Abu Ghraib justice ends with enlisted soldiers
By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON - Tuesday's acquittal of US Army Lieutenant-Colonel Steven Jordan on
charges related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuses means that no US officers have
been found criminally responsible for the mistreatment of prisoners at the
Iraqi prison near Baghdad.
During Jordan's week-long court-martial hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, his
lawyers argued that he was not directly responsible for training and
supervising the soldiers who abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison from
mid-September to late December 2004.
Two generals who investigated the abuses found that Jordan offered "tacit
approval" for abuses committed by military police
under his supervision in November 2003, which was "the causative factor that
set the stage for the abuses that followed for days afterward".
However, the jury of nine military officers was not convinced by prosecutors or
the generals' investigation and sided with Jordan's lawyers, who argued that
their client was nothing more than a manager at the prison and that
interrogation techniques were the responsibility of Colonel Thomas Pappas, the
highest-ranking officer at the prison, and Captain Carolyn Wood, leader of the
Interrogation Command Element unit.
Jordan was found innocent of charges that he was responsible for training and
supervising soldiers who had been convicted of abusing prisoners, as well as
charges that he was personally involved in supervising the use of forced nudity
and the use of dogs to intimidate detainees during interrogations.
He was, however, found guilty of a separate charge of disobeying an order not
to speak with third parties about the investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Prosecutors have recommended that he be reprimanded and fined one month's pay.
"The message they are trying to send is that [the abuse] all stopped at the
lowest level in the chain of command and that it didn't have anything to do
with command," said Georgetown law and philosophy professor David J Luban. "I
think that there's maybe a second message there as well. It's a little odd that
the one thing Jordan's been convicted of is talking about the investigation. He
refused to go along with a cover-up."
An article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker in June contained interviews with
Major-General Antonio Taguba, who admitted that he had suspicions that Jordan
and his subordinates were receiving directions in interrogation techniques from
sources higher in the chain of command. Taguba, who wrote the initial 2004
report on abuses at Abu Ghraib, was reassigned and retired this year.
The verdict means that no officers will be held criminally responsible for the
abuses, leaving most of the blame to fall on 11 low-ranking soldiers who
appeared in a series of digital photos that showed detainees being intimidated
by dogs, wearing hoods, being forced to pose naked in pyramids, and being
forced to participate in sexual acts.
"This leaves a curious record in prosecutions coming out of Abu Ghraib," wrote
human-rights advocate and Harper's magazine blogger Scott Horton.
"Accountability, it seems, is something which applies to enlisted personnel and
non-commissioned officers who make the mistake of being caught in photographs.
The officers who were supposedly in charge of the facility and giving them
guidance escape without serious punishment."
This trend, Horton argued, goes all the way to the top. "After the Abu Ghraib
scandal, a commission composed of close friends of secretary of defense
[Donald] Rumsfeld and headed by former secretary of defense [James] Schlesinger
issued a report which exculpated Rumsfeld without ever interviewing him or
examining any evidence of his involvement, or that of others in the Office of
Secretary of Defense, in the affair."
Indeed, reports of similar interrogation techniques at the US detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, does suggest that higher-ranking officers or
Defense Department officials may have authorized some, if not all, of the
techniques used on prisoners.
"I've talked to interrogators who said, 'Don't think Abu Ghraib was an
aberration,'" said Luban.
Military police at Abu Ghraib's Tier 1A, where detainees of high intelligence
value were held, have stated that they were instructed on what techniques to
employ on detainees by higher-ranking interrogators and civilian contractors.
A US Justice Department investigation has not yet produced any charges against
civilian contractors who were present at Abu Ghraib or instructing soldiers who
guarded detainees.
"What the jurors said is that this guy was not in the chain of command so maybe
command responsibility cannot be used against him. But the fact that he's the
only officer who's been charged ... I would say this is largely a whitewash,"
said Luban. "It's all part of this myth that what we're doing in the
interrogation of detainees is careful and humane, and if bad stuff happens it's
bad apples at the bottom of the barrel."
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