How did the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal become known and what was the immediate result?

Charles Graner loaned two CDs of pictures he had taken while in Iraq to another MP, Joseph Darby. One of the CDs contained content almost exclusively relating to the abuse that had been taking place at Abu Ghraib. Darby would turn a copy of the pictures over to the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). CID immediately launched an investigation of the MPs working at Abu Ghraib's Hard Site. Amnesty boxes were placed around the prison for the MPs to surrender potentially incriminating materials.

Nevertheless, the story would be broken by 60 Minutes in the spring of 2004. Joseph Darby, who had originally been promised anonymity, would receive the dubious honor of the personal thanks of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on national television. Darby was on duty in Iraq at the time of Rumsfeld's statement and would have to be flown home in short order. The investigation that followed the discovery of Graner's photographs would conclude that the activities of Abu Ghraib's night shift had no official sanction and had not been ordered by anyone in authority to make such decisions.

The Schlesinger Report and the upper administration of the White House attempted to isolate the activities at Abu Ghraib from previous Bush administration and even previous military and White House procedures that had been in place since the Vietnam War. In much the same way as those men standing trial at Nuremburg in 1945, the shock on the faces of American officials at every level seemed to have been one of general shock and disgust. The compartmentalized nature of each individual task of the War on Terror, the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and general US government policy allowed the vast majority of individuals involved in the incident to absolve themselves of direct guilt. They weren't killing jews, they just conducted the train that took them to Dachau; they weren't authorizing the torture of Iraqi prisoners, they simply provided a list of acceptable "enhanced interrogation techniques."