Where are Charles Graner and Lynndie England now?

Charles Graner served six and a half years of his ten year sentence. He is now married to Megan Ambuhl, one of the soldiers he served with at Abu Ghraib, who was also found guilty of prisoner abuse. He served the longest sentence of all Abu Ghraib defendants.

Lynndie England served half of her three year sentence before returning home to Fort Ashby, West Virginia. She has had trouble finding a job and feels very uncomfortable in public, always afraid of being recognized. She has nightmares and is on antidepressants. In 2009 she told a reporter that she expected to be on medication for the rest of her life.

The Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Treating of Detainees in December 2008

In December 2008, Carl Levin and John McCain released the conclusions of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of detainees. The committee found that SERE tactics, originally conceived as tests to prepare United States troops for possible interrogation by enemies, were wrongfully used to interrogate detainees. However, the important part of the findings were that this wrongdoing was a direct consequence of policies put in place by senior government officials, approving an atmosphere of pushing the boundaries of what constituted torture. Levin said, “The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees.” The report pointed the finger directly at Rumsfeld and other members of the Bush administration, while simultaneously denying their claims that their use of harsher techniques had been effective in the War on Terror, saying instead the techniques “damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.” The committee emphasized that what happened at Abu Ghraib and other places of torture was not the result of a few twisted, rogue soldiers, but an overall policy backed by the highest-ranking officials in America.

Antonio Taguba & His Report

In May of 2004, Antonio Taguba, an army major general, presented a report on the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib. He said that there was significant abuse and sadism happening at Abu Ghraib, including sodomization and rape of detainees. Other abuses he listed were threatening with rape, threatening with loaded guns, beating with broom handles, and in one instance having a dog bite a detainee. Taguba believed that General Sanchez and other high-ranking officers knew all about what was happening at Abu Ghraib long before the story broke. Taguba thought that Miller’s approach at Abu Ghraib was not in line with Army doctrine, especially using military police to “soften up” detainees prior to interrogation. He thought this exploited people who had never received proper training of what was expected of them in this situation and were never given any clear orders once they found themselves in it. He concluded that very few of the detainees had done anything or been involved in anything deserving imprisonment. Most were not involved in the insurgency or terrorist groups. In short, Taguba’s report was incredibly damning and brought him a lot of hostility from Rumsfeld and other higher-ups he had previously been friends with.

How did the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal become known and what was the immediate result?

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib was uncovered by Joseph Darby, a member of the military police. He asked Charles Graner for any pictures he could have to take home, and Graner handed him two CDs. One of the CDs was full of the sight-seeing type picture Darby was looking for, but the other disc contained pictures of prisoners being tortured. He was horrified and turned the discs over to the Army Intelligence at Abu Ghraib, which sparked an internal investigation. Darby’s identity was kept a secret. After the investigation began, there were boxes set up to pick up “contraband” and the soldiers were told that if they put photos and other “paraphernalia” in the boxes all would be forgotten. Once the story with the photos broke in the mainstream media, outrage was widespread. Rumsfeld dropped Joseph Darby’s name when he was supposed to be kept anonymous. Seven low-level soldiers were charged.

The reaction of high-level officials to the scandal breaking was mostly to dismiss it as the work of a “few bad apples” instead of representative of America’s attitude towards the treatment of prisoners in the War on Terror in general. However, the tolerance toward harsh and cruel behavior started at the top and trickled down. Maybe what appeared on paper to slightly push the boundaries looked far worse in reality. Maybe the idea of approving several harsher techniques for interrogation did not take into account that using two or three of these techniques at once could be immensely more harmful. However, it seems doubtful that an administration that had a legal team writing memos that found a way to stretch the boundaries of what constituted torture wasn’t at fault for what happened in Abu Ghraib. The soldiers who were charged and sentenced were scapegoats for the very high-ranking public officials who made public statements decrying their behavior.

What Happened at Abu Ghraib?

Torture became the usual at Abu Ghraib. Military police who took part in the abuse say that they became numb to it “because you knew you’d see something worse tomorrow”. There was a feeling that their orders were coming from higher up and they were not in a position to question them. Many of the military police who abused prisoners seem haunted by their actions. They don’t seem like the kind of people who would torture and abuse other people, but they did. They were told that the prisoners they were handling were “American-killers” and “the scum of the earth” and that if they softened them up properly, the prisoners could yield information that would save American lives. In the fall of 2003, a prison riot at Abu Ghraib pushed the personnel there to the next level of cruelty. The situation deteriorated. However, whatever the reasoning was behind their behavior, it became commonplace to torture prisoners in ways that were incredibly harsh and in at least a couple instances, but probably many more, resulted in a prisoner’s death. Soldiers captured on digital cameras prisoners bound in stress positions, stripped naked, forced to simulate male-on-male oral sex, forced to masturbate, or piled on the floor. The soldiers felt like they could behave in this way, and as one of them said, “take their aggression out” in this way, because of the great permissiveness that had been a constant of the attitude toward prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Inside the interrogation rooms, the treatment of prisoners was even more extreme. During interrogations, prisoners were beaten severely. There is one definite instance of a detainee dying during torture--Manadel al-Jamadi--and ex-detainees speak of other deaths. The brutality was everyday but became worse following the riot.

