Abu Ghraib

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Iraq War. At the end of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the administration of President George H. W. Bush decided to try to topple the regime of Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein by nonmilitary means. President Bill Clinton continued this policy. Economic sanctions against Iraq, moderated by the United Nations‐run “oil-for-food” program, impoverished the country, but these measures ironically enriched Hussein, who siphoned off funds from oil sales. A “no-fly zone” established in northern Iraq protected the long‐persecuted Kurds from Hussein's air force. Covert action to unseat Hussein, based in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region and elsewhere, however, failed.

Conservative Republicans in the United States demanded a more aggressive approach to overthrowing Hussein and enhancing U.S. power in the Persian Gulf region. Iraq controlled one of the richest oil basins in the world and had, for centuries, been a strategic crossroads. Under pressure, President Clinton signed the Iraqi Liberation Act of 1998, which allocated funds for training and equipping Iraqi opposition forces.

The election of George W. Bush in 2000 brought into the defense establishment a group of Iraq “hawks,” especially Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy undersecretary Douglas Feith, who had been developing a rationale for direct U.S. military action to overthrow Hussein. After Al Qaeda's attacks of September 11, 2001 and even before the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in December 2001, these advisers shifted the president's sights to Iraq. Under a new “Bush Doctrine,” the United States assumed the authority to wage “preemptive war” against any force, including any foreign nation that endangered U.S. security.

Arguing that intelligence reports indicated that Iraq possessed ”weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) and had ties to Al Qaeda, the Iraq “hawks” called for immediate measures to bring about “regime change.” At the insistence of Secretary of State Colin Powell, the White House asked the UN and other nations to support a military strike to remove Hussein on the claim that Iraq had been avoiding the weapons inspections mandated by the Gulf War settlement of 1991. Influenced by France, Germany, and Russia, however, the UN favored giving weapons inspections another try.

Ignoring the UN, in early 2003 the Bush administration put together a “coalition of the willing” (troops from the U.S. and Great Britain, plus small contingents from Poland, Italy, Spain, and a few other countries). On March 20 it launched an air and ground assault against Iraq. The plan was that the impact from a massive U.S. bombing campaign (a strategy called “shock and awe”) would touch off an insurrection against Hussein; British and U.S. troops would secure oil fields and strategic locations; and Iraqis (perhaps led by exile groups such as Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress) would organize a new pro‐U.S. government. Overriding some projections that estimated at least 300,000 U.S. troops would be needed for such a campaign, General Tommy Franks, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Central Command, led an operation named “Iraqi Freedom” that deployed only one‐third that many forces. On May 1, President Bush proclaimed from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that significant combat in Iraq had ended. This carefully crafted media event quickly rebounded against the President, however, as resistance to the U.S.‐dominated occupation of Iraq expanded.

The United States aimed to create a friendly government and an economic order closely tied to U.S companies in postwar Iraq. On May 11 2003 L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad to direct a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which struggled to administer the country. A multi‐faceted Iraqi insurgency, however, brought rising casualties. Insurgents even began to attack aid workers from the United Nations, the Red Cross, and other international relief agencies. In part, the postwar disorder stemmed from the ethnic, religious, and regional divisions in Iraqi society. Under Hussein, Sunni Arabs who lived in areas around Baghdad had dominated political power. The Shi'a Arabs, a majority of the population who were concentrated in the South, and the northern Kurds, mostly Sunni but non‐Arab, had been persecuted outsiders. They now wanted control. Divisions also emerged between Iraqis who wanted any new government to remain secular (as it had been under Hussein) and those who wanted one grounded on some version of Islamic law. Moreover, anti‐western militants from outside Iraq joined the insurgency. Power struggles among these diverse factions, complicated by the presence of foreign troops who understood little of Iraq's socio‐religious dynamics, threatened to embroil the country in civil war. In December 2003 U.S. troops captured Saddam Hussein, hiding in the city of Tikrit, but, contrary to what some had predicted, the insurgency continued.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration faced new problems resulting from “Iraqi Freedom.” Although the Iraq “hawks” had predicted that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for the U.S. military action, in the fall of 2003, the president had to ask Congress for $87 billion dollars to fund immediate needs. The lack of international support meant that, unlike in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. taxpayers had to foot the bill in Iraq. The CPA's financial management was so poor (or impossible to carry out) that a later audit estimated that billions of dollars could not be accounted for. Oil revenue remained low; insurgents blew up infrastructure nearly as fast as it could be rebuilt; and unemployment among Iraqis soared, further fuelling the insurgency.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's public rationale for the war fell apart. It could not document any clear connection between Al Qaeda and Hussein before the war. Moreover, after nearly two years of looking for evidence of WMD, the Iraq Survey Group of CIA‐appointed experts released a 1500 page report (in April 2005), which concluded that Iraq had ended its chemical weapons program in 1991 and possessed no biological or nuclear weapons. One Iraqi defector, code‐named “Curveball,” who was the main source of U.S. claims about Iraq's mobile biological laboratories, turned out to be a fabricator, a suspicion that high CIA officials had known and passed on to high policymakers with no apparent effect. In response, Congress reorganized all of the disparate intelligence‐gathering divisions of the government into a new umbrella agency, and on April 21 2005 John Negroponte was sworn in as the first new Director of National Intelligence.

