really going on, amounted to strategic deception. The target of all the duplicity and double-talk was not, of course, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but the American press corps, and the American people.” (15). He describes the Pentagon’s public statements after the C.I.A. analyst report that Guantánamo prisoners were not being properly treated or efficiently and correctly processed. Hersh got access to even more photos after the story broke. In his investigation of the photos, as well as the detainee statements in the Taguba report, he notes the seemingly deliberate targeting of the detainees’ Muslim faith as a torture technique. Hersh indicates that a government consultant familiar with Bush Administration interrogation policies suggested that the threat of public exposure of photos of prisoners engaged religiously taboo acts could later serve as blackmail to force more confessions. He references his interview with the government consultant and Raphael Patai’s 1973 analysis in The Arab Mind to suggest that, “The photographing of prisoners . . . seems not to be random but, rather, part of the dehumanizing interrogation process,” (Chain of Command, 38). The psychological and socially ostracizing effects of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib photos could be particularly damaging in the Islamic world, and it is unlikely that untrained American MPs would have insight into that element of Arab culture.

The use of military dogs for torture provides more proof that someone higher up in the chain of command orchestrated the abuses. Scott Higham’s May 21, 2004 piece brought forth new allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, kept in stress positions for long periods of time, fondled by female soldiers, forced to eat food from toilets and wear women’s underwear, and being subjected to religious persecution amid threats of beatings and rape. Higham’s June 1, 2004 story sets those after-hours abuses aside from the torture that occurred during interrogation sessions. The date stamps on photos of the non-interrogation abuses include October 17th, 18th, and 35th, while the photos with military dogs and handlers have December 12th as the date stamp. The December abuses coincide with the period in which the prison was turned over to Military Intelligence.

Hersh’s work describes a special-access program (SAP) which has existed since the Cold War, that President Bush allegedly authorized for use at Abu Ghraib prison. Less than 200 people have been fully briefed on the program, but it essentially entails the employment of military intelligence officers, contractors, CIA officers, and individuals solely working for the SAP. The rules of engagement for this intelligence-gathering program have never been published.

If the SAP program was in place at Abu Ghraib, it is certainly possible that when the MPs said that they did not know who orders to torture came from, they were telling the truth. As Hersh writes, “The blurring of identities and organizations meant that it was impossible for the prisoners, or, significantly, the military policemen on duty to know who was doing what to whom and who had the authority to give orders.” (Chain of Command, 61).

The Army is based upon a clear hierarchy of authority that is often the only basis of organization in existence during very chaotic situations. If, as Janis Karpinski says, “disappearing ghosts” were always entering and exiting the prison system in Iraq, it would be interesting to know what the MPs were told about the level of authority of unidentified individuals. While MPs are pictured committing abuses and have been prosecuted and convicted accordingly, a deeper investigation should have been conducted into the identity of the military contractors and other unidentified individuals who had access to the prisoners. Getting access to that sort of information and tracking the origin of orders to torture is one of the biggest challenges for reporters.

[edit] Impact

The Abu Ghraib photos changed the course of the Iraq war in that the media began to seriously question the integrity of the US Army’s mission. The pictures forced everyone to acknowledge that something terrible had happened, but answering questions about why the MPs abuses prisoners has been extremely difficult. The answer to the questions about whether or not these abuses were systematic or isolated governs the direction of any efforts to prevent future abuses, and those have been the most difficult questions to address.

[edit] The Fallout

(Facts gathered from Chain of Command and Salon.com)

Officers

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski- 800th Military Police Brigade commander Relieved of command, demoted to colonel, received letter of reprimand

Colonel Thomas M. Pappas- 205th Military Intelligence Brigade Relieved of command, received a letter of reprimand, fined $8,000

Enlisted soldiers

Staff Sergeant Ivan “Chip” L. Frederick, II- the senior enlisted man 8 years imprisonment, forfeiture of pay, dishonorable discharge, reduced in rank to private

Specialist Charles A. Graner- owner of the camera and digital pictures 10 years imprisonment, dishonorable discharge, reduced in rank to private

Sergeant Javal Davis 6 months imprisonment, bad-conduct discharge, reduced in rank

Specialist Megan Ambuhl Reduced in rank to private, forfeiture of half a month’s pay

Specialist Sabrina Harman 6 months imprisonment, bad-conduct discharge

Specialist Armin J. Cruz, Jr. 8 months in prison, bad-conduct discharge, reduced in rank to private

Specialist Roman Krol 10 months in prison, bad-conduct discharge, reduced in rank to private

Private Jeremy Sivits 1 year in military prison, bad-conduct discharge, reduced in rank

Private Lynndie England pregnant with the child of Spec. Graner Charged later than the others, sentenced to 3 years imprisonment, dishonorable discharge

The United States Army court-martialed enlisted soldiers only. The list of charges includes, “conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault, and indecent acts,” (Hersh, 23). While the CIA and the Pentagon have referred more than 20 cases to the Department of Justice, the DoJ has only chosen to prosecute one civilian, who was a CIA contractor. No military contractors or CIA officers have been charged.