- There are two versions of what Specialist Sabrina Harman,
a US military police officer, was doing with a camera in the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. According to her mother, the former
assistant manager of Papa John's pizza restaurant in north Virginia was
collecting evidence of improper treatment in the jail.
-
- Robin Harman told yesterday's Washington Post that when
her daughter told her what she was doing during her two weeks' leave at
home last November, she told her to stop. 'We got into an argument about
it at 4 am. Sabrina said she had to prove this. I told her to bring the
pictures home, hide them and stay out of it.' It is not an explanation
accepted by military investigators probing Harman's role in the abuse at
Abu Ghraib.
-
- Neither is it an explanation seemingly borne out by the
digital photographs seized from Harman's laptop. Among the hundreds of
pictures found is one taken before her unit got to Abu Ghraib last October
- a gruesome trophy photograph showing Harman crouching by a decaying corpse
giving the camera a thumbs-up and a grin.
-
- Her explanation is also in contradiction with the charges
she faces. For it is Harman who has emerged as a central figure in the
abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib - a figure involved in some of the most
shocking pictures to emerge from the prison.
-
- Harman was one of two soldiers who posed for the now
infamous photograph of the pyramid of naked Iraqis in the jail. She is
charged with photographing and videotaping detainees ordered to strip and
masturbate. And it is Harman who stands accused of attaching wires to a
hooded prisoner - stood on a box - and telling him he would be electrocuted
if he fell off.
-
- Even Harman's witness statement to investigators fails
to stand up the claim by her family and lawyer that she was one of the
good guys amid the bad. She makes clear that she was a participant in institutionalised
torture.
-
- 'The person who brought them in would set the standards
on whether or not to "be nice",' said Harman. 'If the prisoner
was co-operating, then he was able to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and
was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner
didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence]
decided. Sleep, food, clothes, mattresses, cigarettes were all privileges
and were granted with information received.'
-
- The statement confirms what the International Committee
for the Red Cross had been saying for months. In visits to Iraq's US-administered
prison, it has been documenting abuse that was not the 'exception' but
was close to the norm - abuse that was 'tantamount' to a policy of torture,
and tolerated by coalition forces.
-
- According to Harman, prisoners were stripped, searched
and then 'made to stand or kneel for hours'. At other times they were forced
to stand on boxes or hold boxes or to exercise ceaselessly. And what has
become increasingly clear in the past few days, in interviews with returning
special forces soldiers from Iraq, was that the techniques employed at
Abu Ghraib were not simply for the cruel entertainment of military policemen
and private contractors running the prison, but an even crueller application
of abusive interrogation techniques taught to both US and British special
forces.
-
- What has also become clear is that concern over what
was happening to Iraqi detainees had been circulating for months, both
within the coalition and within the Red Cross and human rights' organisations
monitoring Iraq.
-
- Suddenly an administration that seemed immune to bad
news from Iraq has been forced on the defensive as the images of Harman
and her colleagues cheerfully abusing prisoners in their charge have emerged
as a metaphor for the coalition's failures in Iraq.
-
- That it has been a catastrophe for US foreign policy
is asserted by usually robust senior Pentagon officials who claim privately
that Iraq policy is now '97 per cent disaster' and the war is no longer
being planned but crisis-managed from day-to-day. And catastrophe was the
word used by the beleaguered Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during his
humiliating appearance before Congress.
-
- The Red Cross investigates
-
- Last summer - a few days before the Red Cross evacuated
its staff from Baghdad - Nada Doumani, the Lebanese spokeswoman for the
ICRC's delegation to Iraq, was sitting in her sandbagged office complaining
of the huge difficulties in tracking detainees within the US-administered
prison system in Iraq.
-
- Already, as is now clear, her officials were privately
concerned over what they were hearing was happening inside the prisons
that they were visiting.
-
- These days Doumani and the Iraq delegation is based in
neighbouring Jordan, the security situation meaning it still too dangerous
for the ICRC to have a permanent, large-scale presence in Iraq. And with
the leaking of her organisation's damning confidential report into the
conditions of detainees, she can say a little more.
