By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 6, 2004; Page A01

The collection of photographs begins like a travelogue from Iraq. Here are U.S. soldiers posing in front of a mosque. Here is a soldier riding a camel in the desert. And then: a soldier holding a leash tied around a man's neck in an Iraqi prison. He is naked, grimacing and lying on the floor.

Mixed in with more than 1,000 digital pictures obtained by The Washington Post are photographs of naked men, apparently prisoners, sprawled on top of one another while soldiers stand around them. There is another photograph of a naked man with a dark hood over his head, handcuffed to a cell door. And another of a naked man handcuffed to a bunk bed, his arms splayed so wide that his back is arched. A pair of women's underwear covers his head and face.

The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

This group of photographs, taken from the summer of 2003 through the winter, ranges widely, from mundane images of everyday military life to pictures showing crude simulations of sex among soldiers. The new pictures appear to show American soldiers abusing prisoners, many of whom wear ID bands, but The Post could not eliminate the possibility that some of them were staged.

The photographs were taken by several digital cameras and loaded onto compact discs, which circulated among soldiers in the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit based in Cresaptown, Md. The pictures were among those seized by military investigators probing conditions at the prison, a source close to the unit said.

The investigation has led to charges being filed against six soldiers from the 372nd. "The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence," Taguba's report states.

For many units serving in Iraq, digital cameras are pervasive and yet another example of how technology has transformed the way troops communicate with relatives back home. From Basra to Baghdad, they e-mail pictures home. Some soldiers, including those in the 372nd, even packed video cameras along with their rifles and Kevlar helmets.

Bill Lawson, whose nephew, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick, is one of the soldiers charged in the incident, said that Frederick sent home pictures from Iraq on a few occasions. They were "just ordinary photos, like a tourist would take" and nothing showing prisoner abuse, he said.

"I would say that's something that's very common that's going on in Iraq because it's so convenient and easy to do," Lawson said of troops sending pictures home. He added that his nephew also mailed videocassettes "of him talking into a camcorder to [his wife] when he was going on his rounds."

But in the case of prisoner abuse, the ubiquity of digital cameras has created a far more combustible international scandal that would have been sparked only by the release of Taguba's searing written report. Since the "60 Minutes II" broadcast, pictures of abuse have been posted on the Internet and shown on television stations worldwide.

The photographs have been condemned by U.S. military commanders, President Bush and leaders around the world. They have sparked particularly strong indignation in the Middle East, where many people see them as reinforcing the notion "that the situation in Iraq is one of occupation," said Shibley Telhami, who holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland.

The impact is heightened by religion and culture. Arabs "are even more offended when the issue has to do with nudity and sexuality," he said. "The bottom line here is these are pictures of utter humiliation."

Lawyers representing two of the accused soldiers, and some soldiers' relatives, have said the pictures were ordered up by military intelligence officials who were trying to humiliate the detainees and coerce other prisoners into cooperating.

"It is clear that the intelligence community dictated that these photographs be taken," said Guy L. Womack, a Houston lawyer representing Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., 35, one of the soldiers charged.

The father of another soldier facing charges, Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., also said his son was following orders. "He was asked to take pictures, and he did what he was told," Daniel Sivits said in a telephone interview last week.

Military spokesmen at the U.S. Central Command in Qatar and at the Combined Joint Task Force 7 headquarters in Baghdad referred requests for comment about those claims to Col. Jill Morgenthaler, a U.S. military spokeswoman. Morgenthaler could not be reached by telephone yesterday and did not return requests to comment by e-mail. Requests to speak with Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- who commands the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Germany, and whose troops were stationed at Abu Ghraib -- were declined by a U.S. military spokesman for the Army's V Corps in Heidelberg, Germany.

Yesterday, in Fort Ashby, W.Va., two siblings and a friend identified Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, as the soldier appearing in a picture holding a leash tied to the neck of a man on the floor. England, a member of the 372nd, has also been identified in published reports as one of the soldiers in the earlier set of pictures that were made public, which her relatives also confirmed yesterday. England has been reassigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., her family said. Attempts to reach her were unsuccessful. The military has not charged her in the case.

England's friends and relatives said the photographs must have been staged. "It just makes me laugh, because that's not Lynn," said Destiny Goin, 21, a friend. "She wouldn't pull a dog by its neck, let alone drag a human across a floor."

