Abu Ghraib Case Study

The current administration and the American public criticize military and civilian intelligence on a daily basis. The multiple insider threat scandals over recent years come to mind, but the atrocities at Abu Ghraib will forever stand as some of the most severe. Three main factors resulted in the amoral treatment at Abu Ghraib, substandard working conditions, conflicting leadership, and a lack of moral code. The gruesome events will forever stain the reputation of the Military Intelligence (MI) Corps.
In Iraq in 2003, the US set its sights on Abu Ghraib to facilitate the rising number of criminals and detainees from combat operations. Saddam Hussein used Abu Ghraib as a prison for his political enemies and criminals within Iraq, which made

it an ideal facility to house operational detainees. The site was inadequate for the required operation. Guantanamo Bay’s policies and practices were used as a ‘starting point’ during the initial stages of standing up the prison force (Jones and Fay, 2004). There were substantial differences between Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib that made these standards unsustainable. For instance, Abu Ghraib’s estimated capacity was 4000 detainees (Davidson, 2004), however, in the fall of 2003, it was over capacity by about 150 percent. This resulted in an inmate to guard ratio of about 111 to one while in Guantanamo, the ratio was one-to-one (Onishi, 2004; Schlesinger, 2004). The prisoners in Guantanamo were described as ‘mostly compliant’ as opposed to Abu Ghraib, where they were described as ‘repeatedly unruly’ (Schlesinger, 2004 p.10). These working conditions, which admitted by the Schlesinger Report (Schlesinger 2004), contributed greatly to the mental stress abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Insufficient leadership played a key role in the amoral treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Initially, Major General Miller and Major General Ryder gave the 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade mixed instructions about their role at Abu Ghraib. Major General Miller and his advisors instructed the MPs to be ‘actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees’ (Taguba, 2004, p.9). Conversely, Major General Ryder and his advisors instructed that the MPs were ‘not [to] be involved in military intelligence supervised interrogation sessions’ (Taguba, 2004 p.9) Additionally, the 205th MI brigade was instructed to conduct all of the supervised interrogations (Jones & Fay 2004). Abu Ghraib was constantly under attack, resulting in an extreme overlap of military security duties and correctional officer responsibilities. In July 2003, Abu Ghraib was attacked 25 times by indirect fire (IDF) and the 800th MP Brigade, provided protection to the prison while also securing thousands of inmates. This resulted in a hectic and unstable working environment. The conflict of orders and duty crossover led to infighting and competition between the MI and MP personnel. This resulted in coordination failures and ‘hostility between the MI and MP personnel over roles and responsibilities’ (Jones & Fay, 2004, p. 46). The leadership of the facility was aware that the crossover of duties violated military doctrine regarding the establishment of Internment/Resettlement (IR) facilities (Mikolashek, 2004). Leadership hired CIA contractors to fill the gaps created by the substandard conditions, but these agents had no government accountability (Avant, 2006). This compromised command and control procedures. This amalgamation of policy violation and leadership failure directly contributed to the Abu Ghraib

scandal.
Despite the substandard working conditions and inept leadership, the real reason the Abu Ghraib incident happened was moral corruption. Not one single policy, regulation, doctrine, or directive directly impacted the soldier’s behavior. The soldiers knew they were not following proper techniques and proceeded to act in an amoral fashion. Major General (MG) Fay and Lieutenant General (LTG) Jones separated the abuses at the prison into two categories. The first category is ‘intentional violent or sexual abuse’ (Jones & Fay, 2004, p. 4), and the second is ‘abusive actions taken based on misinterpretations of confusion regarding law or policy’ (Jones & Fay, 2004, p. 4). The acts included taking nude photos of the prisoners, forcing the prisoners to perform sexual acts, and utilizing military working dogs to instill fear in the inmates. The abuses were conducted separately from scheduled interrogations and were not focused on gaining intelligence information. During the investigation, MG Fay discovered that the abuses took place from 25 July 2003 to 6 February 2004 and involved twenty-seven personnel from the 205th MI Brigade. They admitted to requesting and encouraging, the MP personnel to abuse detainees and often participated themselves.