Sometimes, jittery U.S. soldiers opened fire on demonstrations, inflicting civilian casualties and embittering the population. In Fallujah, some 17 Iraqis were gunned down in demonstrations after U.S. soldiers claimed they had been fired upon. Fallujah soon became a center of anti-American resistance.
As the Iraqi insurgency began to spread - and Americans began dying in larger numbers - military intelligence officers encouraged prison guards to soften up captured Iraqis by putting them in stress positions for long periods of time, denying sleep and subjecting them to extremes of hot and cold.
Some of the poorly trained prison personnel - like those on Private Lynndie England's night shift at Abu Ghraib - added some of their own bizarre ideas for humiliating captured Iraqis, like forcing them naked into pyramids.
Fishback blamed the pattern of abuse on the Bush administration's vague orders about when and how Geneva Convention protections applied to detainees, a problem that extended from the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a network of shadowy U.S. prisons around the world.
"We did not set the conditions for our soldiers to succeed," said Fishback, 26, who served tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. "We failed to set clear standards, communicate those standards and enforce those standards." [NYT, Sept. 28, 2005]
Rape Rooms
Even Bush's boast that he closed Hussein's torture chambers and "rape rooms" lost its moral clarity.
A 53-page classified Army report, written by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, revealed that abuses at Abu Ghraib from October to December 2003 included use of a chemical light or broomstick to sexually assault one Iraqi. Witnesses also told Army investigators that prisoners were beaten and threatened with rape, electrocution and dog attacks. At least one Iraqi died during interrogation.
"Numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees," said Taguba's report. [See The New Yorker's May 10, 2004, issue.]
Bush's contempt for international law has long been an open secret. On Dec. 11, 2003, when asked by a European reporter about the need for international law to govern the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Bush joked, "International law? I better call my lawyer."
In 2004, Fallujah was back in the news after Iraqi insurgents killed four American security contractors and a mob mutilated the bodies. Bush ordered Marines to "pacify" the city of 300,000 people.
The U.S. assault on Fallujah transformed one soccer field into a mass grave for hundreds of Iraqis - many of them civilians - killed when U.S. forces bombarded the rebellious city with 500-pound bombs and raked its streets with cannon and machine-gun fire. According to some accounts, more than 800 citizens of Fallujah died in the assault and 60,000 fled as refugees.
In attacking Fallujah and in other counterinsurgency operations, the Bush administration again resorted to measures that critics argued amounted to war crimes. These tactics included administering collective punishment against the civilian population in Fallujah, rounding up thousands of young Iraqi men on the flimsiest of suspicions and holding prisoners incommunicado without charges and subjecting some detainees to physical mistreatment.
But the Abu Ghraib scandal, with its graphic photos of naked Iraqis posed in fake sexual positions, became the iconic representation of American mistreatment of Iraqis. When the photos surfaced in 2004, the images fueled anti-Americanism across the Middle East and around the globe.
Back in Washington, the Bush administration tried to defuse international outrage by blaming a few "bad apples." Bush said he "shared a deep disgust that those prisoners were treated the way they were treated."
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