ABU GHRAIB PRISON, a large prison facility in Abū Ghurayb, Baghdad governorate, Iraq. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States military took over the prison, and members of the army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed numerous human-rights violations against detainees that included physical, sexual, and psychological torture and abuse.
Abu Ghraib first became notorious during the presidency of Saddam Hussein (1979–2003), holding over fifty thousand prisoners in horrific conditions, many of whom were subjected to torture and died in mass executions.
During the occupation of Iraq by the American-led coalition, the US military repurposed Abu Ghraib into a detention center for criminals as well as those suspected of participating in the burgeoning insurgency against the invaders. At its height in 2004 the prison housed as many as eight thousand detainees. It was run by the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade from Uniondale, New York, commanded by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski. Though Karpinski had no previous experience running a prison, she was placed in charge of all US-controlled detention centers in Iraq. Importantly, over half of the interrogators working at Abu Ghraib were privately contracted by the US military through CACI International Inc., a multinational corporation and one of the largest defense, homeland-security, and intelligence contractors to the US federal government. Subsequent investigations into the conduct of detention operations at Abu Ghraib revealed that the reliance on privately contracted military personnel greatly contributed to the systemic problems at the prison.
The first reports that something was seriously awry at Abu Ghraib came to light via a series of press releases by Amnesty International in the summer of 2003 that cited the inhumane conditions in which prisoners were being kept and the abuse, frequently amounting to torture that they were subjected to, such as provision with inadequate clothing; being forced to use open trenches for toilets; exposure to extreme heat, bright lights, and blaring music; sleep deprivation; and restraint in stress positions. In April 2004 CBS News aired a 60 Minutes II segment that included pictures of military personnel taunting naked prisoners. A few days later the New Yorker published a damning investigation by Seymour M. Hersh accompanied by photos of a prisoner (Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh) standing on a box with a bag over his head and of interrogators Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner smiling as they posed with a human pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees. Despite the evidence, Karpinski maintained that Iraqi prisoners were being treated “humanely and fairly.”
In response to the cascading revelations Major General Antonio Taguba was appointed to conduct an investigation into the 800th MP Brigade’s detention and internment operations at Abu Ghraib. The Taguba Report, published in May 2004, reviewed interviews with witnesses, potential suspects, and detainees carried out by the army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID), as well as numerous photos and videos depicting the torture of detainees by military police on multiple occasions between October and December 2003. During the CID interviews, members of the brigade had confessed to their personal involvement and that of their fellow soldiers in the maltreatment. The report found clear evidence of “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses . . .inflicted on several detainees,” including but not limited to:
punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing naked male detainees to wear women’s underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; writing ‘I am a Rapest’ (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee’s neck and having a female Soldier pose for a picture; a male MP guard raping a female detainee; using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees; breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; threatening detainees with a charged 9mm pistol; 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; using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
Testimony from prisoners and witnesses at Abu Ghraib consistently identifies rape, sexual assault, and sexual humiliation as pervasive forms of abuse inflicted upon detainees. An article in the Washington Post quoted a prisoner who recalled hearing the screams of a teenage Iraqi boy and then seeing an Army translator raping him while a female soldier took photographs. Hundreds of photos document interrogators sexually assaulting and raping prisoners with objects including truncheons, wires, and phosphorescent tubes. Female prisoners were often raped by American soldiers, and unconfirmed reports say those who became pregnant were later killed by their families.
In many of the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib, women are the perpetrators of sexual violence. Artist Coco Fusco’s A Field Guide for Female Interrogators is a critical look at the role of women in the US military disguised as a CIA manual. Fusco claims the media’s framing of the female perpetrators at Abu Ghraib as victims in their own right was key to diverting the public’s attention away from the actual abuse taking place. Fusco writes her critique of the weaponization of women in the military in the form of a letter to Virginia Woolf, who, in Three Guineas, argues that women could prevent war. Fusco is dubious:
The more access American women have to the exercise of political power and the use of deadly force in war, the more apparent it becomes that we aren’t using it very differently from men. Furthermore, our status as minorities in public office and as relative newcomers in government and military duty, and the persistence of prejudice and sexual harassment to which we are subject, don’t seem to deter us from advocating and partaking in violence against the enemy. Two thirds of the women in the US Congress voted in favor of invading Iraq. Our first black female secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, lied about WMDs [weapons of mass destruction] and allowed a legal loophole to protect Blackwater employees to escape recrimination for killing Iraqi civilians. The female Assistant Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon’s spokesperson, Victoria Clark, created the notion of embedded media. The sole Congresswoman on the Judiciary Committee, Diane Feinstein, voted in favor of appointing an attorney general who wasn’t sure if waterboarding is torture, while two others who were secretly informed of is use by the CIA five years ago raised no objections.
