A Prison on the Brink

[seemslikeadream]

THE ROAD TO ABU GHRAIB : Warning Signs
A Prison on the Brink
Usual Military Checks and Balances Went Missing
By Scott Higham, Josh White and Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 9, 2004; Page A01


First of three articles

For U.S. military police officers in Baghdad, the Abu Ghraib prison was particularly hellish. Insurgents were firing mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades over the walls. The prisoners were prone to riot. There was no PX, no mess hall, no recreation facilities to escape the heat and dust. About 450 MPs were supervising close to 7,000 inmates, many of them crowded into cells, many more kept in tents hastily arranged on dirt fields within the razor-wired walls of the compound. Around the perimeter, GIs kept wary eyes on Iraqi guards of questionable loyalty.



Precisely how many prisoners were being held at Abu Ghraib was anyone's guess. Roll calls were spotty. Escapes were commonplace. Prison logs were replete with flippant and unprofessional remarks. MPs were occasionally out of uniform, and some were out of control. Discipline was breaking down. So was the chain of command.

Abu Ghraib was on the brink.

"Most of the time, I felt like my life was in danger," said Sgt. William Savage Jr., a Florida corrections officer sent to Abu Ghraib as a reservist with the 320th Military Police Company. "I always thought something was going to happen."

Few could imagine what was about to happen at Abu Ghraib. The photographs featuring piles of naked Iraqis seem as though they were taken from a pornographic magazine, not from the digital cameras carried by American servicemen and women. But an examination of military investigative reports and interviews with soldiers and officers in Iraq at the time reveal that there were early warnings, and that a combination of conditions inside Abu Ghraib produced a culture of licentious behavior and abuse. Confusion was high. Morale was low. The checks and balances established to hold soldiers accountable during the vagaries of war were virtually non-existent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11413-2004May8.html

[seemslikeadream]

1. "They made them do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach,

Davis said Graner told him agents and military intelligence personnel "would ask him to do things, but nothing was ever in writing," the report states.

The methods moved from the unorthodox to the perverse.

"They made them do strange exercises by sliding on their stomach, jump up and down, throw water on them and made . . . some wet, called them all kinds of names such as 'gays' do they like to make love to guys . . . ," Adel L. Nakhla, a U.S. civilian contract translator, told military investigators. Then "they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by insuring that the bottom guys penis will touch the guy on tops butt."

The Post obtained a series of digital photographs that were taken by MPs. Scattered among the hundreds of travelogue images of Iraq were some depicting prisoner abuse, most of them stamped with dates. The earliest of the abuse pictures, stamped Oct. 17, shows a naked man handcuffed to a cell door. A photograph of a naked man handcuffed to a cot with a pair of women's underwear stretched over his head was stamped Oct. 18. A photograph of Pfc. Lynndie R. England holding a chain or strap that is wrapped around the neck of a naked man outside a cell was stamped Oct. 24. A picture of a pile of naked men was stamped Oct. 25.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11413-2004May8_4.html