Abu Ghraib Scandal

Article Outline

Introduction; Events Prior to the Scandal; The Military Investigations and What They Found; Aftermath of the Scandal

Introduction

Abu Ghraib Scandal, incidents involving acts of torture and abuse committed by United States military personnel against Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib prison, just west of Baghdād, Iraq, during the U.S.-Iraq War. The public phase of the scandal began in late April 2004 when the CBS News program 60 Minutes II broadcast photographs on television depicting some of these acts of torture. Several days later The New Yorker magazine published several of the photographs accompanying an article on torture at Abu Ghraib by investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh. These images and others subsequently made public—such as those of a naked prisoner lying on the floor with a leash around his neck, a hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires attached to his hands and genitals, and naked prisoners forced to simulate acts of sexual intercourse—became infamous throughout the world.

The photographs and investigative reports sparked demands for an accounting of U.S. treatment of prisoners captured in the war on terror, which included the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003. These military expeditions, which followed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, led to the detention of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations, and at a U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The demands for a full accounting of prisoner treatment quickly led to the official and unofficial release of many documents. The most notable documents originated from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the U.S. military. Among the U.S. military documents was the Taguba Report, named for U.S. Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba. The Taguba Report was the first internal military investigation into the wrongdoings at Abu Ghraib. The Red Cross report, first revealed in the Wall Street Journal, described abuses witnessed by Red Cross investigators.

Subsequent reports explored general government policy on the treatment and interrogation of detainees taken in the war on terror. Still other documents offered a picture of how officials in the administration of U.S. president George W. Bush, notably those in the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, and within the White House itself, had made decisions that altered U.S. policies regarding the interrogation of wartime prisoners.

Events Prior to the Scandal

Print this section

Internal Debates

The Bush administration framed the U.S.-Iraq War as a part of the global war on terror. The policies that guided the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq resulted from decisions made by the administration after the September 11 attacks, which were carried out by the al-Qaeda terrorist network based in Afghanistan. Some officials in the Bush administration argued that the war on terror was “a new kind of war” and that the old norms and policies governing U.S. military campaigns were now obsolete.

At issue were two fundamental questions. The first concerned whether prisoners—specifically suspected members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan that harbored them—should be accorded the legal protections outlined in the Geneva Conventions. The second concerned what methods U.S. military and security personnel should be permitted to use in interrogating those prisoners.

In the first debate, White House and Justice Department officials argued that al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners captured in Afghanistan were not entitled to Geneva Convention protections because they were “illegal combatants.” The president’s chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, argued that “this new paradigm [of the war on terrorism] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions.” Conversely, the Department of State (and certain segments of the Defense Department) harbored grave reservations about any decision to circumvent a tradition of according all prisoners taken on the battlefield the formal status and rights accorded POWs. Secretary of State Colin Powell, for one, voiced his concern that such a move would “reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops.”

The position taken by Gonzales won out in this debate. In February 2002 President Bush issued a memo finding that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees but that U.S. armed forces would “treat detainees humanely” and “in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” Prior to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration determined that the Geneva Conventions would apply to prisoners of war there. Due to the earlier memos, however, there was some ambiguity about whether the Geneva Conventions would apply to “foreign fighters,” possibly members of the al-Qaeda network, captured in Iraq.

The second debate, over what interrogation methods should be permitted in this “new kind of war,” involved a discussion of what coercive techniques should and should not be considered torture—and thus illegal under both U.S. and international law. In this case the discussion was driven by arguments put forward by Justice Department lawyers. They contended in an August 2002 memo that “physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”—a standard that allowed for many brutal interrogation techniques theretofore commonly regarded as torture.

This definition was distinctly different from the definition of torture outlined in the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified in 1994, making it part of U.S. law. The August 2002 memo and subsequent memos that approved specific interrogation techniques in effect raised the threshold of what constitutes torture, allowing many procedures that formerly would have been considered illegal. This in turn laid the groundwork for the detainee abuses that took place first in Afghanistan, then in Guantánamo Bay, and ultimately in Iraq.

U.S. Invasion of Iraq and the Use of Abu Ghraib Prison

On May 1, 2003, President Bush declared an end to “major combat operations” in Iraq. The last remnants of the organized Iraqi military had been defeated. The U.S. and coalition forces effectively controlled the physical territory of the country and its essential infrastructure. The U.S. armed forces governed from Saddam Hussein’s former palaces and controlled the largest and most notorious of his prisons, Abu Ghraib, which had been used as a penitentiary and as a place of torture for the worst Iraqi criminals and for political opponents of the Hussein regime. During the summer and fall of 2003, an insurgency erupted against the U.S. occupation. The U.S. military began detaining thousands of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib under suspicion of contributing to, or having knowledge of, the insurgency. The insurgents consisted mainly of Sunni Muslims but also of foreign fighters linked to the al-Qaeda network and for a time of radical Shia Muslim militias.

The infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib were taken during the autumn of 2003. In November 2003, shortly after the incidents depicted in the photos, Army Specialist Joseph M. Darby returned to his posting at Abu Ghraib and heard about a shooting incident that had taken place at the prison while he was away on leave. Darby asked the military policeman in charge of the night shift, Charles A. Graner, if he had pictures of the incident; Graner handed Darby two compact discs (CDs) containing hundreds of images of U.S. personnel torturing prisoners, many of them naked. Alarmed by what he saw, on January 13, 2004, Darby handed over the CDs to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID). What they saw, in turn, led CID officers to launch an investigation and to interview a number of Iraqi prisoners who claimed to have been abused at Abu Ghraib.

