Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse

• 1. Introduction

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  One freed detainee told a journalist that he wished somebody would publish pictures of what was happening inside Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Somebody eventually did. The photographs showed abuse committed by members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency during the early stages of the Iraq War. They set off shock and outrage in the United States and around the world.

  The abuses at Abu Ghraib ranged from physical abuse and sexual humiliation to torture and rape, along with the killing of a prisoner. Yet the images raised as many questions as they answered. Were the soldiers in the photographs a handful of rogue guards, or were they following methods approved far above their rank? Why did earlier warnings from humanitarian groups reach so few ears? And when the courts finished their work, who actually paid a price?

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• 2. A Prison Reopened

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  Abu Ghraib prison sat on about 110 hectares (272 acres) of land, 32 kilometers (20 miles) west of Baghdad. Under Saddam Hussein it held approximately 50,000 men and women in poor conditions. Torture and execution there were frequent, and it ranked among the most notorious prisons in Iraq.

  When Saddam Hussein's government collapsed, looters carried away everything in the prison that could be removed. The United States Army then refurbished it and turned it into a military prison. It became the largest of several detention centers the American military used in Iraq. In March 2004 it housed approximately 7,490 prisoners, and at its peak it held an estimated 8,000. The army sorted them into three groups: common criminals, suspected leaders of the insurgency, and people suspected of crimes against the occupying force. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that most detainees were civilians with no links to armed groups. Most prisoners lived in tents in the yard, but the abuses took place inside cell blocks 1a and 1b.

  The 800th Military Police Brigade, from Uniondale, New York, ran the prison. Its commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was in charge of every American-run prison in Iraq. She had no previous experience running a prison. The soldiers who committed the abuses belonged to the 372nd Military Police Company, part of the 320th Military Police Battalion, which her brigade headquarters oversaw.

  Civilian contractors filled many roles as well. Over half of the interrogators at the prison were employees of CACI International, and Titan Corporation supplied the linguistics personnel. The Fay Report noted that "contracting-related issues contributed to the problems at Abu Ghraib prison." General Fay added that the army's general policy against contracting out intelligence functions had been designed partly to avoid the very problems that eventually developed there.

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• 3. How It Broke Open

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  In June 2003, Amnesty International published reports of abuse by American and coalition forces in Iraqi detention centers, Abu Ghraib among them. On the 20th of June 2003, Abdel Salam Sidahmed, deputy director of the group's Middle East Program, described a protest at the prison on the 13th of June against indefinite detention without trial. Troops from the occupying powers killed one person and wounded seven. A press release on the 23rd of July 2003 added that prisoners had faced extreme heat, lacked clothing, and were forced to use open trenches as toilets. It also listed denial of sleep, bright lights, loud music, and uncomfortable restraints.

  On the 1st of November 2003, the Associated Press followed with a lengthy report built on interviews with released detainees, conducted by journalist Charles J. Hanley. Freed prisoners described attacks by dogs and the use of hoods. Saad Naif, aged 38, said of the Americans, "They confined us like sheep." The article gained little notice. Karpinski answered that prisoners were being treated "humanely and fairly." The same report noted two pending legal cases against American personnel, one over the beating of a prisoner and one over a death in custody.

  The Red Cross had been allowed to oversee the prison since the start of the invasion, and it submitted reports on how prisoners were treated. Karpinski responded to one of them by saying that several prisoners were intelligence assets and so not entitled to full Geneva Convention protection. The reports still led Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior American military officer in Iraq, to appoint Major General Antonio Taguba to investigate on the 1st of January 2004. In February 2004 Taguba reported "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses." He described the abuse as systemic and illegal, and said several military police guards had intentionally carried it out. He cited photographic evidence. The report was not released publicly.

  On the 16th of January 2004, United States Central Command told the media that an official investigation had begun. On the 24th of February it was reported that 17 soldiers had been suspended. On the 21st of March the military announced the first charges, against six soldiers. Much of the American press still showed little interest.

  The CBS program 60 Minutes II had photographs, and the Department of Defense and Richard Myers, an Air Force general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked it to hold the story. The segment was delayed by two weeks. Then CBS learned that The New Yorker planned to publish an article with photographs in its next issue, and it broadcast its report on the 28th of April 2004. The pictures showed military personnel taunting naked prisoners.

