Home > Torture At Abu Ghraib
by Seymour M. Hersh
American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far up does
the responsibility go?
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."