Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam 1966: In a recent article for the New England Journal of Medicine, Atul Gawande (a former Slate contributor) concluded that improvements to military medicine since Vietnam have dramatically reduced the rate at which U.S. troops die of wounds sustained in combat. The argument follows a 2002 study that tied improvements in U.S. civilian trauma medicine to the nation's declining murder rate. While firearm assaults in the United States were rising, the murder rate was falling, largely because penetration wounds that proved fatal 30 years ago were now survivable. Thus, today's murder rate was artificially depressed in comparison to the 1960s. Gawande applied the same methodology to U.S. casualty statistics in previous wars, arriving at a "lethality of wounds" rate for each conflict. In World War II, 30 percent of wounds proved deadly. In Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War, this rate hovered between 24 percent and 25 percent. But due to better medical technology, doctrinal changes that push surgical teams closer to the front lines, and individual armor protection for soldiers, this rate has dropped to 10 percent for Operation Iraqi Freedom for all wounds. For serious wounds that keep a soldier away from duty for more than 72 hours, the mortality rate is now 16 percent. Simply, a soldier was nearly 1.5 times more likely to die from his wounds in Vietnam than in Iraq today.

Some readers may feel the authors are "goosing up" the statistics by selective comparison; after all, part of the reason why the casualty rate is as high as it is among US forces in Iraq is that the denominator—i.e., the number of soldiers in theater—is arbitrarily reduced; most soldiers sent to Vietnam seldom ever saw combat, and were preoccupied with supporting those who did. In Iraq, those support operations are reduced in scale. However, he is on firmer ground by citing specific operations (Hue vs. Fallujah), suggesting that US commanders have artificially depressed the initial death toll by failing to actually close with the enemy until a year into the Occupation. He also observes a very tragic development:

That today's fighting in Iraq, by these calculations, may actually be more lethal than the street fighting in Vietnam should not be taken lightly. Vietnam was marked by long periods of well-fought, sustained combat but little perceptible gain. Volunteers outnumbered conscripts by a 9-1 ratio in the units that saw combat during the war's early days in 1966, and at first they enjoyed the support of a country that believed in their cause. But as the burden widened and deepened, and conscripts did more of the fighting and dying, the country's faith evaporated. Today's burden is not wide, but it is deep.

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The human cost of the war in Iraq is small in comparison with that incurred during the Vietnam War, or even during the initial period of direct US involvement in ground combat operations. In 1966, the first full year of US ground operations in South Vietnam, 5,008 troops died in combat, for an average of 417 per month, or 13.72 per day. (American combat deaths increased to over 9,000 in 1967 and reached nearly 15,000 in 1968.) South Vietnamese forces suffered roughly 12,000 deaths, while allied force combat deaths exceeded 550.

As of May 2004, US military fatalities in Iraq from all sources since the beginning of major combat operations stood at 816, with 591 combat casualties. If one discounts the period of conventional military operations, US military fatalities stand at 678, or an average of 52 per month, or 1.70 per day.
[p.10]

Mr. Krepinevich's paper mainly addresses the comparative tactics and logistical limitations faced by Vietnamese and Iraqi adversaries (the word "insurgents is problematic), such as the fact that the Iraqi forces are concentrated in urban areas, while the Vietnamese Communists were fighting a rural war; the latter strategy has been far more successful, with the RPF (Rwanda, 1994) and the Taliban (Afghanistan, 1996) being only the most recent examples. Urban insurgencies are usually identified as "revolutions," such as the urban component of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1978-1980).

The main object is to demonstrate that the Vietnamese NLF/PAVN forces opposing those of the US/RoV forces in the war far surpassed anything seen in Iraq today (this is true, but, to my mind, not terribly relevant). Krepinevich adds that the terrain and demographics of Iraq are inhospitable to large insurgent operations. He notes that US forces in Vietnam faced an ethnicaly cohesive, seasoned, and immense foe, abundantly furnished from outside theater; but also were assisted by a large RoV army whose soldiers were also frequently seasoned and excellent fighters. In contrast, Iraq does not even have a government.

