If your interested go here and read the old Kubark CIA manual on interrogation:
http://www.phttp://www.parascope.com/articles/0397/kubark06.htm
``Obviously, many resistant subjects of counterintelligence interrogation cannot be brought to cooperation, or even to compliance, merely through pressures which they generate within themselves or through the unreinforced effect of the interrogation situation. Manipulative techniques - still keyed to the individual but brought to bear upon him from outside himself - then become necessary.
It is a fundamental hypothesis of this handbook that these techniques, which can succeed even with highly resistant sources, are in essence methods of inducing regression of the personality to whatever earlier and weaker level is required for the dissolution of resistance and the inculcation of dependence. All of the techniques employed to break through an interrogation roadblock, the entire spectrum from simple isolation to hypnosis and narcosis, are essentially ways of speeding up the process of regression. As the interrogatee slips back from maturity toward a more infantile state, his learned or structured personality traits fall away in a reversed chronological order, so that the characteristics most recently acquired - which are also the characteristics drawn upon by the interrogatee in his own defense - are the first to go. As Gill and Brenman have pointed out, regression is basically a loss of autonomy. (13)''
And there you have what Abu Ghraib is about in a nutshell. Regression. After regression to the desired level is achieved through various techniques outlined in the manual, the goal is to use the pliability that comes with regression to gain compliance and therefore obtain whatever information or behavior is sought.
I think it is important to understand that the sort of regression that is considered necessary to achieve to break down resistance and get compliance isn't just a mild psychological state, like the sort that can show up in drunken arguments or under mild physical abuse. Those can be resisted and recovered from fairly quickly.
The regression these guys are seeking is the prolonged type that probably takes several weeks to induce and later requires rehabilitation.
The basic methods are rather simple and mostly involve disorientation, isolation from normality, debilitating fear, anxiety, distress and other emotional states compatible with pliability, but that fall short of withdrawal into infantile apathy. Anybody who has been in a seriously abusive relationship with a mate or as a child will recognize the state they are seeking to induce.
I would speculate that only the resistant HVDs (high value detainees) are exposed to the prolonged type regression. Places like Guantanamo would most definitely fall into that category.
At Abu Ghraib and likely most other improvised facilities that have mostly LVDs (low value detainees) probably mimic the techniques to achieve regression in a crude ad hoc way through the use of semi-controlled guard brutalities and general detention conditions like erratic and depreciated schedules for basic necessities of water, tolite, food, clothing and sleep; and through extremes of temperature, noise, lighting, crowding and other physical and sensory deprivations or overloads.
In other words, the trauma of armed capture, screening, assessment and immediate submersion in very bad prison conditions (readily available in most of the world) are probably good enough to get some regression and compliance process started.
Operation Iraqi Freedom. Great stuff.
CG