Detained, September 2008 /

I got into Abu Ghraib prison through the back door. It was spring of 2004 and the world had just seen those shocking photos that graphically illustrated the abuse of detainees by American soldiers and civilian contractors. I had just covered the first operation in Fallujah, photographing the abortive U.S. assault on the insurgent-held city. I’d been embedded with a Marine unit there, and I came to know its commander. One of his other companies was detached to patrol the perimeter of Abu Ghraib. I asked if he wouldn’t mind if I joined his troops based inside the prison walls. He said sure – they hadn’t seen much press inside.

I had been photographing detentions since the 2003 invasion. It was clear things were going very wrong in Iraq from very soon after US troops took the country. By July, the Americans were being attacked across the country and were rounding up large numbers of Iraqi men whenever they raided a town. I covered one operation in which U.S. soldiers arrested every single adult male in the village. They bound them with plastic handcuffs, tagged them with labels around their necks, and then put sandbags over their heads before lifting them onto a flatbed truck for transport.

For posterity, some of the soldiers posed with the prisoners, grinning for trophy photos – a gross violation of the Geneva Conventions. The soldiers had little idea what they were doing nor what would happen to these Iraqi men once they sent them up the chain for processing.

Abu Ghraib prison had gained notoriety long before the Americans arrived. If you were an Iraqi and you got on Saddam’s bad side that is where you ended up. Prisoners were routinely tortured before being put to death in Saddam’s gallows. When American forces occupied Iraq, they were at first reluctant to use the same facility, not wanting to associate themselves with its dark past. Problem was, it was the only prison facility that had not been looted down to its electrical wiring and copper pipes. As U.S. forces rounded up more and more Iraqis, it became clear that they not only had to use Abu Ghraib, but expand it. There was no other place available.

When I arrived, the jail was broken down roughly into two sections. There was the infamous “hard site,” built by Saddam, where American soldiers, six months earlier, had photographed naked Iraqis piled into pyramids and terrorized them with snarling guard dogs. Dangerous and “high value detainees” were held there. The other part of the prison was called “Tent City”; it was comprised of fenced-in areas where prisoners were distributed into sections separated by concertina wire. The Americans often knew very little about the individual histories of each detainee, meaning hardcore insurgents and criminals were mixed in with innocent Iraqi men who had been rounded up in village sweeps. Tent City had outdoor showers, which overflowed leaving large pools of soapy, stagnant water. The guards during my first visit were transport troops and artillerymen, hastily re-trained as military policemen since there was a shortage of actual MPs.

My presence in the prison came as a great surprise to Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Abu Ghraib, who had previously run U.S. military operations in Guantanamo Bay, and who had been tasked with “cleaning up” Abu Ghraib after the scandal. He ordered all journalists kept out of the facility, but since I was already living inside with the Marines, he agreed to meet me instead of kicking me out. I convinced him any pictures I took would only improve their image from what the world had seen so far, even if my photos were negative. He allowed me to stay – but with two conditions: I could not interview detainees, nor show their faces in a recognizable way. He said that way I would not abuse their rights under the Geneva Convention…

I followed these rules to the letter. I stayed in the prison for several weeks and was allowed to come back a half dozen times over the course of the next few years. The prison evolved and improved over time. Prisoners were moved from the squalid tent compounds to newly constructed ones with air conditioning, concrete foundations, and proper bathrooms with showers. Hardcore insurgents and murderers were separated from the general population and put into high-security zones. Well-behaved detainees were granted weekly family visits inside the prison. They were allowed brief moments of heart-wrenching embraces with their kin, followed by 10 minutes of conversation through plexiglass partitions, supervised by American guards.

On one trip, I asked to visit the high-security zone of solitary confinement cells, where I heard screaming coming from a tent. My military escort let me check it out. A guard peeled back the tarp to reveal a prisoner strapped into a “humane restraint chair.” He was throwing his head back and forth and screaming, “Allah, Allah.” I asked what he had done and the guard told me that he had just come on shift, but the prisoner’s chart said that he had earlier been placed in the chair for “disrespecting a guard,” which probably meant spitting on him. Guards told me prisoners could be kept in the chair for two hours before being returned to their cells. Later, when my photo was published prominently in an American newsmagazine to illustrate a story about torture, the military launched an investigation against me. I was cleared, since the prisoner’s face was not visible.

In 2006, Abu Ghraib was finally closed. All the prisoners were shifted to Camp Bucca in the south, near the Kuwait border, or Camp Cropper near the Baghdad International Airport. Cropper was new and could house more than 3,000 prisoners, including the entire juvenile prison population. The Americans opened a school there, dubbed the “House of Knowledge,” where underage prisoners attended regular classes and were also educated by Islamic teachers in a less radical form of Islam. At Cropper, detainees would get a new hearing every six months to review their cases, but they had no way to gather new evidence that might support their innocence. Still, military officials claimed that many detainees were released as part of the review process.

However, despite improvements to the prisons, there are still more than 20,000 prisoners currently detained by the U.S. military in Iraq. The Iraqi court system, set up by the Americans, has simply been unable to cope with the huge number of cases in any way that could be considered just or timely. Many, and some military officers admit that most, of the prisoners are innocent Iraqis, who were swept up in mass raids. They have languished inside the prisons for months, sometimes years, before their names are cleared and they get released.

The torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib brought disgrace to the U.S. military and ceded any high ground the Americans may have had over the insurgency. The scandal forever tarnished America’s image in Iraq and around the world. However, for me, the continued and agonizingly slow pace of justice is the greatest tragedy of all. I wonder how many innocent men have become insurgents while languishing in Iraqi cells.

Visuals / Essays / John Moore