Torture
At Abu Ghraib
By Seymour M.
Hersh
03 May, 2004
The New Yorker
In
the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad,
was one of the worlds most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly
executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men
and womenno accurate count is possiblewere jammed into Abu
Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little
more than human holding pits.
In the looting that
followed the regimes collapse, last April, the huge prison complex,
by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed,
including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had
the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers,
and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison.
Most of the prisoners, howeverby the fall there were several thousand,
including women and teen-agerswere civilians, many of whom had
been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints.
They fell into three 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.
Last June, Janis
Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of
the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons
in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone,
was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served
with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never
run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight
battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like
her, had no training in handling prisoners.
General Karpinski,
who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant
in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview
last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many
of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, living conditions now are
better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they
wouldnt want to leave.
A month later, General
Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major
investigation into the Armys prison system, authorized by Lieutenant
General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under
way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written
by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release,
was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional
failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba
found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous
instances of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses
at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba
reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company,
and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd
was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinskis
brigade headquarters.) Tagubas report listed some of the wrongdoing:
Breaking chemical
lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold
water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and
a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police
guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being
slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical
light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to
frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one
instance actually biting a detainee.
There was stunning
evidence to support the allegations, Taguba addeddetailed
witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic
photographic evidence. Photographs and videos taken by
the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report,
Taguba said, because of their extremely sensitive nature.
The photographsseveral
of which were broadcast on CBSs 60 Minutes 2 last
weekshow leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who are
forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspectsStaff 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; and Private Jeremy Sivitsare
now facing prosecution in Iraq, on charges that include conspiracy,
dereliction of duty, cruelty toward prisoners, maltreatment, assault,
and indecent acts. A seventh suspect, Private Lynndie England, was reassigned
to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, after becoming pregnant.
The photographs
tell it all. In one, Private England, a cigarette dangling from her
mouth, is giving a jaunty thumbs-up sign and pointing at the genitals
of a young Iraqi, who is naked except for a sandbag over his head, as
he masturbates. Three other hooded and naked Iraqi prisoners are shown,
hands reflexively crossed over their genitals. A fifth prisoner has
his hands at his sides. In another, England stands arm in arm with Specialist
Graner; both are grinning and giving the thumbs-up behind a cluster
of perhaps seven naked Iraqis, knees bent, piled clumsily on top of
each other in a pyramid. There is another photograph of a cluster of
naked prisoners, again piled in a pyramid. Near them stands Graner,
smiling, his arms crossed; a woman soldier stands in front of him, bending
over, and she, too, is smiling. Then, there is another cluster of hooded
bodies, with a female soldier standing in front, taking photographs.
Yet another photograph shows a kneeling, naked, unhooded male prisoner,
head momentarily turned away from the camera, posed to make it appear
that he is performing oral sex on another male prisoner, who is naked
and hooded.
Such dehumanization
is unacceptable in any culture, but it is especially so in the Arab
world. Homosexual acts are against Islamic law and it is humiliating
for men to be naked in front of other men, Bernard Haykel, a professor
of Middle Eastern studies at New York University, explained. Being
put on top of each other and forced to masturbate, being naked in front
of each otherits all a form of torture, Haykel said.
Two Iraqi faces
that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the
battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another
prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph
of an empty room, splattered with blood.
The 372nds
abuse of prisoners seemed almost routinea fact of Army life that
the soldiers felt no need to hide. On April 9th, at an Article 32 hearing
(the military equivalent of a grand jury) in the case against Sergeant
Frederick, at Camp Victory, near Baghdad, one of the witnesses, Specialist
Matthew Wisdom, an M.P., told the courtroom what happened when he and
other soldiers delivered seven prisoners, hooded and bound, to the so-called
hard site at Abu Ghraibseven tiers of cells where
the inmates who were considered the most dangerous were housed. The
men had been accused of starting a riot in another section of the prison.
Wisdom said:
SFC Snider grabbed
my prisoner and threw him into a pile. . . . I do not think it was right
to put them in a pile. I saw SSG Frederic, SGT Davis and CPL Graner
walking around the pile hitting the prisoners. I remember SSG Frederick
hitting one prisoner in the side of its [sic] ribcage. The prisoner
was no danger to SSG Frederick. . . . I left after that.
When he returned later, Wisdom testified:
I saw two naked
detainees, one masturbating to another kneeling with its mouth open.
