Legal findings regarding Abu Ghraib and the official response
When
the images surfaced, President George W. Bush was quoted as saying “Their [the
prisoners] treatment does not reflect the nature of the American people.” None of the high ranked White House
officials, or the President talked of the abuses as ‘torture’ instead calling
them ‘abuse’ or ‘humiliation’[1].
Source: Michael Niman, 'Strange Fruit in Abu Ghraib: the privatisation of Torture', The Humanist, 2004, vol. 64(4), p. 23
In
addition to this, there were those who defended the actions of the soldiers
from a ‘this is war’ standpoint. Rush
Limbaugh, a radio show host infamously stated that the soldiers did what they
did as an ‘emotional release’.
“…I’m talking about people having a
good time, these people. You ever hear
of emotional release?”[2]
In
the report written by Antonio M. Taguba, the 800th Military Police
Brigade was investigated. A list was
provided of what ‘abuses’ were common in the prison. The table below lists them.
Source: The Taguba Report, http://www.npr.org/iraq/2004/prison_abuse_report.pdf (Accessed 05/06/2012).
The
report
calls these abuses, ‘sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses’. This highlights the illegality of the
techniques these American soldiers used to interrogate Iraqi prisoners. Some of these abuses were present in the
images that were released such as the Iraqi prisoner being led by a soldier
with a dog leash and collar. Others have
not been seen. In Australia, there has
been very little mention of the instances of abuse of the female prisoners and
there was minimal mention of the photographs in which soldiers give the ‘thumbs
up’ sign to the camera over the deceased body of the Iraqi prisoner below them. Puar (2005) states that there was no
reporting on female rape, was because it was neither ‘news nor
photograph-worthy’[3].
In
the following years, those responsible at the ‘on the ground’ level of the
abuse of Iraqi prisoners were disciplined.
They included staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II, Specialist Charles A.
Graner, Sergeant Javal Davis, Specialist Megan Ambuhl, Specialist Sabrina
Harmna and Jeremy Sivits. However, there has been minimal investigation into the high ranked officials within the armed forces at Abu Ghraib.
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