High-ranking female intelligence officers in Iraq and Afghanistan authorized the use of coercive interrogation strategies—in other words, torture. Female interrogators sporting lipstick and sexy lingerie have figured prominently in both detainee and eyewitness accounts of sexualized excesses in interrogations. The now infamous prison abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib depicted in widely circulated photographs feature women whose sexualized humiliation of prisoners has come to symbolize the utter breakdown of any pretense the US may have once had to being a guardian of democratic values. Military intelligence and military policing—the two divisions of the armed forces that have come under the closest scrutiny in the wake of allegations of abuse— have a relatively high rate of female involvement, since they are classified as non-combat duties. I know of only one woman from military intelligence who has made her misgivings about sexually humiliating prisoners public, and she was not an interrogator or a military policewoman whose training and routine contact with prisoners might inure her to actions that human rights experts would identify as egregious.
I don’t think that the higher percentage of women contributed in a direct way to the abuse, but I do think that their presence has affected how scenarios have been enacted, starting with the selection of what images from Abu Ghraib were made public. Most of the pictures from Abu Ghraib have been kept from public view for fear of even stronger negative reactions at home and abroad; among them are scenes in which male soldiers are raping prisoners. On the other hand, the most infamous of those we have seen show women directing their looks at the camera. I keep asking myself if there might be some correlation between the relative lack of public outcry against the Bush administration’s attempts to rationalize the use of torture and the prevailing images of its perpetrators as young and naive white women. Also known as “torture chicks,” those women look much less intimidating than the oversized Special Force commandos in black ninja suits and masks who preside over interrogations in those notorious so-called black holes and secret prisons that are managed by the CIA.
In multiple instances the abuse at Abu Ghraib culminated in murder. A particularly egregious example was the death of Manadel al-Jamadi, a suspect in a bomb attack on a Baghdad Red Cross facility that killed twelve people (though there was no evidence linking him to the attack), who died in November 2003 after being interrogated and tortured by CIA officer Mark Swanner and “Clint C.,” a private contractor. Numerous photos showed US Army specialists posing next to the corpse, which had been packed in ice; some even made a “thumbs-up” gesture. Though a military autopsy declared al-Jamadi’s death a homicide and Attorney General Eric Holder opened a full criminal investigation in 2011, no charges were ever brought against the perpetrators.
The extent to which the administration of George W. Bush was aware of what was going on at Abu Ghraib was brought to light in a New Yorker investigation, revealing that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved the use of “unconventional” interrogation methods in the Global War on Terrorism. Documents obtained by the Washington Post and the ACLU, moreover, showed that Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US military officer in Iraq, had authorized the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, and sleep and sensory deprivation. In November 2004 Brigadier General Richard Formica concluded that the 800th MP Brigade had been following orders based on a memorandum issued by Sanchez, proving that the human-rights violations carried out at Abu Ghraib were not the result of isolated criminals but were systematically implemented with the full knowledge of US officials.
Both Rumsfeld and Sanchez had been effectively given the green light to sign off on the rampant abuse of detainees by the Bush-administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who in three key documents argued that international humanitarian laws obligating humane treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to detainees in places such as Abu Ghraib, who were rebaptized as “unlawful enemy combatants” and thereby deprived of any rights. Yoo and Bybee employed similar legal sleight of hand in rebranding torture by American interrogators in the War on Terror as the employment of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which skirted the line of legality without crossing it. Collectively these three documents would come to be known as the “Torture Memos.”
The total number of deaths resulting from detainee maltreatment at Abu Ghraib was never disclosed by the US government. Using reports available in the public domain, a 2006 study concluded that sixty-three detainees had died at Abu Ghraib from all causes. Of these, twenty-seven were due to natural causes and homicide, while thirty-six died in insurgent mortar attacks (Abu Ghraib was located in an active combat zone, which violated the Geneva Convention clause stating that detainees are to be kept in facilities not vulnerable to artillery attack). Only twelve US soldiers were convicted of charges relating to the human-rights abuses at Abu Ghraib: Colonel Thomas Pappas, Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, Specialist Charles Garner, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, Sergeant Javal Davis, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, Specialist Sabrina Harman, Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Private First Class Lynndie England, Sergeant Santos Cardona, Specialist Roman Krol, and Sergeant Michael Smith.
Torture Central: E-mails From Abu Ghraib, Michael Keller’s 2007 memoir of his tour of duty as a guard at the prison from 2005 to 2006, documents how the torture continued there even after the extent of the abuse had come to light.
In 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of some two thousand images further documenting the torture at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities in Iraq. Despite two court rulings in the ACLU’s favor, delaying tactics by Congress and presidential administrations have so far prevented the declassification of all but two hundred of them on the grounds that the disclosure of the photographs would jeopardize national security. These two hundred photographs were released in 2016, over a decade after the abuses took place.