-
- It is a report that paints the most damning picture of
conditions in US-run facilities, and that challenges the assertions of
the White House and Pentagon that the torture cases in Abu Ghraib were
'exceptional'.
-
- According to other Red Cross officials, concern had been
mounting throughout the year over persistent allegations of abuse. 'Between
31 March and 24 October we made 29 separate visits,' says Doumani. These
culminated in a visit to Abu Ghraib in October, during which the most egregious
abuses were uncovered.
-
- 'Right after that visit we gave a findings presentation
to the director of the prison, [Brigadier-General] Janis Karpinski.' said
Doumani. That critical presentation was followed by the production of a
working paper for discussion, also to Karpinski.
-
- At the same time, Red Cross officials were also concerned
about allegations of alleged beatings meted out to Iraqis by British soldiers
in their sector which was also raised with senior British officers at around
the same time - in October and November.
-
- As conversations continued between Red Cross officials
and officers on the ground, a damning summary report on treatment of detainees
was forwarded by the Iraq delegation to the organisation's headquarters
in Geneva.
-
- By New Year it had landed on the desk of the Red Cross's
president, Jakob Kellenberger. A former Swiss diplomat, largely to European
missions, it would present of the greatest challenges of his career.
-
- For Kellenberger and other senior officials in Geneva,
that summary report confirmed worrying reports that were coming from across
the US-administered prison system set up to deal with suspects detained
in the war in terror. From Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to Iraq and to
friendly third-party countries with poor human rights records which were
willing to open up their facilities to the US, a picture was emerging of
routine and arbitrary ill treatment. Of men picked up, sometimes on the
smallest pretext, disappearing into a chilling closed world.
-
- Determined to raise the organisation's concerns, Kellenberger
had scheduled a trip to Washington to talk to the most senior US officials
in the Bush administration.
-
- On 13 and 14 January he attended a series of meetings
in Washington. In two days he would meet US Secretary of State Colin Powell,
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz. In each meeting, say Red Cross sources, Kellenberger would
deliver the same message: his organisation's belief that coalition soldiers
were torturing and mistreating Iraqi detainees.
-
- Within hours that message would be on the desks of Donald
Rumsfeld and the most senior officers in the US military. But if Rumsfeld
is to be believed, even as a discreet inquiry was launched into the allegations,
none of the President's most senior officials thought to tell George Bush.
-
- But Kellenberger was not alone in being concerned. According
to the timeline leaked by investigators to the US media, army investigators
had also been tipped about the abuses and, after months of inaction, were
taking the issue seriously.
-
- Joseph Darby, a 24-year-old reservist at Abu Ghraib,
had plucked up his courage and slipped an anonymous note underneath the
door of one of his superior officers. It described brutal incidents of
abuse of Iraqi prisoners and the existence of graphic photographs taken
by Darby's own colleagues.
-
- That move triggered the crisis which has emerged from
the brutal hallways of Abu Ghraib to echo through Washington's corridors
of power. Darby eventually turned over a computer disk of pictures to a
sergeant in his unit on 13 January. A few hours later, army investigators
seized other computers and disks from members of the unit. By 14 January
- according to this version of events - General John Abizaid was on the
phone to Rumsfeld, as Kellenberger was also raising his concern.
-
- On 16 January, the US army curtly announced it had ordered
an investigation into abuses at the prison - a five-sentence press release
said that an inquiry into 'reported' incidents of detainee abuse had begun.
It did not even name the prison.
-
- Washington in crisis
-
- When Rumsfeld, Bush's acerbic, 73-year-old Secretary
of Defence, entered the Oval Office for a scheduled meeting on a spring
morning last Wednesday, his mind was on a request to Congress for an extra
$25 billion to help fund the war in Iraq.
-
- Instead, he found that Bush had other matters to deal
with. What followed was an astonishing dressing-down by Bush of one of
his closest advisers and personal friends in the presence of Vice-President
Dick Cheney.
-
- Bush was deeply upset at the storm of bad publicity swirling
out from the Abu Ghraib scandal. If the story that has been carefully leaked
from the White House is true, the first time the President saw the pictures
that have dominated the world's media was when they were broadcast on CBS's
Sixty Minutes news show.