U.S. troop size also remained an issue. As the insurgency worsened, the Pentagon dispatched greater numbers of Special Forces teams, which carried out specific, secret missions and whose numbers were not formally included in the overall troop size. In addition, private military contractors played a far larger role than in any past conflict. As the occupation continued and official troop size rose to 150,000, the pace of military recruitment at home fell off sharply. In May 2005 the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that the Iraq war had stretched the military so thin that it might not be able to meet other threats. One‐by‐one, coalition members began pulling their troops and support cadres out of Iraq, bowing to the unpopularity of the war in their countries. Spain withdrew its troops after a March 2004 bombing attack on Madrid commuter trains killed nearly 200 and injured more than 1,200. By 2005 the war was largely a U.S.‐U.K. effort. Even in Great Britain, widespread popular opposition to the deployment of British troops in Iraq by the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair intensified after a July 2005 attack on London's subway system, apparently by Islamic terrorists, left more than 50 dead and many injured.

The nature of the U.S. occupation also became a matter of controversy. Abuse of detained Iraqis became particularly egregious at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, and in the spring of 2004 the U.S. news media published graphic photos of mistreatment. Subsequent trials of lower level military personnel stoked a domestic debate over the use and definition of “torture” and over whether the abuse had stemmed from low‐level “rogue” elements or from a climate of harsh interrogation set at higher levels.

Meanwhile hoping to calm the insurgencies, U.S. policymakers intensified efforts to create a new Iraqi‐run government. In June 2004 the CPA was replaced by an interim authority headed by Dr. Iyad Allawi, former leader of a dissident exile group, the Iraqi National Accord.

The American public was sharply divided over the wisdom of going to war in Iraq. Critics charged the administration with misleading the country into war and shifting the cost to future generations while the current one enjoyed tax cuts. The president's defenders warned that dissent endangered national security. Such disputes came into the presidential election of 2004. Pre‐election surveys indicated that nearly three‐quarters of potential voters reported at least “some” confidence in Bush's ability to protect the nation, one of the few issues on which his approval rate topped 50 per cent. Many voters continued to believe, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Hussein possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and had allied with Al Qaeda before September 11. Bush narrowly defeated his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry, by 286 to 251 electoral votes, in large measure because of the President's perceived strength on national security issues.

In January 2005 an election in Iraq chose a 275‐member national assembly charged with establishing an interim government and drafting a federal constitution. The election was held under the tightest security imaginable—thousands were imprisoned and the identities of most of the officials running for office were not known, except by their political affiliation, for fear they would become targets of insurgents. The Sunni population generally boycotted the elections (or were afraid to vote for fear of insurgents' retaliation). Shi'a and Kurds, happy to break Sunni dominance, voted in large numbers. In addition, roughly 250,000 Iraqi expatriates cast absentee ballots. In the spring of 2005, the newly elected assembly (dominated by Shi'a and Kurds) chose Ibrahim al'Jaafari as Prime Minister and struggled to put a cabinet in place.

It was ironic that George W. Bush, who in the 2000 presidential campaign had denounced Democratic attempts at “nation-building” abroad, had undertaken the greatest “nation‐building” challenge in U.S. history. As the war entered its third year, the president made optimistic proclamations about the spread of “freedom” to Iraq, and the U.S. tried to train Iraqi security forces to help maintain order. Still, the insurgency and factional fighting remained virulent, and U.S. commitments of men and money showed no sign of diminishing. By July 2005, the war had claimed the lives of nearly 1,800 U.S. troops (with 13,000 more injured). Estimates of Iraqi civilians killed ranged from 5,000 to 37,000. Costs approached $200 billion, contributing to a severe U.S. government deficit. With Americans in sharp disagreement over how the war had been handled and over whether future gains could be worth such costs and risks, popular support for the war dropped below 40 per cent.
See also Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with the Middle East.