In the weeks following the broadcast of the photos by CBS in April 2004, a number of other documents relating to the internal military investigation were leaked to the media. These included the Taguba Report and a confidential report submitted to the Pentagon by the Red Cross in February 2004. The report was written by members of an independent Red Cross inspection team who had visited Abu Ghraib repeatedly over the summer and fall of 2003.

The Red Cross report, which was never meant to be made public, was leaked to the Wall Street Journal in May 2004. It described horrifically substandard conditions in the prison and stated that many procedures used in interrogating detainees in Abu Ghraib were “tantamount to torture.” In the words of its authors, the report was meant “to draw the attention of the Coalition Forces to a number of serious violations of International Humanitarian Law” at Abu Ghraib. It also included an estimate, provided by military intelligence officers, that between 70 and 90 percent of the detainees held at Abu Ghraib “had been arrested by mistake” in the massive sweeps that followed insurgent attacks.

Soon after the Red Cross report was made public, the sworn statements of Iraqi detainees, taken by Army CID officials over the course of their investigation, were leaked to the Washington Post. In these depositions, the prisoners themselves—many of whom had been arbitrarily detained and held for months in the prison without charge or trial—gave first-person accounts of how they were treated by U.S. military personnel.

III

The Military Investigations and What They Found

Print this section

The first official government investigation into abuses at Abu Ghraib began on January 13, 2004, four-and-a-half months before the photographs were broadcast publicly. On January 31, Major General Taguba was appointed to conduct an investigation into the activities of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which was in charge of running Abu Ghraib prison. Taguba submitted the findings of his investigation to his superior officers in early March. On May 1, just after the broadcast of the photographs by CBS, Seymour M. Hersh, in an article for The New Yorker, reported on and quoted from the report, making its contents known to the public. The full report was later officially released.

The Taguba Report found “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” It also found that the abuse was “systemic” and “intentionally perpetrated.” Among the confirmed incidents were acts of “punching, slapping, and kicking detainees”; “keeping them naked for several days at a time”; “forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing”; and “using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee.”

The Taguba Report was notable for two other findings. One involved insults against Islamic religious practices. The second concerned the involvement of “Other Government Agencies” (OGAs) in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The report found credible the deposition of one detainee who testified that he was ordered to “curse Islam” and forced to eat pork and drink liquor in violation of his religious beliefs. The finding was significant in light of a subsequent military inquiry in 2005 that uncovered evidence of deliberate mishandling of the Qur’an at Guantánamo.

The Taguba Report also revealed the existence of “ghost detainees,” or unregistered prisoners at various detention facilities, including Abu Ghraib. It found that these detainees were brought there by OGAs and were moved around “to hide them” from the Red Cross “in violation of international law.” Subsequent reports disclosed that the OGA involved was the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). At least one detainee under CIA custody died during an interrogation at Abu Ghraib while he was held in a position regarded as a form of torture by many human rights organizations.

Although Taguba’s report was extensive, it did not look into whether prisoner abuse could be traced to official policy, and it focused on military police, not military intelligence (MI) personnel, who were in charge of interrogating prisoners. On April 15, 2004, after CBS producers had obtained the photographs but had not yet broadcast them, Army Major General George R. Fay was appointed to conduct an investigation into the activities of military intelligence personnel at Abu Ghraib. In June Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones was appointed over Fay. This change allowed interviews to be conducted with officers outranking Fay, notably with Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, then commander in Iraq.

The Jones/Fay Report was most notable for acknowledging that detainee abuses ordered by MI officers at Abu Ghraib may have resulted from confusion about whether Geneva Conventions protections applied to prisoners in Iraq since they had not applied to Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. For example, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, told the Red Cross in a November 2003 communication that prisoners of “significant intelligence value” were not entitled “to obtain full [Geneva Conventions] protection,” although Bush administration officials had publicly stated that the Geneva Conventions would apply in Iraq. Similarly, General Sanchez had approved in a September 2003 memo a number of interrogation methods, such as “yelling, loud music, and light control: used to create fear, disorient detainee, and prolong capture shock” and “presence of military working dogs: exploits Arab fear of dogs.” These methods were designed for “significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee.”

On May 12, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed one of his predecessors, James R. Schlesinger, to head an “Independent Panel…to review Department of Defense investigations on detention operations either present or ongoing”—in effect, an investigation of the investigations. The Schlesinger Report acknowledged that both military police and intelligence officers had committed abuses and that “there were five cases of detainee deaths as a result of abuse by U.S. personnel during interrogations.” However, the report concluded that the torture at Abu Ghraib was the result of “deviant behavior.” The Schlesinger Report found “no evidence of a policy of abuse promulgated by senior officials or military authorities.” It did concede, however, that 'the abuses were not just the failure of some individuals to follow known standards, and they are more than the failure of a few leaders to enforce discipline. There is both institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels.'

In addition to the three major reports made public—the Taguba, Jones/Fay, and Schlesinger reports—at least four other investigations were completed. Altogether, inquiries were undertaken by the Army, the Navy (which includes the Marine Corps), the CIA, and the Justice Department. These inquiries revealed that as of spring 2005 at least 108 prisoners had died in U.S. custody during the Afghan and Iraq wars, and of those, 27 deaths had been ruled homicides by the military.

All of the reports made public to date have identified significant wrongdoing at various individual links in the chain of command that allowed prisoner abuses to happen. Military police officers and low-ranking officers at Abu Ghraib were subjected to courts-martial or other disciplinary proceedings. None of the official inquiries, however, actually investigated or identified links in the chain of command going all the way up to the highest levels of the Defense Department or the Bush administration.

Windows Live® Search Results

Introduction

Events Prior to the Scandal

Internal Debates

U.S. Invasion of Iraq and the Use of Abu Ghraib Prison

The Military Investigations and What They Found