England worked as a clerk in the unit, processing prisoners before they were put in cells, taking their names, fingerprinting them and giving them identification numbers, her family said. Other soldiers would ask her to pose for photographs, said her father, Kenneth England. "That's how it happened," he said.

Soon after CBS aired its photographs, Terrie England said she received a call from her daughter.

" 'Mom,' she told me, 'I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,' " Terrie England said.

The pictures obtained by The Post include shots of soldiers simulating sexually explicit acts with one another and shots of a cow being skinned and gutted and soldiers posing with its severed head. There are also dozens of pictures of a cat's severed head.

Other photographs show wounded men and corpses. In one, a dead man is lying in the back of a truck, his shirt, face and left arm covered in blood. His right arm is missing. Another photograph shows a body, gray and decomposing. A young soldier is leaning over the corpse, smiling broadly and giving the "thumbs-up" sign.

And in another picture a young woman lifts her shirt, exposing her breasts. She is wearing a white band with numbers on her wrist, but it is unclear whether she is a prisoner.

Staff writers Michael Amon, Scott Higham and Josh White contributed to this report.

Experts: We're hard-wired to be hooked by horror

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

This may not be the most violent period in history. It may just seem like it. People are bombarded, as never before, with images of terror, torture and degradation, in living color, 24/7.

The reaction to this cascade of images — mutilated American bodies in Fallujah, abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Nicholas Berg beheaded on video — raises troubling questions about Americans' relationship with violence. (Related story: What to tell the kids when the good guys run amok)

After all, box office hits, Nielsen stars and best-selling video games spring from entertainment laden with gore, sadism and humiliation. "In today's media-saturated environment, where we are pelted with many compelling images, we need to be shocked before we perk up and pay attention," says Matthew Felling, media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C. "Anything that violates your eyes — nudity, violence, crassness — cuts through the buzz."

Yet viewers say they're horrified.

"We say, 'How perverse! How awful can you get!' and 'Hey, look at this one!' " says author Maggie Scarf, who specializes in mental health problems.

But some experts fear that the immersion in violent imagery will ricochet in people's psyches.

"It desensitizes us to violence. It makes us scared. And decades of research show it can facilitate violence in the viewer," says Frank Farley, former president of the American Psychological Association.

The effect of this hits much closer to home than Iraq, says Lenore Walker, a psychologist with NOVA Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale.

Ordinary people may grow less tolerant during conflict "with anyone who bugs him, road rage, any little stressors," Walker says.

The repercussions of witnessing violence, even vicariously, can "go beyond the brain, into your body, your whole nervous circuitry," Scarf says. "It can make you feel helpless, that life is out of control and there is no possible response to what's going on."

So why don't people just turn off the news, choose different entertainment, shut out the images?

•The draw is biological, says Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at California State University in Los Angeles.

From the time humans lived in caves until they moved into subdivisions, "we're innately attracted to things that have a threat potential. We track them, instinctively orienting toward the catastrophic or dangerous," he says.

•It's cultural habit.

Long after Romans cheered kill-or-be-killed gladiators, Gladiator became a global box office smash. People have been telling stories of murderous rage, genocide and war since Homer sang of Troy, says Yahoo "Movie Mom" critic Nell Minow of McLean, Va.

And people indulge in violent images for entertainment or political persuasion because fundamentally, they know that what they see is unreal, distant or indirect.

"Even someone who has seen Dawn of the Dead will still be moved and horrified by documentary footage from a war zone," Minow says. "It really is different if you know that it's real."

•It's effective.

Where a violent image is missing, it is supplied to prod voters to the polls, to pack crowds at rallies or rev up donations. Look at clashes over abortion rights in which each side holds placards — coat hangers recalling back-door abortion days on one side, mutilated fetuses on the other.

•It may be necessary, especially in a democracy, in which people need information to make choices.

"The fact is that war is a terrible, terrible thing, and everyone is on the front lines," Minow says. "Now that everyone is embedded through photography, we will have to be more honest with ourselves about the risks we are taking and the sacrifices we are making."

This echoes responses by many newspaper and Web site readers surveyed last month by the Associated Press Credibility Roundtables project.

More than 13,642 readers of 29 news outlets were asked whether media should have published the photo of Iraqis cheering as the burned bodies of two Americans hung from a bridge in Fallujah.

