Post by felixzecat on Oct 4, 2005 8:48:04 GMT -8
As an American in a Democratic society, I feel that it is vital that we as Americans stay informed about issues even if they are too ugly to want to look at. The following is an article from the German magazine, "Der Spiegel", about Abu Ghraib, and is the kind of article you will NEVER see in the U.S., you know, the land of the "free press". The reasons, of course, will become self-evident upon reading the article.
A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib
By Marian Blasberg and Anita Blasberg, Der Spiegel
With Lynndie England's conviction earlier this week, nine US soldiers have now been sentenced for their role in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. But is it enough? DER SPIEGEL looks at two lives destroyed by Abu Ghraib. One, an Iraqi community leader -- the other, his American guard.
On the day he lost his innocence before the eyes of the world, Sergeant Javal Davis was sitting in the mess hall at Victory Base in Abu Ghraib prison, eating a plate of rice and tuna fish. Davis ate mechanically, ignoring what the other soldiers were saying, occasionally glancing up at a TV screen.
It was April 28, 2004. Insurgents were still launching the occasional rocket-propelled grenade at their base near Baghdad, and CNN was broadcasting images from home: basketball, the White House, Wall Street. It was a normal day at Victory Base. But then the room suddenly went still.
There was a man on the screen, his arms spread out and attached to electrical wires, his head covered with a sandbag. The headline read: "Scandal at Abu Ghraib." Other images followed, images of prisoners on dog leashes, of piles of naked, intertwining bodies.
Someone turned up the volume, and Javal Davis heard the reporter mention his name. A photo from his high-school yearbook flashed across the screen, a picture of a tall black boy with a friendly face and a big smile. Then the Secretary of Defense appeared, talking about seven degenerate soldiers who had brought shame upon the USA.
Now, 14 months later, Javal Davis sits in his attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey. He has had a dragon tattooed onto his upper arm and has grown a beard that seems out of place on his youthful face. Davis is unable to look directly at his conversation partner, and he rubs his fingers together when he speaks. He was released four months ago, the first of the nine soldiers America took to court and charged with dereliction of duty and conspiracy, with assault and sexual humiliation of prisoners.
All nine of the accused have now been sentenced. Charles Graner received ten years in prison, Ivan Frederick eight and Lynndie England was just sentenced to three years in prison by a military court in Fort Hood, Texas.
Davis says that his country punished him for crimes over which he had no control. Instead, he says, the people who were responsible for creating the system of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib should be brought to justice. Davis wants to talk and wants to set things right. He leafs through a white binder on the table in front of him. It contains documents from his life, and occasionally he picks out one of them -- an employee-of-the-month award, college transcripts, a character reference from the mayor of Roselle, New Jersey, where he is from.
"Am I a bad person?"
***
Hajj Ali sits on the sofa in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan. He was released from Abu Ghraib 16 months ago. It's a beautiful summer day, but he keeps the curtains drawn -- girls are lounging in bikinis at the pool below.
Hajj Ali reaches for a pack of cigarettes with his right hand and uses his lips to extract a Marlboro. Then he starts up his laptop and calls up an Iraqi Web site, albasrah.net, that shows the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He scrolls through the site, pausing occasionally: "Here," says Hajj Ali, "this is Abu Hudheifa, the imam, lying in the hallway with his gunshot wounds. Or here, Sabrina Harman, bending over the dead from the shower room."
Hajj Ali speaks slowly and quietly. His voice sounds a little hoarse.
"Graner," he says, "that pig."
He scrolls down to a picture of a man standing on a box wearing nothing but a black blanket, his upper body bent forward slightly, his arms attached to wires and a hood over his head. Hajj Ali swallows and zooms in on one of the hands. "Look," he says, "something isn't right about the hand; it seems injured."
Hajj Ali says he is convinced that he is the man in this picture.
It's an image one sees all over Iraq today. It hangs on building walls and in mosques. The hooded man is an icon. His image is a symbol of all the abuses America has committed against his people.
Hajj Ali says that it's a good thing these images exist. Without them, the world would never have learned about Abu Ghraib. No one would have believed us, he says. He uses his lips to fish another Marlboro from his pack, lights it, and tells his story.
When the Americans came, he says, he knew they would pick him up sooner or later -- just like the many who had already been taken away in the preceding weeks. It was October 14, 2003, five months after the end of the war, a Tuesday, and the smell of winter was already in the air.
On the day of his arrest, Hajj Ali was wearing a green shirt over his dishdasha. He was on his way to his parking lot, where he rented parking spaces to people visiting a mosque on the outskirts of Al Madifai near Baghdad. Hajj Ali heard the sound of heavy engines behind him and he turned around to see a group of Humvees bearing down on him. He was quickly encircled, and 20 soldiers jumped onto the sidewalk, pulled out their weapons, handcuffs and a hood, and pushed him to the ground. "Are you Hajj Ali?" they demanded.
Then everything went black.
Ali al-Shalal Abbas, nicknamed Hajj ever since he completed the pilgrimage to Mecca a few years earlier, lay in the truck bed, trying to remain calm. Don't be afraid, he said to himself, you haven't done anything wrong.
