War Without End

Alpha

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/08/15/wrum15.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/08/15/ixworld.html

Rumsfeld escapes blame in 'whitewash' Abu Ghraib report
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 15/08/2004)

A Pentagon report on prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison is being labelled a whitewash before it has even been released.

Dog soldier: the U.S. are accused of prisoner mistreatment
The report is the result of the internal inquiry launched by Gen George Fay in April after the now notorious images of mistreated Iraqi prisoners were broadcast around the world. Critics are arguing that its final conclusions, some of which were leaked last week to the Baltimore Sun, amount to a deliberate cover-up to protect senior military and civilian figures in the Pentagon.

Due to be published by the end of the month, the report will call for disciplinary procedures to be launched against up to two dozen military intelligence officers, all of whom arrived at Abu Ghraib last October, when the worst abuses began. But no action against senior military figures will be called for.

Even more controversially, the role of the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, has been judged to be outside the investigation's remit, despite allegations that extreme treatment of prisoners was authorised at the highest levels. Last month, Brig-Gen Janis Karpinski, the commander formerly in charge of Abu Ghraib, alleged that Mr Rumsfeld had authorised the use of "dogs, food deprivation and sleep deprivation".

"This is a whitewash - a carefully orchestrated one," said a lawyer who has liaised with military officials involved in the case. "People in the Pentagon have been coming to me in a fury because of the way this has been handled. By naming military intelligence officials as well as the seven military police who have been charged, it will look like action has been taken. But basically it's still the same storyline of just a few bad apples, way down the food chain."

The decision to limit the investigation to military personnel has caused huge controversy within the Pentagon. "Some of the military lawyers are incandescent," said one Pentagon adviser. "There's been a deliberate attempt to make sure the buck stops well before it gets to the doors of the civilian hierarchy."

Critics of Mr Rumsfeld allege that a high-level Pentagon decision to toughen up interrogation conditions in Iraq was taken last autumn. Senior civilians at the Department of Defence sanctioned the transfer of Major-Gen Geoffrey Miller from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, where he allegedly told senior officers that he was authorised to "Gitmo-ise" interrogation procedures.

A separate Pentagon investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal, chaired by the former CIA director James Schlesinger, is expected to criticise Mr Rumsfeld and senior aides for failing to set clear interrogation rules for Iraq. But according to the rules by which this investigation, unlike the Fay report, was set up, Mr Schlesinger's panel is not allowed to enter into "matters of personal accountability".

Speaking under condition of anonymity, Pentagon officials said last week that military intelligence officials found to have orchestrated detainee abuse will face sanctions such as loss of pay and reduction in rank. The most serious misdemeanours will lead to court martial.

Almost all the officials named in the report belong to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Its commander, Col Thomas Pappas, has already received a written reprimand for failing to ensure that the Geneva Conventions were followed.

Of the seven military police already charged, Cpl Jeremy Sivits has pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a year in prison. Pte Lynndie England, who was pictured dragging a naked Iraqi man through the prison on a leash, is awaiting trial.

"The handling of the Fay inquiry has been a very smooth operation," said a lawyer familiar with the report. "The focus has been kept on Iraq and on the 'grunts' in uniform."

4 July 2004: Rumsfeld gave go-ahead for Abu Ghraib tactics, says general in charge
13 June 2004: Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
20 May 2004: US soldier jailed and thrown out of army for Iraq prison abuse

Alpha

More U.S. Troops Implicated in Abu Ghraib Abuse

11 minutes ago

By Charles Aldinger

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new U.S. Army report clears top U.S. military brass in Iraq (news - web sites) of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison but implicates 20 or more intelligence troops in the scandal, defense officials said on Wednesday.

The investigation report, expected to be sent to Congress next week, recommends discipline against the military intelligence troops ranging from administrative reduction in rank and loss of pay to further investigation that could lead to military trials, one of the officials told Reuters.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, gave no further details, but said most of the troops implicated in the intelligence probe, launched by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay in April, were from the U.S. 205th Military Intelligence Brigade that was assigned to Abu Ghraib when the abuses occurred.