The report lists several examples of insurgencies waged shortly after the Second World War in a misleading context. For example, it refers to Algerian FLN operations as successful (p.4n) , when in fact the FLN was almost liquidated; the victory of the Hukbalahap Movement in the interior of Luzon is described as a successful US counterinsurgency (p.14) when that war was actually won by Philippine commander (later President) Ramon Magsaysay by overruling his US advisors.

Still, Mr. Krepinevich deserves credit for having scrupulously gathered data to begin a meaningful discussion. He also examines the civilian death toll; he uses, for discussion purposes, the estimates furnished by www.iraqbodycount.net; however, these are not comparable to the statistics published by The Lancet (CT) or MedAct (PDF file) since they only address the number killed in fighting or bombing, not deaths from disease, medical neglect, or other hardships. Also, he assumes the figures he cites are high estimates because those who posted them are opposed to the war; on the other hand, I too was opposed to the war, and yet I struggle to avoid factual distortions by posting what I know can be authenticated. That means the Iraqi body count could easily be a conservative estimate, since its compilers lacked the means to document or tabulate many of the deaths.

Many of the cost comparisons are invalid also since he is comparing what took years to discover in Vietnam with wildy optimistic projections for Iraq.

Both Carter and West are Marine veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom; they are officers with a high level of institutional loyalty to the Marines (as have all the marines I have ever met). This loyalty—to fellow soldiers, to l'esprit de corps, and the platonic ideal of the republic—has often clashed with loyalty to individual politicians who have had occasion to order deployment of the Marines to various adventures. Carter and West seem to resent the fact that their research is providing "ammunition" to opponents of the war; they object to the fact that the planning and reasoning employed by military planners of OIF were unworthy of the name. I think it is they who miss the point: the war was poorly planned because it was misconceived, ill-begotten, rank and gross in nature, and posted to with such wicked speed, that it is not, nor cannot come to, any good.

Again, I turn to Mr. Carter—and the Washington Post. Both allude to the report of Maj. Isaiah Wilson III, who served as an official historian of the campaign and later as a war planner in Iraq.

There was no Phase IV plan [for occupying Iraq after the combat phase...] While there may have been 'plans' at the national level, and even within various agencies within the war zone, none of these 'plans' operationalized the problem beyond regime collapse— that is, laid out how U.S. forces would be moved and structured."

[...] Similar criticisms have been made before, but until now they have not been stated so authoritatively and publicly by a military insider positioned to be familiar with top-secret planning. During the period in question, from April to June 2003, Wilson was a researcher for the Army's Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group. Then, from July 2003 to March 2004, he was the chief war planner for the 101st Airborne Division, which was stationed in northern Iraq.

In a parenthetical note I praised "The War In Iraq: The Nature of Insurgency Warfare" (PDF, Andrew Krepinevich, June '04) for pounding home the point with single-minded focus that occupation is a political act that requires political measures to achieve political ends:

The key to defeating an insurgency is to attack it at the source of its strength: the population. If the counterinsurgent forces can deny the insurgents access to the people, they become like fish out of water, denied sources of manpower and information. The insurgents’ problem is further compounded if the people feel secure enough from retribution to provide counterinsurgent forces with intelligence on insurgent movements and the identities of cadre members. The prospects for gaining such intelligence are further advanced if the counterinsurgent forces have won the people’s “hearts,” by offering them the prospect of a better way of life if the insurgents are defeated, in addition to having won their “minds” by providing personal security.

Should counterinsurgent forces instead focus their principal efforts on destroying insurgent forces, as is more typical of conventional warfare, and accord population security a lower priority, they will play into the insurgents’ hands. Insurgent casualties suffered under these circumstances will rarely prove decisive, for several reasons. First, so long as the insurgents maintain access to the population, they can rarely be compelled to fight. Thus they can meter their casualties to keep them at tolerable levels, and replenish their losses by recruiting from the population. It is only when the insurgents become truly isolated from the population that the real attrition of their forces can take place.
[p.6-7]

I was also very interested by Krepinevich's third essay in this series, "Thin Green Line" (PDF) that I regard as very revealing and dot-connecting.