He heard passerby yelling as the truck drove away. He is a respected man in Al Madifai, a section of Abu Ghraib, a city of 300,000 not far from Baghdad. Before the Americans came, he was a local leader, a Mukhtar -- a sort of community representative to the authorities. Hajj Ali cannot say how long the trip took. All he sensed was the odor of gasoline, the jolts of bumpy roads and the pain in his left hand, which he had injured at a wedding when he shot into the air with his father's shotgun. The magazine exploded, severing his tendons and slicing off two fingertips; the wound was still fresh.
At some point they pushed him out of the truck and chained him to a fence, and he heard Iraqis in the dark. Hajj Ali asked: "Where are we?"
"I think this is Abu Ghraib," another man whispered.
***
When military policeman Javal Davis passes by the gate of Abu Ghraib fortress for the first time in early October 2003, shortly before the arrest of Hajj Ali, he encounters the sickly-sweet odor of decay. Debris is everywhere: the cadavers of rats and dogs, human body parts already gnawed by animals sticking out of a pile of garbage. A sign next to the fortress gate reads "Welcome to Oz."
Welcome to Saddam's infamous torture chamber.
Davis is led through a two-story concrete building from the 1960s, down endless corridors lined with dirty gray cells. Four thousand prisoners are housed here in concrete buildings, and another 6,000 are kept under miserable conditions in camps outside on the 173-acre site, guarded by 170 Americans and ringed by 24 watch towers and a high wall.
Davis wears a face mask in some hallways, where he is told that prisoners have open tuberculosis sores, hepatitis and HIV. He sees a room with a gallows, a shredder for the corpses and Saddam's crematorium. There are still ashes on the floor. The words "I love my family. I don't want to die" are smeared in blood on the concrete floor.
Davis likes his job in the army. He was a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia. He saw the mass graves, the widows and orphans and the cripples, and he learned that America is the champion of good in the world.
Davis had expected a dark, dungeon-like atmosphere, but this, he thought during his first few days in Abu Ghraib, this must be hell.
***
Hajj Ali stands in the middle of a brightly lit room on the day after his arrival. The room stinks of urine. Three men sit behind a table and the oldest asks the questions. The conversation, as Hajj Ali recalls it, went something like this:
"So you are a terrorist." "What makes you think that?" "Where is Saddam Hussein?" "I don't know." "Osama bin Laden?" "In Afghanistan." "How do you know that? Did you meet him?" "I saw it on the news." "We know that you are a well-known man in your town. You know a lot of people. You know who the insurgents are. Tell us what they're planning." Hajj Ali remains silent. "Or do you want us to let your hand rot off?"
***
Not far from Saddam's crematorium, Javal Davis and eight other men are housed in a former cell. It's a small coffin-like room, about a hundred square feet, windowless, door-less, with dried blood on the walls and wastewater on the floor. The first thing Davis does is clean.
He scrubs the cell floor and walls, and then he nails boards over the window and door openings. Davis is a thorough man. He wants to be an officer in 20 years. He doesn't smoke or drink, and he still holds the school record in 110-meter high hurdles at his high school.
When he left for Iraq in May 2003, Davis believed that he was going there to hunt down terrorists and uncover nuclear weapons, and that he would be back home soon, just as his president had promised.
Davis was initially stationed in Hillah, in Babylon Province, where it was quiet and peaceful. His unit, the 372nd Company, which consisted of 180 reservists, trained Iraqi police officers. Within a few months, Davis had handed out 4,000 diplomas. The Iraqis looked up to a man they spoke of as "Sergeant Davis, a good man."
On his first night at Abu Ghraib, Davis lies in his cot, his Bible, a 9-mm pistol and family photos on the floor below, and recites the Lord's Prayer. He hears the sounds of gunfire outside, and of prisoners, some screaming and some praying, inside the prison. They pray day and night, hour after hour, and Shiites and Sunnis pray together. Hajj Ali sits in a tent with about 50 men in a section of the prison called Camp Vigilant. Each unit consists of five 40-foot-long tents.
When they pray, the prisoners squat on the ground closely together, murmuring their verses from dry throats. The 50 men in each tent receive 60 liters of water a day, enough for drinking but not enough for ritual washing. They get their meals, usually rice, shortly after sunrise. But the meal time is carefully chosen; it's Ramadan and Muslims are not allowed to eat after the sun comes up. Hajj Ali refuses to break his fast.
Three men he knows from Al Madifai build him a dirt sleeping platform, telling their stories as they work. One man says that he was brought here because he tried to prevent an American soldier from destroying a sidewalk with his tank. Another says that he was arrested instead of his neighbor. A third man says he was accused of being a Palestinian.
Hajj Ali slowly realizes that he could be kept here for a long time, no matter what he says. He stays at Camp Vigilant for ten days. Soon there is frost. He thinks of his pregnant wife at home. Every day a guard comes to the tent to ask whether prisoner number 151716 is ready to talk.
Hajj Ali says nothing.
Hajj Ali remembers seeing prisoners being dragged around on leashes. AFP/ THE WASHINGTON POST Hajj Ali remembers seeing prisoners being dragged around on leashes. On the morning of the tenth day, the guards pick him up, place a hood over his head and drive him around the grounds for a few minutes. Then he is taken into a building where it is cool and damp, where the sounds of steps echo through hallways. They order him to remove his clothes, and Hajj Ali strips down to his underwear.
