Tip of an Iceberg

The Military Faces Accountability Issues in Dealing With Prisoner Abuse

By Brenna Rackham

It’s been said that people should believe only half of what they see and nothing of what they read. After his experiences as a defense witness in three of the seven Abu Ghraib abuse trials, sociology professor Stjepan Mestrovic would likely agree.

During Saddam Hussein’s reign, Abu Ghraib was an infamous prison near Baghdad that housed prisoners in vile conditions and permitted torture and weekly executions. After the regime collapsed, coalition forces converted the structure into a U.S. military prison. Americans were outraged when photos that seemed to document the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers were leaked to the public. These images brought a heightened level of publicity to the trials of seven low-level Army soldiers.

Mestrovic, an authority on war crimes, particularly in the Balkans area, had served as an expert witness in previous trials on war crimes. Because of this experience and knowledge, defense attorneys asked him to testify in three of the Abu Ghraib trials: for Javal Davis, Sabrina Harman and Lynndie England. He admits that after initially seeing the photographs, he did not want to defend the soldiers in court. It wasn’t until he read more about the circumstances involved and read the psychiatric reports that he agreed to testify on the soldiers’ behalves, because the situation “was not what the public thinks it was.”

Mestrovic says the photographs and stories were misleading because they failed to expose the conditions and the context surrounding the incidents, which he believes indicate that the military has a greater problem.

He testified that the soldiers’ deviation was inevitable because of the “poisonous environment” at Abu Ghraib and the “social disorganization” that left the soldiers with little supervision. He further testified that officers at Abu Ghraib “knew or should have known what was going on.”

Mestrovic believes that the abuse problem is a systemic issue in the military’s command structure and that higher-ranking officials need to take responsibility for their subordinates. “People blame these so-called few rotten apples for what happened, but they’re not the problem,” he says. “A big portion of the apple orchard is contaminated, and the orchard keepers need to be held accountable.”

Organizations like Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental agency that investigates human rights issues, also recognize that there is a problem, after receiving reports from West Point graduate Capt. Ian Fishback. Cases of abuse were also documented at other bases in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Media coverage of the trials frustrated Mestrovic because he thought that it fueled the public’s misunderstanding of the events that occurred at the prison. He noticed that many reporters stayed in court just long enough to gather information to create a sensational headline. This approach, he says, led to unfair representations of the soldiers in the public eye, particularly for Lynndie England, who was one of the most recognized of the soldiers because of a photo in which she held a leash tied to a prisoner. Testimony during the trial revealed that England never yelled at or physically harmed any detainee and held the leash only under orders.

In an effort to address the issues they think were ignored in the trials, Mestrovic and his graduate assistant Ryan Ashley Caldwell began conducting research for several new projects about the experience. Caldwell will focus her graduate dissertation on the social and cultural implications of the events. She will also aid Mestrovic in writing academic articles and book chapters, as well as a book expected to be completed this year.

Mestrovic and Caldwell hope that they will encourage discussion and change. ‘“It’s a critique of a military system that can be helpful,” Caldwell says. “Best-case scenario, it could address these systemic problems and lead to policy changes to respect basic notions of human rights and how we treat prisoners.”