Although seemingly less brutal than physical methods, no-touch torture leaves deep psychological scars on both victims and interrogators. One British journalist who observed this method’s use in Northern Ireland called sensory deprivation "the worst form of torture" because "it provokes more anxiety among the interrogatees than more traditional tortures, leaves no visible scars, and, therefore, is harder to prove, and produces longer lasting effects." Victims often need extensive treatment to recover from injury far more crippling than mere physical pain. Perpetrators can suffer a dangerous expansion of ego, leading to escalating cruelty and lasting emotional disorders. Though any ordinary man or woman can be trained to torture, every gulag has a few masters who take to the task with sadistic flair — abhorred by their victims and valued by their superiors. Applied under the pressure of actual field operations after 1963, psychological methods soon gave way to unimagainable cruelties, physical and sexual, by individual perpetrators whose improvisations, plumbing the capacity for brutality, are often horrifying. — Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation From The Cold War To The War On Terror

Salon has posted all 279 photos and 19 videos they obtained from the Army’s internal investigation of the torture and murder of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. This is probably not all the photos from Abu Ghraib. According to Salon, there were two Criminal Investigation Command reports. The first looked at 1,325 photographs and 93 videos of "suspected detainee abuse." The second report contained the smaller number of images Salon has posted. They have no information about how or why the CID culled fewer than one-quarter of the original images.

Whether or not we’re looking at something incomplete, the photographs, arranged chronologically, and with the CID’s captions of who and what the photos depict, tell the story in a way that makes it far easier to understand what’s going on in the photos, and how the actions evolved.

The earliest photos, taken in mid-October 2003, show what Alfred McCoy calls "no-touch torture" — hooding, stripping, stress positions, methods that leave no physical scars, but are designed to leave prisoners disoriented, confused, humiliated, and blaming themselves for their own abuse. The guards did not come  up with this. It’s been CIA practice for decades. But within a very short time, that "expansion of ego" McCoy talks about starts taking over, and the guards are acting like petty gods in control of their own small worlds, leashing a prisoner like an animal, placing others in sexual positions.

They’re not really in control, of course. For instance, a CID agent ordered the torture of the iconic hooded and wired man — who is probably not the man identified by the New York Times last Saturday, by the way (although the same torture may have been used on more than one prisoner). The agent told guards to keep him awake and "make his life a living hell."  In their own improvised way, they did just that.

But increasing cruelty is not the only sign that practicing psychological torture had a horrible effect on the guards. The clearest sign is the story behind the worst — although far from the most famous — Abu Ghraib photos, those of Manadel al-Jamadi, who was killed by the CIA, and then packed in ice and left in the room where he was murdered while they tried to figure out what to do with his body. Probably the most disturbing photos were of Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman grinning and giving thumbs up signs over his battered corpse.

The story:

According to Graner’s April 2005 testimony to CID investigators, shortly after he and Harman came on the night shift, he remembered noticing that an odd fluid was leaking out of the 1B shower into his office. He said he pulled a spare key he had to the shower room and opened the door. Graner said that there, on the far side of the room, he and Harman saw a sealed body bag leaking fluid across the floor. "We opened it up and looked at it," Graner said. "No one told us not to go into the shower."

Graner and Harman decided to pose for pictures with the body.

What horrors does it take to twist a human being so badly that he stumbles upon a battered corpse, and feeling neither horror nor pity, or maybe feeling both, and finding no way to express either, decides to take joking photos?

Look at the photos, all the photos, and you may have the answer.