"Keep going! The underwear too!"
They tear off his underwear. Hajj Ali trembles with fear, his hands and feet are bound, and six or seven soldiers push him around. Then one of them tells him to walk up the stairs. Hajj Ali lets himself drop to the floor, crawling and squirming, his wounded hand throbbing with pain. An interpreter tells him to bark like a dog, and Hajj Ali complies.
"Bow-wow." "Louder!" "Bow-wow!"
He keeps collapsing, barely able to move forward. After a few steps, they start whipping and kicking him, yelling "faster!"
Then someone tears off his hood, grabs his hair and drags him up the stairs. Hajj Ali looks up and sees a man holding a megaphone on the landing. He looks athletic and aggressive, and he barks at Hajj Ali: "Up, man! Up! Come on!"
The name tag on the man's chest reads: Davis, MP.
At the top of the stairs, they put the hood back on his head, place him against a grating, and tie his hands together high above his head, forcing him to stand on tiptoe. Hajj Ali is freezing cold, and he asks himself what they want from him. The guard with the megaphone, probably Davis, returns periodically and whispers in his ear: "What kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An AK-47?"
Hajj Ali stands at the grate for one day and one night. Whenever he loses consciousness and his ankles collapse, they douse him with cold water to wake him up again.
At some point he asks the black man with the megaphone whether he can go to the bathroom, but the guard refuses. Later he urinates on his own feet.
"So what's the deal?" asks a soft voice a short time later, "are you ready to talk?" "I would like to," he answers, "but I don't know any terrorists. I don't know who is planning what, do you understand? And it's against my religion to denounce innocent people."
Hajj Ali is kept at the grate a while longer. He has stopped thinking, stopped feeling. Finally the guards take him to a cell. They tell him that he has suffered enough, that he needs to relax and listen to music. They tie him to the ground, place a megaphone next to his ear and keep playing the same song, "Rivers of Babylon," ten times, twenty times, throughout the night. The music is so loud that Hajj Ali believes his skull will burst open.
When Javal Davis connects the megaphone to a small CD player, he usually puts on Metallica. Then he presses the repeat button. If the prisoners happen to like Metallica, he plays country music. Country music is always effective.
For the past week, Davis has been working his shift in cell block 1 A/B, the high-security wing at Abu Ghraib. The cells look like cages and the prisoners cowering in them look like frightened animals. They are suspected terrorists and members of the insurgency, imams, high-ranking politicians and generals, and Davis even recognizes a few faces from the deck of cards they handed out to the army.
Some prisoners are naked and wear sandbags over their heads. Others are chained in positions that force them to stand for hours on end, or they squat, naked, penned into dark, toilet-less dungeons. The stench in the wing is worse than at a sewage treatment plant.
"What the hell is going on here?" Davis asked his major, but the officer merely shrugs his shoulders and tells him he should ask the people from military intelligence. "You're a big boy, scare them, be mean," says the Italian from intelligence, the commanding officer in the high-security wing. "Make sure they have a rough night, soften them up. Yell in their ears with your megaphone." "Why, what's the point of all this?" "We need information. They're killing our people out there every day. Believe me, they'd cut off your head if they could."
Davis feels out of his element. He is a military police officer, not a prison guard. But if there is one thing he has learned in his seven years in the military, it is that a command is a command. He joined the army at 19. A well-known tank commander came up to him in a gym and said "you could have a career with us." What the man told Davis sounded exciting: He would wear a uniform and carry a 9-mm pistol, he would drive a Humvee and he would see the world.
Davis's shift begins at 4 a.m. He counts the prisoners three times, and then he takes a look at the log book at the end of the corridor. Cell 25: no food. Cell 30: no sleep. Cell 40: four hours of radio.
Javal Davis, who just wanted to serve his country, who worships Bill Clinton and who gave speeches in high school against the stigmatization of blacks, now patrols the halls with a megaphone, yelling "Wake up!" He forces prisoners to strip naked, pours ice cold water over their bodies and takes them to a shower room they use for interrogations.
Maybe this is a test, Davis thinks to himself. Maybe this is what God wants him to do: to obey every command and never think twice.
A few prisoners lie in their cells, almost lifeless, traumatized, in despair. Others throw garbage, leftover food and feces as Davis. "I hate America!" they yell into the corridor. "Asshole," another yells repeatedly, "Saddam will fuck you!"
Davis knows that many of the prisoners have studied in the USA, and that they are smart -- better-educated than most of the guards. Because their Arab names are too complicated, the guards give them nicknames: Clawman, the fat one with the injured hand; Shitboy, whom Davis likes because he mimics everything he says; Froggy, who is later renamed Shooter when he tries to shoot a guard; and Thumbie, a loyal Saddam supporter, polite and cooperative.
"I just fight against you because you are fighting against us," says Thumbie. "I am defending our country, our oil, our honor. What would you do in my place?"
Davis has trouble differentiating between guilt and innocence. These people are terrorists, killers, bombers. Why else would they be here? But, then again, there are also the brothers and cousins of suspects; and there are the children with whom he plays soccer in the hallways.