"I think it will find that military police weren't the only ones doing anything wrong," said one defense official of the Abu Ghraib abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners which sparked fury in the Arab world and international condemnation.

MILITARY POLICE ALREADY CHARGED

Seven U.S. military police reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company were earlier accused of humiliating and in some cases beating and photographing Iraqi detainees at the infamous prison near Baghdad, once used as a torture chamber by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites).

Some of those military police guards allege that they were simply acting under orders from military intelligence to "soften up" detainees for interrogation.

Col. Thomas Pappas, who was commander of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, has already received a letter of reprimand for failing to ensure that his troops protected rights for prisoners guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top defense officials have promised to leave no stone unturned in several investigations into the U.S. abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan (news - web sites).

Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the top U.S. military officer in Iraq at the time of the abuse, told Congress earlier that they did not find out about the abuse until this year when a military policeman revealed the problem at the prison.

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade in Iraq late last year, has also received a letter of reprimand and been suspended from her post. She is protesting that suspension.

Lawyers defending military police suspects in the Abu Ghraib scandal have argued that the courts should take into account the psychological impact on suspects of working long hours in grim conditions at the big prison.

Alpha

http://www.salon.com

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The figure kneeling by three handcuffed prisoners at Abu Ghraib is translator Adel Nakhla, according to a lawyer representing Spc. Charles Graner, who is facing a court-martial in the scandal.
Contract to torture
A rare look at the entire Abu Ghraib report reveals that inexperienced, under-supervised private-sector employees actively took part in horrifying prisoner abuse.

Editor's note: This article is the result of a joint investigation by Salon and Rolling Stone magazine.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Osha Gray Davidson

Aug. 9, 2004 | The world's outrage over the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has focused largely on the seven U.S. soldiers caught in the infamous photographs; they are now facing criminal charges. But several thousand pages of classified military documents reveal that private contractors, hired as interrogators at Abu Ghraib, played a key role in the abuses. According to the testimony of one detainee, a male contract worker carried out one of the most heinous crimes at the prison, raping a boy while a female soldier took pictures.

In January of this year, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba was ordered to investigate the actions of the military police at Abu Ghraib. The 53-page executive summary of his findings caused a sensation when it was leaked in April. The full report -- 106 "annexes" composed of internal Army memos and e-mails, as well as sworn statements made by soldiers and detainees to the Army's CID (Criminal Investigation Division) -- shows the prison under siege and out of control.

In violation of Army policy, Abu Ghraib was located in a war zone, where detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were under daily assault by mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. Prisoners were regularly beaten, sodomized with broomsticks and police batons, terrorized by military attack dogs, and subjected to psychological torture, including at least one mock electrocution.

When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told a congressional hearing in March that the worst images of abuse at Abu Ghraib were still to come, he may have been speaking of what Kasim Mehaddi Hilas, detainee number 151108, witnessed. Hilas was a prisoner in Tier 1A of what was known as the "hard site" -- a two-story cinderblock structure with dozens of cells, built by Saddam Hussein. Most of the thousands of detainees lived outdoors in canvas tents. Tier 1A was reserved primarily for prisoners thought to have "intelligence value." The hard site was also home to a little-known entity, JICD (Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center), run by Military Intelligence but used also by the CIA, FBI and other intelligence units.

Kasim Hilas told a CID investigator that he witnessed a harrowing incident one night on Tier 1A. "I saw the translator Abu Hamid fucking a kid," Hilas stated. "His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard screaming I climbed the door because on top it wasn't covered and I saw Abu Hamid, who was wearing the military uniform, putting his dick in the little kid's ass. I couldn't see the face of the kid because his face wasn't in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures. Abu Hamid, I think he is Egyptian because of his accent, and he was not skinny or short, and he acted like a homosexual (gay). And that was in cell #23 as best as I remember."

The use of civilian contractors is key to understanding Abu Ghraib. As the full Taguba report makes clear, private contractors held many sensitive positions at the prison. The wealth of classified documents suggests that once the administration decided to privatize military intelligence operations -- giving inexperienced contract workers nearly unlimited power over detainees -- with only a pretense of military oversight, the door to prisoner abuse was thrown open.