  Dan Rather interviewed Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of Coalition operations in Iraq. Kimmitt said, "we're appalled as well," and asked Americans not to judge their army "based on the actions of a few." He also acknowledged that he knew of other cases of abuse during the occupation. Bill Cowan, a former Marine lieutenant colonel, told the program, "We went into Iraq to stop things like this from happening, and indeed, here they are happening under our tutelage."

  Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, an Army Reservist who was himself party to some of the abuses, also spoke to Rather. In civilian life he was a corrections officer at a Virginia prison. "We had no support, no training whatsoever," he said. His video diary from Iraq supplied some of the images used in the story. In it he wrote that Military Intelligence had witnessed the activity and encouraged it.

  Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, relying on a copy of the Taguba report, wrote "Torture at Abu Ghraib." It was posted online on the 30th of April and printed in the issue dated the 10th of May. Editor David Remnick also had the magazine post photographs taken by American guards. Two more Hersh articles followed within two weeks, "Chain of Command" and "The Gray Zone." The pictures were soon reproduced in the press across the world, and the details of the Taguba report became public in May 2004.

  In February 2006, the Australian network SBS broadcast previously unreleased photographs and videos on its Dateline program. The Bush administration had tried to stop their release in the United States. The images showed prisoners crawling naked, being forced to perform sexual acts, and being covered in feces, and some showed prisoners who had been killed. BBC World News said that guards treated one reportedly unstable prisoner as a "pet" for torture. The Pentagon replied that the images had already been investigated.

  On the 15th of March 2006, Salon published what was then the most extensive documentation of the abuse. A report it obtained counted 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse and 93 video files of the same kind. It also counted 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees.

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• 4. Inside the Cell Blocks

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  Taking away prisoners' clothes was a common form of sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib. Hashem Muhsen, one of the naked men in the human pyramid photograph, later said the prisoners were also made to crawl across the floor while soldiers rode them like donkeys. In May 2004, The Washington Post reported the testimony of Ameen Saeed Al-Sheikh, detainee No. 151362. He said his captors told him, "we will make you wish to die and it will not happen."

  On the 12th of January 2005, The New York Times reported more testimony from detainees. It described urinating on prisoners, pounding wounded limbs with metal batons, and pouring phosphoric acid on detainees. A guard's own video diary said that prisoners were shot for minor misbehavior.

  In 2009, Antonio Taguba said there was photographic evidence of American soldiers and translators raping detainees. One detainee told investigators he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming and saw an Army translator raping him while a female soldier took pictures. Senior American officials admitted that rape had taken place. Some of the women who were raped became pregnant, and in some cases they were later killed by relatives in what were thought to be honor killings.

  President Barack Obama first agreed to release more of the photographs, then changed his mind after lobbying from senior military figures. He said release could put troops in danger and "inflame anti-American public opinion." Taguba supported the decision. "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency," he said.

  In November 2003, a prisoner named Manadel al-Jamadi died after CIA officer Mark Swanner and Sabrina Harman interrogated and tortured him. Al-Jamadi had been a suspect in a bomb attack that killed 12 people at a Red Cross facility in Baghdad, though his involvement was never confirmed. His body was packed in ice. It appears in the background of widely reprinted photographs of Harman and Charles Graner, who grin and each offer a thumbs-up. A military autopsy declared the death a homicide, and no one has been charged. In 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder opened a full criminal investigation. In August 2012 he announced that no charges would be brought.

  A 2006 study counted the dead using public reports, because the American government had provided no total. It found 63 detainee deaths at Abu Ghraib from all causes. Insurgent mortar attacks caused 36 of them, and the rest came from natural causes and homicide. The Geneva Convention requires that prisoners not be kept in facilities vulnerable to artillery attack. The prison's position in a combat zone was raised early, yet the decision was to keep prisoners there. No other American detention facility in Iraq suffered casualties from mortar attacks.

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• 5. Orders From Above

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  On the 7th of May 2004, Pierre Krähenbühl, operations director of the Red Cross, said its inspection visits to detention centers run by the United States and its allies showed that abuse was not isolated. He called it a "pattern and a broad system," and said some incidents were "tantamount to torture." Many of the methods had been developed at the Guantanamo detention center. They included prolonged isolation, short shackling in painful positions, nudity, extreme heat and cold, loud music, and preying on phobias. One scheme, the "frequent flyer program," moved prisoners from cell to cell every few hours so they could not sleep for days, weeks, or even months.