Military Police Moved from Incarceration Staff and Placed Under Military Intelligence

In the fall of 2003, after Miller’s visit to Abu Ghraib, the military police were taken from Janis Karpinski’s command and placed under the control of military intelligence. This meant that they were now to take places in interrogations. Ken Davis, a member of the military police, remembers being told that he was to ensure that prisoners “have a bad night” before interrogations using any means he deemed necessary. Other military police personnel relate instances of making the detainees take showers with women present to create sexual degradation, or waking prisoners up often at specified times,  or creating environments that would ensure prisoners did not get any sleep.

Charles Graner was chosen to work the night shift because of his work experience in civilian prisons. He was one of two military police working the night shift on Tier 1 at the time. Ken Davis relates a story of finding out that Graner was losing his voice yelling at prisoners. At that time he also told Davis that he was having moral compunctions about what he was being ordered to do, but felt that he didn’t have a choice. His sense of unease with his orders but unwillingness to disobey them seemed to be characteristic of the military police in their new position.

Major General Geoffrey Miller, Donald Rumsfeld, Ricardo Sanchez & Interrogation Techniques

In 2003, Rumsfeld sent Geoffrey Miller out to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib. “General Miller had turned Guantanamo from a conventional military prison that would abide by the laws of war into a kind of ad hoc behavioral laboratory for the introduction and use of extreme techniques,” said Alfred McCoy. Miller’s techniques were much harsher and were completely oriented towards getting results without respect for tradition or how things had been done. Rumsfeld not only supported Miller’s techniques when he asked permission to use such things as extended stress positions, like standing, he thought that the stress positions should be allowed for longer periods of time. He was eager to get behind what Miller was doing, and he was eager to see what Miller could do in the same spirit in Iraq.

When Miller arrived at Abu Ghraib in August of 2003, Ricardo Sanchez issued a memo approving many harsh interrogation techniques, even though Abu Ghraib was officially under the Geneva Conventions. These new techniques were at odds with the treatment of prisoners under the Geneva Convention. Though Sanchez soon rescinded his memo, Miller made it clear from his arrival that he believed that if the detainees were not treated very poorly, they would not be amenable to interrogation and wouldn’t know who’s “in charge”. The nudity and shackling of the prisoners became an everyday occurrence according to some of the military personnel at Abu Ghraib. The prisoners themselves learned that the torture was connected to the interrogations.

There were so many changes to policy that many of the military guards and interrogators found it confusing. These military personnel found it perplexing and some found it upsetting what they began to see. Some of the techniques seen were prisoners put in degrading positions while naked and left chained or handcuffed there for extended periods of time, sometimes with underwear on their heads. There seemed to be a sense of things getting uglier, but some soldiers complained that when asking directly what was allowed and what wasn’t they would never get a straight answer.

The "Hard Site" and the Failure of "Intelligence" at Abu Ghraib

The hard site at Abu Ghraib consisted of two tiers: Tier 1A, where high security prisoners were kept, and Tier 1B, where women and children were kept. The women and children were primarily family members of prisoners or wanted people who American troops were using as bait to catch or persuade their relatives. A soldier estimated that in the hard site, six or seven guards would be guarding at least a thousand detainees. Those kinds of numbers kept the guards nervous about what would happen if the prisoners got too coordinated. The soldiers were told that the detainees they were guarding were the very worst people, people who had killed Americans. They were also told that any information they could get from them would save lives.

However, that information was not forthcoming. Soldiers estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the detainees they interviewed were not guilty of anything and had no valuable intelligence. “The interrogators I worked with at Abu Ghraib were all extremely frustrated by the lack of intelligence they were getting during interrogation and most of them attributed that to the fact that they had prisoners that didn’t have intelligence to give them,” said Tony Lagouranis, a member of military intelligence. “The interrogators I worked with spent all year in there and they were telling me that they had got nothing.” Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials were very irritated with the lack of intelligence coming out of Iraq and made plans to send in people to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib.

The Location, Atmosphere, and Situation at Abu Ghraib by September 2003

The military police who served at Abu Ghraib speak of ghosts and darkness and overwhelming sense of hostility. In addition to the squalor and very real death that hung in the air of Saddam Hussein’s most terrible prison, there seemed to be an existential darkness that settled over the troops. The heat was oppressive and the smell was haunting. “I will never forget the smell of Abu Ghraib,” said Israel Rivera, a member of military intelligence. “The smell of sweat and trash and feces and urine wafting through the air. It’s just--I will never forget the smell of Abu Ghraib.” Pictures of Saddam Hussein covered the walls and the troops referred to certain rooms as “death chambers”. The road to Abu Ghraib was deadly, laced with IEDs and targeted by snipers. Abu Ghraib itself was constantly shot at and shelled. It was an extremely vicious environment. The 372nd Military Police Company were told upon arrival that they were going to be prison guards at Abu Ghraib, though they had never received any kind of training for those positions. By the end of September, 2003, there were under 300 military police to guard over 6000 prisoners, according to Janis Karpinski.