Among the individuals not qualified for sensitive interrogation positions at Abu Ghraib were many hired by CACI International, a Virginia company that provided intelligence services to the U.S. military, and Titan Corp., a San Diego company that supplied translators. According to an investigation released July 21 by the Army’s inspector general, a third of contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib "had not received formal training in military interrogation techniques, policy, and doctrine."

The problem might not have been so serious if there had been only two or three contract workers on interrogation teams. But according to the Taguba report and an inside source, all 20 of the interpreters at Abu Ghraib worked for Titan. The classified documents contain an organizational chart that indicates that on Jan. 23, 2004, nearly half of all interrogators and analysts employed at Abu Ghraib were CACI employees.

How easy was it to get a job with CACI? Torin Nelson, who was sent to Abu Ghraib in November of last year, a few weeks after the photos of abuse were taken, calls it "the strangest job interview I've ever had."

Early last fall, a man phoned Nelson and spent a half-hour selling him on the position. A six-figure salary, great benefits. Only at the end of the call did the man get around to asking Nelson about his qualifications. That lasted a mere five minutes -- and then the 35-year-old Nelson was offered the job. He accepted. No résumé. No follow-up office interview. No fingerprints or permission to run a criminal records check. Granted, those last two items aren't required for most jobs, but this job was ... unique.

Hired as a civilian interrogator, Nelson's job was to get information out of "high-value" prisoners so that the military could hunt down militiamen who were then (as now) killing U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nelson was one of 31 interrogators hired by CACI, which held contracts with the U.S. military worth tens of millions of dollars. While CACI had snapped up the lucrative deals, it had problems, according to Nelson, finding enough qualified people to fill the positions. If the company failed to meet its quota, it faced a large fine or, worse, the prospect of being locked out of future government contracts. According to Nelson, CACI was "desperate for people."

So was Titan, according to news reports in the Washington Post and Associated Press. With contracts up to $657 million, the company couldn't find enough Arabic speakers. Titan won't say how many employees it has in Iraq, but a military spokesperson told a reporter that there are 4,700 Titan translators working for the military, most of them in and around Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nelson had 11 years' prior experience in uniform as an interrogator, serving in Kuwait, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. But most of the other contract workers at Abu Ghraib had just two to six years' experience as military interrogators. And most of them, says Nelson, had no real-world experience whatsoever.

The fact that the other half of the JIDC interrogators were active-duty military is not as reassuring as it may sound. Twelve of the 19 soldiers on interrogation teams at Abu Ghraib were at the bottom of the military ladder, specialists or privates first class. No one held a rank above sergeant. Military interrogations were conducted by inexperienced, low-ranking soldiers.

Army Spc. Luciana Spencer is a good example of the problem. A military interrogator, Spencer was cited in the Taguba report for forcing a detainee to strip and walk back to his cell naked, in an effort to humiliate him. In a still-classified sworn statement, she also admits to hearing other interrogators instructing the military police to abuse prisoners, and once witnessed Spc. Charles Graner slapping a detainee. Asked why she didn't report Graner, Spencer told investigators that she didn't know that what he had done constituted abuse.

That's not surprising given her level of experience. Spencer had graduated from "the schoolhouse," the military training ground for interrogators at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in the summer of 2003, just months before arriving at her first assignment, Abu Ghraib.

"She didn't speak the language," says a friend of Spencer's who didn't want to be named for this article. "She didn't know the culture, didn't know the history. She didn't really know how to do the job." The friend blames the military for placing her in a situation for which she was not prepared.

Given their inexperience, Nelson says, interrogators were easily influenced about how to do their jobs. He characterizes many of them as "cowboys" who "try the tactics they see on really bad TV shows."

Even before pictures of abuse surfaced among military officials in January 2004, Nelson was concerned enough by what he saw and heard to begin compiling his own list of possible maltreatment. He included many of the same offenses found by Taguba: painful stress positions, prolonged use of weakening techniques such as limiting food and sleep, physical abuse, and blatant threats of violence against people close to the detainees.

