[news] TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB- by Seymour M. Hersh (The Newyorker)

[givara gaza]

TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does the 
responsibility go?
Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-04-30
In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of 
Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with torture, 
weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty 
thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were 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 regime's 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, however—
by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-
agers—were 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 wouldn't want to leave."
A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly 
suspended, and a major investigation into the Army's 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 
Karpinski's brigade headquarters.) Taguba's 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 added—
"detailed 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 photographs—several of which were broadcast on CBS's "60 Minutes 
2" last week—show leering G.I.s taunting naked Iraqi prisoners who 
are forced to assume humiliating poses. Six suspects—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; and Private Jeremy Sivits—are 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 other—it's 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 372nd's abuse of prisoners seemed almost routine—a 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 
Ghraib—seven 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 didn't 
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, "He's 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 didn't 
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 Army's 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 Frederick's 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 client's 
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 cell—and 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 MI's 
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 `Don't 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 
agencies—that is, the C.I.A. and its paramilitary employees—was 
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 prison's inmate-control system, Frederick 
recounted, "and therefore never had a number."

Frederick's defense is, of course, highly self-serving. But the 
complaints in his letters and e-mails home were reinforced by two 
internal Army reports—Taguba's and one by the Army's 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. Ryder's 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 interviews"—a 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 
Karpinski's 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 [Ryder's] 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 Ryder's 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 Frederick's 
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, they're breaking down real fast. They answer every 
question. They're 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 wing"—where the abuse took place—
"belongs 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 Karpinski's 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 detained—indefinitely, 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. Karpinski's 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. Taguba's 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. "They'll 
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 don't 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, Frederick's 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, Frederick's civilian attorney, told me that he 
would argue at the court-martial that culpability in the case 
extended far beyond his client. "I'm 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." 
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact 

		
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