Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse

During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape and the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.

The George W. Bush administration claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents and not indicative of U.S. policy. This was disputed by humanitarian organizations including the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch; these organizations stated that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centers, including those in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.

Documents popularly known as the Torture Memos came to light a few years later. These documents, prepared in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States Department of Justice, authorized certain " enhanced interrogation techniques" (generally held to involve torture) of foreign detainees. The memoranda also argued that international humanitarian laws, such as the Geneva Conventions, did not apply to American interrogators overseas. Several subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including ''Hamdan v. Rumsfeld'' (2006), have overturned Bush administration policy, ruling that the Geneva Conventions do apply.

In response to the events at Abu Ghraib, the United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty. Eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, these 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. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the commanding officer of all detention facilities in Iraq, was reprimanded and 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. In 2004, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized for the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Background

War on terror

The war on terror, also known as the global war on terrorism, is an international military campaign launched by the United States government after the September 11 attacks. U.S. President George W. Bush first used the phrase "war on terrorism" on September 16, 2001, and then used the phrase "war on terror" a few days later in a speech to Congress. In the latter speech, Bush stated, "Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them."

Iraq War

The Iraq War began in March 2003 as an invasion of Ba'athist Iraq by a force led by the United States. The Ba'athist government led by Saddam Hussein was toppled within a month. This conflict was followed by a longer phase of fighting in which an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. During this insurgency, the United States was in the role of an occupying power.

Abu Ghraib prison

The Abu Ghraib prison in the town of Abu Ghraib was one of the most notorious prisons in Iraq during the government of Saddam Hussein. The prison was used to hold approximately 50,000 men and women in poor conditions, and torture and execution were frequent. The prison was located on about 110 hectares of land 32 kilometers west of Baghdad. After the collapse of Saddam Hussein's government, the prison was looted and everything that was removable was carried away. Following the invasion, the U.S. army refurbished it and turned it into a military prison. It was the largest of several detention centers in Iraq used by the U.S. military. In March 2004, during the time that the U.S. military was using the Abu Ghraib prison as a detention facility, it housed approximately 7,490 prisoners. At its peak, it held an estimated 8000 detainees.

Three categories of prisoners were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib by the U.S. military. These were "common criminals", individuals suspected of being leaders of the insurgency, and individuals suspected of committing crimes against the occupational force led by the U.S. Although most prisoners lived in tents in the yard, the abuses took place inside cell blocks 1a and 1b. The 800th Military Police Brigade, from Uniondale, New York, was responsible for running the prison. The brigade was commanded by Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of all of the U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. She did not have previous experience in running a prison. The individuals who committed abuses at the prison were members of the 372nd Military Police Company, which was a constituent of the 320th Military Police Battalion, which was overseen by Karpinski's Brigade headquarters.

The Fay Report noted that "contracting-related issues contributed to the problems at Abu Ghraib prison". Over half the interrogators working at the prison were employees of CACI International, while Titan Corporation supplied linguistics personnel. In his report, General Fay notes that "The general policy of not contracting for intelligence functions and services was designed in part to avoid many of the problems that eventually developed at Abu Ghraib".

First reports of human rights abuses

In June 2003, Amnesty International published reports of human rights abuses by the U.S. military and its coalition partners at detention centers and prisons in Iraq. These included reports of brutal treatment at Abu Ghraib prison, which had once been used by the government of Saddam Hussein, and had been taken over by the United States after the invasion. On June 20, 2003, Abdel Salam Sidahmed, Deputy Director of AI's Middle East Program, described an uprising by the prisoners against the conditions of their detention, saying "The notorious Abu Ghraib Prison, centre of torture and mass executions under Saddam Hussein, is yet again a prison cut off from the outside world. On June 13, there was a protest in this prison against indefinite detention without trial. Troops from the occupying powers killed one person and wounded seven."

