IV. American Gulag

 

Exposure of the American Degradation of Human Rights

On March 14th, 2006, Salon published an archive of some of the tortures that had taken place at the Abu Gharib prison; it included a timeline, photographs and videos. The human rights scandal now known as “Abu Ghraib” had begun its journey toward exposure on Jan. 13, 2004, when Spc. Joseph Darby handed over horrific images of detainee abuse to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The next day, the Army launched a criminal investigation. Three and a half months later, CBS News and the New Yorker published photographs and stories that introduced the world to the devastating scenes of torture and suffering, which occurred inside the run-down, deteriorated prison in Iraq. Although the world is now tragically too familiar with images of naked, hooded prisoners in scenes of horrifying humiliation and abuse, this is the first time that the full file of the Army’s own photographic evidence of the scandal has been made public. It is a shocking, night-by-night record of three months inside one of Abu Ghraib’s notorious cellblocks. The photographs tell the horrific story, in more graphic detail than ever before, of the vehemently violent abuse of the prisoners there.

The Administration’s Attempt to Disguise the Tortures

President Bush’s administration announced plans to shut the notorious prison and transfer detainees to other sites in Iraq. He would have liked the world to believe that issues of the tortures had been dealt with and that it was time to change the focus of our attention, to forego our thoughts about Abu Ghraib in order to proceed to the actual, ongoing combat actions in Iraq. However, questions about what took place there, and who was responsible, won’t end with the closing of Abu Ghraib. The Army’s formal investigative report is now available; it documents in detail what happened at the prison: the dates, times, places, cameras and, in some though not all cases, identities of the detainees and soldiers involved in the abuse. In the published Salon archive, detainees’ identities not previously known to the public were witheld, and their faces were obscured to protect the victims’ privacy. Some of the more noteworthy revelations reported by Joan Walsh in Salon included:

“Three years and at least six Pentagon investigations later, we now know that many share the blame for the outrages that took place at Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003. The abuse took place against the backdrop of rising chaos in Iraq. In those months the U.S. military faced a raging insurgency for which it hadn’t planned. As mortar attacks rained down on the overcrowded prison — at one point there were only 450 guards for 7,000 prisoners — its command structure broke down. At the same time, the pressure from the Pentagon and the White House for “actionable intelligence” was intense, and harsh interrogation techniques were approved to obtain it. Bush administration lawyers, including Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had already created a radical post-9/11 legal framework that disregarded the Geneva Conventions and other international laws governing the humane treatment of prisoners in the “war on terror.” Intelligence agencies such as the CIA were apparently given the green light to operate by their own set of secret rules.

While the Pentagon’s own probes have acknowledged that military commanders, civilian contractors, the CIA and government policymakers all bear some responsibility for the abuses, to date no high-level U.S. officials have been brought to justice in a court of law for what went on at Abu Ghraib. It’s critical to recognize that this set of images from Abu Ghraib is only one snapshot of systematic tactics the United States has used in four-plus years of the global war on terror. There have been many allegations of abuse, torture and other practices that violate international law, from holding prisoners without charging them at Guantánamo Bay and other secretive U.S. military bases and prison facilities around the world to the practice of “rendition,” or the transporting of detainees to foreign countries whose regimes use torture, to ongoing human rights violations inside detention facilities in Iraq.

Abu Ghraib in fall 2003 may have been its own particular hell, but the variations of individual abuse perpetrated appear to be exceptional in only one way: They were photographed and filmed. The purpose for documenting even a select few of the Abu Gharib images is that the actions at Abu Ghraib symbolize “the failure of a democratic society to investigate well-documented abuses by its soldiers.” Although the photos are a disturbing visual account of particular incidents inside Abu Ghraib prison, they should not be viewed as representing the sum total of what occurred. As the Schlesinger report states in its convoluted prose: “We do know that some of the egregious abuses at Abu Ghraib which were not photographed did occur during interrogation sessions and that abuses during interrogation sessions occurred elsewhere.”

Also, the documentation doesn’t include many details about the detainees who were abused and tortured at Abu Ghraib. While the International Committee of the Red Cross report from February 2004 cited military intelligence officers as estimating that “between 70 to 90 percent of persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake,” much remains unknown about the detainees abused in the “hard site” where the Army housed violent and dangerous detainees and where much of the abuse took place.”