The majority, 58%, said yes.

The debate over the line between information and overkill raises another question. "Is it more healthy to have a less realistic vision of the world?" Felling asks.

"If the barometer for (using violent images) is whether Americans would be comfortable with them over their cereal in the morning, what happens when the world doesn't pass the cereal test?"

Contributing: Karen S. Peterson

No matter what happens over the coming weeks and months, as the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal plays out in courts-martial, congressional hearing rooms and the press, those photographs aren't going away. From the moment they first emerged on a "60 Minutes II" telecast late last month and promptly shot around the globe, the digital snapshots of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners in various ways held the public imagination in a fierce, wrenching grip.

Not since Vietnam have widely publicized images registered in such an intimately disturbing way. By depicting the smiling, relaxed faces of soldiers in command of naked, huddled and often faceless figures, the photographs bypass our socialized filters and strike to some appalled and agitated place in all of us.

At once casual and formally contrived, static and sadistic, the Abu Ghraib photographs are, in some way, horribly compelling. Like Goya's pitiless etchings of "The Disasters of War" (1809-14) or Picasso's lurid "Guernica" (1937), they send a peering light into the darkest, most perverse scripts of power and submission that play out in the human subconscious.

"Narratives make us understand," writes critic Susan Sontag in "Regarding the Pain of Others," her 2003 study of war and other violent images. "Photographs do something else. They haunt us."

How is one to comprehend the powerful dark cloud these particular photographs conjured? And then what to make of the thunderclap that followed, with the grainy, premonitory video stills that freeze-frame those moments before the Nicholas Berg beheading?

To a war that has been with us for months, the world's eyes have been forcibly pried open. We are all witnesses, willingly or not, to a collective haunting at the precipice of human behavior. These unguarded images have accomplished that in a way no other dispatches from Iraq have.

There is, first of all, the vivid and visceral shock of seeing what's behind the prison walls at Abu Ghraib. Abuse, torture -- call it what you will: Graphic depiction of captors forcing their captives to strip, pose and play-act in sexual scenarios violates the basic moral and ethical grounds on which the Geneva conventions rest.

Darker deeds are suggested as well. One photograph shows a hooded and robed prisoner perched on a wooden box with arms outstretched and electric- shock wires attached to both hands. There are allegations (and reportedly photographs) of grimmer sexual tactics, including sodomizing detainees with inanimate objects, simulated sex, coerced masturbation and rape threats; beatings; and possible homicide at Saddam Hussein's recommissioned house of terror.

The fact that the perpetrators are Americans, smirking and flashing thumbs up to their buddies' cameras, twisted, contorted and quickly politicized the reaction. Critics of the war and its aftermath found compelling, confirming evidence of a toxic foreign policy. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, defending his troops and his job, insisted that the sins of a few must not be an indictment of the many. Psychologists, human rights workers, religious thinkers, editorialists and election-year politicians weighed in with their own carefully measured perspectives.

And then there was the catharsis line of reasoning from talk radio pundit Rush Limbaugh. "You ever heard of emotional release?" he rhetorically asked his audience. "You heard of the need to blow some steam off?"

The photographs, as photographs do, finally say more than anyone can to amplify, appropriate or explain away their meaning. Even more than film or video, as Sontag says, photography has "the deeper bite" when it comes to etching memories. Our minds apparently work that way, filing fixed tableaux to register events both great (the flag raising at Iwo Jima) and small (a child's cheeks puffed out over birthday candles).

The shots at Abu Ghraib fall somewhere in between, which may contribute to their vexing fascination and unshakable persistence. Taken in a casual way for as yet unclear purposes, the photographs have none of the grit, grandeur or tenderness that mark conventional wartime photography.

Here, instead, we have the leering, frat-party prank of Pfc. Lynndie England leaning in close to a naked prisoner's genitals and grinning at the camera as she pops up both thumbs. In another image, U.S. Army Spc. Charles Graner stands, arms folded, behind a heaped pyramid of crouching naked bodies. Another female American solider completes the picture, her own smiling face positioned just above some faceless Iraqi's hunched back.

