It was a Charlie Foxtrot,
without a doubt.
Without a doubt.
I've never seen anything like it.
I never thought that I would
ever see American soldiers
so depressed
and morale so low,
and it was just unbelievable.
Everything about it.
You got to consider
yourself dead.
And if you come back,
you're just a lucky bastard.
You know, but if you're there and
you consider yourself already dead,
you can do all the
shit you have to do.
I wouldn't recommend a
vacation to Iraq anytime soon.
JANIS KARPINSKI:
When Saddam's sons Uday
and Qusay were killed,
there was a great deal
of information seized.
This was a key operation.
We no longer have to
worry about Uday and Qusay,
but we need to use this
information to find Saddam.
After that big event,
the Secretary of Defense came to visit us.
He wanted to see the prison.
He wanted to see the progress.
He wanted to...
Of course, every trip out there by anybody
included a trip to the torture
chambers and the hanging facility.
So we scheduled
different events.
The first stop was
Saddam's hanging chambers.
We were preparing to
continue his walking tour
and he said,
"No. I don't want to go anywhere else.
"Let some soldiers come over here
and we'll take some pictures.
"I don't need to see anything
else in the prison."
And then he left.
Enter General Miller,
the guru of interrogation and
obtaining actionable intelligence.
And he arrives the day
after Rumsfeld's visit.
He was gonna "Gitmo-ize"
the operation.
Contract interrogators,
military people that had
experience in Afghanistan
or down at Guantanamo Bay,
they all arrived
after Miller's visit.
He gives an in-brief.
He's not afraid to say,
"You have to treat
the prisoners like dogs.
"They have to know
that you are in control."
Cell block 1A
transfers to the control
of the military intelligence
brigade commander, Colonel Pappas.
Cell block 1B,
several days later,
under the control of Colonel
Pappas and away from me.
They're going to use
those cells exclusively
for higher value
security detainees.
Abu Ghraib
was becoming exactly
what General Miller said
he wanted to make it
the interrogation
center of Iraq.
SABRINA HARMAN:
"October 1, 2003. First day at the prison.
"It's 9 p.m.,
and we can hear shots.
"No white lights are
allowed to be on at night.
"No leaving the
building after dark.
"I hope we
ain't here long.
"We drove in and two
helicopters were landing,
"taking prisoners off.
"I'm scared of helicopters
because of the dream.
"The tail was swaying
back and forth.
"Then a huge flame shot
up, and it exploded.
"I have a bad feeling
about this place.
"The prison is called Abu Ghraib.
"There's a chamber where
these men were hung.
"I'm not sure about ghosts,
but it is freaky.
"I'm hoping to be home
for Christmas, or soon after.
I love you. Sabrina."
We're coming up the road,
we see this huge structure.
It's like six
football fields.
Then we seen this sign saying like,
"Fallujah," right there, next town over.
We're like, "Yo, we right in
the heart of it right now."
We get inside,
it's nothing but rubble,
blown-up buildings
from shelling,
dogs running all over
the place, burnt remains.
The stench was unbearable.
Urine, feces, body rot.
It was just disgusting.
You didn't want to touch anything.
And then we had to move
into prison cells ourselves.
You're walking around in your compound.
Next thing you know,
(IMITATES MISSILE SOUND)
Boom.
Incoming. Everyone's yelling,
"Incoming." Like, boom,
"Incoming, incoming!"
You got to run.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Goddamn, you're getting mad,
'cause it happens over and over
and over and over and over again.
After a while, the fear goes
away and you just get angry.
It's like, "Damn it,
can we shoot back?"
One pierced the roof of the
prison right to the floor,
but it didn't explode.
Boom! Ting-ting-ting.
Land on the floor.
Soldiers in there are like, "Holy crap."
(EXPLOSION)
Well, they ain't say, "Holy crap."
Now, you know what they said.
When you walk from the
main portion of the prison,
and you get to 1A1B,
they already had intelligence
detainees down there.
That's when I saw
the nakedness.
I'm like, "Hey, Sarge,
why is everyone naked?"
You know.
"Hey, that's the MI.
That's what the MI does.
"That's the MI thing.
I don't know."
"Why these guys have
on women's panties?"
He's like,
"This is to break them."
There's guys naked,
guys in women's panties,
guys, you know, handcuffed
in stress positions,
you know, in isolation
cells, no lights, no windows.
You open the door, turn the light on.
"Oh, my God, Allah."
Click, turn the light off, close the door.
It's like, "Whoa, what is that?"
It was like,
"Hey, that's Military Intelligence.
"You know, just
stay out their way."
And from then on, I was like,
"Something's not right here."
I was working out
of operations.
Some nights I'd get
off work at 10:00.
Some nights I'd be
working all night.
Depends on how many
prisoners we got in.
Sometimes we'd
get up to 200
that evening and I'd be there
till 6:00 the next morning,
and then I had guard duty at 6:00
a.m. and I'd get off guard duty,
get a couple hours sleep
and then go back to work.
Usually I'd go over to the hard
site after my work day ended.
You know, it'd just be
Megan and Graner and Freddy,
maybe up in the office watching
a movie on his laptop.
Some nights
I'd go up there
and there would be different people
in stress positions here and there
and got them up on
MRE boxes doing squats
or running up and down
the tier, or something.
We thought it was unusual,
and weird and wrong,
but when we first got there,
the example was already set.
That's what we saw.
I mean, it was okay.
The first thing
that I noticed were...
Was this guy.
He had underwear on his head
and he was handcuffed
backwards to a window.
And they were pretty much
asking him questions.
That's the first time
I started taking photos.
I wrote a letter home to Kelly,
who is my wife.
HARMAN: "October 20th, 2003.
"I can't get it
out of my head.
"I walked downstairs to find the
taxi cab driver handcuffed backwards
"naked with his underwear
over his head and face.
"He looked like Jesus Christ.
At first I had to laugh,
"so I went and grabbed a
camera and took a picture.
"One of the guys took my asp
and started poking at his dick.
"Okay. That's funny.
Then it hit me.
"That's a form
of molestation.
"I took more pictures now
to record what's going on.
"Not many people know
this shit goes on.
"The only reason I want to be
there is to get the pictures
"to prove that the U.S.
is not what they think.
"But I don't know if I could take it mentally.
What if it was me in their shoes?
"I thought I could
handle anything.
"I was wrong."
If I come up to you and I'm
like, "Hey, this is going on,"
you probably wouldn't believe me
unless I had something to show you.
So if I say, "Hey, this is going on.
Look, I have proof,"
you can't deny it.
(CAMERA CLICKING)
Gus was the prisoner
with the leash.
We thought he was maybe
part of the Iraqi army,
because he was always,
like, you know,
"Saddam's going to come back
and kill all of you. I hate you."
And all this stuff.
He had all this anger.
And so we thought he was
someone maybe pretty important.
And then we found out the history
of his arrest and why he was there.
And he had gotten drunk
and beat someone up.
He was just
a regular prisoner,
like we'd find at one of our
county jails, or something.
Once he came over to the
hard site, he stopped eating.
And we had to pump him, you
know, five to eight IV's a day
or bags of IV fluid a day
just to keep him alive.
Gus was being verbally threatening
and not following any directions.
Graner put
the leash on him.
And then he crawled out
on his own after that.
And then he handed
the leash to Lynndie.
And that's when
he took the pictures.
And then the guy got up
on his own after that.
They were trying to say
that she was dragging him,
which never occurred.