On July 23, 2003, Amnesty International issued a press release condemning widespread human rights abuses by U.S. and coalition forces. The release stated that prisoners had been exposed to extreme heat, not provided clothing, and forced to use open trenches for toilets. They had also been tortured, with the methods including denial of sleep for extended periods, exposure to bright lights and loud music, and being restrained in uncomfortable positions.

On November 1, 2003, the Associated Press presented a special report on the massive human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. Their report began; "In Iraq's American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis." The report went on to describe abuse of the prisoners at the hands of their American captors: They confined us like sheep,' the newly freed Saad Naif, 38, said of the Americans. 'They hit people. They humiliated people. In response, U.S. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who oversaw all U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, claimed that prisoners were being treated "humanely and fairly". The AP report also stated that as of November 1, 2003, there were two legal cases pending against U.S. military personnel; one involving the beating of an Iraqi prisoner, while the other arose out of the death of a prisoner in custody.

Since the beginning of the invasion, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had been allowed to oversee the prison, and submitted reports about the treatment of the prisoners. In response to an ICRC report, Karpinski stated that several of the prisoners were intelligence assets, and therefore not entitled to complete protection under the Geneva Conventions. The ICRC reports led to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of the Iraqi task force, appointing Major General Antonio Taguba to investigate the allegations on January 1, 2004. Taguba submitted his findings (the Taguba Report) in February 2004, stating that "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated by several members of the military police guard force." The report stated that there was widespread evidence of this abuse, including photographic evidence. The report was not released publicly.

The scandal came to widespread public attention in April 2004, when a '' 60 Minutes II'' news report was aired on April 28 by CBS News, describing the abuse, including pictures showing military personnel taunting naked prisoners. An article was published by Seymour M. Hersh in ''The New Yorker'' magazine, posted online on April 30 and published days later in the May 10 issue, which also had a widespread impact. The photographs were subsequently reproduced in the press across the world. The details of the Taguba report were made public in May 2004. Shortly afterwards, U.S. President George W. Bush stated that the individuals responsible would be "brought to justice", while United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan said that the effort to reconstruct a government in Iraq had been badly damaged.

Authorization of torture

Executive order

On December 21, 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union released copies of internal memoranda from the Federal Bureau of Investigation that it had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These discussed torture and abuse at prisons in Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Afghanistan, and Iraq. One memorandum dated May 22, 2004 was from an individual described as the "On Scene Commander – Baghdad", but whose name had been redacted. This individual referred explicitly to an executive order that sanctioned the use of extraordinary interrogation tactics by U.S. military personnel. The torture methods sanctioned included sleep deprivation, hooding prisoners, playing loud music, removing all detainees' clothing, forcing them to stand in so-called "stress positions", and the use of dogs. The author also stated that the Pentagon had limited use of the techniques by requiring specific authorization from the chain of command. The author identifies "physical beatings, sexual humiliation or touching" as being outside the Executive Order. This was the first internal evidence since the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse affair became public in April 2004 that forms of coercion of captives had been mandated by the president of the United States.

Authorization from Ricardo Sanchez

Documents obtained by ''The Washington Post'' and the ACLU showed that Ricardo Sanchez, who was a Lieutenant General and the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, authorized the use of military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, and sensory deprivation as interrogation methods in Abu Ghraib. A November 2004 report by Brigadier General Richard Formica found that many troops at the Abu Ghraib prison had been following orders based on a memorandum from Sanchez, and that the abuse had not been carried out by isolated "criminal" elements. ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in a statement from the union that "General Sanchez authorized interrogation techniques that were in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and the army's own standards."
In an interview for her hometown newspaper ''The Signal'', Karpinski stated that she had seen unreleased documents from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld which authorized the use of these tactics on Iraqi prisoners.

