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New Yorker: Abu Ghraib abuses were 'de facto US policy' Nick Juliano Photographer wanted to expose 'what the military was allowing to
happen' Like many of the soldiers in charge of the detained Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman had little experience running a prison. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris report, she and others in her Army Reserve unit didn't stick out at the prison, "where almost nothing was run according to military doctrine."
The article, which appears in the March 24 issue of the New Yorker, has not been posted online, but the magazine has posted additional photos and videos to augment the report.
Gourevitch and Morris trace Harman's evolving reactions to the horrors she witnesses -- "ricocheting from childish mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification to despair" -- through interviews and excerpts she sent home from the prison. In one October 2003 letter to Kelly, the woman Harman called her wife, the young MP writes what could now be seen as a grim foreshadow to the war in which American soldiers are still fighting and dying. "These people will be our future terrorist," she writes one night after witnessing interrogators poking one detainees genitals with a stick and handcuffing another to his top bunk. "Kelly, its (sic) awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its (sic) wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong." Harman and other soldiers told of taking prisoners' blankets and leaving them naked in bare cells while temperatures dipped near freezing. The New Yorker writers relay witness accounts of bones being found inside Abu Ghraib incinerators and prisoners being submerged in ice-filled trash cans. She also told of women and children being held at the prison, according to the magazine.
The photos, Harman said, were intended
to "expose what was being allowed ... what the military was allowing
to happen to other people."
One of the most iconic images from Abu Ghraib is actually among the most innocuous, Harman tells the magazine. It shows a hooded prisoner wearing a prison blanket with arms outstretched and attached to wires. The wires were not live, so there was no danger of electrocution for the prisoner, known as Gilligan to the soldiers guarding him. Subsequent investigations revealed that Gilligan was not who the Army's Criminal Investigative Division thought he was -- he was simply an innocent cab driver. His interrogators appeared to have little regard for how he was treated before that information came to light, though, Gourevitch and Morris report.
Another of Harman's photos shows her
smiling and giving a thumbs-up gesture next to the body of a dead Iraqi
man, a suspected insurgent named Manadel al-Jamadi, wrapped in ice. Harman
was told the man died of a heart attack, but a subsequent autopsy revealed
he died of "blunt force injuries" and "compromised respiration,"
presumably at the hands of a CIA interrogator.
After the photos were made public, Harman and several of her fellow low-ranking reservists faced courts martial and were punished with reductions in rank and bad-conduct discharges. Only one person ranked above staff-sergeant faced charges, but was acquitted of criminal wrongdoing. No one has ever been charged with abuses that were not photographed, and charges against Harman related to her al-Jamadi photographs were thrown out (the CIA interrogator never faced charges, either). Harman became increasingly unnerved by what she witnessed, and said she would simply try to forget whatever had happened the day before with each new morning. She was asked how the other MPs could participate in the abuses without similar reservations. "They're more patriotic," is all she could say.
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