At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects [graphic images] including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube. Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts. Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on May 28, 2009 - 186 comments

A Guardian interview with Lynndie England (of Abu Ghraib notoriety).
posted by nthdegx on Jan 6, 2009 - 111 comments

The Most Curious Thing (follow-up of sorts) by Errol Morris. Fuzzed up indeed.
posted by i_am_a_Jedi on May 21, 2008 - 31 comments

“You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas." A Vanity Fair reporter investigates the chain of command that tossed out the Geneva Conventions and instituted coercive interrogation techniques -- some might call them torture or even war crimes -- in Bush's Global War on Terror. UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo's now-obsolete 81-page memo to the Pentagon in 2003 [available as PDFs here and here] was crucial, offering a broad range of legal justifications and deniability for disregarding international law in the name of "self-defense." Others say that Yoo was just making "a clear point about the limits of Congress to intrude on the executive branch in its exercise of duties as Commander in Chief." [previously here and here.]
posted by digaman on Apr 3, 2008 - 76 comments

The Woman Behind the Camera. Film maker Errol Morris, and the New Yorker's Philip Gourevitch look at Sabrina Harman, photographer, and Army MP in Iraq. [more inside]
posted by timsteil on Mar 20, 2008 - 19 comments

The Interrogation Documents - a collection of available records relating to U.S. interrogation policies. (via) (previously)
posted by puddleglum on Jun 19, 2007 - 9 comments

Last week a video was posted to YouTube and linked to by the Iraqslogger site. The YouTube account ("Deathlyillington") is now defunct but the video survives and purports to show a former guard from Abu Ghraib talking about torture techniques employed at the American-run prison. The man recounts the gang rape of a female teenage detainee, in which one guard "pimped" the girl to others for $50 each. As he recalls, "I think at the end of the day he'd made like 500 bucks before she hung herself." The US Army's Criminal Investigation Department has now launched an investigation, but the question remains, is the video real, or is it a hoax along the lines of Jesse Macbeth, the Daily Mirror fake torture photos or the fake beheading video. The video contains few clues to the identity of the alleged soldier, who is shown in silhouette but seems potentially recognizable. A transcript is available.
posted by unSane on Feb 1, 2007 - 67 comments

Meet the new jailers-- Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors. Mass executions, torture again, etc. How bad is it when the inmates plead for us to come back? (Warning--this second link is graphic evidence of what we did there--NSFW)
posted by amberglow on Sep 10, 2006 - 27 comments

Abu Ghraib, continued. A new cache of disturbing images and videos from the original interrogations, with commentary from Salon. [Definitely NSFW, or for Earth, for that matter.]
posted by digaman on Mar 14, 2006 - 48 comments

Adieu, Abu Ghraib -- we hardly knew ye (classified, ya know.) In the wake of a damning Amnesty International report, military spokesperson Keir-Kevin Curry says the infamous Baghdad prison will be closed within three months, its occupants transferred to other facilities in Iraq, including Camp Cropper (and don't ask what's happening there , or the terrorists win.) Or is Curry's statement premature? And would the closing of Abu Ghraib represent a change of policy, or merely rebranding the same old same old to avoid bad associations?
posted by digaman on Mar 9, 2006 - 51 comments

60 "secret" Abu Ghraib photos have been leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald. (Warning, very NSFW and disturbing.) They are thought to be among those viewed in private by U.S. senators following a May, 2004 hearing and "withheld from the public to protect the integrity of military trials and to avoid further inflaming America's enemies."
posted by Saucy Intruder on Feb 14, 2006 - 193 comments

Barbarism begins with Barbie — the doll, that is. Research done at the University of Bath (UK) posits that prepubescents' pre-eminent plasticine plaything provokes disproportionate punishment. According to the study, which originally focused on the effects of branding on young consumers, the statuesque Mattel mini-miss seems to attract undue savagery. "The researchers had not intended to focus on Barbie, but they were taken aback by the rejection, hatred and violence she provoked when they asked the children about their feelings for the doll. Violence and torture against Barbie were repeatedly reported across age, school and gender. No other toy or brand name provoked such a negative response."
posted by rob511 on Dec 19, 2005 - 46 comments