Alleged authorization from Donald Rumsfeld

A 2004 report by the ''New Yorker'' stated that 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. In November 2006, Janis Karpinski, who had been in charge of Abu Ghraib prison until early 2004, told Spain's '' El País'' newspaper that she had seen a letter signed by Rumsfeld, which allowed civilian contractors to use techniques such as sleep deprivation during interrogation. "The methods consisted of making prisoners stand for long periods, sleep deprivation... playing music at full volume, having to sit in uncomfortably ... Rumsfeld authorized these specific techniques." According to Karpinski, the handwritten signature was above his printed name, and the comment "Make sure this is accomplished" was in the margin in the same hand-writing. Neither the Pentagon nor U.S. Army spokespeople in Iraq commented on the accusation. In 2006, a criminal complaint was filed in a German Court against Donald Rumsfeld by eight former soldiers and intelligence operatives, including Karpinski and former army counterintelligence special agent David DeBatto. Among other things, the complaint stated that Rumsfeld both knew of and authorized so-called " enhanced interrogation techniques" that he knew to be illegal under international law.

Prisoner abuse

Death of Manadel al-Jamadi

Manadel al-Jamadi, a prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison, died after CIA officer Mark Swanner and a private contractor ("identified in military-court papers only as 'Clint C.) interrogated and tortured him in November 2003. After al-Jamadi's death, his corpse was packed in ice; the corpse was in the background for widely reprinted photographs of grinning U.S. Army specialists Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner, each of whom offered a "thumbs-up" gesture. Al-Jamadi had been a suspect in a bomb attack that killed 12 people in a Baghdad Red Cross facility, even though there was no confirmation of his involvement in these attacks. A military autopsy declared al-Jamadi's death a homicide. No one has been charged with his death. In 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder said that he had opened a full criminal investigation into al-Jamadi's death. In August 2012, Holder announced that no criminal charges would be brought.

Prisoner rape

In 2004, Antonio Taguba, a major general in the U.S. Army, wrote in the Taguba Report that a detainee had been sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick." In 2009, Taguba stated that there was photographic evidence of American soldiers and translators having raped detainees at Abu Ghraib. An Abu Ghraib detainee told investigators that he heard an Iraqi teenage boy screaming, and saw an Army translator raping him, while a female soldier took pictures. A witness identified the alleged rapist as an American-Egyptian who worked as a translator. In 2009, he was the subject of a civil court case in the United States. Another photo shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner. Other photos show interrogators sexually assaulting prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube, and a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts. Taguba supported United States President Barack Obama's decision not to release the photos, stating, "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency." Obama, who had initially agreed to release the photographs, changed his mind after lobbying from senior military figures; Obama stated that their release could put troops in danger and "inflame anti-American public opinion".

In other instances of sexual abuse, soldiers were found to have raped female inmates. Senior U.S. officials admitted that rape had taken place at Abu Ghraib. Some of the women who had been raped became pregnant, and in some cases, were later killed by their family members in what were thought to be instances of honor killing. In addition, according to Seymour Hersh, video exists which shows that children were raped by prison staff in front of watching women.

Other abuses

In May 2004, ''The Washington Post'' reported evidence given by Ameen Saeed Al-Sheikh, detainee No. 151362. It quoted him as saying; "They said we will make you wish to die and it will not happen ... They stripped me naked. One of them told me he would rape me. He drew a picture of a woman to my back and made me stand in shameful position holding my buttocks." Do you pray to Allah?' one asked. I said yes. They said, ' xpletiveyou. And xpletivehim.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here health you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, 'If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'But if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her. "They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive." "I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, 'But I believe in torture and I will torture you.

On January 12, 2005, ''The New York Times'' reported on further testimony from Abu Ghraib detainees. The abuses reported included 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.

In her video diary, a prison guard said that prisoners were shot for minor misbehavior, and claimed to have had venomous snakes used to bite prisoners, sometimes resulting in their deaths. The guard said that she was "in trouble" for having thrown rocks at the detainees. Hashem Muhsen, one of the naked prisoners in the human pyramid photo, later said the men were also forced to crawl around the floor naked while soldiers rode them like donkeys.

Systematic torture

On May 7, 2004, Pierre Krähenbühl, operations director for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), stated that inspection visits made by the ICRC to detention centers run by the U.S. and its allies showed that acts of prisoner abuse were not isolated acts, but were part of a "pattern and a broad system". He went on to say that some of the incidents they had observed were "tantamount to torture".