  On the 8th of May 2004, The Guardian reported that Major General Geoffrey Miller had confirmed the use of some fifty special "coercive techniques" against enemy detainees. Miller commanded the military jails in Iraq and had previously run the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. He said his main role was to extract as much intelligence as possible.

  The same report quoted a former British special forces officer who said the guards' acts resembled resistance to interrogation training, known as R2I. American and British forces train jointly in these techniques, ostensibly so soldiers can cope with torture if captured. Historian Alfred W. McCoy, who wrote a book on torture in the Philippine armed forces, saw similarities with the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual that the CIA published in 1963. He argued that what he called "the CIA's no-touch torture methods" have been in continuous use by the CIA and military intelligence since then.

  Documents obtained by The Washington Post and the American Civil Liberties Union showed that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez authorized military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, and sensory deprivation as interrogation methods at Abu Ghraib. A November 2004 report by Brigadier General Richard Formica found that many troops had followed orders based on a Sanchez memorandum. It concluded that the abuse had not come from isolated "criminal" elements. ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said Sanchez "authorized interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards."

  On the 21st of December 2004, the ACLU released Federal Bureau of Investigation memoranda it had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. One, dated the 22nd of May 2004, came from an official described as the on-scene commander in Baghdad, whose name was redacted. It referred to an executive order that sanctioned sleep deprivation, hooding, loud music, removal of clothing, stress positions, and the use of dogs. Its author wrote that the Pentagon required specific authorization from the chain of command, and that beatings and sexual humiliation fell outside the order. It was the first internal evidence that the president had mandated forms of coercion.

  A 2004 report in The New Yorker stated that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had authorized the interrogation tactics used at Abu Ghraib, which had earlier been used in Afghanistan. In November 2006, Janis Karpinski told Spain's El País that she had seen a letter signed by Rumsfeld allowing civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation. She said his handwritten signature sat above his printed name, with the comment "Make sure this is accomplished" in the margin. Neither the Pentagon nor Army spokespeople in Iraq commented. Also in 2006, eight former soldiers and intelligence operatives, including Karpinski and former counterintelligence agent David DeBatto, filed a criminal complaint against Rumsfeld in a German court.

  On the 27th of April 2007, German Public Prosecutor General Monika Harms announced that Germany would not pursue charges against Rumsfeld and 11 other American officials. She cited insufficient evidence that the acts occurred on German soil, and the fact that the accused did not live in Germany.

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• 6. Law and Loopholes

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  In August 2002, the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department issued the memoranda now known as the Torture Memos. John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general, wrote them, and his boss Jay S. Bybee signed two of the three. Alberto Gonzales and other senior administration lawyers argued that detainees at Guantanamo Bay and similar prisons were "unlawful combatants" and not protected by the Geneva Conventions. A further memo came on the 14th of March 2003, after Bybee had left and just before the invasion of Iraq. In it, Yoo concluded that federal laws against torture did not apply to American practices overseas.

  Gonzales observed that denying Geneva coverage "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman wrote that the statement suggested the policy was crafted so that the actions of American officials could not be treated as war crimes.

  Because the United States occupied Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority, Common Article Two of the Geneva Conventions applied. The Bush administration itself took the position that both countries were parties to the treaties and that they were binding. The United Nations Convention against Torture, which the United States has ratified, defines torture as severe pain or suffering intentionally inflicted by or with the consent of a public official. Its listed purposes include obtaining information or a confession. On the 5th of November 2003, Major General Donald J. Ryder, the army's provost marshal, reported that prison conditions in Iraq sometimes violated the Geneva Conventions.

  The Red Cross sent a confidential report to the Coalition Forces in February 2004 that documented "serious violations" of international law. It listed brutality at capture that sometimes caused death or serious injury, and no notice of arrests to families. It also cited coercion during interrogation, prolonged solitary confinement in cells without daylight, and excessive force that caused death or injury. Some legal experts said the United States could be obligated to try some of its soldiers for war crimes, since degrading treatment of detainees is a "grave breach."

  In December 2005, John Pace, human rights chief for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq, criticized the practice of holding Iraqi prisoners in Iraqi facilities such as Abu Ghraib. He said United Nations Resolution 1546, which the American government cited as the legal mandate for its occupation, did not authorize it. Only the Ministry of Justice, he said, was empowered to detain anyone. He spoke of "a total breakdown in the protection of the individual in this country."

