Group items tagged

Investigations and other resources A look at investigations into Abu Ghraib; plus, other reports, legal documents and further reading about prisoner abuse and torture.

The Abu Ghraib prison scandal first exploded into public light in April 2004 when reports and photographs of torture were revealed in a daring New Yorker article written by Seymour Hersh. At a conference recently held at Stanford, entitled Thinking Humanity After Abu Ghraib, Hersh and a panel of experts came together to think through the legal, political, psychological, and ethical implications of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and also to weigh the consequences of the US government's evolving approach to handling enemy combatants and suspects taken during the war on terror. You can now find all of the presentations on iTunes (which you can download for free). Here is the lineup:

Wars have a way of reducing themselves to moments, single memories, tiny episodes. Here, pictures have a thousand-to-one advantage over words. The 10-year Vietnam War was summed up in four photographs: Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the instant in 1968 when South Vietnamese Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executed a Viet Cong prisoner on a Saigon street. Nick Ut snapped a picture of Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese girl, fleeing naked down a highway in Vietnam after a napalm attack in 1972. Ron Haeberle took a picture of the limp bodies of the My Lai massacre victims after they were shot in 1968. John Filo caught Mary Ann Vecchio screaming over the body of a fellow student slain by National Guardsmen during a war protest at Kent State University in Ohio in 1970. These photographs, it could be argued, tilted the whole balance of public opinion against the war. What occurred on the battlefield was rendered largely irrelevant by what occurred when certain photons massed themselves into images and rushed into the retinas and minds of the American public.

Read the Report After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account. -Maj. General Antonio M. Taguba (USA-Ret.), preface to Broken Laws, Broken Lives In PHR's new report, Broken Laws, Broken Lives, we have for the first time medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of men who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. These men were never charged with any crime.