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. Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the th 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 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. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. 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. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community.
The nd was attached to the th M. 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.
Six suspects—Staff Sergeant Ivan L. 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. 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. Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood.
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. 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 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. This is of particular importance as CACI has largely evaded accountability for their direct role in the torture of Abu Ghraib prisoners. This case hopefully will narrow that accountability gap. Within two years of operating in Iraq , they were involved as defendants in lawsuits accusing them of ordering and overseeing torture. Despite this fact, and prior to concluding investigations on the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, the US government offered CACI an extension of their contract in the amount of 23 million dollars — accountability for torture, after all, is limited, conditional, and sometimes rewarded for making bolder, the discourse and infrastructure that sustains abuse in the war on terror.
Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick, the two military police members who were convicted of charges related to the abuse of Abu Ghraib prisoners specifically named CACI contractors Daniel Johnson and Steven Stefanowicz as ordering various types of abuse of prisoners.
Though their obvious interest is in absolving themselves of responsibility, their narrative has become all too familiar in the course of the war on terror and in the treatment of Muslim prisoners. Torture is allowed to thrive not only because it is directed at Muslims, but because it must rise to the most egregious levels of abuse to be considered as such.
This case paves a promising path for addressing and challenging torture of Muslim prisoners in the war on terror. However, what we must continue to remember is that torture has and continues to be sanctioned by the US government. A positive ruling in subsequent hearings will not change this fact. A military spokesman at Bagram told the New York Times that the death of the other detainee, year-old Habibullah, was ruled a homicide by a military pathologist, the cause being "pulmonary embolism [blood clot in the lungs] due to blunt force injury to the legs.
Military officials in the Army Criminal Investigative Division told Human Rights Watch in late and early that investigations into the two homicides were "ongoing. In March of this year, Human Rights Watch again called on the United States to release the results of its investigations into the three deaths. These requests have been ignored. The deaths of two other detainees in Afghanistan are under investigation. On June 21, , Abdul Wali, held at Asadabad died under suspicious circumstances; according to the Associated Press, his death is under investigation by the C.
On November 6, , detainee Abdul Wahid died while in U. His death is attributed to multiple blunt force injuries that were complicated by a muscle condition. According to military death certificates released by the Pentagon, his death was ruled a "medical homicide," which means that the person died in connection with the actions or influence of another person. It does not necessarily mean a crime occurred. A fifth incident, in which an Afghan detainee died due to hypothermia after he was doused with cold water and left shackled in an unheated cell overnight, has emerged in the press.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission AIHRC -an autonomous institution within the Afghan government-has collected complaints alleging torture and mistreatment made by recently released detainees and families of persons still detained. The commission repeatedly raised concerns about abuses with U.
The violations of detainees' rights are exacerbated by the almost complete opacity maintained by U. The United States refuses to allow access to detainees' families, lawyers, or advocates, or to journalists or representatives of nongovernmental organizations other than the ICRC. Human Rights Watch has also made formal requests to visit U. Almost nothing is known about U.
Simply put, the United States operates its detention facilities in Afghanistan in a climate of almost total impunity. As noted, the Department of Defense has not even released the results of its investigations into the deaths of Afghan detainees at Bagram and Asadabad and has yet to explain adequately the circumstances of these deaths. Nor have U. The military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at the Bagram detention center where at least two prisoners' deaths were ruled homicides was later placed in charge of questioning at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Carolyn A. Wood, who served at Bagram from July to December , brought to Iraq interrogation procedures developed during service in Afghanistan, according to Congressional testimony. Wood who wrote the interrogation rules posted on the wall at Abu Ghraib. One member of the th Military Police Company told the New York Times that the fact that prisoners in Afghanistan had been labeled as "enemy combatants" not subject to the Geneva Conventions had contributed to the abuse.
A lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important. Military but not necessarily CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan are the subject of a "top-to-bottom" review by Brigadier General Charles Jacoby, the deputy operational commander of Bagram airbase.
Jacoby's mandate is to ensure that procedures at all coalition detention facilities in Afghanistan "are in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions," according to the official CENTCOM press release announcing his assignment on May Jacoby's report would be made public, but that findings regarding specific techniques and incarceration practices would be kept classified.
