Home > War Crimes: What Secrets Can the Photos Reveal?
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Everyone on Planet Earth has now seen America’s liberating forces humiliate, brutalize, and torture naked Iraqis in Abu Ghraib prison. As bad as we thought the story could get, it grows sicker with every new photograph and video. Our eyes glaze over. We despair at seeing how war - and unlimited power over others - can twist a handful of otherwise decent, small-town Army reservists into sadistic torturers.
But, look again. The dirty pictures were not just holiday snaps to dazzle friends back home in West Virginia. Taking and showing humiliating photos and videos qualifies as a war crime, as defined by the Geneva Conventions. The images prove direct participation in those crimes by far more than "the six morons who lost the war." And the devastating damage the images do to America compels us to consider how they fit into the larger pattern of war crimes that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Under-Secretary Stephen Cambone, and other top Pentagon officials conspired to commit.
I know that the current military trials will do their best to duck any whisper of war crimes, and I hardly expect Pious John Ashcroft, the Attorney General, to prosecute the Pentagon faithful, heaven forbid. But I see the inescapable relevance of the Geneva Conventions in the recently revealed memo to President Bush from his counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, who sought, however clumsily, to help the Administration sidestep war crime charges over a similar pattern of abuse in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.
In Iraq, the chain of evidence begins where the chain of command bottomed out - with Pvt. Lynndie England, the grinning, good-time gal with a cigarette in her lips giving a jaunty thumbs up at a group of naked Iraqi men in hoods, their blurred hands where their proper Muslim parents told them never to touch themselves. Pvt. Lynndie, 21, is also the one holding the leash that leads to a dog collar around the neck of a terrified Iraqi lying naked on the floor.
"I was instructed by persons in higher rank to stand there and hold this leash and look at the camera," she said in an exclusive interview with Brian Maass of Denver CBS station KCNC-TV.
"We thought that’s how they did it," she said. "We’re not trained as MI or CIA - mind games, intimidation, it sounded pretty typical to us."
MI - or Military Intelligence - ostensibly ran the two interrogation cell-blocks at Abu Ghraib, with authority from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commanding general of American ground forces in Iraq, to give orders to prison guards like Lynndie, who served in a reserve Military Police unit.
The CIA - or Central Intelligence Agency - also interrogated Lynndie’s prisoners, as did FBI officials and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID.
Whether or not it was a valid order, the spooks told the guards to put psychological pressure on the Iraqi prisoners. Taking photos helped do that, and became a standard part of psy-ops, or psychological operations.
According to Lynndie, the intelligence people looked at the photos and told the guards, "Oh, that’s a good tactic, keep it up. That’s working. This is working. Keep doing it. It’s getting what we need."
"It got information, some reliable," said Lynndie. "Some of it was about future attacks on coalition forces."
Secretary Rumsfeld had put enormous pressure on MI to get that information. According to intelligence sources that Sy Hersh quoted in the New Yorker, Rumsfeld turned to a super-secret Special Access Program, or SAP, which was in the business of killing or capturing al-Qaeda suspects all over the world, and where possible, interrogating them using Stress and Duress techniques banned by the Geneva Conventions. Now the covert operators would bring the same techniques to Abu Ghraib.
According to Hersh and several other un-embedded reporters, Rumsfeld’s protégé Dr. Cambone sent Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller from Guantanamo to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib, whereupon Miller insisted that the prison’s "detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation." This was what Pvt. Lynndie England helped to do.
Here the plot thickens. Many, if not most, of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were common criminals or ordinary Iraqis with no significant intelligence to offer. Why treat them the same way as the serious insurgents?
Once Lynndie and the others felt free to disregard normal constraints, they no doubt used the same techniques to amuse themselves and to punish prisoners for breaking rules. But Robert Baer, a longtime CIA case officer in the Middle East, suggests a more sweeping scenario as well.
"We call this a dirty recruitment," he told CBS’s Dan Rather. "You want to find information on them to blackmail them."
Lacking a large network of informers, Military Intelligence could blackmail hundreds, even thousands, of cab drivers, petty criminals, and all sorts of other Iraqis to be America’s eyes and ears.
Could MI use the photos of sexual humiliation to blackmail the prisoners into becoming informants, Rather asked.
Baer’s answer showed how he - and American Military Intelligence - understood Arab culture. Not only could a photo blackmail someone into becoming an American agent, it carried a continuing threat of death, as Baer explained it. Given local attitudes toward sex, shame, and family honor, the prisoner knew that if the Americans ever showed the photo, he might expect his tribe to kill him.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.