Many of the torture techniques used were developed at Guantánamo detention center, including prolonged isolation; the frequent flyer program, a sleep deprivation program whereby people 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.

Armed forces in the U.S. and the UK are jointly trained in techniques known as ''resistance to interrogation (R2I)'' techniques. These R2I techniques are taught ostensibly to help soldiers cope with, or resist, torture if they are captured. On May 8, 2004, ''The Guardian'' reported that according to a former British special forces officer, the acts committed by the Abu Ghraib prison military personnel resembled the techniques used in R2I training.

The same report stated the following:

Historian Alfred W. McCoy interview, Janis Karpinski said that she was being made a scapegoat, and that the top U.S. commander for Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, should be asked what he knew about the abuse. Karpinski told a reporter in 2014 that military intelligence personnel had told her that 90 percent of the inmates were innocent of the crimes of which they had been accused and had been detained simply by virtue of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
* Donald Rumsfeld stated in February 2005 that as a result of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he had twice offered to resign from his post of Secretary of Defense, but U.S. President George W. Bush declined both offers.
* Jay Bybee, the author of the Justice Department memo defining torture as activity producing pain equivalent to the pain experienced during death and organ failure, was nominated by President Bush to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he began service in 2003.
* Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division advised the CIA on the outer limits of legality in coercive interrogation sessions, was selected by President Bush to fill the cabinet-level vacancy at Secretary of Homeland Security created by the departure of Tom Ridge.
* Karpinski's immediate operational supervisor and Sanchez's deputy, Major General Walter Wojdakowski, was cleared of all charges, and was subsequently appointed Chief of the U.S. Army Infantry School at Fort Benning.
* Pappas's boss, Barbara Fast, was subsequently appointed Chief of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca.

The Final Report of the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense detention operations specifically 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."

Legal issues

International law

The United States has ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture and the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions. The Bush Administration took the position that: "Both the United States and Iraq are parties to the Geneva Conventions. The United States recognizes that these treaties are binding in the war for the 'liberation of Iraq.

The Convention Against Torture defines torture in the following terms:

According to Human Rights Watch:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) concluded in its confidential February 2004 report to the Coalition Forces (CF) that it had documented "serious violations" of international law in connection with prisoners held in Iraq. The ICRD added that its report "establishes that persons deprived of their liberty face the risk of being subjected to a process of physical and psychological coercion, in some cases tantamount to torture, in the early stages of the internment process". There were several major violations described in the ICRC report. These included brutality against protected persons upon capture and initial custody, sometimes causing death or serious injury; absence of notification of arrest of persons deprived of their liberty to their families causing distress among persons deprived of their liberty and their families; physical or psychological coercion during interrogation to secure information; prolonged solitary confinement in cells devoid of daylight; excessive and disproportionate use of force against persons deprived of their liberty resulting in death or injury during their period of internment.

Some legal experts have said that the United States could be obligated to try some of its soldiers for war crimes. Under the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war and civilians detained in a war may not be treated in a degrading manner, and violation of that section is a "grave breach". In a November 5, 2003 report on prisons in Iraq, the Army's provost marshal, Maj. Gen. Donald J. Ryder, stated that the conditions under which prisoners were held sometimes violated the Geneva Conventions.

United Nations resolution 1546

In December 2005, John Pace, human rights chief for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), criticized the U.S. military's practice of holding Iraqi prisoners in Iraqi facilities such as Abu Ghraib. Pace stated that this practice was not mandated by UN Resolution 1546, according to which the U.S. government has claimed a legal mandate permitting its ongoing occupation of Iraq. Pace said, "All except those held by the Ministry of Justice are, technically speaking, held against the law because the Ministry of Justice is the only authority that is empowered by law to detain, to hold anybody in prison. Essentially none of these people have any real recourse to protection and therefore we speak ... of a total breakdown in the protection of the individual in this country."

