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.