During breaks, he sits on a chair at the end of the hall and eats his mother's chocolate chip cookies and, afterwards, he prays. Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. Javal Davis believes in the Last Judgment, and he wants to be standing on the right side when that time comes.
***
Hajj Ali squats in cage 49, diagonally across the hallway from the shower room at the end of the corridor. He hasn't eaten in days, he has been naked for days and he has pulled a sock in lieu of a bandage over his throbbing left hand.
A Syrian imam comes to his cell every day to collect the packaging material from the lunch packets. Sometimes he pulls out pills from his sleeve, pills he has found in the garbage, and Hajj Ali swallows them, swallows every pill he can get, but nothing can lessen the pain.
Interpreters keep appearing at his cell door, asking whether he is finally ready to talk, and each time he turns them down, he gets another beating. On some days he spends eight hours praying to, and praising, his God.
Sometimes he daydreams that he is walking through his old neighborhood. He imagines walking down the street in front of his house, down to the soccer field along the river -- a field that was once his life's work.
When his ancestors settled there, Abu Ghraib was little more than a pit stop on the route between Baghdad and Amman. The soil was fertile and his family lived from the fields, farming a 25-donum (about 15-acre) plot, tending dense gardens of date palms. Hajj Ali grew up as the youngest of eight children.
After finishing school, he ran a business collecting local farmers' fruit, vegetables and grain and selling it in the market in Baghdad. Business was good until the first Gulf war came along in 1991, followed by the embargo. When the profits dried up as a result, Hajj Ali sought comfort in the mosque, where he studied Islamic law. He made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and returned to find his father on his death bed. When his father died a short time later, tribal leaders asked him to take over his father's position as their local leader. From then on, people would come to him, complaining that their food rations weren't enough, or that they didn't have enough money for medical treatment. Hajj Ali comforted these people and did what he could to intercede on their behalf with the authorities and with doctors.
One day he came across an unused, rocky and uneven field near the river. He leveled the surface, built two goals and planted grass. Every day he would water the field and draw boundary lines with chalk. After a few weeks, he divided his neighborhood into four districts, and by the summer before the war, the Al Madifai soccer league began playing its first games. Hajj Ali stood on the sidelines and wept for joy.
"Clawman, what kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An RPG-7?"
"Clawman, have you thought about it? Are you ready to talk to us now?"
The guards repeatedly drag him from his cell, lock him up in the shower room and force him to squat there for hours on end. The days are filled with interrogations that lead nowhere, and in the end they always pour sewage over Hajj Ali. They call the procedure a "shower."
The worst nights of all are when Specialist Charles Graner is on duty. He whistles when he walks into the wing, and sometimes he pretends to be a waiter, a white cloth draped over his arm and carrying a tray of hot macaroni. Graner serves the prisoners the meal, and whenever one of them rejects the food, either because he is fasting or because he believes the food could be poisoned, Graner laughs loudly and takes a picture.
At first, Hajj Ali didn't know that cell phones could be used to take pictures. Strange, he thought, why do they hold their phones with their arms stretched out like that? One evening, when the pain begins to move up into his arm, he stops Graner while the guard is making his rounds. He asks a cellmate who speaks a little English to ask Graner for some medicine to reduce the pain. Graner says that he can have it.
"Put your hand through the bars," Graner says. Hajj Ali extends his hand and Graner tears off the blood-soaked sock. Bits of Ali's flesh adhere to the material. Graner smiles, and says, "Doesn't that take away the pain, Clawman?"
***
Javal Davis is relieved when, in his second week at Abu Ghraib, they move him to wing 3 A/B, a section housing 400 prisoners, eight men to a cell -- rapists, petty thieves, kidnappers. After the high-security wing, his new job feels like babysitting -- except when he is occasionally called upon to intervene when an older prisoner tries to rape a boy.
Davis shows them how to do push-ups and sit-ups, and he helps them point their prayer rugs toward Mecca. In return, they teach him a few Arabic phrases. But Specialist Charles Graner keeps ordering Davis back for special shifts in the high-security wing.
Graner, a simple prison guard from Maryland, has recently begun smiling more often. The people from intelligence have put him in charge of the terrorist section.
After a visit by Geoffrey Miller, the commander-in-chief at Guantanamo Bay, more and more investigators, analysts and interpreters have been coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. They bring along their dogs, and these people are clearly the ones in charge now. They wear no name tags, and they address each other with code names, like DJ, John Israel, James Bond. They begin to apply pressure. It's late October 2003, Saddam is still at large, and Americans outside are dying every day.
Night after night, Davis is ordered to bring prisoners into the shower room for interrogation. The intelligence officers inside then lock the door, and Davis, standing outside, hears screams and the occasional prayer. The prisoners seem grateful when he brings them back to their cells. Davis works 14 hours a day, from 4 a.m. until 6 p.m., seven days a week. When his shift ends, he flops into bed still wearing his uniform, the stench of decay lingering in his nose.