-
- According to that account, Bush was also unaware of a
detailed secret military report into the Abu Ghraib abuses that had also
leaked to the press, and the Red Cross's devastating presentation.
-
- 'I should have known about the pictures and the report,'
Bush said. Rumsfeld agreed that what had happened was 'not satisfactory'.
-
- But if Rumsfeld thought that was the end of it, he was
dead wrong. At least three senior White House officials, with the President's
authority, then leaked the scolding to the media. Karl Rove, Bush's political
guru, took the lead in spinning the story. Rove had been furious to see
Bush 'blindsided' due to Rumsfeld's failure to alert the White House to
the crisis.
-
- As he scanned Thursday's morning headlines, Rumsfeld
knew his future was on the line. One defence official last week went so
far as to say that Rumsfeld was 'white as a sheet' that day.
-
- But by then the White House was in full crisis mode.
Shortly after the Wednesday morning meeting with Rumsfeld, crews from two
Arab networks arrived and began setting up equipment in the Map Room. Bush
had scooped a hole in his busy schedule to speak directly to the Arab world.
-
- The interviews began at 10 am, each lasting 10 minutes.
Several senior aides had advised Bush to apologise, as Rice had done the
day before. But when the interviews ended, stunned officials were still
left waiting for the magic 'I'm sorry'. Onlookers from the State Department
were horrified. They had included a strong recommendation Bush apologise
for the Abu Ghraib abuses in a so-called 'talking points' memo to the President.
-
- Perhaps Bush felt an apology was not yet necessary. But
as the day wore on and the scandal continued to swirl around the world,
advisers kept pressing him to change his mind. He was initially reluctant,
believing enough had been done. It was a position that was not to last.
-
- Inside Abu 'Grope'
-
- >From the outside all you can see of the prison at
Abu Ghraib is a series of squat watchtowers along the road atop a long
wall and a tangle of barbed wire that funnels visitors towards the gate
of Saddam's most notorious prison. Beyond the wall, it is subdivided into
smaller 'camps', including Camp Ganci (with five divisions according to
the seriousness of the crime); Camp Vigilant for high-security detainees
split into 'black, grey, and white lists;' a Medical Wing, and another
camp for those 'serving time'.
-
- Rumours of brutality had been circulating for most of
last year. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had both raised
concerns about Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Among Iraqis, the rumours
of sexual abuse found greater credence than with the international media,
and among US soldiers the prison was even dubbed 'Abu Grope'.
-
- Among those waiting outside yesterday for news from inside
was Zacaria Falah, from the northern city of Mosul, who himself spent 70
days in Abu Ghraib this year. His older brother is still imprisoned. Both
were accused of helping 'the resistance' - a charge they deny.
-
- Falah tells a similar story to many detainees. He was
taken from his home, which was ransacked during the raid, in the middle
of the night and transported to a base in Mosul known as 'Camp Disco' to
Iraqis because of the habit of the guards of putting on loud music and
making the detainees 'dance' for hours on end. >From there he was taken
to Abu Ghraib, where he was housed in a tent, sleeping on the floor with
34 other men.
-
- But last January few were listening to those like Falah.
The story, on a low simmer, needed graphic pictures to boil over - pictures
that would detonate a political crisis when they emerged.
-
- Instead, the hundreds of photos, CD discs and videotapes
seized from the military police in Abu Ghraib after Darby's complaint were
locked in a safe in Baghdad belonging to the army's Criminal Investigation
Division. Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt, the US military spokesman in
Iraq, called the Pentagon. He reportedly called the evidence 'damaging
and horrific'. Secretly, Major-General Antonio Taguba was appointed to
investigate the problem.
-
- Official silence in the Pentagon was still the pattern.
Although top officials, including Rumsfeld and the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, were kept abreast of the probe,
it was in the form of conversations, not a passing on of the detailed reports
or photographs. Taguba's report wrapped up in March and six soldiers were
charged.
