The Scandal's Growing Stain

By Johanna McGeary

Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi kept his shame to himself until the world saw him stripped naked, his head in a hood, a nude fellow prisoner kneeling before him simulating oral sex. "That is me," he claims to a TIME reporter, as one of the lurid photographs of detained Iraqis suffering sexual humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers scrolls down a computer screen. "I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend." In the nine months he spent in detention, al-Abbadi says he was never charged and never interrogated. On that awful November night, four months after his arrest, he thought he and six other prisoners were being punished for a petty scuffle.

They were herded into Cellblock 1A. The guards cut off their clothes, and then the degrading demands began. Through it all, al-Abbadi knew the Americans were taking photos, he says, "because I saw the flashbulbs go off through the bag over my head." He says he is the hooded man in the picture in which a petite, dark-haired woman in camouflage pants and an Army T shirt gives a thumbs-up as she points to a prisoner's genitals. He says he was in the pileup of naked men ordered to lie on the backs of other detainees as a smiling soldier in glasses looks on. And al-Abbadi says he was told to masturbate, though he was too scared to do more than pretend, as a female soldier flaunted her bare breasts.

Those scenes, caught in shocking candor by someone's digital camera, played over and over last week in the world's newspapers and magazines and across the airwaves. Jarring new examples emerged: the same female soldier, holding a leash wrapped around the neck of a naked prisoner cringing at her feet. Even when the shots were pixilated or cropped for modesty, nothing could hide the raw cruelty of U.S. soldiers ridiculing the manhood of Iraqi captives. Of all places, these atrocities occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, once the infamous home of Saddam Hussein's torture chambers.

The accounts of these misdeeds would be sickening in the best of times. But with each new revelation of abuses inflicted by U.S. troops in Iraq, it seems evident that the damage goes far beyond the appalling acts of a few miscreants. As public doubts about the war grow, the images of sadism symbolized all that is going wrong with the U.S. venture in Iraq. The photos touched off a global outcry, especially in the Arab world, where they provoked fresh fury among millions of Muslims opposed to George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and provided grist for every conspiracy theorist who claims the U.S. is bent on debasing Islam and humiliating Arabs. "We're going to live with the consequences of this for the next 40 years," says a senior White House official, and few would accuse him of exaggeration. Most immediately, the scandal has imperiled the U.S. effort to pacify Iraq by turning even more ordinary Iraqis against the occupation and reinforcing the sense that control is slipping everywhere, less than two months before the U.S. is due to hand sovereignty back to the nation.

Nothing the Bush Administration said or did could contain the damage. The President, who says he first learned of the existence of the photographs when they were aired two weeks ago on CBS's 60 Minutes II, went on Arab television to proclaim the abusive treatment "abhorrent" behavior that "does not represent the America that I know." His words weren't enough to dent the outrage of Muslims who wondered why he failed to apologize. A day later Bush finally said he was sorry, but America's image in much of the Arab world may well be irredeemable. U.S. officials tried to portray the sordid scenes as the isolated acts of a few low-ranking soldiers who were violating U.S. policy. The military, they pointed out, has already rooted out the offenders and is disciplining them. "Please don't for a moment think that's the entire U.S. military, because it's not," said Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for coalition forces in Iraq.

But the horror stories keep coming. An Army investigation of conditions at Abu Ghraib concluded that prison guards had carried out "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton abuse" for months. The Army is investigating reports of crimes committed at other detention facilities in Iraq. Testifying before the Senate last Friday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the Pentagon has obtained more photos and video footage that show U.S. troops engaged in even worse behavior. "We're not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience," Senator Lindsey Graham said. "We're talking about rape and murder and some very serious charges." A senior Pentagon official tells TIME that the Pentagon is considering the possibility of showing the unseen material to members of Congress.