Torture Memos

Alberto Gonzales and other senior administration lawyers argued that detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other similar prisons should be considered "unlawful combatants" and were not protected by the Geneva Conventions. These opinions were issued in multiple memoranda, known today as the "Torture Memos", in August 2002, by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Justice Department. They were written by John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney-general in the OLC, and two of three were signed by his boss Jay S. Bybee. (The latter was appointed as a federal judge in 2003, starting March 21, 2003.) An additional memo was issued on March 14, 2003, after the resignation of Bybee, and just prior to the American invasion of Iraq. In it, Yoo concluded that federal laws prohibiting the use of torture did not apply to U.S. practices overseas. Gonzales observed that denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions, "substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act." Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman wrote that Gonzales's statement suggested that policy was crafted to ensure that the actions of U.S. officials could not be considered war crimes.

Other legal proceedings

In ''Hamdan v. Rumsfeld'' (2006), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions applied to all detainees in the War on Terror. It said that the military tribunals used to try these suspects were in violation of U.S. and international law. It said that the president could not unilaterally establish such tribunals, and that Congress needed to authorize a means by which detainees could confront their accusers and challenge their detention.

On June 27, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals of lawsuits from a group of 250 Iraqis who wanted to sue CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp. (now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications), the two private contractors at Abu Ghraib, over claims of abuse by interrogators and translators at the prison. The suits had been dismissed by the lower courts on the grounds that the companies held a derivative sovereign immunity from suits based on their status as government contractors pursuant to a battle-field preemption doctrine.

On November 14, 2006, legal proceedings invoking universal jurisdiction were begun in Germany against Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, George Tenet and others for their alleged involvement in prisoner abuse under the command responsibility. On April 27, 2007, the German Public Prosecutor General, Monika Harms, announced that the government would not pursue charges against Rumsfeld and the 11 other U.S. officials, stating the accusations did not apply, in part because there was insufficient evidence that the acts occurred on German soil, and because the accused did not live in Germany.

In June 2011, the Justice Department announced it was opening a grand jury investigation into CIA torture which killed a prisoner.

In June 2014, the U.S. court of appeals in Richmond, Virginia, found that an 18th-century law known as the Alien Tort Statute, allowed non-US citizens access to U.S. courts for violations of "the law of nations or a treaty of the United States". This would enable abused Iraqis to file suit against contractor CACI International. Employees of CACI International are being accused of encouraging torture and abuse as well as taking part in it as the four Iraqis contend that they were "repeatedly shot in the head with a taser gun", "beaten on the genitals with a stick", and forced to watch the "rape fa female detainee", during their time at the prison.

Military Commissions Act of 2006

Critics consider the Military Commissions Act of 2006 an amnesty law for crimes committed in the War on Terror by retroactively rewriting the War Crimes Act. It abolished habeas corpus for foreign detainees, effectively making it impossible for detainees to challenge crimes committed against them.

Later developments

On October 29, 2007, the memoir of a soldier stationed in Abu Ghraib, Iraq from 2005 to 2006 was published. ''Torture Central'' chronicled many events previously unreported in the news media, including torture that continued at Abu Ghraib over a year after the abuse photos were published.

In 2010, the last of the prisons were turned over to the Iraqi government to run. An Associated Press article said

In September 2010, Amnesty International warned in a report titled ''New Order, Same Abuses; Unlawful Detentions and Torture in Iraq'' that up to 30,000 prisoners, including many veterans of the U.S. detention system, remain detained without rights in Iraq and are frequently tortured or abused. Furthermore, it describes a detention system that has not evolved since Saddam Hussein's regime, in which human rights abuses were endemic with arbitrary arrests and secret detention common and a lack of accountability throughout the military forces. Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa director, Malcolm Smart went on to say: "Iraq's security forces have been responsible for systematically violating detainees' rights and they have been permitted. U.S. authorities, whose own record on detainees' rights has been so poor, have now handed over thousands of people detained by U.S. forces to face this catalogue of illegality, violence and abuse, abdicating any responsibility for their human rights."

