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The photos from Iraq's Abu Ghraih prison shocked the world. This humiliation and torture as carried out by members of the American military. But it wasn't just A FEW BAD APPLES.
Aired November 16,
2005 at 9pm
on CBC-TV

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REPORTER: Gillian Findlay
PRODUCER: Morris Karp

WEB EXCLUSIVE
John Woo
John Yoo was a member of the legal team that developed a new policy
for the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.

Read more of his interview with the fifth estate.

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THE PHOTOS
The images that the world came to know as the Abu Ghraib photos come from, not one, but many cameras. Soldiers who worked in the prison burned pictures on cd’s and traded them amongst themselves. They were even used as screen savers on office computers.

In late April 2004, the CBS News program 60 Minutes II broke a story involving abuse and humiliation of Iraqi inmates by U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

CBS News, at first, delayed its report on the story for two weeks on a request from Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Myers told CBS the story could hurt the American war effort and jeopardize lives.

CBS held off from going to air. It broadcast the story only after The New Yorker magazine's Seymour Hersh was due to publish the revelations about the photographs in that magazine. Hersh's "Torture at Abu Ghraib" was posted by the magazine on April 30, 2004 and was based in large part on information taken from the Army, then, unpublished internal investigation on the abuses – The Taguba Report .

hooded prisoner
One of the photos showing abuse at Abu Ghraib. (AP Photo/Courtesy of The New Yorker)

See others here. WARNING: Some of the photos are graphic.

An accompanying photo, one that quickly became iconic, showed a hooded Iraqi prisoner balanced on a box, wires attached to his fingers and toes.

Hersh followed up with articles in the magazine's next two issues , explaining how a covert Pentagon program, focused on the hunt for al Qaeda, had been expanded to the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners.

He also outlined how the Department of Defense mishandled what became known as the Abu Ghraib scandal.

His third story showed how a decision approved by Rumsfeld to expand the highly secretive interrogation operation led to the abuse scandal.

 

 

 

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