New Yorker: Abu Ghraib abuses were 'de facto US policy'

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Some of the most iconic images of the Iraq war came not from photojournalists on the front lines, but US soldiers carrying point-and-shoot digital cameras. In its latest issue, the New Yorker profiles the woman who snapped many of the photos depicting abuse at Abu Ghraib prison that the same magazine revealed nearly four years ago.

Like many of the soldiers in charge of the detained Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Harman had little experience running a prison. As Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris report, she and others in her Army Reserve unit didn't stick out at the prison, "where almost nothing was run according to military doctrine."

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Harman and other soldiers told of taking prisoners' blankets and leaving them naked in bare cells while temperatures dipped near freezing. The New Yorker writers relay witness accounts of bones being found inside Abu Ghraib incinerators and prisoners being submerged in ice-filled trash cans.