The jovial mood is jarring and discordant. So is the offhand, snapshot look of the photos. Some are carefully, woodenly posed, like shots of tourists in front of a roadside monument or Grand Canyon view. Others, such as the blurry view of tightly leashed dogs snarling at a cringing naked man, are the hurried candid action shots of a camera hungry to catch it all.

The nudity and sexual content of the photographs clearly complicate and confound the public's reactions. In a recent commentary, Tikkun magazine's Michael Lerner argued that the sexual nature of the humiliations at Abu Ghraib transformed the Iraqi prisoners into powerless innocents in many eyes. Lerner lamented that Americans seem disinclined "to identify with the victims of torture when it does not have this sexual dimension." He went on to speculate on the sadomasochism and staged homosexuality photographed and their connection to the repressed "fantasy life of many many Americans."

In both deeply private and broadly cultural ways, these prison photos do reverberate. There's something oddly classical, almost allegorical about the deployment of the nude bodies in some of the images. All those limbs and torsos and agonized postures unintentionally invoke noble paintings like Poussin's "The Rape of the Sabine Women" (1636) and Rubens' "The Consequences of War" (1638). Then, too, there are the echoes that any photographs of unclothed prisoners touch off. From the Civil War to World War II to Cambodia and Vietnam, the vulnerability of the prisoner is underscored by near or total nakedness.

None of this fully accounts for the insinuating force of these photographs. There's an obscenity to the Abu Ghraib catalog that goes beyond the content of the images themselves. Their mere existence and wide-scale distribution cast an implicating stain. Writing of a very different kind of photographed violence, Sontag notes, "Intrinsic to the perpetration of this evil is the shamelessness of photographing it."

Sontag's subject here is a 2000 touring exhibition of American lynching photographs from 1890 to 1930. What happened at Abu Ghraib cannot be compared to the lawless murder of black men over all those decades. No moral equivalence is intended or should be drawn. But our experience through photographs of the prison abuse is uncomfortably familiar. The shameless dash and carefree bravado of these images are intrinsic to the sense of evil unleashed.

That the release of these deeply unsettling photographs was followed by the grisly videotaped murder of Nicholas Berg seems dreadfully fateful, regardless of the actual motive of that killing. None of this will -- or should -- fade from our consciousness soon. These photographs will be an American family album of our haunted memories.

New Iraqi prison photos surface

United States prison guards are smiling and giving the thumbs-up over the body of an unknown prisoner in Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail in new pictures broadcast by US media.

The photos, broadcast on Thursday, show Army Specialist Charles Graner grinning with his thumbs up as he peers into the camera over an unidentified body lying on a black body bag.

A second almost identical picture was taken of Specialist Sabrina Harman over the same body.

Both photographed soldiers are among seven US guards at Abu Ghraib charged with prisoner abuse.

One of them, Jeremy Sivits, was sentenced to one year in jail on Wednesday in Baghdad, in the first court martial over the prisoner abuse scandal.

CNN said the two new photographs, which have not been authenticated, surfaced following Sivits' courts martial in Iraq.

Numerous photographs of US soldiers posing before naked, hooded and often handcuffed Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib have made the round of international media since last month.

Hundreds more have been shown only to US lawmakers and kept by the Pentagon as evidence in upcoming courts martial.

The Pentagon on Wednesday informed a Senate committee by letter that it had located another disc with 24 digital photographs of "apparent abusive acts by US forces".

Thirteen of the pictures on the disc "appear to be images already seen on international television media," the Pentagon said, adding that it was not clear whether the images were genuine or fakes.

The widespread abuse - which the Red Cross has said is tantamount to torture - has severely sullied US reputation in Iraq and the entire Arab world.

In prison abuse scandal, 'following orders' defense just might work

Thursday, May 20, 2004 Posted: 4:23 PM EDT (2023 GMT) Thursday, May 20, 2004 Posted: 4:23 PM EDT (2023 GMT)

(AP) -- It is the "defense of superior orders," in the jargon of military justice.

It didn't work for the Nazis at Nuremberg, or for Army Lt. William Calley, who claimed he was just following orders when he directed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

But it could help the Army guards accused of abusing Iraqis inside the Abu Ghraib prison avoid long sentences, and just might get them off the hook entirely, if they can prove there were such orders and establish who gave them, experts in military justice say.

"The defense of superior orders is no defense if the accused knows the act is illegal," explained Michael Noone, a retired Air Force colonel and military attorney. Soldiers are required to disobey unlawful commands, he said, but the "big issue is going to be whether or not the order was obviously illegal."