  In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions applied to all detainees in the war on terror. It held that the military tribunals used to try suspects violated American and international law, and that the president could not set them up alone. Congress, the court said, needed to authorize a way for detainees to confront their accusers and challenge their detention.

  The Military Commissions Act of 2006 pushed in the opposite direction. Critics consider it an amnesty law for war on terror crimes, because it retroactively rewrote the War Crimes Act. It also abolished habeas corpus for foreign detainees, which critics say made it effectively impossible for them to challenge crimes committed against them.

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• 7. Reactions

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  President George W. Bush's administration did not readily acknowledge the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Once the pictures were published, it described the scandal as an isolated incident, the work of a few individuals who disregarded American values. That view was widely disputed, notably in Arab countries. On the 7th of May 2004, Bush publicly apologized, saying he was "sorry for the humiliations suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliations suffered by their families." He called the abuse "abhorrent" and "a stain on our country's honor and our country's reputation."

  The same day, Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee, "These events occurred on my watch." He said, "I take full responsibility," and offered his deepest apology to the Iraqis who had been mistreated. He also drew a line between abuse and torture: "What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture." He complained, too, that in the information age people with digital cameras pass photographs to the media before they even reach the Pentagon.

  Senator Lindsey Graham said the American public needed to understand that "we're talking about rape and murder here." James Inhofe, a Republican on the same committee, argued the events were blown out of proportion. He said he was "more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment" of prisoners he called murderers, terrorists, and insurgents.

  On the 26th of May 2004, Albert Gore gave a sharply critical speech. He called for the resignations of Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas J. Feith, and Stephen A. Cambone. Abu Ghraib, he said, was "not the result of random acts of a few bad apples." The New York Times and The Boston Globe also called for Rumsfeld's resignation. The Economist, which had backed Bush in 2000, put a photograph of the abuse on its cover with the words "Resign, Rumsfeld." Radio host Rush Limbaugh took the opposite view, saying the events were "no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation."

  Yahia Said, an Iraqi scholar at the London School of Economics, described the reception in Iraq as surprisingly low-key. Rumors and tall stories about abuse had circulated for a long time, he said, so the pictures seemed quite benign by comparison. Many people asked why they had surfaced at that particular moment. CNN reporter Ben Wedeman found the reaction to Bush's apology mixed. A Baghdad newspaper from the Iraqi Islamic Party said an apology was not enough. General Stanley McChrystal, who held several commands in Iraq and Afghanistan, said nearly every first-time jihadist he encountered claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him into action.

  On the 10th of May 2004, swastika-covered posters of the Abu Ghraib photographs were attached to graves at the Commonwealth military cemetery in Gaza City. Thirty-two graves of soldiers killed in World War I were desecrated or destroyed. The Bahraini Daily Tribune wrote on the 5th of May 2004 that the pictures would make more people determined to attack Americans and British. In November 2008, Lord Bingham, the former UK Law Lord, criticized the "cynical lack of concern for international legality among some top officials in the Bush administration."

  Philip Zimbardo's 2007 book The Lucifer Effect cited Abu Ghraib in support of conclusions from his 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In 2008, scholars Alette Smeulers and Sander van Niekerk argued that pressure after the September 11 attacks pushed the Bush administration toward extreme tactics. They concluded that the abuses were state-sanctioned crimes, and scholar Michelle Brown agreed.

  In 2004, the International Center of Photography in New York and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh presented the photo exhibition "Inconvenient Evidence." The painter Fernando Botero took up the scandal in provocative work that was debated controversially. Errol Morris's documentary Standard Operating Procedure explores the story behind the images and gives perpetrators a voice. Rory Kennedy's 2007 documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib lets both victims and perpetrators speak and compares the events to the Milgram experiment. In Paul Schrader's 2021 film The Card Counter, the characters played by Oscar Isaac and Willem Dafoe were previously involved in torture at Abu Ghraib.

  At the 2022 Berlin Biennale, French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel built a labyrinth from the photographs in the Rieckhallen of the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum. It caused a stir and drew a letter of protest from artists.

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• 8. Accountability

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  Twelve soldiers were convicted of crimes connected to Abu Ghraib, and every conviction included dereliction of duty. Most received minor sentences. Three other soldiers were cleared or never charged, and no one was convicted for the deaths of detainees. The courts-martial ran from May 2004 to April 2006.