Bibliography

Bob Woodward , Bush at War, 2003.
Seymour M. Hersh , Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, 2004.
John Keegan , The Iraq War, 2004.

Emily S. Rosenberg

Detainee Cases, argued 28 April 2004, decided 28 June 2004. Hamdi etal. v. Rumsfeld (2004), 124 S.Ct. 2633 (2004), decided by vote of 6 to 3, O'Connor for plurality, Souter and Ginsburg concurring in part and dissenting in part, Scalia, Stevens, and Thomas in dissent; Rasul etal. v. Bush (2004), decided by vote of 6 to 3, Stevens for the Court, Kennedy concurring, Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas in dissent; Rumsfeld v. Padilla (2004), decided by vote of 5 to 4, Rehnquist for the Court, Kennedy and O'Connor concurring, Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer in dissent.

In three separate cases brought by individuals held in custody by the U.S. government, the Supreme Court provided the most definitive statement yet of what powers are afforded to the president to hold so‐called enemy combatants. On 11 September 2001, the al Qaeda terrorist network hijacked four commercial airliners with the goal of steering them into prominent American targets, including the World Trade Center towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Nearly three thousand people were killed in those attacks. One week later, Congress passed a resolution entitled “Authorization for Use of Military Force” (AUMF). The AUMF vested the president with the authority to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks” or “harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” In one of the more controversial applications of this policy, U.S. government officials indefinitely detained many individuals captured during military operations waged in Afghanistan and Iraq. Numerous others were seized within the United States itself as part of the Bush administration's ongoing “war on terrorism.”

The government refused to label many of these detainees as either “Prisoners of War” (which would entitle them to various protections granted under the Geneva Convention, including the right to be returned to their home countries at the conclusion of hostilities) or as ordinary criminal defendants (which would entitle them to the full panoply of procedural protections listed in the Bill of Rights). Instead, the government identified the detainees as “enemy combatants,” a classification accorded to those alleged to be “part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners.” Two U.S. citizens (Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla), two Australians, and twelve Kuwaitis filed three separate lawsuits against the U.S. government challenging their detentions as violations of due process. Specifically, they complained that as “enemy combatants” they had never been formally charged with wrongdoing, permitted to consult counsel, or been provided with access to courts and other tribunals.

The most significant of the three cases, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, considered whether the U.S. military could indefinitely detain an American citizen who had been arrested while allegedly fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. Because Hamdi was captured in an enemy combat zone, the military offered no factual inquiry or evidentiary hearing allowing him to rebut the government's assertions about his activities. In Hamdi, executive authority was upheld in one respect: A majority of Supreme Court justices conceded that Congress, through passage of the AUMF, had indeed authorized the president as commander‐in‐chief to detain U.S. citizens as “enemy combatants.” Such action taken by the federal government was not unprecedented: the justices specifically referenced the Nazi saboteurs case, Ex Parte Quirin (1942), where the purpose of such detentions had been to prevent the captured individuals (including at least one U.S. citizen) from returning to the field of battle and taking up arms once again. Any such detention of enemy combatants could be considered an “important incident of war.”

Still, six of the nine justices voted to vacate the lower court judgment that Hamdi could be held without a more “searching review” of the facts underlying his detention. Writing for a plurality of four justices, Sandra Day O'Connor argued that neither the AUMF nor the Constitution authorizes indefinite or perpetual detention for purposes of interrogation without some form of judicial review. According to O'Connor: “[A] state of war is not a blank check when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens.” Hamdi was thus entitled to receive notice of the factual basis for his classification, as well as a fair opportunity to rebut the government's factual assertions before a neutral decision maker.

The other two detainee cases raised more technical legal issues concerning enemy combatant lawsuits. In Rasul, fourteen foreign nationals held at the United States military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, similarly challenged their detentions as unconstitutional. The U.S. government had argued that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction to consider such challenges because the foreign nationals had been captured abroad and were being maintained in military custody outside the United States. In his opinion for the Court, Justice John Paul Stevens ruled that because the United States exercises complete jurisdiction and control over the Guantanamo Base, aliens held at the base were, just like American citizens, entitled to invoke federal court jurisdiction over their claims. In Padilla, an American citizen held as an “enemy combatant” at a navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, challenged his detention by filing suit in New York City, where he had originally been brought as a material witness concerning the 11 September attacks. Declining to reach the merits of Padilla's claim, the Court held that Padilla would have to resubmit his petition for relief in the federal district court of South Carolina, where he was being detained.