I was there, and I
know it didn't happen.
It may have been unorthodox,
but he came out of the cell
and he didn't hurt anybody,
and he didn't get hurt.
Graner had the camera
in his cargo pocket.
And he asked me and Ambuhl
to come downstairs with him.
When he opened
the door,
Gus was in there,
he was naked.
He didn't want to stand up,
so that's why he brought
the tie-down strap.
So he put it around his neck.
So he's gonna make him crawl out.
And I guess he got about
halfway out of the door.
Graner told me to hold onto the
end of the tie-down strap, so I did.
I just grabbed it.
You can see the slack on it.
People said that
I dragged him,
but I never did.
(CAMERA WHIRRING)
Graner took three
pictures back-to-back.
You can see Megan
on the side standing.
He would've never had me standing
next to Gus if the camera wasn't there.
I'm a 95 to 100 pound
female, short female, at that,
holding a strap that's attached
to his neck. I'm dominating him.
Maybe that's what
Graner was going for.
Maybe it was for documentation,
maybe it was for his own amusement.
I don't know. I don't know
what was going through his head.
But he took it.
In all the years
as a cop,
I'd say over half of
all my cases were solved
because the criminal
did something stupid.
Taking photographs of these things
is that one something stupid.
BRENT PACK:
They gave me 12 CDs
and said, "There's thousands
of pictures from Abu Ghraib.
"We want you to find
all of them that depict
possible prisoner abuse
"or people that were in
the area at the time
that the abuse was occurring.
"And we need to know exactly
when the pictures were taken."
The pictures spoke
a thousand words,
but unless you know what day
and time they're talking,
you wouldn't know
what the story was.
I started lining pictures
up based on subject matter.
Put these on a time line
so that the jury could see
when did the incident
begin and when did it end.
How much time elapsed in
between these photographs.
How much actual effort
did these people put into what
they were doing to the prisoners.
Who else was there in the room
at the time that it occurred?
How could all this go on
without anybody noticing it?
When you look at this whole case
as one great, big media event,
you kind of lose focus.
These pictures actually depict
several separate incidents
of possible abuse or possible
standard operating procedure.
All you could do is present
what you know to be factual.
You can't bring in emotion
or politics into the court.
LYNNDIE ENGLAND: When I was
in the brig,
every single woman there was
in that brig because of a man.
Different reasons, yes,
but it was because of a man.
And when you join the military,
no matter what anybody says,
it's a man's world.
You have to either equal a
man or be controlled by a man.
If you want to be their
equal, you got to be strong.
They're going to
try to control you.
You need to step up and tell them,
you know, show them who's boss.
"I'm not gonna take that.
I'm not gonna let you power me.
"You know, control me because
I'm a woman and you're a man.
"It's not gonna happen."
Even though it's the military.
I mean, hell, if you're in
the military, you got a gun.
Use it.
If I would have thought about
that then, by God, I would have.
But I was blinded by
being in love with a man.
Graner, he's
really charming.
If you didn't know him
and you just meet him,
you'd be drawn
in to him.
And in a crowded room,
he'd be the one to look at.
He would draw
the attention.
If the attention is not on him,
he'll get it there.
That's what he does.
He thrives on that.
If you're not paying attention to him,
he'll make comments about you
and this and that,
you know.
Whatever you wanna hear,
he'll say it. And he knows.
He knew. And I was, what,
He was 34.
He had 14 years more
experience than I did.
So he knew what
to say, what to do.
And I was dumb enough to fall for it.
I should have listened.
Everyone tried to tell me,
"He's too old for you.
He's a bad guy."
But I didn't
believe them
because I believed him
for some reason.
Can't figure it out now.
The population was
just simply growing
but nobody really had a
plan on how you release
a formerly known as
"suspected terrorist" or an
"associate of a terrorist."
General Wojdakowski told me after
the first intake of prisoners
that this was going to
go on for several weeks
and at the end of it we might have
that we would be
responsible for.
And I said,
"Don't you think you should have
shared that information with me, sir?
"You know, I mean, we don't
have any resources to provide
"for the 200 prisoners in
the cells out at Abu Ghraib.
"And now you're going
to give us 1500 more.
"What's the release
procedures?"
He said, "You are not
to release anybody.
Do you understand me?
"If any one of these
prisoners gets released,
or ends up out on the street,
"I'm coming after you."
They would go out in
the middle of the night
and sweep up every single, you know,
fighting age male and lock them all up.
That's why you hear
the stories about
sons and fathers
and, you know, nephews
all getting locked up.
That's what they would do.
Imagine someone coming to your
town and taking all the men in it.
They would come in, like, on
cattle trucks, and just like cattle.
I mean, you come to the back door,
I mean, you hear a bang on the door
you know, bang, bang, bang, here
come the deuce and a half truck
full of scared
individuals coming to jail.
Were like,
"They come get me in middle of night.
"Mister, Mister, what, am I in trouble?
What I do? I'm not terrorist."
You know, they were like taxicab
drivers and welders and, like, bakers,
and they're at Abu Ghraib.
We had kids.
If we can't get the insurgent
leader, we took their kid.
"Akbar, I have your son.
Your son is in jail.
"Turn yourself in and
we'll let your son go."
I call that kidnapping.
It got filled up so fast
that we couldn't take
the children out anymore
and they had to stay
in their cells.
You feel bad for
them holding a child
for no reason just 'cause
of who your father was.
You can only make their stay a
little bit acceptable, I guess.
You give them all
the candy from the MREs
to make their time
go by better, I guess.
But there's only so much you
can do or so much you could feel.
HARMAN: "The lights
went out in the prison
"so here we are
in the dark.
"I hear, 'Missus! Missus!'
I go downstairs and flash my light
"on a 16-year-old sitting
down smacking ants.
"Now these ants are Iraqi ants.
Large.
"So large they could carry the family
dog while giving you the finger.
"All the ants in the prison
came to this one boy's cell
"and decided
to take over.
"All I could do was spray Lysol.
The ants laughed at me and kept going.
"So here we were in the dark
with one small flashlight
"beating the ants
with our shoes.
"So that was the start of my shift.
"They've been stripping
the fucked-up prisoners
"and handcuffing
them to the bars.
"I get to laugh at them
and throw corn at them.
"I kind of feel bad
for these guys
"even if they are accused
of killing U.S. soldiers.
"We degrade them but we don't
hit them, and that's a plus.
"They sleep one hour, stay up
for one hour then sleep one hour.
"This goes on for 72 hours
while we fuck with them.
"Most have been so scared
they piss on themselves.
It's sad.
"Pictures were taken,
you have to see them.
"A sandbag was put over their heads
while it was soaked in hot sauce.
"Okay, that's bad,
but these guys have info.
"We were trying to get them to talk.
That's all."
TIM DUGAN: The big word that always
comes up for me is "surreal".
Everything that you saw,
everything that was going on.
A bunch of unprofessional schmucks
that didn't know their damn job.
All thrown together, mixed
up with a big-ass stick
and what you get out of it is the shit
you see on the news from Abu Ghraib.
It's disgusting.
Pisses me off.
Because the whole time
we're screwing around
and not doing the damn job,
Americans are dying.
DUGAN: Abu G. had been
hit by a mortar barrage
killed two Americans
and wounded about 16.
We went to do an
interrogation on the Wolf,
the cell leader of that group of
people that mortared the prison.
There was two female
specialists,
one was an interrogator,
one's an analyst.