Pictures taken of nude Iraqis being sexually humiliated in the same prison where Saddam Hussein's regime tortured thousands of opponents have infuriated America's enemies and allies alike. President Bush characterized the abuse as the failings of a few renegade soldiers and promised that those responsible will be quickly punished.

One of the seven guards, who tearfully pleaded guilty in Baghdad Wednesday and will testify against the others, has said that the mistreatment was not authorized by superior officers. "If they saw what was going on, there would have been hell to pay," Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits told military investigators.

But most of those accused said they were just following the orders of intelligence officers and civilian contractors who told them to humiliate the prisoners and thereby make them more willing to reveal information.

In letters home to his family, Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick said that he was told "this is how military intelligence wants it done," and that when he questioned his battalion commander about the harsh inmate conditions, he was told "to do as he says."

The treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib "was being controlled and devised by the military intelligence community and other governmental agencies, including the CIA," said Guy Womack, an attorney for Spc. Charles Graner Jr., who was arraigned in Baghdad along with Frederick and Sgt. Javal Davis. "There's going to be plenty of evidence that they orchestrated all of this."

The defense just might work, said Tim Naccarato, the former chief of the criminal law division of the Army's Judge Advocate General School.

"If these lower-ranking military policemen can make the case they were told to do these things, instructed to do these things, they were cooperating with intelligence to soften up these prisoners so they would provide more information, they have the ability to be found not guilty based not so much on `I was following orders' but based on the theory that a criminal act requires not only an act but criminal intent," Naccarato said.

Some members of Congress want to investigate whether the Bush administration erected a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment by announcing in 2002 that al Qaeda detainees did not qualify for protection by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits mistreatment.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld dismissed that assertion as "garbage," but Sen. John Warner, R-Virginia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, insisted that questions remain about "how those in positions of responsibility either ordered, encouraged or authorized -- or maybe looked the other way."

The superior orders defense will be extremely difficult to assert in the courts-martial because the accused must prove who gave them the orders.

"Certainly, the lawyers they're going to have their work cut out for them," said Eugene Fidell, a defense attorney and president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Military law experts could not recall a single case in which the superior orders defense completely cleared a defendant, but said it often works to reduce prison time.

"It may not absolve you, but it would certainly mitigate what you've done," said David Sheldon, a former Navy attorney.

Davis, 26; Frederick, 37; and Graner, 35, face charges along with Spc. Megan M. Ambuhl, 29; Pfc. Lynndie R. England, 21; and Spc. Sabrina Harman, 26.

Graner can be seen grinning broadly behind a pile of naked Iraqis in one photograph; others show England holding a naked prisoner by a dog leash and Ambuhl posing with detainees on leashes. Harman is seen smiling over a pile of naked prisoners. Davis is said to have stepped on the toes and fingers of prisoners. Frederick is accused of forcing prisoners to masturbate and form naked human pyramids.

A teary-eyed Sivits, 24, took some of the most explosive photographs. He pleaded guilty to four reduced abuse charges -- the equivalent of misdemeanors -- and is expected to testify against others.

The following-orders defense, also known as the Nuremberg defense, got its modern-day start in 1945, after some of the 22 Nazis indicted for war crimes claimed they were carrying out orders during Germany's decade-long drive to kill millions of Jews. Eleven were sentenced to death, three were acquitted and the others were sent to prison.

In Vietnam, the defense did not help Calley, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1971 for ordering his Charlie Company to kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Still, some believed he was made a scapegoat for an undisciplined Army, and President Nixon ordered him released after three years.

The defense may be more successful in the prison-abuse scandal than in cases involving genocide or murder. There is no dispute that murder is wrong, and that an order to commit murder would be an unlawful order. But laws governing proper interrogation tactics are more open to interpretation.

It is unclear whether fellow soldiers on the court-martial juries would be sympathetic toward the accused. Many serving in Iraq may blame the scandal for making their tour more dangerous.

Then again, they also know how hard it can be to disobey a potentially illegal order, said David Sheldon, a Washington-based military attorney.

"Ask any American what the Geneva Convention requires in the gray area of intimidation, or ask a young, unsophisticated private guarding a prison while their buddies on the outside are being shot," Sheldon said. "You're going to do exactly what these people did if told to."