Exhaustion eats away at his limbs, the days go by with no end in sight, and occasionally a glimpse from home flickers across a TV screen almost like a pathetic joke. When he watches "Terminator 3" or a New York Mets game, he thinks about his son Zaniel, his daughter Latrice and his wife Zeenethia.
(Continued in next reply)
A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib
By Marian Blasberg and Anita Blasberg, Der Spiegel
With Lynndie England's conviction earlier this week, nine US soldiers have now been sentenced for their role in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. But is it enough? DER SPIEGEL looks at two lives destroyed by Abu Ghraib. One, an Iraqi community leader -- the other, his American guard.
On the day he lost his innocence before the eyes of the world, Sergeant Javal Davis was sitting in the mess hall at Victory Base in Abu Ghraib prison, eating a plate of rice and tuna fish. Davis ate mechanically, ignoring what the other soldiers were saying, occasionally glancing up at a TV screen.
It was April 28, 2004. Insurgents were still launching the occasional rocket-propelled grenade at their base near Baghdad, and CNN was broadcasting images from home: basketball, the White House, Wall Street. It was a normal day at Victory Base. But then the room suddenly went still.
There was a man on the screen, his arms spread out and attached to electrical wires, his head covered with a sandbag. The headline read: "Scandal at Abu Ghraib." Other images followed, images of prisoners on dog leashes, of piles of naked, intertwining bodies.
Someone turned up the volume, and Javal Davis heard the reporter mention his name. A photo from his high-school yearbook flashed across the screen, a picture of a tall black boy with a friendly face and a big smile. Then the Secretary of Defense appeared, talking about seven degenerate soldiers who had brought shame upon the USA.
Now, 14 months later, Javal Davis sits in his attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey. He has had a dragon tattooed onto his upper arm and has grown a beard that seems out of place on his youthful face. Davis is unable to look directly at his conversation partner, and he rubs his fingers together when he speaks. He was released four months ago, the first of the nine soldiers America took to court and charged with dereliction of duty and conspiracy, with assault and sexual humiliation of prisoners.
All nine of the accused have now been sentenced. Charles Graner received ten years in prison, Ivan Frederick eight and Lynndie England was just sentenced to three years in prison by a military court in Fort Hood, Texas.
Davis says that his country punished him for crimes over which he had no control. Instead, he says, the people who were responsible for creating the system of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib should be brought to justice. Davis wants to talk and wants to set things right. He leafs through a white binder on the table in front of him. It contains documents from his life, and occasionally he picks out one of them -- an employee-of-the-month award, college transcripts, a character reference from the mayor of Roselle, New Jersey, where he is from.
"Am I a bad person?"
***
Hajj Ali sits on the sofa in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan. He was released from Abu Ghraib 16 months ago. It's a beautiful summer day, but he keeps the curtains drawn -- girls are lounging in bikinis at the pool below.
Hajj Ali reaches for a pack of cigarettes with his right hand and uses his lips to extract a Marlboro. Then he starts up his laptop and calls up an Iraqi Web site, albasrah.net, that shows the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He scrolls through the site, pausing occasionally: "Here," says Hajj Ali, "this is Abu Hudheifa, the imam, lying in the hallway with his gunshot wounds. Or here, Sabrina Harman, bending over the dead from the shower room."
Hajj Ali speaks slowly and quietly. His voice sounds a little hoarse.
"Graner," he says, "that pig."
He scrolls down to a picture of a man standing on a box wearing nothing but a black blanket, his upper body bent forward slightly, his arms attached to wires and a hood over his head. Hajj Ali swallows and zooms in on one of the hands. "Look," he says, "something isn't right about the hand; it seems injured."
Hajj Ali says he is convinced that he is the man in this picture.
It's an image one sees all over Iraq today. It hangs on building walls and in mosques. The hooded man is an icon. His image is a symbol of all the abuses America has committed against his people.
Hajj Ali says that it's a good thing these images exist. Without them, the world would never have learned about Abu Ghraib. No one would have believed us, he says. He uses his lips to fish another Marlboro from his pack, lights it, and tells his story.
When the Americans came, he says, he knew they would pick him up sooner or later -- just like the many who had already been taken away in the preceding weeks. It was October 14, 2003, five months after the end of the war, a Tuesday, and the smell of winter was already in the air.
On the day of his arrest, Hajj Ali was wearing a green shirt over his dishdasha. He was on his way to his parking lot, where he rented parking spaces to people visiting a mosque on the outskirts of Al Madifai near Baghdad. Hajj Ali heard the sound of heavy engines behind him and he turned around to see a group of Humvees bearing down on him. He was quickly encircled, and 20 soldiers jumped onto the sidewalk, pulled out their weapons, handcuffs and a hood, and pushed him to the ground. "Are you Hajj Ali?" they demanded.
Then everything went black.
Ali al-Shalal Abbas, nicknamed Hajj ever since he completed the pilgrimage to Mecca a few years earlier, lay in the truck bed, trying to remain calm. Don't be afraid, he said to himself, you haven't done anything wrong.