I thought I should just get out of there. I didnt think it was
right . . . I saw SSG Frederick walking towards me, and he said, Look
what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.
I heard PFC England shout out, Hes getting hard.
Wisdom testified that he told his superiors what had happened, and assumed
that the issue was taken care of. He said, I just
didnt want to be part of anything that looked criminal.
The abuses became
public because of the outrage of Specialist Joseph M. Darby, an M.P.
whose role emerged during the Article 32 hearing against Chip Frederick.
A government witness, Special Agent Scott Bobeck, who is a member of
the Armys Criminal Investigation Division, or C.I.D., told the
court, according to an abridged transcript made available to me, The
investigation started after SPC Darby . . . got a CD from CPL Graner.
. . . He came across pictures of naked detainees. Bobeck said
that Darby had initially put an anonymous letter under our door,
then he later came forward and gave a sworn statement. He felt very
bad about it and thought it was very wrong.
Questioned further,
the Army investigator said that Frederick and his colleagues had not
been given any training guidelines that he was aware of.
The M.P.s in the 372nd had been assigned to routine traffic and police
duties upon their arrival in Iraq, in the spring of 2003. In October
of 2003, the 372nd was ordered to prison-guard duty at Abu Ghraib. Frederick,
at thirty-seven, was far older than his colleagues, and was a natural
leader; he had also worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia
Department of Corrections. Bobeck explained:
What I got is that
SSG Frederick and CPL Graner were road M.P.s and were put in charge
because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things
were supposed to be run.
Bobeck also testified that witnesses had said that Frederick, on one
occasion, had punched a detainee in the chest so hard that the
detainee almost went into cardiac arrest.
At the Article 32
hearing, the Army informed Frederick and his attorneys, Captain Robert
Shuck, an Army lawyer, and Gary Myers, a civilian, that two dozen witnesses
they had sought, including General Karpinski and all of Fredericks
co-defendants, would not appear. Some had been excused after exercising
their Fifth Amendment right; others were deemed to be too far away from
the courtroom. The purpose of an Article 32 hearing is for us
to engage witnesses and discover facts, Gary Myers told me. We
ended up with a c.i.d. agent and no alleged victims to examine.
After the hearing, the presiding investigative officer ruled that there
was sufficient evidence to convene a court-martial against Frederick.
Myers, who was one
of the military defense attorneys in the My Lai prosecutions of the
nineteen-seventies, told me that his clients defense will be that
he was carrying out the orders of his superiors and, in particular,
the directions of military intelligence. He said, Do you really
think a group of kids from rural Virginia decided to do this on their
own? Decided that the best way to embarrass Arabs and make them talk
was to have them walk around nude?
In letters and e-mails
to family members, Frederick repeatedly noted that the military-intelligence
teams, which included C.I.A. officers and linguists and interrogation
specialists from private defense contractors, were the dominant force
inside Abu Ghraib. In a letter written in January, he said:
I questioned some
of the things that I saw . . . such things as leaving inmates in their
cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the
door of their celland the answer I got was, This is how
military intelligence (MI) wants it done. . . . . MI has also
instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or
no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for
as much as three days.
The military-intelligence officers have encouraged and told us,
Great job, they were now getting positive results and information,
Frederick wrote. CID has been present when the military working
dogs were used to intimidate prisoners at MIs request. At
one point, Frederick told his family, he pulled aside his superior officer,
Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Phillabaum, the commander of the 320th M.P.
Battalion, and asked about the mistreatment of prisoners. His
reply was Dont worry about it.
In November, Frederick
wrote, an Iraqi prisoner under the control of what the Abu Ghraib guards
called O.G.A., or other government agenciesthat is,
the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employeeswas brought to his unit
for questioning. They stressed him out so bad that the man passed
away. They put his body in a body bag and packed him in ice for approximately
twenty-four hours in the shower. . . . The next day the medics came
and put his body on a stretcher, placed a fake IV in his arm and took
him away. The dead Iraqi was never entered into the prisons
inmate-control system, Frederick recounted, and therefore never
had a number.
Fredericks
defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the complaints in his
letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two internal Army reportsTagubas
and one by the Armys chief law-enforcement officer, Provost Marshal
Donald Ryder, a major general.
Last fall, General
Sanchez ordered Ryder to review the prison system in Iraq and recommend
ways to improve it. Ryders report, filed on November 5th, concluded
that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues,
system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious
concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police
assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted
to interrogate them. Army regulations limit intelligence activity by
the M.P.s to passive collection. But something had gone wrong at Abu
Ghraib.