They took all of his clothes
off and got him totally naked,
which we weren't
supposed to do.
When we got done with
the interrogation,
I'm like,
"So, what's the scoop
with the guy being naked?
"I mean, what's going on?"
Trying to think how they put it.
The Arab position
on the females,
they're a subservient
role in their culture.
And to try
and break that down
so they'll cooperate with
the female interrogator,
they interrogate him nude.
I went back and I asked
my section sergeant.
And he's like,
"Yeah, we're not really
supposed to do that
"but we let the females
do some things like that
"you know, to get over
the Arab culture thing."
And I'm like,
"You just said we weren't
supposed to be doing that."
And he's like,
"Well, they're allowed to
do it, but you can't do it."
I said,
"Okay. What am I supposed to do?"
And he's like,
"Well, you know,
"if I was you, I wouldn't be
around that kind of stuff."
It's not like they were
trying to hide anything.
And that's what
stands out to me
is if you know you're doing
something wrong, dead wrong
you're gonna hide it.
You're gonna do your
best to conceal it
so people that know
better don't see it.
As I walk in, here's a
guy in his black PT shorts
and T shirt
and shower shoes
and there's another guy off just
with his pants and his shirt.
Each one had
a naked detainee.
Someone says,
"We're MI. We know what we're doing."
And I'm like, "Okay."
You know, because I had no idea.
They're not wearing rank. I don't
know what rank these people are.
And they'll put their handcuffs above
their head, stretch them out that way,
you know,
stretch them out long.
Then they started handcuffing
them together. I'm like...
The whole time they're yelling,
"Confess. Confess. Confess.
"You know you did it.
Tell us what you did. Confess."
Then they start
handcuffing them into
what appeared to be
simulated sexual positions.
And, I'm just like. I thought
I had missed something.
Come to find out,
what's going on is,
these guys were accused of
raping a teenager inside the jail.
No military intelligence
value.
Cruz is yelling at him,
"Get undressed, get undressed!"
And the guy's like,
"No, mister, no."
So after they're undressed, they
throw water down on the floor
and they make
them low crawl
making him try to drag his
genitals onto the concrete.
And I'm like,
"What is going on here?"
I said, "Is this the way
you all interrogate people?"
He goes, "There's a lots of
different ways we interrogate people."
So I said,
"I've had enough," and I left.
The next morning, the
lieutenant's right out back.
I said, "Sir, military
intelligence over at the hard site.
"They are doing some pretty weird
things with naked detainees."
He told me I had no
business being over there.
And he also told me, "Stay out of
MI's way and let them do their job."
ROMAN KROL: Okay.
Okay, on the right, in
black trunks, it's Cruz.
Right next to him,
myself.
To the left
against the wall, Graner
and we're looking at the two
detainees handcuffed on the floor.
Can't see anything
else, actually.
It was never intended
as an interrogation.
It was never
an interrogation.
The yelling was just
for show, I believe.
To show the spectators this
would be done to anybody
who breaks the rules.
Abu Ghraib was mortared almost
every day. People were dying there.
So my frustration
level was really high.
And when I heard about detainees
that raped a little boy,
I just completely
went nuts.
Right before I left, I was so pissed
off that I had a bottle of water
and I splashed some of them just
to show, pretty much, my hate.
KROL: At one point, there
was a Nerf ball brought in.
Everybody was throwing it
to each other, playing catch.
Here, I'm going to get it.
Once, I threw the ball, it hit
one of them in the leg, actually.
It's a Nerf ball,
so it can't bring any pain anyway.
Graner wanted me
to take some pictures.
He didn't tell me which
ones to take or not to take.
So I was just walking
around, and...
"Just take one,"
you know?
MI came in and
they got involved.
They wanted to mess
with them, too.
They didn't like it that they
were raping the 15-year-old boy.
They were roughing them up, having
them run up and down the tier,
crawl, run into walls,
stuff like that.
And then they
handcuffed them together.
That's Graner with his hands on his
hips and the gloves on his hands.
The two guys
in the background
are the MI guys.
They didn't wanna be in
the pictures. They were mad.
But I was like, "Well, hey, you know,
don't tell me. Whatever.
"Just taking pictures."
I'm not gonna even
comment on picture taking.
The whole time I was there I
didn't see any pictures being taken.
Even though I was in a few of them
I didn't see a flash or anything.
Because if I did I would have
said something to these guys.
First of all, there's a big sign,
"No photography".
And besides photographing
something like that is just stupid.
I received a 10 month
sentence, a demotion to E1
and a bad conduct
discharge.
I was more humiliated by that
sentence than actually punished.
Eight months in jail for
pouring water on somebody,
and throwing a Nerf ball at somebody.
That's humiliating. People laugh at that.
So I go back home
to my prison cell
and I got one of the terps, interpreter,
sitting outside waiting on me.
And he's like, "Mr. Dugan, I'm so pissed.
I'm just so pissed. I'm pissed off.
"The general that you guys did, he
wanted to tell us where Izzat was."
Well, that's great.
And he's like, "No, the interrogator
wouldn't ask him where Izzat was."
He's the vice president of Iraq,
Saddam's number two guy.
Ten times
the general said,
"I'll tell you where Izzat is.
I'll tell you where Izzat is."
And then he never
asked the question.
HARMAN: He was standing just in
front of his cell at attention.
I mean, he wasn't
handcuffed or anything.
He was like a grandfather.
Very respectful.
They shaved his eyebrows for
some reason and he was so upset.
And I told him not to worry,
that it made him look younger.
I just felt really
bad for the guy.
Four days later,
we were gonna do him and the
Army kid takes off the sandbag
and the dude
looks like Yoda.
I mean, he's got no eyebrows,
he's got no hair.
I'm like,
"Who the hell is that?" You know.
And he's like, "That's the
freaking general," you know.
And I'm like, "Bullshit." And I
thought he was playing a joke on me.
"Damn it, I don't
want this bullshit.
"I wanna do this guy, I wanna get this stuff.
I want to find out fricking Izzat."
He's like, "This is the fricking general,
I'm not kidding you."
Never got him.
That general wouldn't say
nothing else about it.
He had a serious resolve that he
wasn't gonna cooperate anymore.
We got promoted from
babysitters to condition-setters.
We got implemented
into the plan.
The military intelligence
people would come up there
and say, "Hey, play music
at this time. Play it loud.
"And if you got to, take the megaphone
and stick it right in front of the door.
"And turn it all the way
up so the guy can't pray,
"you know, he can't sleep.
Totally disorient him."
So I played this song
called Hip-Hop Hooray
over and over
and over again.
Hip-hop hooray
Ho
That's what
it sounded like.
After a while, the
Iraqis were saying...
Hey, ho
This is not working.
So, I changed it and I
put on heavy metal music.
I put on Metallica.
Like, Enter the Sandman,
this very loud song.
Then they were screaming
like, "I don't like it."
But after a while it didn't...
They were numb to that.
I guess they were so deaf
from the guitar, the A chord
that they were able to,
you know, sleep. Go figure.
I put in country music.
That worked. They couldn't stand it.
They're like, "Oh my God, Allah. Allah."
You know, "Cut it off."
By the time the interrogators would
come to take them out the cells
they were more than ready to go.
Like, "Please take me."
Sometimes MI
would come in,
say, "Hey, we're gonna
interrogate this guy today.
"Get him out and you can start...
Soften him up a little bit."
Scream at him, yell
at him, make him do PT.
Handcuff him in a awkward
position for a while.