He heard passerby yelling as the truck drove away. He is a respected man in Al Madifai, a section of Abu Ghraib, a city of 300,000 not far from Baghdad. Before the Americans came, he was a local leader, a Mukhtar -- a sort of community representative to the authorities. Hajj Ali cannot say how long the trip took. All he sensed was the odor of gasoline, the jolts of bumpy roads and the pain in his left hand, which he had injured at a wedding when he shot into the air with his father's shotgun. The magazine exploded, severing his tendons and slicing off two fingertips; the wound was still fresh.
At some point they pushed him out of the truck and chained him to a fence, and he heard Iraqis in the dark. Hajj Ali asked: "Where are we?"
"I think this is Abu Ghraib," another man whispered.
***
When military policeman Javal Davis passes by the gate of Abu Ghraib fortress for the first time in early October 2003, shortly before the arrest of Hajj Ali, he encounters the sickly-sweet odor of decay. Debris is everywhere: the cadavers of rats and dogs, human body parts already gnawed by animals sticking out of a pile of garbage. A sign next to the fortress gate reads "Welcome to Oz."
Welcome to Saddam's infamous torture chamber.
Davis is led through a two-story concrete building from the 1960s, down endless corridors lined with dirty gray cells. Four thousand prisoners are housed here in concrete buildings, and another 6,000 are kept under miserable conditions in camps outside on the 173-acre site, guarded by 170 Americans and ringed by 24 watch towers and a high wall.
Davis wears a face mask in some hallways, where he is told that prisoners have open tuberculosis sores, hepatitis and HIV. He sees a room with a gallows, a shredder for the corpses and Saddam's crematorium. There are still ashes on the floor. The words "I love my family. I don't want to die" are smeared in blood on the concrete floor.
Davis likes his job in the army. He was a United Nations peacekeeper in Bosnia. He saw the mass graves, the widows and orphans and the cripples, and he learned that America is the champion of good in the world.
Davis had expected a dark, dungeon-like atmosphere, but this, he thought during his first few days in Abu Ghraib, this must be hell.
***
Hajj Ali stands in the middle of a brightly lit room on the day after his arrival. The room stinks of urine. Three men sit behind a table and the oldest asks the questions. The conversation, as Hajj Ali recalls it, went something like this:
"So you are a terrorist." "What makes you think that?" "Where is Saddam Hussein?" "I don't know." "Osama bin Laden?" "In Afghanistan." "How do you know that? Did you meet him?" "I saw it on the news." "We know that you are a well-known man in your town. You know a lot of people. You know who the insurgents are. Tell us what they're planning." Hajj Ali remains silent. "Or do you want us to let your hand rot off?"
***
Not far from Saddam's crematorium, Javal Davis and eight other men are housed in a former cell. It's a small coffin-like room, about a hundred square feet, windowless, door-less, with dried blood on the walls and wastewater on the floor. The first thing Davis does is clean.
He scrubs the cell floor and walls, and then he nails boards over the window and door openings. Davis is a thorough man. He wants to be an officer in 20 years. He doesn't smoke or drink, and he still holds the school record in 110-meter high hurdles at his high school.
When he left for Iraq in May 2003, Davis believed that he was going there to hunt down terrorists and uncover nuclear weapons, and that he would be back home soon, just as his president had promised.
Davis was initially stationed in Hillah, in Babylon Province, where it was quiet and peaceful. His unit, the 372nd Company, which consisted of 180 reservists, trained Iraqi police officers. Within a few months, Davis had handed out 4,000 diplomas. The Iraqis looked up to a man they spoke of as "Sergeant Davis, a good man."
On his first night at Abu Ghraib, Davis lies in his cot, his Bible, a 9-mm pistol and family photos on the floor below, and recites the Lord's Prayer. He hears the sounds of gunfire outside, and of prisoners, some screaming and some praying, inside the prison. They pray day and night, hour after hour, and Shiites and Sunnis pray together. Hajj Ali sits in a tent with about 50 men in a section of the prison called Camp Vigilant. Each unit consists of five 40-foot-long tents.
When they pray, the prisoners squat on the ground closely together, murmuring their verses from dry throats. The 50 men in each tent receive 60 liters of water a day, enough for drinking but not enough for ritual washing. They get their meals, usually rice, shortly after sunrise. But the meal time is carefully chosen; it's Ramadan and Muslims are not allowed to eat after the sun comes up. Hajj Ali refuses to break his fast.
Three men he knows from Al Madifai build him a dirt sleeping platform, telling their stories as they work. One man says that he was brought here because he tried to prevent an American soldier from destroying a sidewalk with his tank. Another says that he was arrested instead of his neighbor. A third man says he was accused of being a Palestinian.
Hajj Ali slowly realizes that he could be kept here for a long time, no matter what he says. He stays at Camp Vigilant for ten days. Soon there is frost. He thinks of his pregnant wife at home. Every day a guard comes to the tent to ask whether prisoner number 151716 is ready to talk.
Hajj Ali says nothing.
Hajj Ali remembers seeing prisoners being dragged around on leashes. AFP/ THE WASHINGTON POST Hajj Ali remembers seeing prisoners being dragged around on leashes. On the morning of the tenth day, the guards pick him up, place a hood over his head and drive him around the grounds for a few minutes. Then he is taken into a building where it is cool and damp, where the sounds of steps echo through hallways. They order him to remove his clothes, and Hajj Ali strips down to his underwear.