On October 22, 2010, nearly 400,000 secret United States Army field reports and war logs, detailing torture, summary executions and war crimes, were passed on to the British paper, ''The Guardian'', and several other international media organisations through the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. Among other things, the logs detail how U.S. authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape, and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers, whose conduct appeared to be systematic and normally unpunished, and that U.S. troops abused prisoners for years even after the Abu Ghraib scandal.

In 2013, Associated Press stated that Engility Holdings, of Chantilly, Virginia, 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.

In 2014, Abu Ghraib prison was closed indefinitely by the Iraqi government over concerns that ISIL would take over the facility.

Popular culture

*The song "Hey Blue Eyes" from the EP '' American Beauty'' was described by Bruce Springsteen (a singer and musician) as "a metaphor for the house of horrors our government's actions created in the years following the invasion of Iraq. At its center is the repressed sexuality and abuse of power that characterized Abu Ghraib prison. I feel this is a shadow we as a country have yet to emerge from."
*In season 2, episode 11 of the U.S. sitcom ''Arrested Development'' Gob's wife, who served in the military, is shown in place of Lynndie England in the infamous forced masturbation photo.
*The poem "Hillbillions" by Jeannette Allée, appeared in The Iowa Review (Vol. 35, Issue 3, 2005).
*An Off-Broadway play, "On The Head Of A Pin", written and directed by Frank Winter, switches between a flashback story of events similar to the Abu Ghraib tortures, and a present-day reporter investigating the events.
*The poetic sequence, "abu ghraib arias", by Philip Metres, was first published as a chapbook, then included in the collection ''Sand Opera'' (Alice James Books, 2015).
*The cover of the 2013 album '' Virgins'' released by Tim Hecker features a figure bearing a pose similar to that of an Abu Ghraib detainee with a bag over his head. Additionally, a track references Abu Ghraib in its name.
*The film '' Children of Men'' contains allusions to images from Abu Ghraib. In a sequence where a bus enters a refugee camp, many prisoners are shown in positions similar to imagery of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, including a recreation of the infamous photo of Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh.
*The film ''The Card Counter'' directly references the events in Abu Ghraib. Oscar Isaac plays an ex-soldier turned poker player struggling with his guilt in the aftermath of being convicted for his role in the torture at Abu Ghraib.
*The documentary ''Ghosts of Abu Ghraib'' premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and won an Emmy award for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special.ACADEMY OF TELEVISION ARTS AND SCIENCES 59TH ANNUAL PRIMETIME EMMY AWARDS Retrieved September 16, 2007

See also

Incidents and coverage

*Bagram torture and prisoner abuse
*Camp Nama
*"Copper Green" (May 2004 Seymour Hersh article connecting abuse to alleged Black Ops program)
*Emad al-Janabi
*Human rights in post-invasion Iraq
* Iraq prison abuse scandals
* Maywand District murders
* Stanford prison experiment
* ''The Dark Side'' (book)
*''Taxi to the Dark Side''
*'' The Lucifer Effect''

Other

*Criticism of the war on terror
* Disarmed Enemy Forces (redesignation of POWs after WWII to avoid having to obey international treaties on POW treatment)
*Erotic humiliation
*Human Rights Record of the United States
*International Criminal Court and the 2003 invasion of Iraq
*Kampala Review Conference
*Legal issues related to the September 11 attacks
*List of war crimes
*Milgram experiment
* Nuremberg principles
*Sexual assault in the United States military
* Superior orders
*United States and the International Criminal Court
*United States war crimes

References

Sources

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Further reading

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U.S. government documents related to Abu Ghraib
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External links

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at The National Security Archive
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George W. Bush administration controversies
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Photography in Iraq
United States war crimes
War crimes in Iraq
Wartime sexual violence
Sexual abuse
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Human rights abuses in Iraq
Torture in the United States
People subject to extraordinary rendition by the United States