Robert Weitzel: Photos of dead and wounded a rebuke to Bush's war in Iraq

The images in these photographs plumb the depths of humankind's capacity to inflict evil upon those who have been demonized. The evil we see in the photographs of April is not a product of race, "ism" or religious belief, however. It is a product of our humanity that has followed us from the cave. The ghost of Cain has dogged our steps through every age and on every continent.

By any standard, the photographs of April should stand throughout history as a testament of the evil unleashed on the Iraqi people by an American president, his cadre of right-wing ideologues, and a country made willing the old-fashioned way, with lies and fear and appeals to patriotism.

The photographs of April 2003 were deemed too disturbing to Americans' sanitized sensibilities and too damaging to the war effort to be published.

But make no mistake. These photographs have been published in other parts of the world and the images on these prints are indelibly fixed in the minds of those who live in fear and hatred of the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive war.

There are no prison cells or prisoners in the photographs of April 2003. No dog leashes. No silk panties. No sexual humiliation. No grinning American soldiers. There is no one who looks like us to blame in the photographs of April 2003. There are only the tortured victims, both dead and unmercifully alive. And they look different than we do, as victims of war always must.

There is a photograph of a father - a farmer perhaps - holding out the bloody pieces of his child to the camera lens. His face is tortured by grief and the insanity of impotent rage. He is screaming, "Cowards! Cowards!" He wants someone to bear the blame. But no one can or will. His child's dismemberment is collateral damage, which falls outside the lawful parameters of guilt.

There is a photograph of a boy. He is lying naked on a hospital gurney. The flesh from his chest to his waist is charred black. One can only assume he is tortured by each breath as his burnt-crisp skin cracks and rips and separates with each inhalation. His sidelong glance at the camera is full of pain and anger.

There is a photograph of a young girl who chose to wear a turtleneck and jumper on the morning of her last day alive. She is lying on a blanket and looks like any other child taking an afternoon nap except that the top half of her head is missing, and torn, jagged pieces of hairy scalp hang limply over an empty brain case. Her brain is gone. The organ that gave her the ability to choose is drying in the sun-baked dust. Torture can no longer reach her.

There is a photograph of an adult-sized coffin. Inside the coffin are the bodies of three babies. One baby's feet have been blown off. One baby died of a head wound. One baby is just dead, a pacifier hangs on a string around its neck. The bodies are so small that there is easily room in the coffin for another baby. Maybe they are waiting for a brother or sister or cousin to claim the space. Maybe the tortured parents if they are alive want to hold their baby for just a few moments more.

There is a photograph of the body of a young man being washed in preparation for burial. The body is naked except for a small towel at its midsection. There is no apparent wound. Maybe a single bullet killed him. The father has raised his son's hand to his lips in a last tortured kiss. A brother cradles the young man's head close to his own whispering his goodbye and, perhaps, promising vengeance, as brothers will.

There is a photograph of a woman. She is alive. A scarf covers her head. Her face is covered by her hand in a way recognizable to anyone who has ever been consumed by grief. Though the photograph cannot show it, her shoulders seem to heave as she gasps for breath in her mourning. Her tortured soul asks only one question. "Why?"

Why, indeed. Why did the photographs of April 2003 fail to incite a riot of moral outrage on the scale of the Abu Ghraib photographs of April 2004? The answer to that question and to the question asked by all tortured souls travels, I suspect, with the ghost of Cain.

Robert Weitzel lives in Middleton. E-mail: debraw@chorus.net. Most of the photographs described above can be accessed at: www.robert-fisk.com and www.thenauesa.com.

LONDON -- Four British soldiers will face courts-martial on charges of abusing prisoners in Iraq, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said Monday.

He said the charges include allegations of "assault, indecent assault which apparently involves making the victims engage in sexual activity between themselves, and a military charge of prejudicing good order and military discipline."

In a written statement to the House of Lords, he did not name the defendants or give the date of the alleged offenses, but said there was "photographic evidence" pertinent to the case.

The government said last week that military police are investigating 30 cases of alleged abuse, civilian deaths and injuries in Iraq. A further 37 probes had been completed and no further action was being taken.