"Keep going! The underwear too!"
They tear off his underwear. Hajj Ali trembles with fear, his hands and feet are bound, and six or seven soldiers push him around. Then one of them tells him to walk up the stairs. Hajj Ali lets himself drop to the floor, crawling and squirming, his wounded hand throbbing with pain. An interpreter tells him to bark like a dog, and Hajj Ali complies.
"Bow-wow." "Louder!" "Bow-wow!"
He keeps collapsing, barely able to move forward. After a few steps, they start whipping and kicking him, yelling "faster!"
Then someone tears off his hood, grabs his hair and drags him up the stairs. Hajj Ali looks up and sees a man holding a megaphone on the landing. He looks athletic and aggressive, and he barks at Hajj Ali: "Up, man! Up! Come on!"
The name tag on the man's chest reads: Davis, MP.
At the top of the stairs, they put the hood back on his head, place him against a grating, and tie his hands together high above his head, forcing him to stand on tiptoe. Hajj Ali is freezing cold, and he asks himself what they want from him. The guard with the megaphone, probably Davis, returns periodically and whispers in his ear: "What kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An AK-47?"
Hajj Ali stands at the grate for one day and one night. Whenever he loses consciousness and his ankles collapse, they douse him with cold water to wake him up again.
At some point he asks the black man with the megaphone whether he can go to the bathroom, but the guard refuses. Later he urinates on his own feet.
"So what's the deal?" asks a soft voice a short time later, "are you ready to talk?" "I would like to," he answers, "but I don't know any terrorists. I don't know who is planning what, do you understand? And it's against my religion to denounce innocent people."
Hajj Ali is kept at the grate a while longer. He has stopped thinking, stopped feeling. Finally the guards take him to a cell. They tell him that he has suffered enough, that he needs to relax and listen to music. They tie him to the ground, place a megaphone next to his ear and keep playing the same song, "Rivers of Babylon," ten times, twenty times, throughout the night. The music is so loud that Hajj Ali believes his skull will burst open.
When Javal Davis connects the megaphone to a small CD player, he usually puts on Metallica. Then he presses the repeat button. If the prisoners happen to like Metallica, he plays country music. Country music is always effective.
For the past week, Davis has been working his shift in cell block 1 A/B, the high-security wing at Abu Ghraib. The cells look like cages and the prisoners cowering in them look like frightened animals. They are suspected terrorists and members of the insurgency, imams, high-ranking politicians and generals, and Davis even recognizes a few faces from the deck of cards they handed out to the army.
Some prisoners are naked and wear sandbags over their heads. Others are chained in positions that force them to stand for hours on end, or they squat, naked, penned into dark, toilet-less dungeons. The stench in the wing is worse than at a sewage treatment plant.
"What the hell is going on here?" Davis asked his major, but the officer merely shrugs his shoulders and tells him he should ask the people from military intelligence. "You're a big boy, scare them, be mean," says the Italian from intelligence, the commanding officer in the high-security wing. "Make sure they have a rough night, soften them up. Yell in their ears with your megaphone." "Why, what's the point of all this?" "We need information. They're killing our people out there every day. Believe me, they'd cut off your head if they could."
Davis feels out of his element. He is a military police officer, not a prison guard. But if there is one thing he has learned in his seven years in the military, it is that a command is a command. He joined the army at 19. A well-known tank commander came up to him in a gym and said "you could have a career with us." What the man told Davis sounded exciting: He would wear a uniform and carry a 9-mm pistol, he would drive a Humvee and he would see the world.
Davis's shift begins at 4 a.m. He counts the prisoners three times, and then he takes a look at the log book at the end of the corridor. Cell 25: no food. Cell 30: no sleep. Cell 40: four hours of radio.
Javal Davis, who just wanted to serve his country, who worships Bill Clinton and who gave speeches in high school against the stigmatization of blacks, now patrols the halls with a megaphone, yelling "Wake up!" He forces prisoners to strip naked, pours ice cold water over their bodies and takes them to a shower room they use for interrogations.
Maybe this is a test, Davis thinks to himself. Maybe this is what God wants him to do: to obey every command and never think twice.
A few prisoners lie in their cells, almost lifeless, traumatized, in despair. Others throw garbage, leftover food and feces as Davis. "I hate America!" they yell into the corridor. "Asshole," another yells repeatedly, "Saddam will fuck you!"
Davis knows that many of the prisoners have studied in the USA, and that they are smart -- better-educated than most of the guards. Because their Arab names are too complicated, the guards give them nicknames: Clawman, the fat one with the injured hand; Shitboy, whom Davis likes because he mimics everything he says; Froggy, who is later renamed Shooter when he tries to shoot a guard; and Thumbie, a loyal Saddam supporter, polite and cooperative.
"I just fight against you because you are fighting against us," says Thumbie. "I am defending our country, our oil, our honor. What would you do in my place?"
Davis has trouble differentiating between guilt and innocence. These people are terrorists, killers, bombers. Why else would they be here? But, then again, there are also the brothers and cousins of suspects; and there are the children with whom he plays soccer in the hallways.