The United States, as an Occupying Power in Iraq under the Geneva Conventions, may deprive civilians in Iraq of their liberty in only two situations: for "imperative reasons of security," or for prosecution.
Until very recently, the U. What is clear is that abusive treatment used after September 11 on suspects in the "war on terror" came to be considered permissible as well in an armed conflict to suppress resistance to a military occupation. Procedures used in Afghanistan and Guantnamo were imported to Iraq, including the use of "stress and duress" tactics and the use of prison guards to set the conditions for the interrogation of detainees.
In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, information has come to light which suggests that harsh and coercive interrogation techniques such as subjecting detainees to painful stress positions and extended sleep deprivation have been routinely used in detention centers throughout Iraq. In its February report, the ICRC found that "methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information" emphasis added.
The methods cited by the ICRC included:. The classified investigative military report of Maj. Antonio Taguba confirmed these findings. Taguba reported that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" were inflicted on several detainees.
His catalogue was even longer than the ICRC's:. There is additional evidence that interrogation methods in violation of international human rights and humanitarian law were commonplace in Iraq.
According to a transcript obtained by the New York Times , Col. General Antonio Taguba that intelligence officers sometimes instructed military police to strip detainees naked and to shackle them in preparation for interrogation when there was a "good reason" to do so. Jerry Phillabaum, the former top military police commander in Abu Ghraib, said in a written statement that military interrogators routinely used sleep deprivation and other forms of psychological intimidation to elicit information from prisoners.
A summary of the U. Army's 82nd Airborne Division's investigation provided to Reuters conceded that the detainees were "purposefully and carefully put under stress, to include sleep deprivation, in order to facilitate interrogation.
From the earliest days of the U. Yet soldiers accused of abuse have until after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke escaped judicial punishment. To date, no one has been criminally charged in any of the cases. In one case dating from the first days of the occupation, three Army reserve MPs allegedly beat prisoners and encouraged others to do so at CampBucca in the southern city of Um Qasr on May 12, The commanding officer at CampBucca was Lt. Jerry Phillabaum, later implicated in the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Charges were brought against the military police but were ended with only their demotion and discharge. In his report, Maj. Captured in October , the former chief of Iraqi air defenses, Maj. The Pentagon first released a death certificate reporting that Mowhoush had died "of natural causes" -- a news release added that "he did not feel well and subsequently lost consciousness.
Reportedly, Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer and another officer slid a sleeping bag over Mowhoush's head and rolled him over and over while asking questions. Welshofer is accused of sitting on Mowhoush's chest and placing his hands over his mouth.
According to the investigative summary, "approximately 24 to 48 hours prior to Mowhoush's death , Mowhoush was questioned by 'other governmental agency officials,' [i. The original death certificate stated that he died of "natural causes during his sleep. Spiegel TV, a German news organization, interviewed another detainee held with 'Abd al-Jalil who stated that during interrogation, American soldiers "would kick him ['Abd al-Jalil] a lot, cuff his hands and place them behind his neck.
And they would also cuff his feet, then one of them would hold his feet up while the other pulled down his head. They tossed him on his back and stepped on him. They danced on his belly and poured cold water all over him. When he was untied, he attacked his interrogators and later tried to escape. When recaptured, his hands were tied to the top of his cell door and his mouth gagged. After these revelations, the Pentagon released another certificate calling 'Abd al-Jalil's death a homicide from "blunt force injuries and asphyxia.
Another Marine is charged with kicking Hatab in the chest in the hours before his death - several of his ribs were broken. The Marines believed Hatab had taken part in the ambush of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's unit and reportedly were instituting some form of vigilante justice. Eight Marines were initially charged with various offenses related to Hatab's death; six later had the charges dropped or reduced to administrative punishment.
The two men to be tried are Maj. Gary Pittman, who was a guard there. They will be tried at CampPendleton in August and September , respectively. Prior to the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos, the U. In May , the ICRC sent a memorandum based on over allegations of ill-treatment of prisoners of war during capture and interrogation at collecting points, battle group stations and temporary holding areas.