Americans Object to War Images Online

ANICK JESDANUN

Associated Press

NEW YORK - Half of Americans object to the online availability of graphic war images, though millions have actively sought them out, a new study finds.

In a report released Thursday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project also found a major cultural divide: Men, Democrats and younger Americans were more likely to approve of having such images on the Web.

Television, newspapers and the Web sites of mainstream media outlets generally refrained from using the most graphic images of Iraqi prisoner abuses and the killings of Nicholas Berg and other Americans in Iraq.

But photos and even video could be readily found elsewhere - at anti-war sites, Web journals, the Drudge Report and discussion boards frequented by sympathizers of terror groups.

According to the study, 24 percent of adult Internet users, or 30 million people, have seen such graphic images online, and 28 percent of those people actively sought them out. That comes out to more than 8 million active seekers.

Yet overall, Americans disapprove of the postings by a margin of 49 percent to 40 percent. Another 4 percent say approval depends on circumstances, while the rest wouldn't say or have no opinion.

A third of the Americans who saw the images - some 10 million - regret doing so.

Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia University online media professor who is not connected with the study, said Americans aren't always prepared for what they click, even though many links carry warnings about the images' graphic nature.

"Our experiences on the Internet are built upon experiences with previous media," he said. "What's graphic in most people's minds is a slasher movie or a Sopranos episode with a beheading. Those don't prepare you for how graphic (these images) could be."

Lee Rainie, director of the Pew study, said Americans generally embrace the principle that more information is better, "but once they encounter real-life applications of that principle, in many cases, they are unhappy."

MSNBC.com cloaked the more disturbing images with a black "curtain" carrying a warning before visitors click. But the most graphic images were left off the site entirely, consistent with NBC broadcast guidelines, said Dean Wright, the site's editor in chief.

"We want our Web site to be a place where the mainstream news consumer can feel safer," he said.

He said a small number of visitors complained that the site was censoring the reality of war, just as a small group complained that even the moderate images were too much. But he said visitors were overall happy with MSNBC's judgment calls.

According to the random telephone-based survey of 2,200 adult Americans, conducted May 14 to June 17:

_Internet users approve of the images' availability by 47 percent to 44 percent, which is within the margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Only 29 percent of non-users approve having the photos, while 58 percent disapprove.

_Fifty-three percent of men approve, compared with 29 percent among women.

_Fifty-two percent of adults under 30 approve, while only 31 percent of those 50 or over do.

_Fifty-two percent of Democrats and 53 percent of independents were OK with having the images, compared with 42 percent of Republicans.

ON THE NET

http://www.pewinternet.org

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/news/9109194.htm

Posted on Fri, Aug. 20, 2004

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Doctors, medics played role in Iraq prison abuse, UM prof says

ABU GHRAIB:A bioethicist's study finds evidence that doctors and medics covered up homicides, hid beatings.

BY EMMA ROSS

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in the Lancet medical journal.

In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet. "Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."

The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.

A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon's own investigation of the abuses.

"Many of these cases remain under investigation and charges will be brought against any individual where there is evidence of abuse," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, U.S. Army spokesman for prison operations in Iraq.

In a related matter, two military officials in Washington said Thursday that a high-level Army inquiry will cite medical personnel who knew of abuse at Abu Ghraib but did not report it up the chain of command. The inquiry also will criticize senior U.S. commanders for a lack of leadership that allowed abuses to occur, but finds no evidence they ordered the abuse, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Photographs of prisoners being abused and humiliated by U.S. troops in Iraq have sparked worldwide condemnation. Although the conduct of soldiers has been scrutinized, the role of medical staff in the scandal has received relatively little attention.

"The detaining power's health personnel are the first and often the last line of defense against human rights abuses. Their failure to assume that role emphasizes to the prisoner how utterly beyond humane appeal they are," Miles said.

He said military medicine reform needs to be enshrined in international law and include more clout for military medical staff in the defense of human rights.

Miles gathered evidence from U.S. congressional hearings, sworn statements of prisoners and soldiers, medical journal accounts and news reports to build a picture of physician complicity, and in isolated cases active participation by medical personnel in abuse at the Baghdad prison, as well as in Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.

In one example, cited in a sworn statement from an Abu Ghraib prisoner, another prisoner collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating. Medical staff revived the prisoner and left, allowing the abuse to continue, Miles reported.