Completely strip him
and have a female do it
because that would embarrass the
person or humiliate them even more.
We didn't kill them.
We didn't cut their heads off.
We didn't shoot them.
We didn't cut them and
let them bleed to death.
We just did what we were told,
to soften them up for interrogation.
And we were told to do
anything short of killing them.
We would make them stand
in awkward positions
for hours at a time to stress
them out and to strain them.
And we would have them
crawl up and down the tier.
We'd pour
cold water on them.
Point at him and laugh at him
while he was in the shower naked.
Shower him with
all his clothes on.
Cut off all his clothes
with a knife.
Burn him
with a cigarette.
We'd just do what
they want us to do.
If they want us to P the guy that's what we do.
If they want us to keep him up,
that's what we do.
They say,
"I want him to be awake."
They say, "He's dirty.
I want him to shower a lot."
ERROL MORRIS: Did any
of this seem weird?
Not when you take into account
that we're being told
that that's helping to save lives
and you see that people are coming in
from right outside the wire
with their body parts missing
and they need to know who's
doing it so they can stop it.
And these are
your battle buddies.
Gilligan was the one on
the box with the wires.
He was accused of
killing two CID agents.
It was his box. He had to hold it,
he had to stand on it.
It was cold so
he had a blanket on.
I mean, he was never physically
ever touched that I saw.
He was just
very, very tired.
HARMAN: He kept giving us different names,
so Graner nicknamed him "Gilligan."
When I got there
he was in the shower.
There was wires
on his fingers
and he was told he would be
electrocuted if he fell off.
There was no electricity
going through the wires
and to say, "Hey, if you fall
off you're gonna be electrocuted."
I mean, that would keep anybody awake.
So, it was part of the sleep plan.
You had to
keep him awake.
It would have been meaner
if there was electricity
and he really could
be electrocuted.
It was just words.
The wires were taken off
after photos were taken.
You'll see Sergeant Frederick in it.
That's the one I took.
And the one where I'm
outside the shower looking in
I took that one.
He became one of our workers so
he was let out, like, every day.
He was, like...
He's kind of fun.
But I think it was
proven he was innocent.
We'd give him an extra
meal for helping out
and cigarettes,
that kind of stuff.
He was about
Young guy.
Pretty decent.
Each of the pictures
had file time stamps
but they were all off anywhere
from a year plus to a couple hours.
And every time they got copied to
a CD from one computer to another,
the times would change based
on that computer's time setting.
But the one time setting
that did stay constant
is what we call metadata.
Metadata's a big, two-dollar word
for information about information.
Pictures have information
inside the file
that tells you about when
that file was created,
what software created it,
the exposure settings
and the date and time that
the camera thought it was
when it took the picture.
I was really elated to see that
the metadata was still intact.
The three main cameras belonged to Graner,
Harman and Frederick.
Graner's camera, the Sony FD Mavica,
that took most of the pictures.
There was a Sony Cybershot
I believe belonged to Harman.
And Deluxe Classic Cam,
which belonged to Frederick.
I then realized that these people
were actually taking pictures
of the exact same incident
almost at the exact same time.
Found a total of eight
separate time-synch incidents
where I could say, "This camera
thought it was this time.
"This camera thought
it was that time."
Once I was able to adjust it,
all the pictures just seemed to line up.
There was a guard log
where they recorded incidences
that occurred at the jail.
It actually confirmed the
time line was accurate.
Sabrina Harman's camera
thought it was 2002.
I had to adjust her camera one year,
nine months, 11 hours, 29 minutes.
Frederick's and Graner's were
only seven or eight hours off.
Nobody really got any intelligence there.
Very few of us.
Most of our interrogators were
And if you think about it,
you got a 45 to a 65-year-old
one, two, or three,
or four-star general
that you're gonna be
talking to.
And you're 18 years old, just got
out of high school, joined the Army
and went through
interrogator school.
What the hell are you gonna
ask that 55-year-old general
that's seen the world, done
everything and been everywhere?
You know, these kids
are intimidated as hell.
And the generals and the colonels
and these older guys know it.
And it's like,
they laugh at them.
DUGAN: So I'm working this guy,
not getting crap out of him.
His brother was also captured with him.
So I went into the hallway
and decided I'd see what was
going on with his brother.
There's six interrogation booths,
and each one has a two-way mirror
so you can view what's going
on with the interrogation.
You got an Army female and
an Army male playing grab-ass
and not asking
the detainee questions.
There was a guy coming on to a girl
and a girl being receptive
when they're supposed to be
interrogating this schmuck.
And I said,
"Hey, why don't we, like, switch guys?"
So this new detainee's
in my booth and I say,
"Listen. I've been
sitting here for two hours,
"and I've actually been
sitting here for two days
"'cause I was standing
outside a two-way mirror
"watching you with
the other guys, okay?
"I know you know
all kinds of crap.
"And I know that you're
pulling a lot of bullshit
"on these Army kids."
I said, "I'm not gonna put
up with your bullshit, okay?
"It takes me three minutes and 47
seconds to smoke this cigarette.
"I'm gonna go outside, I'm
gonna smoke this cigarette,
"and when I come back in
"you're gonna tell me every damn
thing I wanna know. You understand me?"
I said, "Do I look like I'm
in the fricking Army to you?"
And I put my fist through the plastic table
and I went outside to smoke my cigarette.
Then after about
a minute and a half,
there was crying and yelling
coming out of my booth.
And my terp was standing
near the doorway
and he's like,
"You scared the shit out of this guy.
"He don't know
what you're gonna do.
"He'll tell you anything you want.
I mean, whatever you want to talk about."
So I walked back in there real
calm and I sat down in the corner
and I said, "So,
what's your decision?"
KARPINSKI: My prisons were
spread all over the place,
so I was on the road
quite a bit.
One time I arrived down at Abu Ghraib
and Lieutenant Wood said to me,
"Oh, ma'am, we have an
interrogation going on.
"Would you like to
come over and see it?"
She took me over there and we stood
in the hallway and I observed it,
and it looked
perfectly normal.
I've wondered many times
if they didn't take me in there
specifically so I would be able to say,
"Yes, I saw an interrogation, and,
yes, it looked perfectly normal."
It's kind of funny how when, say,
General Karpinski or some other big shot
would come look at the prison we'd...
You know, have a dog-and-pony show.
And everybody would get
their mattresses back.
Everybody would get
their clothes back.
And then as soon as
the people left,
whoever was deprived of certain
things got deprived of it again.
That just seemed normal to
deprive people of something
if they're not
cooperating with you.
JAVAL DAVIS:
CIA, Iraqi Survey Group,
DIA, FBI,
Task Force 121,
the other government agencies,
that's what we called it, the OGA.
They had no rules.
We called them the ghosts
'cause they'd come in,
you don't know
who they are.
Whoever their prisoners were,
you never logged them.
"How's it going
there, soldier?
"You know, here's this guy,
don't log him in the book.
"He's not here,
hasn't been here.
"Just put him in a cell in there
and, you know, don't mark it.
"When the Red Cross comes
here, move them another place.
"When the Red Cross
goes to the other place
"move them back to where they were.
You know, 'cause they don't exist here."
I'm used to being out
in the road, you know.
"Hey, soldiers,
go do this."
"Roger that, sergeant, airborne.
See you later, we're done."
But now we're a part of this
big high-profile operation.
You know, we're getting,
like, the deck-of-card guys,
the guys who were on the deck
of cards. We're getting them.