The scandal has metastasized into a full-blown political crisis as Washington tries to figure out who to blame. The seven reservists involved in the photographed abuses have been charged with conspiracy, maltreatment and indecent acts, and six additional soldiers up the chain of command have been severely reprimanded and one was admonished. But many are looking for accountability higher up. Rumsfeld took most of the fire after the White House put out word he had been chastised by Bush for not reporting how bad the allegations were or warning that the photos were about to break on 60 Minutes II. Called on the carpet by furious members of Congress, Rumsfeld conceded, "I failed to identify the catastrophic damage that the allegations of abuse could do to our operations in the theater, to the safety of our troops in the field, to the cause to which we are committed."

A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld is more shaken than in any previous crisis. "He's not a man of self-doubt," says the official, but he's "questioning himself and others more rigorously than previously." Rumsfeld told Senators that he intends to keep his job, but he betrayed doubts about his future. "If I felt I could not be effective, I'd resign in a minute," he said. Asked by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh whether it "would serve to demonstrate how seriously we take the situation" if he were to step down, Rumsfeld responded, "That's possible." Evidence that further abuses took place under his watch could well raise the pressure on him to resign. To see if more probes should be initiated, Rumsfeld plans to appoint a blue-ribbon panel of retired officials to examine the slew of investigations into prison management and guard training now under way. The Army is studying the deaths of 25 detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, including two that have been ruled homicides, while the Justice Department is examining the role of the CIA and contract employees in the deaths of three other detainees.

So many questions remain unresolved. Were the Abu Ghraib abuses carried out by rogue officers or done on someone's orders? Were they an excessive campaign for intelligence, or humiliation for fun? Did the U.S. get useful intelligence, or was it a nasty waste? As Americans struggle to make sense of the news, they want to understand: Why did this happen? And what is being done about it?

A HOUSE OF HORRORS

The trouble at Abu Ghraib was a long time brewing. The 260-acre prison complex lies behind tall walls off a highway 20 miles west of Baghdad. In the days of Saddam it housed thousands of criminals and political prisoners who were subjected to unspeakable torture at the whim of the regime. The U.S. military decided to reopen the prison last August for all Iraqis being detained and renamed it the Baghdad Correctional Facility. But reminders of the prison's grim history were inescapable. From the ceiling of each 10-ft.-by-12-ft. cell still dangled a large hook, which had been used to hang inmates from their hands or feet. Waleed Sabih al-Delami, detained after soldiers found suspicious wires near his house, tells TIME the Americans picked up where Saddam left off. He says he was suspended from such a hook three times during his five-month stint in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib. His feet were tied, and his arms were bound behind his back. "They would take a stick and put it through the rope and pull me off the ground," he says. While he was bound and suspended, a military translator stood by him, shouting: "You are a terrorist! You are a terrorist!" But no real questioning took place.

Guarding the thousands of detainees sent to Abu Ghraib by coalition forces across Iraq was a nasty billet for the 800th Military Police Brigade, which includes the reserve 372nd Military Police Company, and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which also operated there. A senior military official who lived at Abu Ghraib says soldiers were underequipped and undermanned. The reservists in particular had virtually no training for their prison-guard jobs. Discipline flagged. In November and December, around the time most of the abuse photos were taken, Abu Ghraib was under constant attack from nightly mortar raids. Basic sanitation for the troops consisted of overflowing portable toilets, and soldiers jerry-rigged showers from pumps they bought themselves. Six months after reopening as a prison, Abu Ghraib still had no single declared commander. All the while, detainees kept flooding in, at the rate of 250 a day. When the abuses occurred, there were some 6,000 prisoners. The MPs had no good system for keeping prison rolls: criminals, insurgents and innocents were all lumped together. Escapees and some detainees believed to be of high intelligence value went unrecorded.

In September 2003, Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the secret U.S. detention center for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, visited Iraq to straighten out the prison. He recommended that the MPs should act not just as guards but as "enablers for interrogation." In November, a second visiting general advised the exact opposite, saying MPs should have nothing to do with interrogation. The conflict had apparently not been resolved by the prison's top brass when the photographed abuses occurred.

