For about three months in the fall of 2003, Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became the site of production of some of the most striking and disturbing images in the entire war on terror. Images of naked, hooded men being beaten, sexually humiliated and subjected to “stress positions” were captured by digital cameras, stored on hard drives and CD-ROM disks, and disseminated over the Internet. In the winter of 2004, the US military began a series of internal investigations into the incidents of torture and abuse, with special emphasis on the photographic record. An attempt was made to recover and suppress the photographs, offering amnesty to anyone who turned them in. But the containment effort failed, and by April 2004, the photographs had been revealed to the public by CBS News's Sixty Minutes and Seymour Hersh's New Yorker articles.

Thus was created what I shall call the “Abu Ghraib Archive,” a body of texts and images, recordings and remembrances that is centrally constituted by, but not limited to the 279 photographs and 19 video clips gathered by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). These images, first brought to CID on 13 January 2004 by Specialist Joseph Darby, are only a small portion of the total information in the CID archives (over one thousand photographs remain classified), and it took two years for this partial record to be released to the public. They were leaked by “a military source who spent time at Abu Ghraib,” and published by Salon magazine in February 2006, at which time investigative reporters Mark Benjamin and Michael Scherer produced “The Abu Ghraib Files,” an annotated, chronological archive that follows the CID timelines, supplemented by material from the numerous investigations, including classified material.