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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
A rare look at the entire Abu Ghraib report reveals that inexperienced, under-supervised private-sector employees actively took part in horrifying prisoner abuse.
Aug 9, 2004 | The world's outrage over the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has focused largely on the seven U.S. soldiers caught in the infamous photographs; they are now facing criminal charges. But several thousand pages of classified military documents reveal that private contractors, hired as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, played a key role in the abuses. According to the testimony of one detainee, a male contract worker carried out one of the most heinous crimes at the prison, raping a boy while a female soldier took pictures.
In January of this year, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba was ordered to investigate the actions of the military police at Abu Ghraib. The 53-page executive summary of his findings caused a sensation when it was leaked in April. The full report -- 106 "annexes" composed of internal Army memos and e-mails, as well as sworn statements made by soldiers and detainees to the Army's CID (Criminal Investigation Division) -- shows the prison under siege and out of control.
In violation of Army policy, Abu Ghraib was located in a war zone, where detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were under daily assault by mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Prisoners were regularly beaten, sodomized with broomsticks and police batons, terrorized by military attack dogs, and subjected to psychological torture, including at least one mock electrocution.
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a congressional hearing in March that the worst images of abuse at Abu Ghraib were still to come, he may have been speaking of what Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee number 151108, witnessed. Hilas was a prisoner in Tier 1A of what was known as the "hard site" -- a two-story cinderblock structure with dozens of cells, built by Saddam Hussein. Most of the thousands of detainees lived outdoors in canvas tents. Tier 1A was reserved primarily for prisoners thought to have "intelligence value." The hard site was also home to a little-known entity, JICD (Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center), run by Military Intelligence but used also by the CIA, FBI and other intelligence units.
Kasim Hilas told a CID investigator that he witnessed a harrowing incident one night on Tier 1A. "I saw the translator Abu Hamid fucking a kid," Hilas stated. "His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. Abu Hamid, I think he is Egyptian because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember."
The use of civilian contractors is key to understanding Abu Ghraib. As the full Taguba report makes clear, private contractors held many sensitive positions at the prison. The wealth of classified documents suggests that once the administration decided to privatize military intelligence operations -- giving inexperienced contract workers nearly unlimited power over detainees -- with only a pretense of military oversight, the door to prisoner abuse was thrown open.
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