American Techniques of War & Iraqi Civilians

During the summer of 2003, the US troops in Iraq did not uphold very high standards of wartime behavior, to say the least. There was little differentiation or even attempt at differentiation between innocent civilians and enemy soldiers. Male civilians were often herded up indiscriminately and imprisoned, their houses looted, and their wives and children terrified.

Soldiers arrived with little to no information on the culture they were entering and were encouraged to view all Iraqi people as the enemy. Ken Davis, a member of the military police, was told to shoot anyone who “looked like the enemy”. They had no direction for who to target, and often arrested mass quantities of people, imprisoning and interrogating the innocent along with the guilty. Many Iraqi civilians were treated as if they were enemy combatants, and were taken to Abu Ghraib, having committed no violence.

If the civilians were treated as enemy combatants, they were not even given the dignity that American troops have traditionally afforded to enemy prisoners of war. Degradation and intimidation were hallmarks of the methods of the American troops in Iraq, even when dealing with civilian women and children. The troops, probably motivated by fear and crippled by not having enough information, did not behave humanely.

The Justice Department & The UN Convention Against Torture

One of the standards the United States had agreed to abide by that determined how it would treat its prisoners was the UN Convention Against Torture. In the wake of the decision that the Geneva Conventions and those kinds of codes of conduct did not apply to the United States in the War on Terror, the Justice Department set about finding ways to dismantle the convention. John Yoo describes looking at the convention and finding that many crucial words were undefined. He then took them to the farthest stretches of the definition. He defined the "severe physical pain and suffering" forbidden by the document as pain that caused lasting physical or psychological handicaps, such as "organ failure". By using the absence of formal definitions in the document as grounds to define torture so drastically, he and his team made anything short of that legal and permissible.

Albert Mora and other opponents of Yoo's work point out that under their definition, much of what Saddam Hussein had done to his prisoners would not qualify as torture. Many who read the memos were horrified and could not believe that this kind of reasoning had ever seen the light of day, much less become United States official policy. It was very extreme and absolutely turned all existing policy on its head.

The Geneva Conventions & The War on Terror

The United States helped write the Geneva Conventions after World War II, preventing torture, humiliation, and degradation of prisoners in the wake of some of the horrors seen in that struggle. The Geneva Conventions are a set of international laws that protect human dignity in war time. They are a standard of behavior for combatants, and they are quite thorough in their provisions. The United States had signed them and agreed to them in 1949, and had primarily upheld them ever since. It is crucial that the United States continue to uphold them, because they also help ensure that American troops will be treated according to that same standard when captured. Prior to the Geneva Conventions, the United States troops had adhered to similar or even higher standards. Many people see this kind of protection of human dignity as an essential American value.

The Geneva Conventions became an issue when the War in Afghanistan started. When the US started acquiring captives, they wanted to know how to categorize them. John Yoo's position on the issue was that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to the people captured in this war, because Al Qaeda had not signed the Geneva Conventions or upheld any standards of humane warfare. Early in 2002, Bush decided that he agreed with Yoo and the Justice Department, and Yoo and other lawyers set about to create a legal loophole by which the Conventions could be ignored. They made the decision to treat the detainees and prisoners not as prisoners of war who were protected by the Conventions, but as unlawful combatants, who did not have any rights. The importance of intelligence in this new kind of covert war overrode longstanding codes of conduct so that the United States would be able to use inhumane methods to extract information from prisoners.

The Context of the Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Scandal

In the summer of 2003, American troops in Iraq were dealing with a mounting insurgency. The insurgents used types of guerrilla warfare reminiscent of the Vietnam War. Snipers and car bombs took out US forces. It was very dangerous for the US troops in Iraq, but many of the officials at the top remained in denial about the state of things.

However, in August the bombings on the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad finally pushed leaders to recognize how bad the situation had become. It was now clear that America wasn't going to be able to pull out of Iraq anytime soon. One of the people who had remained in denial about the insurgency was Donald Rumsfeld. He traveled to Iraq that summer to see the state of things for himself. He put pressure on General Sanchez to get results, and in return Sanchez put pressure on his commanders. Arrests became undiscriminating, sweeping up whole groups of Iraqis for capture and questioning, and the interrogators were supposed to be sending in information to meet certain quotas.

US troops took over Saddam Hussein's prison Abu Ghraib and used it to hold the captured Iraqis for questioning. The intelligence the soldiers were getting from their interrogations was not of the caliber that Rumsfeld wanted. Rumsfeld visited Abu Ghraib himself and decided that they needed harsher interrogation techniques to get useful information out of the inmates. The techniques he approved were incredibly savage, including stripping prisoners, conducting 20-hour interrogations, exploiting prisoner's personal fears, and depriving prisoners of their senses.

In the fall of 2003, General Sanchez approved these highly questionable techniques and Abu Ghraib followed in Guantanamo's footsteps of cruel treatment of prisoners. The pressure that the troops were under with the growing insurgency and the increasing pressure from higher-ups to obtain important intelligence had pushed them to use terrible methods and abandon long-held American values respecting human dignity, even that of enemy soldiers.