There was evidence
dating back to the Afghanistan war, the Ryder report said, that M.P.s
had worked with intelligence operatives to set favorable conditions
for subsequent interviewsa euphemism for breaking the will
of prisoners. Such actions generally run counter to the smooth
operation of a detention facility, attempting to maintain its population
in a compliant and docile state. General Karpinskis brigade,
Ryder reported, has not been directed to change its facility procedures
to set the conditions for MI interrogations, nor participate in those
interrogations. Ryder called for the establishment of procedures
to define the role of military police soldiers . . .clearly separating
the actions of the guards from those of the military intelligence personnel.
The officers running the war in Iraq were put on notice.
Ryder undercut his
warning, however, by concluding that the situation had not yet reached
a crisis point. Though some procedures were flawed, he said, he found
no military police units purposely applying inappropriate confinement
practices. His investigation was at best a failure and at worst
a coverup.
Taguba, in his report,
was polite but direct in refuting his fellow-general. Unfortunately,
many of the systemic problems that surfaced during [Ryders] assessment
are the very same issues that are the subject of this investigation,
he wrote. In fact, many of the abuses suffered by detainees occurred
during, or near to, the time of that assessment. The report continued,
Contrary to the findings of MG Ryders report, I find that
personnel assigned to the 372nd MP Company, 800th MP Brigade were directed
to change facility procedures to set the conditions for
MI interrogations. Army intelligence officers, C.I.A. agents,
and private contractors actively requested that MP guards set
physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses.
Taguba backed up
his assertion by citing evidence from sworn statements to Army C.I.D.
investigators. Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the accused M.P.s,
testified that it was her job to keep detainees awake, including one
hooded prisoner who was placed on a box with wires attached to his fingers,
toes, and penis. She stated, MI wanted to get them to talk. It
is Graner and Fredericks job to do things for MI and OGA to get
these people to talk.
Another witness,
Sergeant Javal Davis, who is also one of the accused, told C.I.D. investigators,
I witnessed prisoners in the MI hold section . . . being made
to do various things that I would question morally. . . . We were told
that they had different rules. Taguba wrote, Davis also
stated that he had heard MI insinuate to the guards to abuse the inmates.
When asked what MI said he stated: Loosen this guy up for us.Make
sure he has a bad night.Make sure he gets the treatment.
Military intelligence made these comments to Graner and Frederick, Davis
said. The MI staffs to my understanding have been giving Graner
compliments . . . statements like, Good job, theyre breaking
down real fast. They answer every question. Theyre giving out
good information.
When asked why he
did not inform his chain of command about the abuse, Sergeant Davis
answered, Because I assumed that if they were doing things out
of the ordinary or outside the guidelines, someone would have said something.
Also the wingwhere the abuse took placebelongs
to MI and it appeared MI personnel approved of the abuse.
Another witness,
Specialist Jason Kennel, who was not accused of wrongdoing, said, I
saw them nude, but MI would tell us to take away their mattresses, sheets,
and clothes. (It was his view, he added, that if M.I. wanted him
to do this they needed to give me paperwork.) Taguba also
cited an interview with Adel L. Nakhla, a translator who was an employee
of Titan, a civilian contractor. He told of one night when a bunch
of people from MI watched as a group of handcuffed and shackled
inmates were subjected to abuse by Graner and Frederick.
General Taguba saved
his harshest words for the military-intelligence officers and private
contractors. He recommended that Colonel Thomas Pappas, the commander
of one of the M.I. brigades, be reprimanded and receive non-judicial
punishment, and that Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the former director
of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, be relieved of duty
and reprimanded. He further urged that a civilian contractor, Steven
Stephanowicz, of CACI International, be fired from his Army job, reprimanded,
and denied his security clearances for lying to the investigating team
and allowing or ordering military policemen who were not trained
in interrogation techniques to facilitate interrogations by setting
conditions which were neither authorized nor in accordance
with Army regulations. He clearly knew his instructions equated
to physical abuse, Taguba wrote. He also recommended disciplinary
action against a second CACI employee, John Israel. (A spokeswoman for
CACI said that the company had received no formal communication
from the Army about the matter.)
I suspect,
Taguba concluded, that Pappas, Jordan, Stephanowicz, and Israel were
either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib,
and strongly recommended immediate disciplinary action.
