What the U.S. Really Did in Iraq: the Tortures and Abuses at Abu Ghraib
BOY this was a long one. For the sake of my poor fingers, I’m going to speed through the background a little but will link to resources for further reading if anyone is interested. Without further ado - let’s get started. Welcome to one of the worst things I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading about - the abuses and torture at Abu Ghraib prison.
Wow, Jumping Right Into Torture, Huh?
Hey, it’s about war crimes, right?
For those who have never heard of this, I’m so sorry in advance. We’ll need to set the groundwork for why the United States was occupying Iraq in the first place before we head into what was done in Abu Ghraib specifically. If nothing else, it lends a little context to what the military police claimed to be doing and also helps us understand why this whole situation should have never happened in the first place. You can make your own determinations as to whether the U.S. should have ever entered Iraq… but I’m sure you can guess where we stand.
So Where Do We Start?
The first Persian Gulf War 1990. Tensions had been high in Iraq after the Iraq/Iran War, but they seemed to be cooling - that is, until Saddam Hussein, then-leader of Iraq, made a speech accusing Kuwait of siphoning oil from Al-Rumaylah oil fields and conspiring to keep oil prices low for western buyers. He also demanded that their war debts be cancelled and shortly after began amassing troops along the Iraq-Kuwait border. On August 2, he ordered the invasion on Kuwait to begin and Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and Kuwait’s exiled king turned to the UN for help.
Without getting too into the weeds here, Hussein formally annexed Kuwait and declared a jihad (which means “holy war” literally and has nothing to do with terrorism). The US responded to King Fahd’s plea for military aid by sending their own troops and aircraft to Saudi Arabia. What followed was a defense of Saudi Arabia from anticipated Iraqi invasion (Operation Desert Shield), an airstrike against the Iraqi military (Operation Desert Storm), and a ground assault (Operation Desert Sabre). To read more about the Persian Gulf War, check out these articles from the History Channel and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
It took three days for coalition forces to regain Kuwait from Iraqi forces, after which the president announced a formal ceasefire. The terms for peace were that 1) Iraq acknowledge Kuwait’s sovereignty and 2) that Iraq destroy all Weapons of Mass Destruction and missiles with ranges over 90 miles. To ensure the last point, the UN ordered weapons inspectors to investigate Iraq’s progress. Until their terms were met, economic sanctions on Iraq would continue indefinitely.
Saddam Hussein returned to Iraq and began violently putting down rebellions from the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ites in the south. The U.S. and Great Britain responded by creating no-fly zones in Iraq. The Iraqi government then did everything in its power to trip up weapons inspections, and in 1998 inspectors were banned from the country after it came to light that some UN inspectors were spying for the United States.
That same year, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton passed the Iraq Liberation Act which made the removal of Saddam Hussein official foreign policy. Here we fast forward a bit until well after George W. Bush (the second Bush) was inaugurated as President and the 9/11 terror attacks. We won’t get into 9/11 because, boy, there’s enough for a whole episode there. But suffice to say that President Bush seemed suddenly very keen on the provision within the Iraq Liberation Act after 9/11.
What Does 9/11 Have to Do With Iraq?
What an excellent question - nothing!
We have evidence that as early as 9/11 the Bush administration was looking for ways to justify war with Iraq. In 2002, George W. Bush began prepping the American people for such a war by saying that Iraq 1) Iraq continued to hold weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be entirely fabricated, and 2) that Iraq supported and aided Al-Qaeda’s attack on the US, which was, again, entirely fabricated. During his state of the Union address, the president labelled Iraq as part of what he called the Axis of Evil which was shorthand for countries who sponsored terrorism. The US demanded that Iraq comply with inspections, and all evidence supports that they did. There was zero proof of WMDs in Iraq during these inspections.
The U.S. and the U.K. insisted otherwise, claiming that Iraq was purposefully stymying inspection attempts, which was found later to be entirely false.
Though other countries spoke in favor of allowing Iraq more time to comply with the disarmament agreement, President Bush laid down the final ultimatum. Saddam Hussein had 48 hours to leave Iraq, or the United States military would invade.
So I Guess the U.S. Invaded
You bet.
Within months of the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s reign had ended and he was captured and executed. Of course, this didn’t mark the end of the Iraq War. Insurgents rose up, infuriated by the continued U.S. occupation, and thus the war continued with American forces fighting to suppress pro-Hussein sentiments and insurgent groups.
And now we can get into the actual war crime.
It’s About Time
So Abu Ghraib opened in the 50s and has had a long, sordid history of violence and torture even before the U.S. got its hands on it. It was a prison under Hussein’s reign and was generally regarded as a place you go to die.
This didn’t get better when the U.S. military occupied Iraq!
In the midst of the occupation, the military police took Abu Ghraib and installed soldiers to live and detain prisoners of war. The soldiers who lived there often lived in fear that they would be attacked, they had almost zero training with prisoners of war or interrogation techniques, and they had very little supervision in the day-to-day. This, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, was a very bad combination.
