During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News on this day in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
The George W. Bush administration claimed that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents and not indicative of US policy. This was however disputed by humanitarian organizations including the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, who stated that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a wider pattern of torture and brutal treatment at American overseas detention centres, including those in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.
Documents popularly known as the Torture Memos came to light a few years later. These documents, prepared in the months leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States Department of Justice, authorized certain enhanced interrogation techniques (generally held to involve torture) of foreign detainees. The memoranda also argued that international humanitarian laws, such as the Geneva Conventions, did not apply to American interrogators overseas. Several subsequent US Supreme Court decisions, including Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), have overturned Bush administration policy, ruling that the Geneva Conventions do apply.
In response to the events at Abu Ghraib, the United States Department of Defence removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty. Eleven soldiers were charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. Between May 2004 and April 2006, these soldiers were court-martialled, convicted, sentenced to military prison, and dishonourably discharged from service. Two soldiers, found to have perpetrated many of the worst offenses at the prison, Specialist Charles Graner and PFC Lynndie England, were subject to more severe charges and received harsher sentences. Graner was convicted of assault, battery, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty; he was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and loss of rank, pay and benefits. England was convicted of conspiracy, maltreating detainees and committing an indecent act and sentenced to three years in prison. In 2004, President George W. Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized for the Abu Ghraib abuses.
-Wikipedia
Photo Caption –One of the many iconic photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal: Lynndie England forcing an inmate, known to the guards as “Gus” to crawl and bark like a dog on a leash – Public Domaine