n 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.
Quite apart from anything else, that mix of prisoners pretty much guarantees an ongoing disaster. Leaving aside the "high-value" leaders, there are reasons why we don't put together that sort of mix in our own prisons. It would be terribly volatile, even if the prisoners had been being well treated ... which, clearly, they were not.
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.” [...] 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.’”
That contractors could give orders to military personnel is the puzzling thing. Normally, civilian contractors are absolutely barred from that sort of thing. The only way that it makes sense that civilian contractors were allowed to do this is if the situation was being deliberately structured to insulate the military from certain charges. The soldiers carrying out the orders -- and it is truly astonishing that they don't even once seem to have refused the orders as illegal -- would be ultimately cashiered once the abuse was discovered, of course. However, the military can do nothing to the contractors directing the abuse; they're not subject to the military code. The government can do something to them, of course; the government can arrest and prosecute them for war crimes and Geneva code violations, all of which are pretty much apparent on their face. However, since the soldiers were the ones carrying out the orders, the government is really quite likely to simply let the civilian contractors slide, if possible. After all, they won't want it to be generally revealed in open court the extent to which they allowed the military to be compromised in the government's search for information.
It does seem that it's a bit late for that, however. One of the soldiers is reportedly demanding a full board of inquiry, at which his attorney plans to "drag every involved intelligence officer and civilian contractor [he] can find into court." That the administration was so willing to compromise the military, on top of sending it into battle underequipped and making it preserve the peace while severely undermanned, will do it no favors in the public eye.
Posted by iain at May 03, 2004 12:05 PM