Between October and December of last year, the poorly trained, demoralized reservists in the 372nd crossed the line. William Lawson, uncle of Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, claims that his nephew and the other guards were following orders when they tortured and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners. The MPs told investigators they did it because officers in the military-intelligence unit and civilian contractors working with them told them to "loosen up" men for interrogation. Sabrina Harman, who appears in one photograph grinning behind a pile of naked detainees, told the Washington Post that the MPs were instructed by military-intelligence officers to "make it hell" on the prisoners in order to make them talk. Now facing possible court-martial, Harman is allegedly the one who attached wires to a hooded man's hands and forced him to stand on a box, threatening him with electrocution if he fell off.

If the soldiers were following orders, why did they photograph themselves in the act? The MPs claim the pictures too were meant to serve as a psychological tool to scare new prisoners into talking. Frederick's uncle says the platoon had tried to soften them up with techniques like sleep deprivation, "but they found the best way was with these photographs, and it apparently worked very effectively." Lawson says his nephew complained about some of the measures and was told, "Don't worry about it." Yet the photos, showing MPs smiling and mugging as they degrade their prisoners, suggest that the accused were hardly acting against their will.

Reports of scandalous U.S. behavior inside Abu Ghraib have circulated in Iraq since the day it reopened. Amnesty International raised questions back in July, but coalition forces blamed any trouble on the general disorganization of the occupation's early months. Officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) brought serious allegations of abuse--which they are bound to keep confidential--to U.S. attention beginning in October. Pierre Gassman, head of the ICRC delegation in charge of Iraq, told TIME that his team found credible, disturbing evidence of mistreatment after interviewing virtually all the prisoners during that visit. The Red Cross reported its findings to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the overall prison commander, and to staff officers attached to the office of Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad. In February, after more prisoner interviews, Red Cross officials sent a comprehensive report directly to the staffs of Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer, head of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority. Later that month, Gassman met with Bremer and Sanchez. Gassman says he had the impression that the officials were aware of the allegations of prison abuses before he entered the room.

They were. For months Bremer's authority had been hearing complaints from released prisoners and families of those still in detention. The State Department knew enough to realize, says a senior official, "this was going to be a problem." Aides to Bremer and Secretary of State Colin Powell say that as early as last fall, both men raised the issue in meetings with the rest of the Administration's national-security team. Yet no action was taken until mid-January, when Specialist Joseph Darby, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company, got hold of some of the incriminating photographs. He slipped an anonymous note under the door of a superior officer, reporting the misbehavior, and then turned over the photos proving it.

Beginning the next day, the Army launched a discrete investigation. Sanchez immediately admonished Karpinski for "serious deficiencies" and quietly suspended her from command. In January Sanchez ordered a full-scale probe of prison practices under the charge of Major General Antonio Taguba, who completed his "Secret/No Foreign Dissemination" report in early March. The report, first obtained by the New Yorker two weeks ago and now on the Internet, blames MP commanders for poor leadership and a refusal to enforce basic standards. But it points to plenty of other failings as well. Overcrowded cells held too many prisoners guarded by unsupervised reservists with inadequate training. Left on their own, the soldiers of the 372nd practiced systematic and illegal abuse beyond what appeared in the photos, including forcing prisoners to wear women's underwear, pouring phosphoric liquid on prisoners, sodomizing a man with a chemical light and using dogs, which Muslims consider unclean, to intimidate detainees.

Taguba's report supports the contention of MPs like Frederick that the soldiers were told that inflicting such indignities would "set the conditions" for favorable interrogation by military-intelligence officers, CIA officers and private contractors. Taguba concluded that a quartet of military-intelligence officers and civilian contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuse at Abu Ghraib." According to testimony from another accused abuser, Sergeant Javal Davis, military-intelligence officers essentially egged the guards on: "Loosen this guy up for us. Make sure he gets the treatment." Davis testified that military-intelligence officers praised Specialist Charles Graner, another of the accused, for his efforts, using "statements like 'Good job, they're breaking down real fast.'"