The problems inside
the Army prison system in Iraq were not hidden from senior commanders.
During Karpinskis seven-month tour of duty, Taguba noted, there
were at least a dozen officially reported incidents involving escapes,
attempted escapes, and other serious security issues that were investigated
by officers of the 800th M.P. Brigade. Some of the incidents had led
to the killing or wounding of inmates and M.P.s, and resulted in a series
of lessons learned inquiries within the brigade. Karpinski
invariably approved the reports and signed orders calling for changes
in day-to-day procedures. But Taguba found that she did not follow up,
doing nothing to insure that the orders were carried out. Had she done
so, he added, cases of abuse may have been prevented.
General Taguba further
found that Abu Ghraib was filled beyond capacity, and that the M.P.
guard force was significantly undermanned and short of resources. This
imbalance has contributed to the poor living conditions, escapes, and
accountability lapses, he wrote. There were gross differences,
Taguba said, between the actual number of prisoners on hand and the
number officially recorded. A lack of proper screening also meant that
many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detainedindefinitely,
it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty
per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be
a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released.
Karpinskis defense, Taguba said, was that her superior officers
routinely rejected her recommendations regarding the release
of such prisoners.
Karpinski was rarely
seen at the prisons she was supposed to be running, Taguba wrote. He
also found a wide range of administrative problems, including some that
he considered without precedent in my military career. The
soldiers, he added, were poorly prepared and untrained . . . prior
to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater, and
throughout the mission.
General Taguba spent
more than four hours interviewing Karpinski, whom he described as extremely
emotional: What I found particularly disturbing in her testimony
was her complete unwillingness to either understand or accept that many
of the problems inherent in the 800th MP Brigade were caused or exacerbated
by poor leadership and the refusal of her command to both establish
and enforce basic standards and principles among its soldiers.
Taguba recommended
that Karpinski and seven brigade military-police officers and enlisted
men be relieved of command and formally reprimanded. No criminal proceedings
were suggested for Karpinski; apparently, the loss of promotion and
the indignity of a public rebuke were seen as enough punishment.
After the story
broke on CBS last week, the Pentagon announced that Major General Geoffrey
Miller, the new head of the Iraqi prison system, had arrived in Baghdad
and was on the job. He had been the commander of the Guantánamo
Bay detention center. General Sanchez also authorized an investigation
into possible wrongdoing by military and civilian interrogators.
As the international
furor grew, senior military officers, and President Bush, insisted that
the actions of a few did not reflect the conduct of the military as
a whole. Tagubas report, however, amounts to an unsparing study
of collective wrongdoing and the failure of Army leadership at the highest
levels. The picture he draws of Abu Ghraib is one in which Army regulations
and the Geneva conventions were routinely violated, and in which much
of the day-to-day management of the prisoners was abdicated to Army
military-intelligence units and civilian contract employees. Interrogating
prisoners and getting intelligence, including by intimidation and torture,
was the priority.
The mistreatment
at Abu Ghraib may have done little to further American intelligence,
however. Willie J. Rowell, who served for thirty-six years as a C.I.D.
agent, told me that the use of force or humiliation with prisoners is
invariably counterproductive. Theyll tell you what you want
to hear, truth or no truth, Rowell said. You can flog
me until I tell you what I know you want me to say. You dont
get righteous information.
Under the fourth
Geneva convention, an occupying power can jail civilians who pose an
imperative security threat, but it must establish a regular
procedure for insuring that only civilians who remain a genuine security
threat be kept imprisoned. Prisoners have the right to appeal any internment
decision and have their cases reviewed. Human Rights Watch complained
to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that civilians in Iraq remained
in custody month after month with no charges brought against them. Abu
Ghraib had become, in effect, another Guantánamo.
As the photographs
from Abu Ghraib make clear, these detentions have had enormous consequences:
for the imprisoned civilian Iraqis, many of whom had nothing to do with
the growing insurgency; for the integrity of the Army; and for the United
States reputation in the world.
Captain Robert Shuck,
Fredericks military attorney, closed his defense at the Article
32 hearing last month by saying that the Army was attempting to
have these six soldiers atone for its sins. Similarly, Gary Myers,
Fredericks civilian attorney, told me that he would argue at the
court-martial that culpability in the case extended far beyond his client.
Im going to drag every involved intelligence officer and
civilian contractor I can find into court, he said. Do you
really believe the Army relieved a general officer because of six soldiers?
Not a chance.
Copyright: The New
Yorker