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.