Nelson says some interrogators may have believed their "gray zone" tactics had at least the tacit approval of the highest levels of the military and government.

"You have tough-talking people [in the Bush administration], saying 'Bring 'em on' and 'The gloves have come off,' and 'These are the worst of the worst'," says Nelson, quoting, in turn, President George W. Bush, J. Cofer Black (the administration's coordinator of counterterrorism) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Then you get people who go into theater who listen to that and they feel fully justified to abuse prisoners."

The same problems applied to the interpreters, some of whom had little or no experience working as translators in any setting, let alone in the high-stakes wartime environment of Abu Ghraib. They heard the same inflammatory rhetoric and had little supervision or accountability, according to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, in charge of all military prisons in Iraq.

In his final report, Taguba named three civilians. He accused Steven Stefanowicz, a CACI interrogator, of instructing M.P.'s on how to handle prisoners, directions that, according to Taguba, "equated to physical abuse."

Taguba also cited Titan interpreter John Israel for lying under oath when he denied having witnessed detainee abuse. The last civilian named by Taguba was Adel Nakhla, also a Titan interpreter. In the widely leaked 53-page executive summary of Taguba's report, Nakhla's role is unclear. But more details about him emerge in the classified documents.

According to Nakhla's own résumé, which he had posted on a Web site devoted to the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, Nakhla had never worked as a translator before being sent to Abu Ghraib. Born and educated in Egypt, the 49-year-old Nakhla had lived in suburban Washington, D.C., for many years, working in computer sales, support and programming.

Like all other translators at Abu Ghraib, Nakhla began working for military intelligence officers in the interrogation center. But at some point, he was moved over to assist the military police with translating -- possibly because Nakhla didn't have the secret clearance required to work in interrogations. (Although that problem didn't hinder Israel, another Titan interpreter, who worked at the interrogation center without security clearance.)

A large man, Nakhla is seen in a few of the pictures from Abu Ghraib. According to Guy Womack, the lawyer representing Graner, Nakhla is the figure seen kneeling on or next to a group of three naked men, suspected of rape, handcuffed together on the floor.

In a sworn statement about the incident, made to the CID on Jan. 14, Nakhla presents himself as a Good Samaritan. He tried to lessen the detainees' pain by rearranging their cuffed hands, he said. He told the soldiers, "This is not acceptable behavior in this society," a plea that, according to Nakhla, moved the soldiers to end the abuse.

Four days later, Nakhla returned to the CID to made a second statement. He had left something out. "I did not say the part of how I held the detainee's foot that was on the floor so he would not run away," Nakhla admitted. He hastened to explain, that, although he did hold the man's foot down, it was "not in any powerful way." Nakhla was also contrite, saying that what he had done was wrong. On the other hand, he told the investigator that he had apologized to the alleged rapists that night: "I told them I thought what had happened was very degrading."

Asked if he had ever abused a prisoner, Nakhla replied, "I just held his foot down," but then added, "and I shook them by grabbing their clothes."

The questioning then suddenly veered into new territory:

"Q: Was there ever a time when you were in a cell with a detainee alone?
A: I do not recall ever being alone in a cell with any detainee. I always have a guard present when I am in the cell.
Q: Have you ever been in a cell alone and the detainee was nude?
A: No, not alone, only when they were being questioned by [Military Intelligence] or someone and I was translating.
Q: Did you ever engage in sexual intercourse with a male detainee?
A: No."

The interview ended soon after that exchange. In the classified interviews of the CID investigation, no one but Nakhla was asked similar questions.

But the CID report does have an allegation, made by a detainee, of a male-on-male rape. This was the written statement -- made two hours before Nakhla's second interview -- by Kasim Mehaddi Hilas. Hilas identified the rapist only by the pseudonym Abu Hamid. The man was a translator, recalled Hilas. He was also large ("not skinny or short"), and his accent was Egyptian.

