III.

The Military Investigations and What They Found

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.