Depositions from two prisoners at Abu Ghraib described an incident in which a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to sew up a prisoner's wound.

A military police officer reported a medic inserted an intravenous tube into the corpse of a prisoner who died while being tortured to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital, Miles said.

At prisons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, "Physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke or natural causes without noting the unnatural (cause) of the death," Miles wrote.

He cites an example from a Human Rights Watch report in which soldiers tied a beaten prisoner to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated he died of "natural causes... during his sleep." However, after media coverage, the Pentagon changed the cause of death to homicide by blunt force injuries and suffocation.

In his article, Miles dismissed Pentagon officials putting the blame for the abuse on poor training, understaffing, racism, pressure to procure intelligence and the stress of war.

"Fundamentally, however, the stage for these offenses was set by policies that were lax or permissive with regard to human rights abuses, and a military command that was inattentive to human rights," Miles concluded.

photo credit and caption:

Sgt. Charles Graner of the 372nd Military Police Company poses with the body of a dead Iraqi man packed in ice in this undated photo, released by ABC News May 19, 2004 and allegedly taken by Sgt. Charles Frederick at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq. According to testimony obtained by ABC from Spc. Jason Kennel, who is not accused of wrongdoing, the man died while in custody of U.S. authorities at the prison. Graner is among four soldiers facing hearings for the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison at the U.S. military court at Taylor Barracks in Mannheim, southern Germany, beginning Monday, Aug. 23, 2004. (AP Photo/ABC News)

Abu Ghraib Report Faults Top Officials

Rumsfeld, Senior Pentagon Officials Share Blame for Prisoner Abuse Scandal, According to Report

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON Aug. 24, 2004 — The Pentagon's most senior civilian and military officials share a portion of blame for creating conditions that led to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, according to a new report.

The report, by a commission appointed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, was briefing Rumsfeld on its findings and recommendations Tuesday in advance of a Pentagon news conference to release the details. The commission was headed by James Schlesinger, a former secretary of defense.

A person familiar with the report said it implicitly faulted Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by finding that those responsible for the military prison system in Iraq were operating under confusing policies on allowable interrogation techniques. The person discussed some aspects of the report on condition of anonymity.

The question of how high responsibility for the abuse goes continues to be one of the central unanswered questions in the scandal and it is key to the ongoing criminal cases against several low-ranking military police soldiers charged with mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

The U.S. military judge hearing the Abu Ghraib abuse case in Mannheim, Germany, said Tuesday that prosecutors have until Sept. 17 to file charges against top military intelligence commanders or he would consider forcing them to testify under a grant of immunity.

The judge, Col. James Pohl, also rejected a request from the attorney for Spc. Javal Davis for Rumsfeld and his chief deputy for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, to submit to an interview, but said the request could be brought back if the defense can fill in some of the gaps.

"There's got to be some links in that chain," Pohl said.

Davis and the five other military police accused of abusing prisoners at the prison near Baghdad insist they were following orders from military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. A seventh soldier, Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., pleaded guilty May 19 to taking pictures of naked prisoners and was sentenced to a year in prison.

None of the investigations has found that Rumsfeld or Myers ordered or encouraged any mistreatment of prisoners. In May, Rumsfeld told the House and Senate that as secretary of defense "I am accountable" for the events at Abu Ghraib and he issued "my deepest apologies" to the Iraqis who were abused.

Also faulted by the Schlesinger commission is Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the top field commander in Iraq at the time of the reported abuses last fall.

Sanchez also takes a portion of the blame in a separate Army investigation which looked specifically at the role of military intelligence soldiers. That probe has been completed and is expected to be publicly released as early as Wednesday.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan, with President Bush at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas, had no immediate comment on the Schlesinger report.

"I think we'll wait until we see the full report," McClellan said. "I fully expect the president will be briefed on any and all reports from these investigations."

The Army report, initially headed by Maj. Gen. George Fay, says at least two dozen lower-ranking military intelligence soldiers, as well as civilian contractors, were responsible for the abuses, which were depicted in photographs and videos taken by U.S. soldiers.

The New York Times said in Tuesday editions the report also blames Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib for faulty leadership. She has been faulted in other investigation reports but has denied knowing about any abuses until they become public.

The Schlesinger commission interviewed Rumsfeld twice during its investigation, which began in May. The three other commission members are former defen

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