Saturday marked the third anniversary of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. On Apr. 28, 2004 CBS broadcast the first graphic photos of torture inside of the US-run prison in Iraq on its 60 Minutes II programme.

“Americans did this to an Iraqi prisoner,” news anchor Dan Rather said as a slideshow of disturbing torture photos flashed across the screen. “The man was told to stand on a box with his head covered, with wires attached to his hands. He was told if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.”

More photos followed. The US soldiers posed with naked Iraqi prisoners, including one with detainees stacked in a pyramid. In most of the photos, the soldiers were smiling. At the time, the Pentagon, represented by Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, said only a few “bad apples” engaged in torture.

The soldiers in the photos were prosecuted and many received prison sentences, but no high-ranking officers or Bush administration officials were put on trial. That didn’t sit well with US Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis. He came forward to say that torture was common practice in Iraq and that he had himself tortured prisoners while stationed in Mosul in 2004.

“We would bring in dogs,” he said. “They would be muzzled dogs, but the prisoner would be blindfolded so he wouldn’t realise the dog was muzzled. We would try to terrify them and induce pain, put them in stress positions, sleep deprivation, all of these together to break down the prisoner.”

Subsequent reports indicated that each of those interrogation policies was approved by then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. Lagouranis says his immediate superiors orchestrated the torture he meted out.

Joshua Casteel is a former US Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib. He arrived at the prison in June 2004, a few months after the scandal broke. “By the time I arrived at Abu Ghraib, every camera in the world was pointed at us,” he said. “So things had changed radically. We were not allowed to touch people except in acts of reassurance — like if we wanted to calm someone down, we might be able to touch their hand. We were also being watched by cameras and audio recording equipment and by visiting dignitaries on occasion. So (interrogations) were more structured around just talking in a room.”

The main problem, Casteel says, was that over 90 per cent of the people he interrogated were innocent — simply caught up in large-scale military raids. Because the US military rarely releases detainees, Casteel says he was forced to interrogate innocent prisoners again and again.

Casteel left the military in 2005 after requesting and receiving a discharge as a conscientious objector. He’s now a graduate student at the University of Iowa studying playwriting and non-fiction writing. Ironically, he said, it was an interrogation of a self-described jihadist that caused him to leave the service.

The Washington Post reported this month that the US military now holds 18,000 security detainees in Iraq — almost double the number of Iraqis incarcerated when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke three years ago. The newspaper reports that this number will soon pass 20,000, with more and more Iraqis apprehended in sweeps as part of Bush’s “surge”. Most of them will be held indefinitely, will never be charged with any crime, and will not be allowed to see a lawyer. — IPS