Like, whoa,
we have a big job.
Wow, we got to guard
these guys now?
JAVAL DAVIS:
That's when things changed.
They'd take them
into the shower room,
put a sheet up over the door,
stick them underneath
the shower spigot.
Or stick them in the
garbage pails with the ice.
Then have at it.
A burlap sack
on their head
the wetness, it's sticking to your nose,
sticking to your mouth.
Makes them feel
like they're drowning.
Open a window while it's,
like, 40 degrees outside
and watch them
disappear into themselves.
For hours and hours and hours,
all you would hear is screaming, banging.
When they were done, eight, ten hours
later, they'd bring their guy out.
They'd be halfway
coherent or unconscious.
Put them back in their cell, and then,
"We'll be back for them tomorrow."
I know what it sounds like to hear,
you know, skin smacked or punched.
I know the difference
between someone screaming
because they're upset
and then someone screaming
because they're in pain.
You know, I know
the difference.
It was early
in the morning
like 4:30, around that time,
so everything was silent.
OGAs were, "Okay, we have
another special prisoner here."
He was wearing
only a shirt.
So he came in,
he was shackled,
handcuffed and everything,
with a hood on.
When he came in,
we didn't ask,
we didn't ask nobody who
this guy was, what he did.
That wasn't our business.
Two soldiers took him
straight to the shower
where he was
interrogated by one OGA.
He was there
quite a while.
I think he was there
about an hour and a half.
All of a sudden, the OGA guy
opened the door and said,
"Can you help me here?
"Tie him a little higher 'cause
he don't want to cooperate now.
"He's, I guess..."
You know,
he was just sagging.
There were some
CIA guys there.
I think they were CIA.
Well, yeah, they were.
But at the time, we didn't
know what agency they were with.
They asked us to handcuff him to the
window, so he has to hold himself up
'cause he was playing possum. Now
I'm just holding him by the jumpsuit.
I'm not holding him under
the arms or anything.
And his jumpsuit
is riding up his crotch
and I commented
and said, you know,
"Damn, this guy's pretty
good at playing possum."
'Cause I know I'd be
howling like a, you know,
whatever with this riding up
my crotch like his jumpsuit was.
Everybody just kind of laughed and
nobody really thought anything of it.
And I remember how, like,
far back his arms were going
and it was just
a really awkward position.
Again, you know, I was like,
"You know, this guy's pretty damn good
"'cause, you know, his arms
are almost about to break.
"I'm surprised they haven't broken.
I'm waiting for the pop."
And then all of a sudden,
just like, I guess,
blood started pouring out
of his nose and mouth.
And so we realized something
was, you know, was wrong.
That's when I went
and raised the hood.
And that's the first time
I saw his face.
I was surprised 'cause his
face was totally messed up.
He got huge black eyes
with bruises everywhere.
And I was like,
"Whoa, what happened to this guy?"
And then one of
his eye was open.
So I kind of, like, did the thing
like Pierce so he could move his eyes.
And nothing.
He was just looking down like this.
And I was, "Whoa, this guy's...
This guy is not even alive."
This whole time we were
messing with this guy,
you know, carrying him
and lifting him
and this entire time
the guy was dead.
I even got some blood on my
uniform 'cause he was dripping.
It kind of felt bad,
you know, 'cause I'm like,
I know I'm not part
of this, but, you know...
But it kind of make you feel like you
are 'cause you're there with the guy.
Colonel Jordan, he was
in charge of the MIs,
he came in, the medics came in,
Captain Reese came in
Captain Brinson,
the first sergeant,
Sergeant Snider,
everybody showed up.
You had the entire chain
of command right there,
trying to figure out
what was going on.
We checked him and, you know,
sure enough he had died.
(SIGHING)
And we kind of...
I don't know, I walked out of the room,
just kind of like, you know...
(HUMS) You know,
like nothing happened.
And then I asked
one of the CIA agents
you know, I was like,
"Well, what do you guys normally do
"in a situation
like this?"
They were kind of,
not panicky
but, you know, they were
on their phones calling
whoever, to see how to, you know,
see what to do or what not.
JEFFREY FROST:
Well, what do we do with him?
We can't take him out in a body
bag 'cause that may start a riot.
So we had to keep him
there overnight.
And so we got
a body bag.
We got a bunch of ice.
Iced him down.
Left him in the room
where he was at.
And then we shut
and locked the door.
I remember saying
to the NCO,
"You need to take the
spare key and hold on to it
"or someone will probably go in
there and, you know, mess with him."
We should have
just taken both keys
and held on to them instead
of leaving one there.
But I guess he, you know,
had to leave one there
in case they wanted to come take
the body that night or something.
FROST: It was pretty much supposed
to be, you know, hush-hush.
Didn't want the word
to spread around.
HARMAN:
"It was a crazy day yesterday.
The guy they brought in died.
"He was beat pretty bad.
I'm not sure what happened.
"It was on the shift
before us.
"They stuck him in a room next
to where I was working last night
"and put him in a body bag
on ice. How fucking gross.
"He's already been
defrosting for 24 hours."
Captain Brinson had a meeting in
the main office with all of us.
And he said that there was a
prisoner who had died in the shower
and he died
of a heart attack.
HARMAN: Sergeant Frederick got the key,
and we just checked him out.
He started to melt,
and it started to smell.
He was there for at least 24
hours prior to us getting there.
So he was there for
a pretty long time.
His knees were bruised,
his thighs were bruised by his genitals.
He had restraint marks
on his wrists.
It was kind of obvious,
after you just kept looking
that there was no way
he died of a heart attack.
MORRIS: You've gotten
into trouble because of the thumb.
HARMAN: I can understand.
It does look really bad.
But whenever I would get into a photo,
I never know what to do with my hands.
Any kind of photo,
I probably have a thumbs-up,
'cause it's just something
that automatically happens.
Like when you get into a photo,
you wanna smile.
It's just, I guess,
something I did.
He was a ghost detainee,
so he wasn't supposed to be there.
They didn't want him to be in
there when the Red Cross came
so we had to
do something.
So someone came up with the idea
to take him out of the body bag,
dress him in the orange jumpsuit,
put his dead body on a gurney,
stick a IV in his dead arm and
take him out of the facility.
DAVIS: From that point on, we never
heard anything of it. It was just...
The guy died, they put him in a body bag,
put him on a gurney, he was gone.
Go about your business, keep working.
Disappeared. He dissolved into thin air.
(DAVIS MAKES SWISHING SOUND)
They tried to charge me with
destruction of government property
which I don't understand
and then maltreatment of
taking the photos of a dead guy.
But he's dead. I don't know
how that's maltreatment.
And then altering evidence
for removing the bandage from
his eye to take a photo of it
and then I placed it back.
When he died, they cleaned him all
up and then stuck the bandages on.
So it's not really altering evidence.
They had already done that for me.
In order to make
the other charges stick,
they were gonna have
to bring in the photos
which they didn't want to bring
up the dead guy at all, the OGA,
'cause obviously they covered up a murder
and that would just make them look bad.
So they dropped all the charges
pertaining to the OGA in the shower.
Camp Ganci had a huge riot.
It was a female MP.
She got smashed in the face with, like,
a cinder block or something like that.
They were gonna break out
of the tent encampments,
get the MPs,
and hold them hostage.
We brought them down the hallway,
put them on the floor.
That's where I come in.
I can't go
to sleep at night
worrying about the
detainees trying to kill me
when I got people outside
the walls trying to kill me.
