The Context of the Abu Ghraib Prison Abuse Scandal

Iraq in the summer of 2003 had been chaos. There was really no set plan of what the United States Army would be doing there and there was very little intelligence. American soldiers arrested any Iraqi citizens for basically anything they could think of. Those arrested would be sent to prison to be interrogated but there was little intelligence coming out of it. The soldiers were not trained to interrogate people, and there were only a few hundred soldiers for the thousands of detainees held. Iraqis, however, were rewarded for any crime against the U.S. troops. This began the spur of many car bombings, grenades thrown, and even snipers. The Americans had been in denial of an insurgency in Iraq until on August 7, when the Jordanian embassy was bombed then just a few days later, the UN was bombed. This was proof that there was in fact an insurgency in Iraq.

In September 2003, the secretary of defense went to Iraq to observe the situation and found that American soldiers had little intelligence on the situation in Iraq. Soldiers began arresting more citizens for absolutely nothing. Donald Rumsfeld decided to allow harsh interrogation techniques to get more intelligence out of the Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, which was a prison outside of Baghdad. Rumsfeld signed a document that stated that Abu Ghraib could now conduct interrogations in a way that Guantanamo had conducted interrogations. This included allowing isolation, deprivation of light, twenty hour interrogations, and exploitation of phobias.

Many instances of abuse were reported among the army from this doctrine. In one case, some soldiers put an Iraqi general into a sleeping bag and sat on him then proceeded to roll him on the floor. Another incident was when a man who's son was recently killed by American soldiers and buried was forced to dig up the body. On September 11, 2003, one Iraqi detainee had been handcuffed in an isolation cell, and a soldier came in and shot him for no apparent reason. Many of the attacks on the Iraqi citizens were not for a reason. One soldier admitted that, "everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration, you show up and the PUC tent," where they would beat detained Iraqis, nearly to death.

In late April 2004, photos of the harsh conditions of Abu Ghraib went public. The army risked losing support of the American public when these pictures were shown. The response of one commander about the photos was that "guards were trained to guard people, not to interrogate".