What kind of people are these torturers? Are they the bad apples of the American military, as the Bush administration has alleged, or is it the whole barrel that is bad, as Philip Zimbardo, former president of the American Psychological Association, declared? Back in 1975, one year after the fall of the military dictatorship in Greece, I received special permission to attend the trials of the Greek military police's torturers... These torturers were made, not born, to torture... These transformations from “ordinary” young men to fierce perpetrators are paralleled in other studies that I and my colleagues have carried out on Brazilian military and civil policemen and on elite special forces training in the US and elsewhere.
Psychological and Sociopolitical Factors Contributing to the Creation of the Iraqi Torturers: A Human Rights Issue
beliefnet: Michael Wolfe on relationship between Christian evangelism in the U.S. government and abuse of Muslims and the Qur'an
U.S. Military Says 26 Inmate Deaths May Be Homicide
We Are All Complicit - But What Can We Do About It?
posted by y2karl on Jun 20, 2005 - 33 comments

From the folks who brought you Abu Ghraib, new information from Afghanistan. More torture of "terrorists," more deaths of prisoners, more untrained interrogators pummeling instead of interrogating—facts direct from a leaked Army investigation.
posted by Mo Nickels on May 20, 2005 - 83 comments

The Pentagon's Secret Stash. "...There can be narratives of things that are much worse, but if they aren't accompanied by photos, they somehow don't register....The Abu Ghraib photos are sort of the military equivalent of the Rodney King case....And I hate to attribute motives to people I don't know, but it is easy to imagine that the officials who are withholding these images have that fact in mind."
posted by gsb on Apr 2, 2005 - 16 comments

Sanchez Perjury Proof ? That depends on the meaning of "never" Mainstream media once again caught with pants down as blogger citizen-journalist notes apparent perjury by Gen. Sanchez during testimony before the US Congress concerning whether he authorized torture or not. The Globe and Mail noticed the ACLU release of a FOIA-obtained memo showing that Sanchez did in fact authorize torture, but the implication of perjury seems to have escaped MSM notice, to be pointed out by a blogger Metafilter's own citizen journalist Mark Kraft, who declares : "Sanchez is clearly guilty of perjury, and should face the wrath of Congress... and the Senate should determine the guilt of his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, while they're at it."

The case all hinges on the meaning of the word "never" which - rumor holds - is much more flexible in Sanchez' native "Never-never Land" where - as with the rumored numerous Eskimo terms for different kinds of snow - denizens of that realm have many different meanings for "never", some of which in fact mean "sometimes" or "occasionally" !
posted by troutfishing on Mar 30, 2005 - 62 comments

While the proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions, the internal government memos collected in this publication demonstrate that the path to the purgatory that is Guantanamo Bay, or Abu Ghraib, has been paved with decidedly bad intentions. The policies that resulted in rampant abuse of detainees first in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq, were product of three pernicious purposes designed to facilitate the unilateral and unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment, and punishment of prisoners: (1) the desire to place the detainees beyond the reach of any court or law; (2) the desire to abrogate the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of persons seized in the context of armed hostilities; and (3) the desire to absolve those implementing the policies of any liability for war crimes under U.S. and international law.

Regarding the Torture Papers, which detail Torture's Paper Trail, and, then there's Hungry for Air: Learning The Language Of Torture, and, of course, there's ( more inside)
posted by y2karl on Mar 14, 2005 - 97 comments

Request for guidance regarding the OGC's EC regarding detainee abuse, referring to “interrogation techniques made lawful” by the “President's Executive Order.” comes from Records Released in Response to Torture FOIA Request.
Smoking Gun ? asks the ACLU--or just another stepping stone from Torture's Path ? As Ex-Military Lawyers Object to Bush Cabinet Nominee, and in Torture begins at the top, Joe Conason suggests that a recently disclosed FBI memo indicates that "marching orders" to abandon traditional interrogation methods came from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld himself and all the while Guantánamo torture and humiliation still going on, says shackled Briton. (more inside)
posted by y2karl on Dec 20, 2004 - 35 comments

Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib , and Matchbox Twenty
posted by Espoo2 on Nov 6, 2004 - 10 comments

The Road To Abu Ghraib A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq... It was a direct—and predictable—consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office... Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11—a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting—did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.
posted by y2karl on Oct 27, 2004 - 33 comments

The Conscience of Joe Darby
"Because the irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime."
posted by quonsar on Aug 16, 2004 - 48 comments

Michael Moore witheld Abu Ghraib torture footage - So, when do we get to see it, Michael ? Liberal torture apologia is OK then ?
posted by troutfishing on Jun 17, 2004 - 43 comments

Human Rights Watch Report: The Road to Abu Ghraib
Introduction, A Policy To Evade International Law:
Circumventing the Geneva Conventions, Undermining the Rules Against Torture, Renditions, “Disappearances” and so on and so on...
See also Human rights group finds Abu Ghraib cover-up
posted by y2karl on Jun 9, 2004 - 23 comments

I have been in torture photos, too. Gerry Adams speaks out. "News of the ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq created no great surprise in republican Ireland. We have seen and heard it all before. Some of us have even survived that type of treatment. Suggestions that the brutality in Iraq was meted out by a few miscreants aren't even seriously entertained here. We have seen and heard all that before as well. But our experience is that, while individuals may bring a particular impact to their work, they do so within interrogative practices authorised by their superiors."
posted by sunexplodes on Jun 5, 2004 - 9 comments

Rumsfeld knew. More revelations from Seymour Hersch at The New Yorker.
posted by digaman on May 17, 2004 - 119 comments

U.S. Military Bars Some Iraq Interrogation Methods ...The officials said the decision was made on Thursday by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, on the same day that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met with him on a surprise trip to the country and visited the Abu Ghraib facility on the outskirts of Baghdad. .. Is this a tacit admission that what took place was not simply rogue actions by individuals but rather military folks following orders of some kind? And, then, why do the new ground rules apply just to Iraq and not to other places?
posted by Postroad on May 14, 2004 - 27 comments

A tale of two West Virginia soldiers: one named Jessica, one named Lynndie. Both are on opposite sides of the propaganda war. One is a hero, one is a monster. No, wait - actually, one is a fraud, one was just following orders. No wait, one is perky and blonde, the other is kind of butch and ugly. Now I'm all confused. Help me Metafilter, you're my only hope.
posted by PrinceValium on May 11, 2004 - 20 comments

The Wrong Morons. (from the Army Times) "Around the halls of the Pentagon, a term of caustic derision has emerged for the enlisted soldiers at the heart of the furor over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal: the six morons who lost the war...But the folks in the Pentagon are talking about the wrong morons."
posted by Ty Webb on May 11, 2004 - 23 comments

The Scandal's Growing Stain Time Magazine: "Abuses by U.S. soldiers in Iraq shock the world and roil the Bush Administration. the inside story of what went wrong—and who's to blame"
posted by Postroad on May 9, 2004 - 18 comments

"Pull out, pull out", she cried, "Before it's too late!" - Sex sells. Amidst the ongoing PR conflagration - as newly released imagery of the psychosexual humiliation, by US guards at Abu Ghraib, of imprisoned Iraqis (a naked Iraqi man on a leash held by a female American soldier, notably) provokes widespread outrage (and the Red Cross says things are much worse than those pictures show), the BBC reports on informed speculation that the perfect storm of a growing insurgency, political reversals, and a PR debacle will lead to a hasty coalition pullout from Iraq. A frustrated and tense "Machine Gun Cheney" achieves release, via his wheelbarrel load of 30 guns (including a Thompson), blasting away at a Secret Service gun range. His aim, they say, is very good. But will Cheney bite the bullet and level with the American public about what it will now take for the US to prevail in Iraq ?
posted by troutfishing on May 6, 2004 - 153 comments

One Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted. Torture by Saddam? No, torture by American soldiers in Saddam's most notorious prison. After an Army investigation, courtmartials are likely, and a brigadier general may be forced to resign in disgrace.
posted by hipnerd on Apr 29, 2004 - 81 comments