This has got to stop.
These guys are gonna have to...
They got to know.
So I lost it.
Threw the guys on the floor,
I fell on the pile,
did like a WWF, you know,
just jumped on them a little bit.
I wanted to do more,
I was mad.
I'm like, "You done hurt one of
our soldiers, like, that's it."
So I stepped on the finger,
stepped on the guy's finger,
stepped on the guy's toe.
I wanted to hurt him,
the gentleman who hit the female
in the face with the brick.
I wanted to hurt
him really bad.
I finished my day
in the motor pool
and I had generator
detail that night.
Just sitting there at night,
it gets very boring.
Computer system
was very slow.
I was waiting for
e-mail to come up.
And Sergeant Frederick
walked in.
He had to print out
some papers and stuff.
And we started talking.
He got a call on the radio
that he had some individuals
he had to in-process.
He said, "Come on, you walk down
to the holding cell with me."
So I walked down with him. And they
had the seven individuals there.
And I said,
"Hey, Freddy,
"you want me to grab one of the
detainees and take him down for you?"
He said,
"Yeah, go ahead."
And as I'm getting closer to Tier 1 Alpha,
I could hear Graner yelling.
And I'm like,
"Where do you guys want him?"
They said,
"Just put him on the floor."
So I pushed him onto the
floor with the other guys.
And that's when all the pictures
and stuff started happening.
That's when Javal was stepping on
the fingers and stuff and on the toes,
and Lynndie was also.
And that's when all
the pictures started
and Graner asked me
to take the staged photo
of him with the one detainee where
he was cradling the detainee's head
and he was acting like he
was gonna strike the detainee.
Never struck him.
As soon as I took the photograph,
he laid the detainee down.
And then they start the
stripping of the detainees
and taking more
photographs.
Graner walks over to one of the detainees,
punches him in the temple,
for what reason,
I don't know.
I mean, hits
the detainee hard.
And, after he does that,
Sabrina matches up the numbers,
says, "This guy's
in here for rape."
So Graner rips the leg open
on the jumpsuit that he had.
Sabrina writes,
"I am a rapeist," on him.
The guy hasn't moved for,
like, two or three minutes.
I kind of look
at him and I said,
"Hey, Grane, something's
wrong with that guy."
And I walked over and
I lifted the sandbag,
up to where
I could see his eyes.
The guy was unconscious.
I said, "Graner, you knocked
that dude out."
And he kind of shook his...
And after he punched him,
he kind of shook his hand
and he said,
"Ouch! Damn, that hurt."
And he didn't seem
too concerned about it.
And then I walked back over by Freddy.
We were standing there.
And Freddy looks at me and he says,
"Hey, watch this."
Goes over, gets the guy
that I escorted down,
lifts the guy up, marks
an "X" on his chest
punches the guy right
square in the chest.
I'm like, "What?
"Who are you and what
did you do with Freddy?"
Then they started the whole one
facing the wall on his knees
and setting the other
one on top of him.
They had flex-cuffs,
which are, more or less, big zip ties.
And I told Graner,
"This guy's gonna lose his hands
"if we don't get them
off of him. They're purple."
I said, "Well, I got
my Gerber on me.
"I can probably get
them with that,
"but we're gonna have
to stand him up."
It took a little while,
but I finally got them off of him
and then the blood started
flowing back in his hands.
And as far as I know,
the guy kept his hands.
That's when Graner and Freddy
started with the human pyramid thing.
Graner told me that he
was doing what he was told
that's why
he was doing it.
And as I was leaving the tier that night,
I was told that I didn't see shit.
And me being the person that I am,
I try to be friends with everybody.
I said, "See what?
I didn't see nothing."
I was always
asked by CID,
"Why didn't you
report this?
"Didn't I feel that
it was morally wrong?"
I said, "Yes, but when
you're in war, things change."
We were told,
"No pictures of prisoners."
I was asked to take it.
I'm a nice guy, so I took it.
I try not to have
anybody mad at me.
That's the way
I've always been.
But I guess being a nice
guy doesn't always pay off.
Some people ask me now why I'm
not as nice as what I used to be.
I say, "Put yourself
in my shoes.
"Go through what I've went through
in the last two and half, three years.
"See how nice you'll be."
HARMAN: Sivits just happened to
stick around for maybe five minutes.
I mean, he never
hurt anyone.
He got a year in jail for nothing.
Just for being there.
He shouldn't have
got any time at all.
I don't think he would've even been
charged if he wasn't in that video.
MORRIS: Who took the video?
I did.
The last thing I remember
was one guy standing
and one guy kneeling.
And the one guy had his
hand on the other guy's head.
And that's the last
photo that I took.
Then we left to go
use the phones.
It was Kelly's birthday,
so I went to make a phone call.
Me and Megan were still
upstairs in the office.
And we walked out and they were
throwing them into a dogpile
and taking pictures
from the top tier.
About that time,
Graner and Davis and Frederick
started jumping
on the dogpile.
And that's when I went
downstairs with a camera.
Graner said he wanted
some taken down there, too.
Me, Freddy and Sabrina
were taking pictures,
three different cameras
that night.
They were lined up against the wall,
and Graner started taking them one by one.
We didn't know
what he was doing.
Nobody knew.
He didn't say anything.
And then he told us that he
was piling them in a pyramid.
And we're like,
"Okay, why?"
He's like, "To control them,
so they're all in one area."
So we're like, "Okay."
Freddy is the one that
started them masturbating.
I don't know why,
but he did.
He started the one
and then he wanted to see if the
others would do it too, I guess.
I don't know.
But he had them all
doing it at the same time.
At one point,
six of the guys stopped
and the one guy kept doing
it for like 45 minutes.
No joke.
The one guy that was
still masturbating,
that was the one
picture with me in it.
He wanted me in it,
and I didn't want to be in it.
I was like,
"I'm not going over there."
MORRIS: Who wanted you in it?
Freddy.
And then Graner
joined in.
Graner was like,
"Yeah, just come on."
I was like,
"No, I don't want to go over there."
And he's like,
"Come on, just do it for me,"
and this and that.
And I'm like, "Fine."
MORRIS:
Was this your birthday?
They brought them in after midnight.
So, yeah.
MORRIS: Which birthday?
I had heard Graner saying,
"Well, this is your birthday present,"
or something,
and I'm like...
I don't know why
he would have said it
'cause I really wouldn't
have wanted that, but, yeah.
I mean, he used me.
And even though I was
stupid enough to fall for it.
I mean, now I'll know
what to look for.
Least he's moved
on past me.
PACK: This was the infamous
seven-man naked-Iraqi stacking.
The facial expressions
kind of set the tone
for what they were thinking
and feeling at the time.
You look in their eyes, and it
looked like they're having fun.
This scene is what
sealed their fate.
Pretty much everybody
that participated
is in the photograph
at one time or another.
Here you see Graner
in a punching motion.
Two cameras actually caught
him at the exact same time
from two totally
different angles.
And again you see it where they
had the seven men stacked naked
with the hoods
over their heads.
You actually see both of the
cameras inside each of the pictures.
It's not so much that you're there
committing these acts of abuse.
If you're in the pictures
while this stuff was going on,
you were gonna
be in trouble.
MORRIS: Big trouble.
If you make our President apologize
to the world, I would say so, yeah.
HARMAN: "I haven't slept
all night. I just can't sleep.
"Six prisoners
escaped last night.
"That's eight we've lost
in three nights.