The Army that went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq was designed, almost exclusively, with an eye toward waging conventional warfare. This orientation was not novel. Indeed, it was consistent with the Army’s emphasis over the past century. Moreover, the Army had enjoyed great success in this form of warfare and, from an institutional perspective, was very comfortable with this approach. This institutional preference was further reinforced by the United States’ traumatic experience in the Vietnam War, in which the Army played the central role and suffered the most, in both a human and institutional sense. Thus in addition to a cultural preference for conventional war, the Army became positively neuralgic over the thought of waging a protracted war against irregular forces.

In its desire to avoid such conflicts, the Army found willing partners in the form of the American people and their political leaders. “No More Vietnams” became a slogan, not just for Americans in general, but for the US military—and especially the Army—in particular. Thus the 1980s saw the introduction of the Weinberger Doctrine, and its stepchild, the Powell Doctrine, which sought to avoid future “Vietnams” by carefully choosing America’s battlefields, applying overwhelming force when troops were committed, and looking for an early way out of the conflict. When it looked like US forces might be tied down in an irregular conflict, or incur substantial casualties, as occurred, for example, in Lebanon in the fall of 1983, US forces were withdrawn before the mission could be accomplished.

This theme continued in the 1990s, under the rubric of “Exit Strategies.”

This is understandable. Democracy doesn't weather protracted war very well; even when it survives the war intact, the consolidation of power and the standing institutions of state violence eat away until democratic institutions atrophy. They exist, with the trappings, but they are irrelevant—less relevant, indeed, than two children playing "army" have anything to do with combat.

People do not relish the decline of democracy in their society even if they cheerfully contribute to its decline, even if theyhave no idea what is going on and daydream of a benevolent dictator. They notice a decline in the mutuality of the social contract between state and nation, and find themselves wards of the state. They simmer in resentment and frustration but vote as they may for stern action against "cultural decline" they are stuck with the decline of culture and freedom alike. So of course they do not relish endless wars abroad, even if they have a streak of bloodlust.

However, the point that is missed here is that protracted wars—the ultimate error of military strategy, always—are the result of state plans, state goals, that are inherently imperialistic. The state tries to end the juggling of diplomacy with unsavory characters by drop-kicking their country's military and making it a ward that can never again be obstreperous. This spawns vendetta, and the rest is noisy.

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
Hamlet, V.ii

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The ICRC article to which Ms. Cobbam linked is on far stronger ground when it appeals to the definition of "occupying power" thus:

Thus, occupation is a more or less long-term situation during which a territory and its population find themselves under the control of an occupying force. However, occupation is by nature temporary and involves no transfer of sovereignty. The occupation of territory during war does not confer upon the Occupying Power 'State authority' over the population of the occupied territory or over the territory itself. It merely brings about a situation in which the Occupying Power takes over the territory's administration from the sovereign State, temporarily and in a limited manner. It also assumes responsibility for ensuring that the necessary conditions exist for individual development.

These are principles that have been accepted since the nineteenth century. In legal terms, what finally became of an occupied territory depended on the terms of a peace treaty.

By way of comments at Back2Iraq2.0 (Stephan) comes this story (Reuters) on the humanitarian situation in Fallujah:

According to [Dr Rafa'ah al-Iyssaue, director of the main hospital in Fallujah], the hospital emergency team has recovered more than 700 bodies from rubble where houses and shops once stood, adding that more than 550 were women and children [...] Al-Iyssaue added these numbers were only from nine neighbourhoods of the city and that 18 others had not yet been reached, as they were waiting for help from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS) to make it easier for them to enter.

He explained that many of the dead had been already buried by civilians from the Garma and Amirya districts of Fallujah after approval from US-led forces nearly three weeks ago, and those bodies had not been counted.

IRCS officials told IRIN they needed more time to give an accurate death toll, adding that the city was completely uninhabitable.

Officials admit that rebuilding the city will take a long time. In the meantime, NGOs say that they are dealing with a growing humanitarian disaster. "The city is virtually destroyed and people who have returned are starting to feel the lack of assistance and poor health care, it's a humanitarian disaster," Abdul-Hamid Salim, a spokesman for the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS), told IRIN in Baghdad.

So far, as few as 5,000 citizens have returned to live in the city, according to US military figures, although the government has said that as many as 90,000 have passed through.

Another tip to an old post: the intermittant but irreplaceable Baghdad Burning reports:

Sunni Arabs are going to boycott elections. It's not about religion or fatwas or any of that so much as the principle of holding elections while you are under occupation. People don't really sense that this is the first stepping stone to democracy as western media is implying...