-
- But while many officials would have hoped a line had
been drawn under the issue, the story was far from over. By the second
week of April it began to leak.
-
- That was when CBS reporters rang the Pentagon revealing
they had the pictures and planned to broadcast them. The Pentagon launched
an effort to keep the story off the airwaves. Myers called CBS and persuaded
staff at Sixty Minutes to hold off on the broadcast. He argued the pictures
would be so damaging to US forces in Iraq that deaths could directly result,
especially with some US hostages still in Iraqi hands.
-
- In the meantime Pentagon planners drafted an 11-page
media response to the story, including some three dozen expected questions
and prepared answers. The plan was to focus on Darby's role as an honest
whistleblower and the army's swift - if largely secret - investigation.
-
- But as the week has worn on, the Pentagon's strategy
to concentrate the story on a few 'bad apples' - including Sabrina Harman
- has begun to seriously unravel, not only because of Harman's own evidence
but because of the leaked Red Cross report and evidence of returning special
forces soldiers to the UK.
-
- According to one officer recently returned from Iraq,
sexual humiliation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib was not an invention of 'maverick
guards' but part of a system of degradation developed for use by British
and US troops called R2I - resistance to interrogation - which uses sexual
jibes and stripping prisoners to prolong 'the shock of capture' when detainees
are at their most vulnerable.
-
- In an interview with the Guardian yesterday, the officer
said: 'It was clear from discussions with US private contractors in Iraq
that prison guards were using R2I techniques, but they didn't know what
they were doing.'
-
- What has also emerged is the role that US military intelligence
officers - and private intelligence contractors - have played in directing
the abuse with most of the reservists involved alleging that they thought
their duty was to 'soften up' the prisoners for questioning.
-
- Indeed, Taguba's leaked confidential report identifies
at least three contractors as being potentially to blame for the problems
- contractors who are neither subject to Iraqi law, military discipline
or the Geneva Conventions. Yet even as the scandal has boiled over, according
to at least one of the companies named in Taguba's report, CACI International,
the Pentagon has yet to contact it.
-
- The British connection
-
- By this weekend the disturbing ramifications of what
went on in Abu Ghraib had spread to America's closest ally in Iraq - Britain.
The Observer has established it was not only US military intelligence,
CIA and private contractors who conducted interrogations with prisoners
softened up by Harman and her colleagues, it was British officials as well.
-
- Sources in London have disclosed that not only were three
military intelligence officers based at Abu Ghraib since January as, unbeknown
to them, the crisis was unfolding in Washington, but MI6 officers had been
visiting the prison on a regular basis to carry out their own interrogations.
-
- On top of concerns over British mistreatment of Iraqi
detainees in the Red Cross report, on top of allegations of abuse by the
Queen's Lancashire Regiment in the Daily Mirror, allegations that British
officers were in Abu Ghraib, and were unaware of the abuse, has deepened
the sense of crisis in London as well as Washington.
-
- As the allegations of abuse continue to build up, UK
officials both in London and Baghdad have been at pains to try to distance
themselves from what some in the US military have been up to, describing
stand-up rows between civilian officials and the US military officers over
the treatment of detainees.
-
- It is a tension described to The Observer by Rahman al-Dulaimy,
39, who was arrested in June last year and held in different detention
centres for four months. Dulaimy, a former Baath party official whose brothers
were in Saddam's secret police, contrasts his treatment by US and British
soldiers.
-
- 'The soldiers took me to their base at the civil defence
headquarters in the al-Shaab district of Baghdad. They kept me alone in
a room with my hands zip-tied behind my back for two days, feeding me only
one spoonful of army rations a day and giving me a total of two glasses
of water. During these two days some interrogators beat me frequently,
flung me around, pried off one of my toenails and stood on my back.'
-
- He went down to al-Basra, to Um Qassr, to al-Nasariya,
then finally to Basra. 'In Basra I was put in a warehouse under the guard
of British soldiers. They treated me well, with dignity and asked many
questions, but not in a violent way. The food was much better there - three
meals each day and good Iraqi food - and when I felt ill they took me to
hospital.