"Something bad is going
to happen here.
"I hope I'm wrong,
but if not, know I love you.
"We might be under investigation.
There's talk about it.
"Yes, they do beat the prisoners.
I don't think it's right and never have.
"That's why I take the pictures
to prove the story I tell people.
"No one would ever believe
the shit that goes on. No one.
"If I want to keep taking
pictures of these events,
"I have to fake
a smile every time.
"I hope I do not get into trouble
for something that I haven't done.
"I love you. Sabrina."
I guess reality hit that
what was going on wasn't right
which, of course,
you know from the beginning,
but then it's your job.
I mean, there's really nothing.
You can't just walk away and say,
"Hey, I'm not coming back,"
or "I'm not doing this."
'Cause either way,
you're gonna get screwed.
We had a Iraqi prison guard
smuggle in a pistol, a 9mm
and a brand-new bayonet.
The prison guard
wrapped it up in a sheet
shimmied it up to a cell.
The detainee went underneath
his pillow, pulled out a 9mm,
(GUNSHOTS)
hit Sarge Cathcart
in the vest.
Sergeant Elliot had to
stick the shotgun inside
to get the guy to stop shooting.
And all he hit him in was the leg
'cause he was in the corner praying, like,
"Allah, Allah." And he was willing to die.
All the Iraqi prison guards
that were involved,
they rounded them all up and fired some,
but the Iraqis hired them right back.
Not only did you have to risk your
life from the shelling on the outside,
you was risking your life
dealing with the unscreened
Iraqi corrections guards.
You know.
And the detainees.
So strike one, two and three.
One of them is going to take you out.
Not all of them were bad,
but a vast majority were bad.
The guy who smuggled
in the pistol,
I thought was a good guy.
I thought was a good guard.
He turned out
to be Fedayeen.
Smile in your face,
stab you in the back.
They rushed in right away
and took care of this guy
who had just tried
to kill us. So...
But it doesn't appear when you see
a picture that that's what happened.
AMBUHL GRANER: Your imagination can
run wild when you just see blood.
The pictures only show you
a fraction of a second.
You don't see forward
and you don't see backward.
You don't see
outside the frame.
HARMAN: "This is the first time
I've seen military police dogs here.
"Two dogs with two owners go
to the man against the wall.
"The guy is scared out of his mind.
The dogs get closer.
"The Iraqi starts screaming
and runs straight to Graner.
"And one of the guys lets his dog
loose enough to bite him in the leg.
"The guy is hysterical.
The dog got another bite.
"Blood was everywhere.
"It was teeth marks that
looked something like this.
"One of our medics came, and he
taught me how to give stitches.
"It was kind of fun,
but I felt horrible for this guy.
"The dogs should've
never been there."
One of the things an
interrogator does every time,
it's the last paragraph
of all your reports,
is you evaluate
the truthfulness
and reliability
of the information
that was just given you.
That's the very last paragraph
of every report you ever write.
So if I get information through
torture I have no way to verify anything
because, well, I would just
assume that you're going to tell me
whatever the hell you
want so the pain stops.
But if I give you some carrots
and I give you some reasons
to cooperate with me,
usually you're going to get
more righteous information.
General Sanchez routinely
subjected Colonel Pappas
to this finger pointing,
poking a finger in his chest
and saying,
"I want Saddam. Find Saddam!
"Find Saddam!
Do you understand me?
"Find Saddam!
Find Saddam at whatever the cost."
If you poke your finger in
somebody's chest long enough,
they'll do whatever they need to
do to get you to stop doing that.
It's a downward spiral.
"This isn't working.
Try this. This worked in Gitmo.
"This worked in Bagram.
Try this. It's okay."
It doesn't stop the mortars,
doesn't get the information they want
and it doesn't
find Saddam.
It wasn't any information they
obtained in any interrogation
or interview out
at Abu Ghraib.
It was soldiers on the
ground who found Saddam.
DUGAN: You ready for this?
The farm that Saddam was hiding on,
a little tiny farm right
next to the Tigris River.
Saddam knocked
on the door,
and he said, "I'm Saddam Hussein.
I'm the President of Iraq.
"I am the leader of Iraq and all
the people of Iraq are my people.
"All the homes in Iraq
are my homes."
And he went to the kitchen and
he made hisself a single egg
and he ate the egg
and he left.
And he came back about
four hours later,
and he's like,
"I'm staying here."
And the dude's wife,
like, freaked.
Saddam was captured
on the 13th, Sunday morning.
And then on Monday,
I had to report to Colonel Pappas' office.
He asked if we wanted to volunteer
for a special projects team.
He'd just got off the phone
with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld and Sanchez had
authorized all approach techniques
on the high value detainees.
They said we had the opportunity
to break the insurgency right then
'cause of the stuff that
was captured with Saddam.
And at that time
I believed it.
PACK: You have to look at
exactly what the pictures depict.
It was important to separate
those that were criminal acts
and those things that
were not criminal acts.
And that's what the prosecution
would have to focus on.
If somebody was physically injured,
you know you have a criminal act.
Putting somebody into sexually
humiliating positions,
you have a criminal act.
Making them abuse themselves sexually,
you have a criminal act.
Standing by and watching somebody
hit their head on the wall
and taking photographs
at the time
that's dereliction of duty,
so it's a criminal act.
The individual with the wires tied
to their hands and standing on a box,
I see that as somebody that's
being put into a stress position.
I'm looking at it,
thinking,
"They don't look like they're
real electrical wires."
Standard operating procedure.
That's all it is.
Does this one actually constitute a crime
or is it standard operating procedure?
That's probably
standard operating procedure.
The panties on the head
are an added touch,
but it's no more than
sleep deprivation.
They weren't being
tortured, per se.
They were going through discomfort to
try to aid in obtaining information.
I've been in the Army for 20 years.
You know, I've been to Desert Storm One.
I spent four months
at Guantanamo Bay.
People that haven't been
where I've been
I can't expect them to see
the pictures in the same way.
I came back from a meeting,
it was very late at night.
I opened my classified e-mail.
"Ma'am, just wanted to let
you know I'm going in to brief
"the CG on the progress of the
investigation at Abu Ghraib.
"This involves the allegations
of abuse and the photographs."
And I sent an e-mail
back to him and I said,
"I don't know what to say.
First I've heard of it."
I was preparing in my mind to
hold a mini-press conference
to tell the truth
and to tell it early.
To say, "This is what
we've uncovered.
"We're looking into it because
we discipline ourselves.
"We're Americans, and we
know right from wrong."
General Sanchez said,
"No, absolutely not. You're not
to discuss this with anyone."
The fear of the truth
silenced people.
Everybody knew. Everybody
that was inside of that prison
that stayed there, lived there,
worked there, they had the pictures.
They would come over and they
would get copies from Graner.
And he had all these discs
so he would make copies.
"Well, here you go, here you go,
which ones do you want?"
Everybody had a copy of a picture.
Everybody knew.
When those photographs came out,
the infamous photographs
the day after
Colonel Pappas issued
a battalion-wide
amnesty period.
Any type of evidence
was destroyed.
Burn it, throw it away,
erase it off your hard drive
and be done with it.
He just wiped out every
last single defense witness,
every last single person
that would've been
available to come forward
and say, "Look, this is
what I know," in one day.
You know, after
the amnesty period,
who's gonna want
to come forward?
Who's gonna want to say,
"Hey, I know something.
"I know what happened"?
No one.
Find a way to make it go away
and that's what they did.