There are several problems. The first is the fact that, technically, we don't know the candidates. We know the principal heads of the lists but we don't know who exactly will be running. It really is confusing. They aren't making the lists public because they are afraid the candidates will be assassinated.

Another problem is the selling of ballots. We're getting our ballots through the people who give out the food rations in the varying areas. The whole family is registered with this person(s) and the ages of the varying family members are known. Many, many, many people are not going to vote. Some of those people are selling their voting cards for up to $400. The word on the street is that these ballots are being bought by people coming in from Iran. They will purchase the ballots, make false IDs (which is ridiculously easy these days) and vote for SCIRI or Daawa candidates. Sunnis are receiving their ballots although they don't intend to vote, just so that they won't be sold.

Yet another issue is the fact that on all the voting cards, the gender of the voter, regardless of sex, is labeled "male" [...] There are some theories about this. Some are saying that many of the more religiously inclined families won't want their womenfolk voting so it might be permissible for the head of the family to take the women's ID and her ballot and do the voting for her. Another theory is that this 'mistake' will make things easier for people making fake IDs to vote in place of females.

Slightly more recently, Christopher Allbritten (Back2Iraq) expresses his uncertainty as to whether the elections will be held—and if they are held, if the turnout will be so skewed to the detriment of Sunni Arabs that the outcome will be totally disregarded. After all, queues of voters will pose a very tempting target for bombings.

UPDATE: Courtesy of John P. Hoke's Asylum, I learn that the entire 13 member electoral commission of the Anbar province resigned today after being threatened by insurgents, and immediately went into hiding fearing for their personal safety (Washington Post).

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The elections, in Mr. Milne's view, can only be legitimate if the occupation ends first; he refers to elections held in South Vietnam—but fails to make the argument that would unify his article: that the USA, by sponsoring elections to replace juntas with civilian, quasi-elected leaders, was unable to actually negotiate with Hanoi or the NLF without betraying its associates.

(He declares that "major political groups and politicians are boycotting the elections (including the popular Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr) as illegitimate under occupation"—although this is not, at the moment, the case. Moqtada al-Sadr has warned other countries not to interfer, but his organization has candidates in the lists. Likewise, Salama A Salama's "Fighting the Facts" [al-Ahram] says the same thing.)

Had he done this, I think he would have had a really convincing argument.

In fact, Mr. Milne argues that the elections will stimulate a civil war by creating a polity recognized by many Shi'a as a responsible government, while the Sunnis smoulder at Shi'a perfidy:

The danger is that the election won't simply lack credibility, but could actually intensify Iraq's crisis by fuelling sectarian divisions. The combination of the effective truce with Sadr's Mahdi army while the US military concentrates its fire on the Sunni-based resistance, lack of Shia support for Fallujans during November's onslaught and the commitment to the elections by the governing Shia parties has strained relations to the limit.

Whereas, Mr. Milne trips up his own analysis by demonizing the participants. He seems to believe he is describing the plotting of villains utterly without any worthy motive. The problem with such thinking, aside from my opinion that it is incorrect, is that it leaves activists and readers with an inability to understand what they are dealing with. People assuming that evil results come from evil motives are never able to do anything preventative, because they're watching out for somebody cackling as he "divides and rules." (Hence, he alleges Thomas Friedman hoped in print for a "proper civil war" as evidence that the US government needs a civil war in Iraq; here is Friedman's essay, which argues that Iraq has a civil war already, but that war is inconclusive because indecisive. The essay is not very good, but I think it's very misleading to say that Friedman leaking a policy of creating a civil war for permanent satrapy in Iraq. Friedman has been silly and tendentious, but Milne seems to be contracting a little of Bush's Encephalitis if he thinks that of Friedman.

Whereas, Milne would have something meaningful to say if he thought about worthy motives leading horribly awry—painful decisions being painted over, hierarchies of wishful thinkers, people imprisoned by fears of heresy and unchallenged assumptions. I suspect if Milne were to magically take Bush's place, he could quickly do as much damage. Evil events are caused by evil people—that's Bush's Encephalitis. Evil events can be caused by ordinary people with understandable, even idealistic, motives—and the conviction that the circumstances under which they act are so distinct from the past, that rules don't apply to them.

