The final act of Abu Ghraib: in which tragedy turns to farce, amnesia becomes sop, the highest-ranking officer at the prison gets off scot-free, and America gives itself a pass

Mother Jones, March-April, 2008 by JoAnn Wypijewski

THERE Is A PHENOMENON, known in the film industry, that after getting comfortable in their uniforms, extras on the sets of war movies exhibit a peculiar behavior: Actors suited up as officers refuse to eat lunch at the same table with those playing enlisted men. It doesn't matter that yesterday they were all ordinary men or that today their circumstance is actually the same; the illusion of power is so fully assumed, and so necessary, that it translates into action with barely a second thought. I was reminded of this watching Golonel Robert Norton, retired, arrive at the judicial center at Fort Meade, Maryland, last summer. He might have been any man who'd got lost on his way to the senior center, weedy and dressed to disappear in off-white casuals, frail almost, except that he was carrying a uniform, and in no time that dark green costume and a pair of shiny high-laced black boots would remake him into a spanky figure, striding toward the witness chair to testify on behalf of Lt. Golonel Steven Jordan.

This was the last court-martial that the Army would convene in the most notorious scandal of the Iraq War, the end of the road from Abu Ghraib that began in the spring of 2004 when photographs of naked, humiliated prisoners and smiling GIs first flashed around the world. Jordan had been the highest-ranking officer living at the prison when those photos were taken, and he was the only officer the Army chose to prosecute. Earlier that day he was acquitted of all charges connected with prisoner abuse, but he faced sentencing for disobeying a general order from a superior officer during the Abu Ghraib investigation. Of the charges he had confronted, this one carried the stiffest penalty--up to five years in prison, as opposed to one year for maltreatment of a fellow human. Like other character witnesses for Jordan, Golonel Norton had made a career depending on orders given and carried out: Special Forces, Vietnam, Haiti, General Dynamics. Like them, he was unfazed by Jordan's offense. "He's a man I'd go to war with, in a heartbeat," Norton told the jurors, nine colonels and one brigadier general, on the panel. "He was a team player." By then even the prosecutors seemed to agree. The government had begun its pursuit of Jordan more than three years earlier, at one point piling on charges that could have put him away for almost 48 years. Now its lawyers concluded, sighing, "What is a fair and just punishment? ... A fine is certainly appropriate"--$7,373.10, one month's pay--"a reprimand is certainly warranted." A reprimand is all that Lt. Golonel Jordan got. It's what he could have got without the expense of a trial and the jury's affirmation that the authority invested in rank doesn't carry much responsibility after all, that an officer might just be an empty suit.

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HERE WILL BE no record of Jordan's conviction. In courts-martial, a jury's decision may be negated by the convening authority, and in January it dismissed both verdict and sentence. Jordan was given, instead, an administrative reprimand. It is as if the court-martial never happened. For most people, that was no doubt true even before the latest twist. Among the press at trial, the Associated Press, a German wire service, Agence France-Presse, and I were the only regulars, joined some days by reporters from the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun. It was the end of August, dog-day hot when not weirdly dank, and Abu Ghraib was a spent scandal. The news of the week, Alberto Gonzales resigning as attorney general, closed a circle that had begun in January 2005, when the Senate held his confirmation hearings on the eve of the first full Abu Ghraib trial. In conversation among the reporters watching Jordan's trial and with the soldiers there to watch us, escort us, and provide us doughnuts, the old lines came easiest-and so it ends "not with a bang but a whimper." No one had expected a bang from the trial, exactly, but nor had we expected farce. "You'd think that if they went to all the trouble to go to trial they'd have had some evidence," one of the soldiers said after the prosecution rested. Yet it was perfect in a way, the final act in a drama so sordid that travesty was its only honest end.

In retrospect, the story of Abu Ghraib was never clearer than in the spring of 2004, when the photos emerged and a leaked internal report by Maj. General Antonio Taguba concluded that soldiers in the 800th Military Police Brigade, officially responsible for prison security, had been "actively requested" by Military Intelligence and others to deny prisoners sleep, safety, clothing, and humanity so as to "set the conditions" for interrogation. That was Act I of the scandal, the panic phase. General Taguba had described Lt. Colonel Jordan, an MI officer who directed the prison's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC), as evasive and untrustworthy, and recommended rebuking officers across the MP and MI chains of command who had failed their soldiers and flouted the law. Tagnba would later say that he thought a full and serious inquiry was what his superiors desired. As Act I concluded, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sputtered to Congress that he was dumbfounded about what had happened in the prison; the prospect of broad accountability was sunk; and Taguba's career was effectively over.