On March 20, the military announced that Frederick, Harman, Davis, Graner, Specialist Megan Ambuhl and Private Jeremy Sivits of the 372nd Military Police Company were being held in Iraq and charged with conspiracy, dereliction of duty, assault, maltreatment and indecent acts. A seventh soldier, Lynndie England, the jaunty G.I. Jane in many of the photos, who is now pregnant, was sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where she was later charged with the same offenses. Six soldiers up the chain of command were given formal reprimands that will end their military careers, and one was less severely admonished. Although Taguba recommended firing the two civilian contractors, their U.S. companies say the Pentagon has made no such formal requests yet. The Justice Department is trying to figure out if the private contractors can be prosecuted under any U.S. law.

Devastating as it is, the Taguba report only addresses one set of abuses. Though U.S. officials insist that the Abu Ghraib crimes were rare instances of misconduct, the problem may well be more widespread. Britain's Ministry of Defense is investigating 12 cases of civilian death, injury or mistreatment in Iraq at the hands of British soldiers, and is considering action against troops for six deaths. Charges of mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by four British soldiers are also being investigated.

Freed detainees have scores of horror stories to tell. Though most of the accounts have not been corroborated, the scandal makes anything seem possible. Nabil Shakar Abdul Razaq al-Taiee, 54, a retired electrical worker who was arrested last December, told TIME that as recently as March, he witnessed soldiers beating prisoners, including a mentally unstable man who was thrown in a shipping container and pummeled and taunted for days. Another former prisoner, Mohammed Unis Hassan, was arrested by U.S. forces for looting a bank last July. He told TIME of a seven-month odyssey through the prison system that included beatings, humiliation and soldiers having sex with female detainees. At the Baghdad airport holding pen, he laughed at interrogators who asked if he knew which terrorists were exploding bombs. When he failed to provide information, they beat him with a cable or a riot stick on the back of the legs. He saw U.S. soldiers strip the clothes off a fellow inmate and put their feet on his head, making him lie naked on the ground for hours. Mohammed claimed that prisoners, angered by the death of an old man forced to lie on his face, loosened a tent pole and hit a U.S. soldier so hard that "he died."

Eventually Mohammed, 24, wound up in a cell at Abu Ghraib, where he was beaten for hiding a pack of cigarettes. A woman soldier that he recalled as "so beautiful" pushed his arms through the bars of the cell and cuffed them so tightly he couldn't move. Then, he says, she poked his eye with her finger so hard he couldn't see afterward. Three months after the incident, Mohammed's left eye was gray and glassy, allowing only modest vision of blurry shapes. He says the guards at Abu Ghraib drank whisky and walked the halls with cans of beer. And he says he saw an American guard having regular sex with an Iraqi woman prisoner on the floor above and across the hall from his cell.

WHAT DID THEY KNOW?

The firestorm of outrage provoked by the Abu Ghraib pictures seemed to catch U.S. officials by surprise. Army General John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command that oversees Iraq, told TIME that after learning of the abuses in January, he sent word of it to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Though military investigators had been aware for months that graphic photos existed, Pentagon officials showed no particular urgency in finding out how bad they were or informing anyone else about them. When Myers learned several weeks ago that CBS was about to air the pictures, he persuaded the network to delay the broadcast for two weeks. An earlier telecast might jeopardize the safety of Americans held hostage by Iraqi insurgents, he said, and further inflame anti-U.S. tensions in the country. But amazingly, Myers hadn't actually seen the pictures. When he appeared on television four days after they were broadcast, he admitted he hadn't read Taguba's report yet.

