In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu
Ghraib, twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of the world’s most
notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living
conditions. As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is
possible—were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in
twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more than human holding
pits.
In the looting that followed the regime’s
collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was
stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows,
and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells
cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center
added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners,
however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and
teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random
military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely
defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of
“crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected
“high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces. Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.
READ MORE: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib
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