U.S. Torture At Abu Ghraib Prison Revisited In Lawsuit 15 Years Later
The case of American torture of detainees at an Iraqi prison two decades ago, one of the darkest scandals in American history, refuses to die.
This week, a judge declared a mistrial 15 years after a lawsuit related to the torture was filed. A jury deadlocked in the trial of a military contractor accused of contributing to the abuse of detainees, referred to euphemistically by the U.S. government as “enhanced interrogation,” at the infamous, Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. The revelations, including “waterboarding” were uncovered by various media and reverberated with criticism from around the world.
The topic is timely as trump has frequently voiced support for waterboarding as an effective means of interrogation, despite findings by experts that the practice does not work in coercing captives.
Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the sensation of drowning. In the most common method of waterboarding, the captive’s face is covered with cloth or some other thin material and immobilized on their back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees.
Torturers pour water onto the face over the breathing passages, causing an almost immediate gag reflex and creating a drowning sensation for the captive. Normally, water is poured intermittently to prevent death; however, if the water is poured uninterruptedly it will lead to death by asphyxia. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, and lasting psychological damage. Adverse physical effects can last for months, and psychological effects for years. Historically, waterboarding has been viewed as an especially severe form of torture.
Abu Ghraib was taken over by the U.S. in 2003 after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In 2014, Abu Ghraib prison was closed indefinitely by the Iraqi government over concerns that ISIL would take over the facility.
Abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib uncovered by media reports in 2004 included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture and rape, in addition to the killing of one and the desecration of his body.
Torture included sleep deprivation, hooding prisoners, playing loud music, removing all detainees’ clothing, forcing them to stand in so-called “stress positions,” the use of dogs, waterboarding, sexual assault, urinating on detainees, pounding wounded limbs with metal batons, pouring phosphoric acid on detainees, and tying ropes to the detainees’ legs or penises and dragging them across the floor. Other torture techniques included prolonged isolation; the so-called, “frequent flyer program,” where prisoners were moved from cell to cell every few hours so they could not sleep for days, weeks, or even months; short shackling in painful positions; nudity; extreme use of heat and cold; the use of loud music and noise; and preying on phobias.
The Abu Ghraib prison was one of the most notorious prisons in Iraq during the government of Saddam Hussein. The prison was used to hold around 50,000 men and women in poor conditions, and torture and execution were frequent. After the invasion, the U.S. turned it into a military prison and was one of the largest of several detention centers in Iraq used by the U.S. military. At its peak, the prison held an estimated 8,000 detainees.
The administration of President George W. Bush initially said the incidents of torture at Abu Ghraib were isolated and did not represent U.S. policy. Humanitarian groups disputed the claim and said the abuses were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.
A report disclosed that in 2004 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had authorized the interrogation tactics used in Abu Ghraib, and which had previously been used by the U.S. in Afghanistan. That year, Bush and Rumsfeld apologized for the Abu Ghraib abuses. Rumsfeld had twice offered to resign from his post but Bush declined both offers.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s office also played a central role in eliminating limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the administration later portrayed as the initiatives of lower-ranking officials.
The Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense detention operations absolved U.S. military and political leadership from culpability.
“The Panel finds no evidence that organizations above the 800th MP brigade or the 205th MI Brigade-level were directly involved in the incidents at Abu Ghraib,” the report concluded.
Several military spokesman, elected officials and right wing media said the abuse was necessary to force prisoners to give up information about other terrorists.
“I’m probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment … [They] are not there for traffic violations. … these prisoners — they’re murderers, they’re terrorists, they’re insurgents. … Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we’re so concerned about the treatment of those individuals,” said then Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.
General Stanley McChrystal, who held several command positions in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said the torture likely had the opposite effects.
“In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him into action,” said McChrystal, whose was in command of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from 2003 to 2008 during which his organization was credited with the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
On May 7, 2004, Nick Berg, an American businessman who went to Iraq after the U.S. invasion, was captured and decapitated on video by the Islamist militant organization al-Ansars in response to Abu Ghraib.
The only criminal charges were lodged by the Department of Defense against 17 soldiers and officers. Eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, the soldiers were court-martialed, convicted, sentenced to military prison, and dishonorably discharged from service.
Two soldiers, found to have perpetrated many of the worst offenses at the prison, Specialist Charles Graner and PFC Lynndie England, were subject to more severe charges and received harsher sentences.
Graner was convicted of assault, battery, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and loss of rank, pay and benefits.