During breaks, he sits on a chair at the end of the hall and eats his mother's chocolate chip cookies and, afterwards, he prays. Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. Javal Davis believes in the Last Judgment, and he wants to be standing on the right side when that time comes.
***
Hajj Ali squats in cage 49, diagonally across the hallway from the shower room at the end of the corridor. He hasn't eaten in days, he has been naked for days and he has pulled a sock in lieu of a bandage over his throbbing left hand.
A Syrian imam comes to his cell every day to collect the packaging material from the lunch packets. Sometimes he pulls out pills from his sleeve, pills he has found in the garbage, and Hajj Ali swallows them, swallows every pill he can get, but nothing can lessen the pain.
Interpreters keep appearing at his cell door, asking whether he is finally ready to talk, and each time he turns them down, he gets another beating. On some days he spends eight hours praying to, and praising, his God.
Sometimes he daydreams that he is walking through his old neighborhood. He imagines walking down the street in front of his house, down to the soccer field along the river -- a field that was once his life's work.
When his ancestors settled there, Abu Ghraib was little more than a pit stop on the route between Baghdad and Amman. The soil was fertile and his family lived from the fields, farming a 25-donum (about 15-acre) plot, tending dense gardens of date palms. Hajj Ali grew up as the youngest of eight children.
After finishing school, he ran a business collecting local farmers' fruit, vegetables and grain and selling it in the market in Baghdad. Business was good until the first Gulf war came along in 1991, followed by the embargo. When the profits dried up as a result, Hajj Ali sought comfort in the mosque, where he studied Islamic law. He made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and returned to find his father on his death bed. When his father died a short time later, tribal leaders asked him to take over his father's position as their local leader. From then on, people would come to him, complaining that their food rations weren't enough, or that they didn't have enough money for medical treatment. Hajj Ali comforted these people and did what he could to intercede on their behalf with the authorities and with doctors.
One day he came across an unused, rocky and uneven field near the river. He leveled the surface, built two goals and planted grass. Every day he would water the field and draw boundary lines with chalk. After a few weeks, he divided his neighborhood into four districts, and by the summer before the war, the Al Madifai soccer league began playing its first games. Hajj Ali stood on the sidelines and wept for joy.
"Clawman, what kind of weapon did you use to shoot at us? A Kalashnikov? An RPG-7?"
"Clawman, have you thought about it? Are you ready to talk to us now?"
The guards repeatedly drag him from his cell, lock him up in the shower room and force him to squat there for hours on end. The days are filled with interrogations that lead nowhere, and in the end they always pour sewage over Hajj Ali. They call the procedure a "shower."
The worst nights of all are when Specialist Charles Graner is on duty. He whistles when he walks into the wing, and sometimes he pretends to be a waiter, a white cloth draped over his arm and carrying a tray of hot macaroni. Graner serves the prisoners the meal, and whenever one of them rejects the food, either because he is fasting or because he believes the food could be poisoned, Graner laughs loudly and takes a picture.
At first, Hajj Ali didn't know that cell phones could be used to take pictures. Strange, he thought, why do they hold their phones with their arms stretched out like that? One evening, when the pain begins to move up into his arm, he stops Graner while the guard is making his rounds. He asks a cellmate who speaks a little English to ask Graner for some medicine to reduce the pain. Graner says that he can have it.
"Put your hand through the bars," Graner says. Hajj Ali extends his hand and Graner tears off the blood-soaked sock. Bits of Ali's flesh adhere to the material. Graner smiles, and says, "Doesn't that take away the pain, Clawman?"
***
Javal Davis is relieved when, in his second week at Abu Ghraib, they move him to wing 3 A/B, a section housing 400 prisoners, eight men to a cell -- rapists, petty thieves, kidnappers. After the high-security wing, his new job feels like babysitting -- except when he is occasionally called upon to intervene when an older prisoner tries to rape a boy.
Davis shows them how to do push-ups and sit-ups, and he helps them point their prayer rugs toward Mecca. In return, they teach him a few Arabic phrases. But Specialist Charles Graner keeps ordering Davis back for special shifts in the high-security wing.
Graner, a simple prison guard from Maryland, has recently begun smiling more often. The people from intelligence have put him in charge of the terrorist section.
After a visit by Geoffrey Miller, the commander-in-chief at Guantanamo Bay, more and more investigators, analysts and interpreters have been coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. They bring along their dogs, and these people are clearly the ones in charge now. They wear no name tags, and they address each other with code names, like DJ, John Israel, James Bond. They begin to apply pressure. It's late October 2003, Saddam is still at large, and Americans outside are dying every day.
Night after night, Davis is ordered to bring prisoners into the shower room for interrogation. The intelligence officers inside then lock the door, and Davis, standing outside, hears screams and the occasional prayer. The prisoners seem grateful when he brings them back to their cells. Davis works 14 hours a day, from 4 a.m. until 6 p.m., seven days a week. When his shift ends, he flops into bed still wearing his uniform, the stench of decay lingering in his nose.
Exhaustion eats away at his limbs, the days go by with no end in sight, and occasionally a glimpse from home flickers across a TV screen almost like a pathetic joke. When he watches "Terminator 3" or a New York Mets game, he thinks about his son Zaniel, his daughter Latrice and his wife Zeenethia.
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