Only the first post–11 September terrorism cases to reach the Supreme Court, the first three detainee cases left many questions unanswered. In particular, no five justices could agree as to precisely what sort of legal process Hamdi and the other enemy combatants should receive. Unable to secure a majority in Hamdi for her suggestions that the presumption of innocence and normal hearsay rules be suspended, Justice O'Connor's opinion necessarily left it up to the district court to fashion “a fact‐finding process that is both prudent and incremental.” Even more significantly, while revelations about the harsh treatment and abuse of some prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had already reached the Court at the time the detainee cases were decided, challenges to the legality of such measures would await judgment at a future time.

David A. Yalof

Abu Ghraib or Abu Ghurayb , infamous prison located in the town of Abu Ghraib, c.20 mi (32 km) W of Baghdad, Iraq. Built by British contractors in the 1960s, it occupies c.280 acres (113 hectares) and is comprised of five separate compounds. During Saddam Hussein 's regime, Abu Ghraib was believed to house thousands of political and other prisoners, many of whom were tortured and executed there.

After U.S. forces captured the prison during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was placed under the command of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who led the 800th Military Police Brigade, and in Aug., 2003, was reopened and used to hold criminals and later those suspected of terrorist activities. In September military intelligence officers assumed control of parts of the facility, and the following month Col. Thomas Pappas, head of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, assumed command of the prison. In Oct., 2003, International Red Cross inspectors detected "serious violations" of human rights at Abu Ghraib, and the Army's provost marshal reported grave problems there and at other prisons. As early as April and May, however, the Red Cross and United Nations had raised concerns about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces.

In the wake of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 (see 9/11 , U.S. President George W. Bush stated (2002) that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to terrorist detainees, who were deemed "unlawful combatants" instead of prisoners of war ; he also insisted that they would be treated humanely. However, the government sanctioned the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" on real and suspected members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, including such methods as waterboarding (designed to induce a feeling of drowning), which the U.S. military had long considered a war crime. These techniques seem to have been adapted for use at Abu Ghraib, where the military police were encouraged by intelligence officers to "loosen up" suspects prior to interrogation.

In Jan., 2004, reports by soldiers of abuse at Abu Ghraib led to an Army investigation headed by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who detailed widespread abuses there in a Mar., 2004, report. Investigations of Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi detention facilities were also conducted and reported by the International Red Cross in Feb., 2004. Beginning in April, reports in the U.S. media explicitly revealed to the public the extent of the physical and sexual abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees, many of whom were civilians who had not been charged; photographs showed the abused, mostly naked Iraqis, some of whom were accompanied by smiling U.S. soldiers. A worldwide outcry followed the release of the photos, and many believe they increased support for the insurgents in Iraq. Later, videotapes of various abuses were also discovered; those and other photographs not seen by the public were described as showing cruel, sadistic, and inhuman acts, including rape, sodomy, and murder.

An Aug., 2004, Pentagon report from a panel chaired by James Schlesinger reported "deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and discipline" at Abu Ghraib. Subsequently, Karpinski was demoted, Pappas reprimanded and fined, and 11 soldiers convicted of crimes. Only one officer, a reserve lieutenant colonel who had commanded the prison's interrogation center, faced court martial, but he was eventually cleared of all charges. The U.S. Defense Dept. rewrote its handbook on interrogation to ban many of the so-called enhanced techniques that had been sanctioned for use in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, but a 2007 executive order by President Bush continued to permit the CIA to use harsh methods in its interrogation of terror suspects.

Bibliography: See M. Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (2004); S. Strasser, ed., The Abu Ghraib Investigations (2004); K. J. Greenberg, J. L. Dratel, and A. Lewis, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (2005); J. Jaffer and A. Sing, Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (2007); P. Gourevich and E. Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (2008); studies by S. M. Hersh (2004), D. Levi Strauss and C. Stein (2004), and T. McKelvey (2007); R. Kennedy, dir., Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (documentary film, 2007), E. Morris, dir., Standard Operating Procedure (documentary film, 2008).