Rumsfeld's response was equally clueless. Just hours before the CBS show, says Republican Senator John McCain, Rumsfeld trooped up to S-407, the secure Intelligence Committee room in the Capitol, "and briefed us on how they're armoring the humvees. He never mentioned a word about the story that was to run that evening." Democrats and Republicans alike were furious that the Defense Secretary had kept them in the dark about the looming scandal. "If the answer is, 'He didn't know much and that's why he didn't tell us,'" said Representative John Spratt, a senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, "then the follow-up question is, 'Why didn't he know much?'" When Rumsfeld fielded questions at a press conference early last week, he still hadn't read the entire Taguba report either.

And Rumsfeld neglected to inform the most important person of all: his Commander in Chief. Rumsfeld advised Bush in February of an "issue" involving mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq, says a senior White House aide. But he didn't warn anyone that CBS was about to document the abuse with shocking photos.

Throughout official Washington, there is little agreement about whether the malfeasance at Abu Ghraib was isolated or is symptomatic of a broad breakdown of interrogation standards. A senior White House aide says the abuse had nothing to do with interrogations but was the work of a handful of bad hats egged on by a ringleader who was doing it for kicks. "It was the night shift," he says. Military officers tell TIME that reserve Brigadier General Karpinski was responsible for the wrong-doing. "When a commander says, 'I didn't know,' that in itself is an indictment," says a senior officer serving in Iraq.

But the practices employed at Abu Ghraib may be more widespread than the U.S. has acknowledged. Human rights groups and many military experts say the Administration's approach to prosecuting the war on terrorism, including open-ended detention of captives, denial of due process and intense pressure to come up with "productive" interrogations, may have created a climate that fosters abuse. One U.S. official says that some FBI agents were well aware that the military was using "very aggressive" interrogation methods that would not be condoned in the U.S. An Army officer seems to confirm that. Among Arab men, he tells TIME, sexual insecurity is a powerful lever: fear of homosexuality and, almost as significant, female domination, are particular issues. "We don't like to talk about it," says the officer, "but it is working." If so, success has come at a staggering cost.

LOSING THE WAR

Once all the apologies were spoken, a battered Administration was searching for more tangible ways to repair the damage. Major General Miller has been hustled back to Baghdad to fix the prison system. He promised to halve the number of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and end the practice of hooding captives. But he refused to entirely rule out the use of other tactics, like sleep deprivation and "stress positions," if they were approved by a senior officer. A senior Pentagon official says Rumsfeld has taken a personal interest in coming up with a dollar figure to compensate Iraqis who have been wronged. Abizaid tells TIME that he thinks the outrage will fade as the U.S. demonstrates its willingness to take action against the perpetrators. "Our openness about it," he says, "is a lesson about the rule of law." As the President told Arab interviewers, "A dictator wouldn't be answering questions about this."

Nevertheless, the scandal has made it exceedingly difficult for the U.S. to build support for its faltering project in Iraq by pointing to good intentions. Bush has always seemed his most impassioned when he railed against Saddam's "torture chambers" and "rape rooms." As other rationales for invasion--like Iraq's alleged store of weapons of mass destruction--evaporated, the purpose of human liberation had remained. Even last week Bush was telling an audience in Michigan, "Because we acted, the torture rooms are closed." The newest inhuman prison scenes struck at the very heart of his claim that the U.S. was in Iraq to promote freedom and liberty. "This is our greatest strength," says Republican Representative Christopher Shays, "and we've blown it." For many Iraqis, no amount of U.S. generosity or contrition will ever erase the taste of humiliation conveyed by the photographs, especially given the symbolic importance of Abu Ghraib. It was Saddam's torture chamber, and now it's ours. --Reported by Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/Washington; Mark Thompson/Doha; Brian Bennett, Paul Quinn-Judge, Simon Robinson and Vivienne Walt/Baghdad; Helen Gibson/London; Simon Crittle/New York; and Scott MacLeod/Cairo

With reporting by Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, Sally B. Donnelly, Michael Duffy, Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf and Adam Zagorin/ Washington; Mark Thompson/Doha; Brian Bennett, Paul Quinn- Judge, Simon Robinson and Vivienne Walt/Baghda