The Road to Abu Ghraib

The US Army's experience with detainee operations spans the period from the Revolutionary War to the present. More to the point, over the past 60 years a body of international law and military regulations, the joint and Army doctrine derived from it, and two centuries of practical experience have emerged that inform current detainee operations in the Global War on Terrorism. The 2004 revelations of detainee maltreatment at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad, Iraq have led to an exhaustive overhaul of Army doctrine and training with respect to this topic. The Army has identified disconnects in its individual, leader, and collective training programs, and has also identified the absence of a deliberate, focused doctrinal crosswalk between the two principal branches concerned with detainees, Military Intelligence (MI) and Military Police (MP). These problems and their consequences are real and immediate. The perceptions of just treatment held by citizens of our nation and, to a great extent the world at large, have been and are being shaped by the actions of the US Army, both in the commission of detainee maltreatment but also, and more importantly, in the way the Army addresses its institutional shortcomings. James Gebhardt's study, The Road to Abu Ghraib: US Army Detainee Doctrine and Experience, captures the salient doctrinal issues of this critical aspect of the Army's battlespace. Indeed, this work, in DRAFT form, has already informed the evolution of detainee doctrine in the MP and MI schoolhouses, as well as Combat Training Center practical exercises. A solid understanding of our past experiences will aid those soldiers charged with executing this important mission today and in the future, and this study represents a valuable contribution to the effort. When the Global War on Terrorism began in late 2001, few Americans had ever heard of the Geneva Conventions. Now type "Geneva Convention" into any Internet search engine and you can easily find all four Geneva Conventions and read them in the comfort of your home in three languages. Our armed forces, though, have a long history of dealing with Geneva Conventions that began with implementing the Convention of 1929 during World War II and then led to the Conventions of 1949 a year before the beginning of the Korean War. The US Army, in particular, has a long history of dealing with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Geneva-based non-governmental organization that is the "promoter and enforcer," if one can use that phrase, of the Geneva Conventions. This study examines the relationship over time between doctrine in two branches of the Army-Military Police (MP) and Military Intelligence (MI)-and the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War (GPW). Specifically, it analyzes the MP detention field manual series and the MI interrogation field manual series to evaluate their GPW content. It also further examines the relationship of military police and military intelligence to each other in the enemy prisoner-of-war (EPW) and detainee operations environment, as expressed in their doctrinal manuals. Finally, the study looks at the Army's experience in detainee operations through the prism of six conflicts or contingency operations: the Korean War, Vietnam, Operation URGENT FURY (Grenada, 1983), Operation JUST CAUSE (Panama, 1989), Operation DESERT STORM (Iraq, 1991), and Operation UPHOLD DEMOCRACY (Haiti, 1994).