Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq: Torture #1 - starring Lindy England

"This was Abu Ghraib jail. Everything that had gone wrong with the occupation since the previous heady spring, when Bush had stood on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner proclaiming 'Mission Accomplished', was summed up in the chaos and brutality of the old prison west of Baghdad.

All of the post-invasion problems in Iraq — poor planning, clumsy leadership, strategic confusion, counterproductive tactics, under-manning, heavy-handedness — came together in this horrible place.

As the insurgency grew and the need for 'actionable' local intelligence became more desperate, thousands of Iraqis were rounded up in indiscriminate sweeps and dumped on Abu Ghraib for interrogation. By October 2003 there were almost 7,000 of them — guarded by just 360 Military Police reservists.

Orders were received by these ill-trained jailers that the gloves were to come off. A senior officer from Guantanamo was flown in from Cuba to give advice on softening up prisoners for questioning.

What developed was a policy of institution-alised abuse which brought shame on America, undermined its supposedly benign purpose and vastly strengthened the insurgency by its cruelty and unfairness.

In the first 18 months, 30,000-40,000 Iraqis were locked up in Abu Ghraib for weeks to be frightened, humiliated and sometimes tortured. It was later estimated that 90 per cent of them were of no intelligence value whatsoever."

Source

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Legofestos are re-enacted from source images, in this case the photographs taken by the soldiers involved of abuse and torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

Dahr Jamail photo gallery
Lindy England