Specifically, when he snarls at the fraudulent elections in Vietnam, he ignores why they were held and how the elections themselves influenced the outcome of the war. Even fraudulent elections express the will of somebody; it's a rare rigged election in which the winner does not have a large and reliable base of support. This is a problem because if elections are rigged to get the wrong winner (as, for example, Ferdinand Marcos in the RP, 1986) then a people-power movement can reverse the outcome; the losers splinter and regroup. In the elections we are anticipating, the fraud may lie in the conceit that the elections have any validity at all. The illusion of orderly power transfer, for the benefit of the Iraqis, may take root, leading to clean elections in the future (or a government to whom the US can transfer authority—and which will honor future elections). That was also essential to ending the Vietnam War on terms desired by Washington.

The problem with the elections in South Vietnam (mentioned by Milne) was that there was a substantial share of the Vietnamese populace that had signed onto the order of civilian government, market economy, and vigilance against Communism. Elections made our "puppets" in Vietnam fellow citizens implicated as "class enemies"; in Iraq, it could make withdrawal harder when we have a government elected by a third of the population.

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It seems pretty clear now that the term "freedom" has a very specific meaning peculiar to the coterie around Pres. Bush; "freedom" is often used to refer to freedom from business regulations, or the SEC, or environmental regulations. It "warms those who feel its power," which is an unusual attribution of agency; usually freedom causes people to feel their own power. Then there is the matter of freedom "burning those who fight its progress": this could be any ideology, such as the Church Militant or Stalinism. It's possible that the speechwriters were thinking of freedom advancing against the tiny minority of state functionaries that sustain repression—indeed, I suspect they did; but I also think they believed that "freedom" could be imposed by another small minority: "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom, not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events."

Again, whose choices? Whomever Bush means by "we." Perhaps a speechwriter, painfully conscious of Marxist dialectical materialism, insisted on this clarification: Bush was not going to propound a Hegelian vision in his speech, no sir! In that case, however, it wasn't the inevitability that hundreds of millions of people would choose this peculiar freedom—it is Bush himself making this choice.

Iraq did not rate a mention in the speech, but clearly the entire speech was about Iraq.

So let us turn to Iraq, where the pace of violence has significantly accelerated. Juan Cole (Informed Comment) remarks about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

Arab satellite channels broadcast excerpts Thursday from an Internet recording attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian radical Muslim fundamentalist, in which he bitterly attacked Iraqi Shiites for fighting alongside US troops at Fallujah in November. He accused them of looting the city. He also denounced Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as an atheist and an apostate for declining to denounce the Fallujah campaign. He alleged that 800 Israeli soldiers took part in the fighting there (an absurd charge, of course, but it will be widely believed). The strategy attributed to Zarqawi, of attempting to foment a civil war between Shiite Iraqis and Sunni Iraqis, is a desperate one and so far the Shiites have refused to take the bait. Zarqawi may well be a black psy-ops operation of Baathist military intelligence, which is probably behind most of the violence in Iraq.

I have long held a position similar to that enunciated by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter's assessment that the lion's share of violence in Iraq is the work of Baathist military intelligence and military gone underground, and that the tendency to blame everything on Zarqawi and a handful of foreigners is a propaganda move that suits both the Baath mukhabarat and the Bush administration. AP correspondent in Baghdad, Borzou Daragahi, makes much the same argument.

Only 6 percent of the fighters captured at Fallujah were foreigners, and Fallujah anyway had long had a high foreign-born population, being a frontier and desert port.

I've been inclined to suspect the Bazaar of Violence, rather than some centralized hierarchy, is at the core of the violence. Cole & Ritter suggest a centralization to this insurgency that seems highly unlikely to me. The reason is that the Ba'th, while advancing a far-fetched, flimsy ideology, were all about privilege. The entire system worked with a hierarchy of privilege; informers had privileges over their neighbors, mukhabarat had privileges the informers did not, and so on. Adherence was motivated by self-preservation, but enthusiastic, zealous adherence was obtained by prerequisites: a Mercedes saloon, a villa, a mistress. Such organizations would have to reconstruct itself, not only with a much smaller pool of resources than before, but with different "cadres" controlling the goodies.