England was convicted of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and committing an indecent act and sentenced to three years in prison.
During his trial, Graner claimed that he was following orders from, and supervised by, intelligence officers.
On August 6, 2011, Graner was released from the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., after serving 6+1⁄2 years of his ten-year sentence. On August 6, 2011, Graner was released from the federal prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., after serving 6+1⁄2 years of his ten-year sentence.
Graner served in the military from 2001 to 2005. In November 2003, Graner was awarded a commendation from the Army for serving as an MP in Iraq. Graner held the rank of specialist in the company during his tour of duty in Iraq.
Prior to his military service, in 1994, he began working as a corrections officer at Fayette County Prison where he was accused of putting mace in a new guard’s coffee as a joke, causing him to be sick.
In May 1996, he moved to the State Correctional Institution, Greene, Pa. Most of the prisoners were black and most guards were white. Guards at the prison were accused of beating and sexually assaulting prisoners and conducting cavity searches in view of other prisoners. There were also reports of racism, including reports of guards writing “KKK” in the blood of a beaten prisoner.
In 1998, a prisoner accused Graner and three other guards of planting a razor blade in his food, causing his mouth to bleed when he ate it. Graner and four other guards were accused of beating another prisoner who had deliberately flooded his cell, taunting anti-capital punishment protesters, using racial epithets and telling a Muslim inmate he had rubbed pork all over his tray of food.
In May 1997, Graner’s wife and mother of their two children filed for divorce and sought a protection order, saying Graner had threatened to kill her.
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer of all detention facilities in Iraq, was not charged but was demoted to the rank of colonel. Several more military personnel who were accused of perpetrating or authorizing the measures, including many of higher rank, were not prosecuted.
A memorandum compiled by the Justice Department in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, authorized certain “enhanced interrogation techniques” (generally held to involve torture) of foreign detainees. The memoranda argued that international humanitarian laws, such as the Geneva Conventions, did not apply to American interrogators overseas. Since then, U.S. Supreme Court decisions have overturned Bush administration policy, ruling that the Geneva Conventions do apply.
In 2013, Engility Holdings, of Chantilly, Va., paid $5.28 million in a settlement to 71 former inmates held at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run detention sites between 2003 and 2007. The settlement was the first successful attempt by the detainees to obtain reparations for the abuses they had experienced.
The latest lawsuit involved accusations that civilian interrogators paid by a company, CACI, who were supplied to the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004, had conspired with soldiers there to abuse detainees as a means of “softening them up” for questioning. It was the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors in the 20 years since photos of detainee mistreatment and smiling U.S. soldiers inflicting the abuse, shocked the world during the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The lawsuit was filed in 2008 and was delayed many years by legal wrangling and multiple attempts by CACI to have the case dismissed.
A lawyer for one of the plaintiffs said attorneys would likely request a re-trial.
The Virginia-based CACI argued that the government, not the company was liable for the mistreatment. CACI claimed that it wasn’t complicit in the abuse and that its employees had minimal interaction with the three plaintiffs in the case and were acting under the control and direction of the Army.
The Army investigated CACI, the Titan Corp. and other contractors and “found that contractors were involved in 36 percent of the [Abu Ghraib] proven incidents and identified six employees as individually culpable”. None of these personnel were prosecuted.
Over half the interrogators working at Abu Ghraib were employees of CACI International, while Titan Corporation supplied linguistics personnel.
The “CACI Ever Vigilant” website says the company “delivers distinctive expertise and differentiated technology to U.S. government customers in support of critical national security missions and government modernization.”
The lawsuit against CACI is the first civil case against U.S. contractors to get to a point where a judge is evaluating allegations of mistreatment. Other lawsuits have been thrown out on procedural grounds.
In one case, the contractor Engility, based in Chantilly, Va., paid $5.28 million to settle with former Abu Ghraib inmates.
CACI is a subsidiary of L3 Technologies. In an unrelated lawsuit, in 2015, L3 Technologies agreed to pay a $25.6 million settlement after it was accused of providing the U.S. military with optics that failed in extreme temperatures and humid weather conditions. The sights were provided to infantry and special operations forces operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as civilians and law enforcement.
In 2017, two psychologists who devised the CIA’s brutal interrogation program, settled a lawsuit with several victims. In the settlement, the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were hired as contractors, acknowledged that they worked with the CIA to develop the program to interrogate detainees using “specific coercive methods.” The terms of the settlement were kept confidential.