The Scandal's Growing Stain

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Guarding the thousands of detainees sent to Abu Ghraib by coalition forces across Iraq was a nasty billet for the 800th Military Police Brigade, which includes the reserve 372nd Military Police Company, and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which also operated there. A senior military official who lived at Abu Ghraib says soldiers were underequipped and undermanned. The reservists in particular had virtually no training for their prison-guard jobs. Discipline flagged. In November and December, around the time most of the abuse photos were taken, Abu Ghraib was under constant attack from nightly mortar raids. Basic sanitation for the troops consisted of overflowing portable toilets, and soldiers jerry-rigged showers from pumps they bought themselves. Six months after reopening as a prison, Abu Ghraib still had no single declared commander. All the while, detainees kept flooding in, at the rate of 250 a day. When the abuses occurred, there were some 6,000 prisoners. The MPs had no good system for keeping prison rolls: criminals, insurgents and innocents were all lumped together. Escapees and some detainees believed to be of high intelligence value went unrecorded.

In September 2003, Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the secret U.S. detention center for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Iraq to straighten out the prison. He recommended that the MPs should act not just as guards but as "enablers for interrogation." In November, a second visiting general advised the exact opposite, saying MPs should have nothing to do with interrogation. The conflict had apparently not been resolved by the prison's top brass when the photographed abuses occurred.

Between October and December of last year, the poorly trained, demoralized reservists in the 372nd crossed the line. William Lawson, uncle of Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, claims that his nephew and the other guards were following orders when they tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. The MPs told investigators they did it because officers in the military-intelligence unit and civilian contractors working with them told them to "loosen up" men for interrogation. Sabrina Harman, who appears in one photograph grinning behind a pile of naked detainees, told the Washington Post that the MPs were instructed by military-intelligence officers to "make it hell" on the prisoners in order to make them talk. Now facing possible court-martial, Harman is allegedly the one who attached wires to a hooded man's hands and forced him to stand on a box, threatening him with electrocution if he fell off.

If the soldiers were following orders, why did they photograph themselves in the act? The MPs claim the pictures too were meant to serve as a psychological tool to scare new prisoners into talking. Frederick's uncle says the platoon had tried to soften them up with techniques like sleep deprivation, "but they found the best way was with these photographs, and it apparently worked very effectively." Lawson says his nephew complained about some of the measures and was told, "Don't worry about it." Yet the photos, showing MPs smiling and mugging as they degrade their prisoners, suggest that the accused were hardly acting against their will.

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