  Specialist Charles Graner was found guilty on the 14th of January 2005 and sentenced the next day to 10 years in prison, a dishonorable discharge, and reduction in rank to private. He was paroled from Fort Leavenworth on the 6th of August 2011, after six and a half years. Private First Class Lynndie England was convicted on the 26th of September 2005 of conspiracy, maltreating detainees, and an indecent act. She received three years and was paroled on the 1st of March 2007, after one year and five months. Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick pleaded guilty on the 20th of October 2004, received eight years, and was paroled in October 2007. Specialist Jeremy Sivits received the maximum one-year sentence from a special court-martial on the 19th of May 2004. He died from COVID-19 in 2022. Sergeant Santos Cardona drew 90 days of hard labor, left the Army with an honorable discharge on the 29th of September 2007, and was killed in action in 2009 while working as a government contractor in Afghanistan.

  Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was demoted to colonel on the 5th of May 2005. She told the BBC she was being made a scapegoat and that General Ricardo Sanchez should be asked what he knew. In 2014 she told a reporter that military intelligence personnel had said 75 percent of the inmates were innocent of the accusations against them. She later learned the figure was closer to 90 percent.

  Colonel Thomas Pappas was relieved of command on the 13th of May 2005 after non-judicial punishment for two instances of dereliction of duty, including allowing dogs at interrogations. He was fined $8000, and a reprimand effectively ended his military career. He faced no criminal prosecution. Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan was charged on the 29th of April 2006. Eight of twelve charges were dismissed after Major General George Fay admitted he had not read Jordan his rights. On the 28th of August 2007, Jordan was acquitted of all charges of prisoner mistreatment, though he received a reprimand for disobeying an order not to discuss the investigation.

  Donald Rumsfeld said in February 2005 that he had twice offered to resign over the scandal, and Bush declined both offers. Jay Bybee, author of the Justice Department memo that defined torture as pain equal to that of death and organ failure, had been nominated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and began service in 2003. Michael Chertoff, who had advised the CIA on the limits of coercive interrogation, was chosen as Secretary of Homeland Security. Major General Walter Wojdakowski, Karpinski's immediate operational supervisor, was cleared of all charges and later became Chief of the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning. The Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense detention operations said, "The Panel finds no evidence that organizations above the 800th MP brigade or the 205th MI Brigade-level were directly involved in the incidents at Abu Ghraib."

  On the 27th of June 2011, the Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from a group of 250 Iraqis who wanted to sue CACI International and Titan Corp., the two private contractors at the prison. Lower courts had dismissed the suits on the grounds that the companies held derivative sovereign immunity as government contractors. In 2013, Engility Holdings paid $5.28 million to settle claims by 71 former inmates held at Abu Ghraib and other American-run sites between 2003 and 2007. It was the first successful attempt by detainees to obtain reparations. In June 2014, an appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, found that the 18th-century Alien Tort Statute let non-American citizens use American courts, opening the way for abused Iraqis to sue CACI.

  On the 12th of November 2024, a federal jury held CACI Premier Technology liable in the case Al Shimari et al. v. CACI. It awarded three Iraqi plaintiffs, Suhail Al Shimari, Asa'ad Zuba'e, and Salah Al-Ejaili, $3 million each in compensatory damages and $11 million each in punitive damages. The total was $42 million. The jury concluded that CACI interrogators had told military police to "soften up" prisoners for questioning by mistreating them, though CACI employees were not found to have inflicted the abuse directly. An earlier jury had failed to reach a unanimous decision, the case had run for 16 years, and CACI had tried more than 20 times to have it dismissed. The American government has not set up any official compensation program for survivors.

  In 2010, the last of the prisons were turned over to the Iraqi government. Major General Douglas Stone had been assigned to reform the American detention system in Iraq, and conditions were reportedly better by the time of the withdrawal. In September 2010, Amnesty International warned in a report titled "New Order, Same Abuses" that up to 30,000 prisoners remained in detention in Iraq without rights and were frequently tortured or abused. On the 22nd of October 2010, nearly 400,000 secret American Army field reports reached The Guardian and other media through WikiLeaks. The logs showed that American authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse by Iraqi police and soldiers. They also showed that American troops abused prisoners for years after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

  In 2014, the Iraqi government closed Abu Ghraib prison indefinitely, out of concern that ISIL would take over the facility.

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