Seymour Hersh: Torture at Abu Ghraib

This is the man under the hood...
Warning: Some viewers may find this content distressing pic.twitter.com/7RBE654DXP

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) March 28, 2018

I am on vacation this week but thought it would be useful to republish a painful story I did two decades ago for the New Yorker about a group of US army soldiers who went out of control amid a war in Iraq that, so they were told, was being waged against the terrorism that struck America on 9/11. What the GIs did then are what any army does in war when hating and fearing the enemy is encouraged and runs through the ranks, from the lowest level grunts to the senior generals. It takes a special leader, as you will read about below, who confounds his superiors by not covering up the crimes of his soldiers and their most senior officers, and does so knowing that his career is over. Would that there were such fearless leaders in the Middle East today.

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women--no accurate count is possible--were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding pits.

[...]
A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army's prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski's brigade headquarters.) Taguba's report listed some of the wrongdoing ...

Artivle 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade