Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse

On April 28, 2004, the CBS program 60 Minutes II broadcast photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, a prison west of Baghdad that the U.S. Army had taken over after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The pictures, taken by soldiers of a military police company in late 2003, showed naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid, a hooded man standing on a box with wires attached to his hands, and guards posing with grinning thumbs up beside a dead prisoner. Days later Seymour Hersh published a detailed account in The New Yorker based on a secret Army report.¹²

The abuse was reported from inside. In January 2004 Specialist Joseph Darby handed a disc of photographs to Army investigators, and Major General Antonio Taguba's inquiry found sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses. The prison was badly overcrowded, understaffed and under mortar fire, and military intelligence officers had pressed guards to soften up detainees for questioning. Techniques such as stress positions and the use of dogs had been approved for Guantanamo and then brought to Iraq.²³⁵⁶

About eleven soldiers were convicted in all, most at courts-martial; Specialist Charles Graner received ten years and Private First Class Lynndie England three. The prison commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, was demoted, but no general or senior official was prosecuted, and only one lieutenant colonel faced trial. A 2004 panel led by James Schlesinger blamed leadership failures at many levels, and a 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report linked the abuse to policies approved by senior officials. In November 2024 a federal jury ordered the contractor CACI, which supplied interrogators, to pay $42 million to three former detainees.⁴⁵⁶⁷