-
- 'The prison was more clean and tidy too, and for that
I don't want to criticise or accuse the people in Basra. I made a kind
of friendship with one of the [British] soldiers who used to listen to
me and help me. I got blankets and slept and sat with no problems. People
did not bother us and were good to us.
-
- 'There were a few Americans there and they did not mix
with the British but lived in an isolated area close to the camps and relations
were not good. The Americans accused the British of being too soft with
prisoners.'
-
- Yet for all of Dulaimy's flattering comparisons between
the British and US, it is also clear from the Red Cross's report that,
while treatment by British soldiers is not of the order of the organised
abuse in some US facilities, the British army has no reason to be complacent
amid repeated reports of beatings.
-
- 'We know that bad things have gone on,' said one official.
'But we believe it is of a different order. We know a few people may have
stepped over the line and they will be dealt with appropriately.'
-
- Rumsfeld at bay
-
- But the question that remains is what is appropriate
for the official who has presided over the whole sorry mess - Rumsfeld.
On Friday, almost five months after he was first told of the scandal, he
appeared before Congress to tell them what he knew, his second career-threatening
interview in a week.
-
- 'I offer my deepest apology,' he said of the soldiers'
behaviour: 'It was un-American.'
-
- In more than six hours of testimony Rumsfeld was contrite
and apologetic, while still defending his corner. One after another Rumsfeld,
Myers and two other senior Pentagon aides expressed their sorrow for what
had happened.
-
- But if the administration was uniform in expressing regret,
behind the scenes it is a different scene. Though many do not expect Rumsfeld
to resign, his future is uncertain. Even Republican congressmen are furious
that he did not inform them of the pictures of the abuse. But sacrificing
Rumsfeld is likely to be seen as too high a political price to pay in an
election year.
-
- With Rumsfeld warning, however, that the 'worst images'
are yet to come, and respect for the US across the world at an all-time
low, many are happy to bet he will not make it to the elections in November.
-
- How the story of abuse unfolded
-
- 1 May 2003 - President George Bush declares end to major
combat.
-
- 30 June - US Army Reserve Brig Gen Janis Karpinski named
commander of all military prisons in Iraq.
-
- 13 October-6 November - Maj Gen Donald Ryder, the US
army's provost marshal general, visits Iraq to review prison operations.
He noticed 'tension' between US military police and intelligence interrogators.
-
- October-November - The abuse documented in the pictures
from Abu Ghraib takes place.
-
- 13 January 2004 - Whistleblower Joseph Darby informs
his superiors of an abuse problem and of the existence of pictures. Rumsfeld
is told within days and informs Bush.
-
- 16 January - US Central Command announces that prison
abuses are being investigated.
-
- 17 January - Karpinski told of serious deficiencies in
her command and a lack of leadership. Karpinski is later suspended from
duty.
-
- 31 January - Maj Gen Antonio M Taguba is named chief
investigator on abuse probe.
-
- January-February - Bush becomes aware of charges of abuse
in Iraqi prisons.
-
- 3 March - Taguba presents findings of abuse.
-
- 13 March - Six soldiers charged with counts ranging from
conspiracy to indecent acts.
-
- April - CBS journalists contact Pentagon about pictures.
General Richard Myers persuades CBS to delay its broadcast.
-
- 28 April - CBS's 60 Minutes broadcasts pictures.
-
- 1 May - Six more US soldiers are reprimanded. Daily Mirror
releases photos of Iraqi prisoners. Members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment
are allegedly involved.
-
- 2 May - Doubts raised over authenticity of Mirror photos.
-
- 3 May - A third British soldier says he saw members of
the regiment beating prisoners.
-
- 4 May - Army claims Mirror images are fake.
-
- 5 May - High court case announced into claims that British
soldiers acted unlawfully by killing six innocent Iraqis in Basra over
the past year.
-
- 6 May - British soldier gives new details of abuse of
jailed Iraqis: prisoners were said to have been beaten by UK servicemen
until their faces were 'like haggises'.
-
- 7 May - Rumsfeld apologises to Congress and warns that
others photos and videos still exist.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1212589,00.html
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