Sacrifice the little guys,
that's how they cover it up.
I'm a 28-year-old young
American. A volunteer soldier.
And I'm gonna get
everything blamed on me.
HARMAN: "Well, sweetie, you married a criminal.
Yep, the pictures are out
"and I'm under investigation
as of 10 a.m. this morning.
"So much for turning those
pictures in when I come home.
"I knew I'd be in trouble
just by being there.
"But how else would you let people
know the shit the Army does?
"You think I'd be scared,
but I'm not.
"I knew I'd go down with them.
Wrong place, wrong time.
"What sucks is almost the entire
company knows what happened,
"have seen the pictures
and have done nothing."
AMBUHL GRANER: My husband
is in prison right now.
I can't move on from this
until he comes home.
So, that's pretty difficult.
This huge political monster
cost Lynndie England three years,
Ivan Frederick eight years
and my husband ten years.
When I went through Desert Storm,
we were seen as the rescuers, the heroes.
Our mission was to reclaim Kuwait.
That was something that was honorable.
This war in Iraq,
like Vietnam,
will probably get remembered as
the one time that we not the heroes,
we were not the saviors.
And these photographs will
play a big part in that.
War is a stressful
time for people.
They were getting shelled on a
frequent basis at that prison.
A young person with no
experience in the world
being thrown into something
like that may get confused.
We all say that
hindsight is 20-20.
And I'm sure they all look back
realizing what happened was wrong
and they played a part in something that
was very embarrassing for the country.
But at the time,
they were in a war zone
where the rules
get fuzzy sometimes.
Lynndie England,
I really feel sorry for that gal.
It's obvious she is one
of those young people
that doesn't have much
experience in life.
There had been
no indication
that she would have been
involved in anything like this.
But she was in love.
Ambuhl. She...
Well, she knew when
the line was drawn
and when it was time
for her to disappear.
Because she would be
present during some things
and then noticeably
absent during others.
Um...
So she was probably
one of the smarter ones.
ENGLAND: In the pictures that came
out in the media, all you seen was me.
You didn't see Megan
'cause that was
the cropped picture.
Graner told me he just
wanted her out of the shot
'cause it was interfering with,
I don't know, his picture.
Maybe it was to
secretly protect her
because now that I know
that they were closer
than what I thought at the time,
maybe he was trying to protect her.
MORRIS: When did he find out
that you were pregnant?
Well, when I found out
on February 20th,
I come back and I told
the First Sergeant Commander.
And, of course, they wanted
to know who the father was.
So they knew,
and then I told him.
At first he sounded excited
and then he was just like he
didn't want anything to do with me.
He didn't want anything
to do with the baby.
Once the story broke,
and it came out that I was pregnant,
he denied that the baby was his.
He was accusing me of cheating
on him, which I never did.
So if that's how he wants to play it,
then that's fine with me.
He'll never see him.
It's his choice.
I was in the mess hall.
I look up
and I saw myself
and Dan Rather
and I'm like,
"What the hell?"
It's like, "Javal,
Sergeant Javal Davis."
I'm like, "Whoa.
Yo, that's me.
"Where the hell did they
get this picture from?"
They went to my high school.
They acquired a picture
of me from the newspaper
when I was running track,
going over a hurdle.
They cut my face out
and showed me like this.
But, in actuality,
I was jumping over a hurdle.
So they made me look
like this mean-ass guy.
They're showing
naked people in a pyramid
and then they show
a picture of me.
I'm like, "Hold on.
If you look at these pictures,
"do you see a black guy anywhere
in any of these pictures?"
There would be no me,
no no one else,
no shock-the-world, no scandal,
if there wasn't any photographs.
It'd went away, it'd went
underneath a rock,
and that would have
been the end of it.
PACK: Photographs
are what they are.
You can interpret
them differently,
but what the photograph
depicts is what it is.
You can put any kind
of meaning to it
but you're seeing what happened
at that snapshot in time.
You could read emotion on their
face and feelings in their eyes,
but it's nothing that
can be entered into fact.
All you can do is report
what's in the picture.
Somebody caught our administration
with their pants down. That's it.
They're pissed off
at that.
You can kill people
off-camera.
You can shoot people. You can,
you know, blow their heads off.
As long as it's not
on camera, you're okay.
But if it's on camera,
you're done.
You know, torture didn't
happen in those photographs.
That was humiliation.
That was softening up.
Torture happened
during interrogations.
Guys going through interrogation,
and they're dead,
and they were killed,
and they died.
That's where the torture happened.
We don't have photographs of that.
I just thought it was a bunch of
schmuck MPs acting like idiots.
I don't think so
anymore, not at all.
I think you got a bunch
of kids getting shammed.
It's just cover-ups and people
are afraid of culpability
and ramifications of their actions,
so there's nobody saying crap.
Except they're throwing a
lot of people under the bus.
I received a phone call
from a Pentagon reporter who said,
"You were relieved from command."
So I said, "I haven't
heard about it."
I didn't hear from General Helmly.
He didn't call me.
He didn't summon me to Washington D.C.
to be in front of his desk
so he could relieve me.
This is cowardice
of a different kind.
You're afraid to look
Janis Karpinski in the eye?
I got a letter 10 days
later from his office
relieving me from command
of the 800th MP brigade.
My name was a good name in the
military until I did what I did.
My uncle died in Vietnam 13
years to the day till I was born.
My dad has two bronze stars
for valor from Vietnam.
My grandfather's got a
bronze star from Vietnam.
And then I come along
and get involved in that.
That just put that
name in the mud.
You're taught from
the very beginning that
you have to follow
your orders.
And if you don't you're
gonna get in trouble.
And if you do,
obviously you end up in trouble.
You know, it's easy for retired
colonels and generals, and majors,
or whatever to
stand there and say,
"Well, these people should
have known illegal orders
"and they should've stood up to
these lieutenant-colonels and majors.
"And they should-a stood up to
them at the time in a war zone
"where, you know,
lives were at stake."
And it's just kind of
unrealistic to think that...
That that would happen.
You were getting shelled
every day, shot at every day.
Detainees, you know,
putting together shanks,
weapons, starting riots.
You know, this guy blew up,
like, 10 of my buddies.
He needs to get
his behind kicked.
I know what I can do
and I know what I...
And I think I know
what I can't do.
I think I know what I can't do,
but I see these guys doing this
and I see, you know,
the CIA guys coming and doing this.
You know, after a while
it's like, "You know what?
"It's free reign,
just don't kill them."
I was not the same person there
that I am sitting in this chair
or that I was
before I got there.
I don't know what I
could've done different.
I could've said,
"Screw you, I'm not working here"
and just gone to jail for
disobeying an order, I guess.
But, I don't know.
I'm sure everybody can do
something different put in...
I just don't know what I
would've done different,
put in the same
situation.
If I could back all the way up,
I wouldn't have joined the military.
That's what I would
have done different.
It's just not worth it.
You go through all that
trouble to start back
where you were
when you first went in.
Trying to get in school,
trying to get...
It just wasn't worth it.
I just want to
go on with life.
You know, get a job,
raise my son.
I don't think
I have a lot of choices.
Can't change anything, so...
And if I did, then
I wouldn't have Carter.
I mean, I wouldn't trade him
for the world, so...
I wouldn't want to go
back and change anything.
It's how the world turns,
ain't it?
People backstabbing
other people.
Unfairness.
It's drama. It's life.
You live it.
Now I just got to move on.