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

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