It does seem a bit odd, too, that in the initial months after the invasion the Pentagon typically brushed off the routine car bombings as Ba'thist "dead-enders," remnants of the previous regime.

In the meantime, Iraq's elections draw closer; the incumbent PM, Iyad Allawi of the Iraqi National Accord (INA) is facing his principle opponent in the form of Abdel Aziz Hakim of the Unified Iraqi Alliance (UIF; Hakim is also the head of the Shi'a organization SCIRI). Jon Lee Anderson (New Yorker). Mr. Anderson believes it is most likely that Abdel Aziz Hakim will be the victor (SCIRI is widely believed to be an Iranian organization; Hakim and his brother, the late Ayatollah Muhammad Bakir, resided in Iran for much of their lives, and of course Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shi'a, is a native of Iran; the Badr Brigades, SCIRI's armed wing, have reportedly been employed by the CPA to enforce order in Shi'a areas).

In the meantime we need to consider the peculiar meaning of "freedom" used by President Bush in his inaugural address: "freedom" burning those who stand in its way, while warming those who feel its power. It's not particularly original for "freedom" to be used to refer to some ideology the speaker admires. As always, the speaker regards "freedom" as the new dispensation to be imposed. Those who resist this are opposed to "freedom," even if any objective oberver can see the increase in state coercion, the loss of individual rights to large employers, the imposition of foreign regimes on defeated peoples, and so on. Ironically, Kana Makiya, in Republic of Fear begins his analysis of Saddam Hussein's regime as follows:

Bizarre as it may seem, the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait is genuinely seen by the Ba'thi state as an extension of the total amount of freedom available to the Arab people. The anti-imperialist rhetoric of pan-Arabism revolves around the idea of freedom from imperialism, toward unity of an artificially fragmented whole... Half a century ago, Michel 'Aflaq, the Syrian founder of the Ba'th movment, [...said] it was not even possible to be an Arab without believing in the imperative of union between all Arabs at the same time.
(p.xix, The Republic of Fear)

Here's what I mean:

Some, I know, have questioned the global appeal of liberty — though this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt. Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of our ideals.

And all the allies of the United States can know: We honor your friendship, we rely on your counsel, and we depend on your help. Division among free nations is a primary goal of freedom's enemies. The concerted effort of free nations to promote democracy is a prelude to our enemies' defeat.

This is the gist of the speech, too. I'm not nitopicking at details; the speech is a Castro-esque piece of monomania. "Freedom" occurs 27 times, "liberty" 15 times, "tyranny"/"tyrant" 6 times, and so on. It frames every parapgraph, including the bizarre doublespeak in which the creation of Social Security and of public education are somehow equated with its abolition—and with freedom.

All of this was intended, naturally, to validate the invasion of Iraq and future invasions. THere was no WMD. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks. The news coming from Iraq is of spiraling violence, mutual resentment of soldiers and Iraqi nationals, destruction of entire cities and a dubious political system. All the same—freedom is on the march!

UPDATE: The American Prospect features this article by Tara McKelvey on the fate of Iraqi women held in the American prison system there.

Were Iraqi women raped or sexually assaulted by Americans at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities? None of the women I interviewed would talk about it. "You’re asking this question in a culture that kills you for being raped," explains [Iraqi American Atty. Riva] Khoshaba [...]

Under such circumstances, rape is difficult to prove. Yet reports of sexual abuse and exploitation have crept into government documents. On October 7, 2003, American soldiers held a female detainee’s hands behind her back, forced her to her knees, "kissed [her] on the mouth," and removed her blouse, according to a Commander’s Report of Disciplinary or Administrative Action. Major General Antonio Taguba reported on the "videotaping and photographing [of] naked male and female detainees” in his May 2004 report on detainee abuse. In their August 25, 2004, report examining the role of military intelligence, Major General George R. Fay and Lieutenant General Anthony R. Jones describe "Incident No. 38," in which "a criminal detainee housed in the Hard Site was shown lifting her shirt with both her breasts exposed [...]"

And an image shown to members of Congress on May 12, 2004, seems to depict a female detainee exposing her breasts, apparently against her will, according to a high-level Senate staffer. “She just looked like she’d died inside,” the staffer says.

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