Cambone, sent Maj. Geoffrey D. Miller, who oversaw the interrogation efforts at the U. Taguba, "review current Iraqi Theater ability to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence. As Taguba highlighted in his report, Miller recommended that "the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees. On October 12, Sanchez implemented Miller's proposals, issuing a classified memorandum calling for interrogators at Abu Ghraib to work with military police guards to"manipulate an internee's emotions and weaknesses" and to assume control over the"lighting, heating.
In addition, between three and five interrogation teams were sent in October from Guantnamo to the American command in Iraq ' "for use in the interrogation effort"' at Abu Ghraib. Wood, who oversaw interrogations at the Bagram detention center in Afghanistan where two prisoners died, apparently prepared the document titled "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" that was posted at Abu Ghraib.
According to the document, certain interrogation methods could be undertaken, but only if the "CG's" Sanchez's approval was sought and obtained in writing. Depending on their actual application, these methods would violate the Geneva Conventions prohibitions against abusive and coercive treatment of detainees.
They included:. Even though his title appears on the document, which also carried the logo of Combined Joint Task Force-7, the U. Keith B. Alexander, the head of the Army intelligence, however, said that they were the approved policy for interrogations of detainees in Iraq. What is clear is that U. The brazenness with which the soldiers at the center of the scandal conducted themselves, snapping photographs and flashing the "thumbs-up" sign as they abused prisoners, suggests they felt they had nothing to hide from their superiors.
The abuse was so widely known and accepted that a picture of naked detainees forced into a human pyramid was reportedly used as a screen saver on a computer in the interrogation room.
Taguba, "interrogators actively requested that MP guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses. Taguba cited the testimony of several military police: "One said the orders were 'Loosen this guy up for us.
Make sure he has a bad night. Make sure he gets the treatment. Example being statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast. General Sanchez announced on May 14, , that he had barred the use of coercive interrogation techniques including "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," and the use of hoods, that had previously been available, though it is still not clear what he had previously approved.
Leila Hull, associate with the Middle East and North Africa division, prepared the report for publication. Andrea Holley, publications director for Human Rights Watch, and Fitzroy Hepkins, mail manager, made possible the production of this report. Bush 9th Circuit, Dec. The United States asserts the power "to do with [them] as it will, when it pleases, without any compliance with any rule of law of any kind, without permitting [them] to consult counsel, and without acknowledging any judicial forum in which its actions may be challenged.
Indeed, at oral argument, the government advised us that its position would be the same even if the claims were that it was engaging in acts of torture or that it was summarily executing the detainees. To our knowledge, prior to the current detention of prisoners at Guantnamo, the U. Section , which punishes the commission of a war crime, including torture and humiliating or degrading treatment, by or against a U.
Gonzales to the President, January 25, Powell to Counsel to the President, January 26, Prisoners at U. Rumsfeld dismissed the criticism as "isolated pockets of international hyperventilation. See Human Rights Watch, "U. Senior government officials had earlier told Human Rights Watch of the approval of a "point matrix.
Senate Armed Services Committee, May 13, Officers who have recourse to force must use no more than is strictly necessary. Marc Warren, stated at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on May 19, , that members of the th Military Intelligence Battalion from Fort Bragg, NC, including Carolyn Wood, "had served as interrogators in Afghanistan, where the American military runs detention centers at Bagram Air Base and at a site in Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan," and that the th was one of the several units that brought to Iraq "their own policies that had been used in other theaters.
General: Details in probe of Afghan jails to stay secret," June 1, General Antonio Taguba noted in his report, recent intelligence collection in support of Operation Enduring Freedom [the war in Afghanistan] posited a template whereby military police actively set favorable conditions for subsequent interviews.
Investigative report, on alleged abuses at U. Antonio M. Ricks, "Iraq prison supervisors face army reprimand," Washington Post , May 4, Uniform Code of Military Justice, military personnel may be subject to so-called non-judicial punishment via an article 15 administrative hearing or to prosecution by court martial. Article 15 punishments include up to one-year imprisonment, fines, loss of rank, and discharge from the military.
See also, Alberto R. The United States recognizes that these treaties are binding in the war for the liberation of Iraq. There has never been any suggestion by our government that the conventions do not apply in that conflict.
Pappas also stated that the recommendation was approved by Lt. Ricardo S.
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