In June of 2003, Amnesty International published the first of what would be several reports of abuse within detention centers in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib. These reports all alleged that these centers were committing rampant human rights violations. In response, the U.S. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski made several statements alleging the excellent living conditions in Abu Ghraib, once going so far as to say, “Living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”
In response to several reports published by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the U.S. government ordered a full-scale investigation of Abu Ghraib and the 800th Military Police Brigade. Antonio Taguba carried out the investigation (whose findings eventually became known as the Taguba Report), and, though he was forbidden from investigating the behavior of those higher up the chain of command, he found the following:
TRIGGER WARNING FOR GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF BRUTALITY AND ABUSE, BLOOD, BODILY FLUIDS/HUMAN WASTE, NUDITY, SEXUAL ASSAULT AND ABUSE, RAPE, AND HUMILIATION.
“Between October and December 2003, at the Abu Ghraib Confinement Facility (BCCF), numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force (372nd Military Police Company, 320th Military Police Battalion, 800th MP Brigade), in Tier (section) 1-A of the Abu Ghraib Prison (BCCF). The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements (ANNEX 26) and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence...In addition to the aforementioned crimes, there were also abuses committed by members of the 325th MI Battalion, 205th MI Brigade, and Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC). Specifically, on 24 November 2003, [name redacted] , 205th MI Brigade, sought to degrade a detainee by having him strip and returned to cell naked. (ANNEXES 26 and 53)".
He also found "...that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts:
a. (S) Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. (S) Videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. (S) Forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. (S) Forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time;
e. (S) Forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear;
f. (S) Forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped;
g. (S) Arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. (S) Positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture;
i. (S) Writing “I am a Rapeist” (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked;
j. (S) Placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. (S) A male MP guard having sex with a female detainee;
l. (S) Using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee;
m. (S) Taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees. (ANNEXES 25 and 26)"
The Taguba Report was never supposed to be published publicly, but the New Yorker and, subsequently, 60 Minutes II on CBS News were able to find and publish Taguba’s findings and associated photos. The photos caught fire, and suddenly everyone in the world knew what the United States military was doing to prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
The photos are harrowing. They show seven officers Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, known as Chip, who was the senior enlisted man, Specialist Charles A. Graner, Sergeant Javal Davis, Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Specialist Sabrina Harman, Private Jeremy Sivits, and Private Lynndie England taunting and laughing at prisoners they forced into humiliating and often life-threatening positions.
The following photos and articles depicting the brutality that took place in Abu Ghraib are incredibly graphic. I’m placing the heaviest trigger warning for violence, abuse, bodily fluids, blood, gore, sexual assault, nudity, and just about anything else you can think of. I do think it’s important to see the stark reality of what happened there, but do so with the utmost care for your own mental health. I won’t describe the photos’ contents here for the sake of avoiding the details if you don’t want to see them. For a collection of the more emblematic photos, click here. To read the New Yorker’s expose, complete with some photos and descriptions, click here.
There’s also the issue of the murder. His name was Manadel al-Jamadi, a suspected terrorist accused of bombing a Red Cross center in Iraq. He was brought in at 4am and was tortured and interrogated by the CIA for about a half hour before being left alone. When interrogators returned, it was clear that al-Jamadi had been dead for some time. They covered up the fact that he had been murdered by connecting him to an IV and wheeling him out of the prison, feigning that he was simply sick. It took three months for them to report the death, which made an autopsy and subsequent cause of death determination difficult. But the ICRC eventually determined that the combination of al-Jamadi’s wounds, covering his face with a bad, and the position in which he was chained functioned as a sort of crucifixion and that he had suffocated.
Of the Navy personnel involved, nine were given non-judicial punishment and none were held legally responsible for al-Jamadi’s murder. The commanding officer was court martialed, but all charges were dropped during the proceedings.
So Who’s Responsible for All This?
What a fascinating question.
The soldiers involved maintain that they were simply following orders, and I believe them to a point. There’s absolutely evidence that the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld instructed and endorsed the use of some (not all) of the torture methods we saw in Abu Ghraib. We also have plenty of direct quotes and evidence that Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials viewed the prisoners held at Abu Ghraib as less than human and beyond the Geneva Conventions’ reach because they were “intelligence assets.”
That being said, the soldiers living in Abu Ghraib went far beyond the orders given with many of the abuses documented in the leaked photos. The sexual abuse and humiliation tactics used were entirely creations of the military police. There is no excuse for violence of the nature outlined in Rumsfeld’s orders anyway, but the soldiers were responsible for acting on their own and extending their cruelty for no reason but their own amusement.
What Were the Consequences?
In the end, eleven soldiers were tried in relation to their behavior at Abu Ghraib. Most only received minor charges, and a few were cleared of all charges. One, Charles Graner, received the bulk of the responsibility, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, dishonorable discharge, and reduction in rank to private. For a full list of the soldiers’ punishments, listen to the episode or read here.
As for the commanding officers? Most of them were promoted. One, our old friend Janis Karpinski, was demoted to colonel, but the rest seemed to come out unscathed. Some even seemed to benefit from their involvement. You can read a breakdown of their punishments here (or listen in the episode, obviously).
As far as the events themselves go, in 2013 there was a $5.28 million settlement for 71 of the former detainees at Abu Ghraib, which was the first settlement of its kind. But in 2010, a dossier of more than 400,000 U.S. field reports and war logs confirmed that this kind of abuse still happens in war zones all the time. Most reports of abuse go uninvestigated, and those who commit such violence are never punished.