In the CID report, Nakhla is never mentioned by the detainees in Tier 1, even though the translator had been reassigned there. When asked about Nakhla, Nelson says that he didn't really know the man. "He would have had much more interaction with the M.P.'s," Nelson says, "and especially the Tier 1 M.P.'s."

While Nakhla's name is absent from the detainee claims of abuse, there are references to a man named Abu Hamid (sometimes spelled Abu Hamed by an interpreter). Hayder Sabbar Abd was one of the six victims of the November night of torture and humiliation that was documented in photographs that have caused outrage around the world: pictures of men naked, hooded with sandbags, forced to form a human pyramid, to ride on each other's backs, and to simulate oral sex. Abd, whose prison number was 13077, said in his sworn statement that a translator named Abu Hamed was there, translating the commands of Abd's tormentors. In May, after Abd was released, he told a New York Times reporter the same thing. The translator's name isn't mentioned in the Times piece, just the fact that the man was Egyptian. Titan fired Nakhla on May 21, the same day as the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was opening an investigation into possible prisoner abuse by an unnamed civilian worker at Abu Ghraib.

In a phone interview on July 30, Mark Corallo, director of public affairs at the Department of Justice, confirmed that the investigation is ongoing, but declined to say who was being investigated or for what specific crime.

Titan spokesman Wil Williams confirmed that Nakhla no longer works for the company, but he, too, declined to go into specifics, citing employee privacy rights.

It's fair to ask whether we will ever learn the full truth about what happened at Abu Ghraib. So far, military investigations have seemed little more than exercises in damage control, designed to place a ceiling on how far up the chain of command the responsibility will go. The Army has attempted to make Karpinski -- the first woman to command troops in combat in U.S. history -- the primary scapegoat for the sins of Abu Ghraib. She was reprimanded and relieved of her command for not preventing the abuses, even though her superiors had ensured that she couldn't have known about them. Over her objections, control of the interrogation facility at Abu Ghraib had been handed over to a military intelligence unit that didn't report to her.

Karpinski could be partially vindicated if rumors are correct about the forthcoming report by an independent panel appointed by the Department of Defense. The final report, scheduled to be released Aug. 18, is said to place at least some responsibility for the prison abuses on Pentagon officials, perhaps including Secretary Rumsfeld.

Torin Nelson doesn't have much confidence in another ongoing Army investigation -- this one examining the role military intelligence may have played in prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. "There are a lot of people who would like to see this just go away," he says. "Or at least the reporting on it."

Perhaps the best chance for a resolution lies in the courts. Two civil suits have already been filed in federal courts on behalf of detainees claiming they were tortured at Abu Ghraib. Defendants include Titan, CACI, Steven Stefanowicz, John Israel and Adel Nakhla.

A class action suit was brought in June by several lawyers affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York human rights group. That suit seeks unspecified damages for prisoners who were abused at Abu Ghraib. But it goes much further, alleging an ongoing pattern of abuse at Abu Ghraib, which allows harsher sanctions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. The suit asks the court to prohibit CACI and Titan from entering into any future contracts with the U.S. government -- a move that would likely put the companies out of business.

The most recent suit was brought by a smaller group of lawyers representing five plaintiffs and calling itself the Iraqi Torture Victim Group. In addition to seeking damages, that suit also asks the court to prevent Titan and CACI from doing business with the government. One of the plaintiffs is Saddam Saleh Aboud, who charges he was taken by U.S. military forces in a raid on his home in early November and wasn't released from Abu Ghraib until April 2. According to the suit, "Mr. Aboud is able to identify one of the individuals who was involved in his torture at Abu Ghraib as Adel Nakhla, also known as Abu Hamid."

Currently, the military has no ongoing investigations into the involvement of private-contractor employees in the horrors at Abu Ghraib.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Osha Gray Davidson is the author of five books of nonfiction and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.

Alpha

http://us.gq.com/features/exclusive/printables/040727feco_03/?pagination=none

The Conscience of Joe Darby

When he saw the horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, Joe Darby knew he had to blow the whistle. But coming forward would change his life—as well as his family's—forever, and for the worse. Because back in his own community and in the small towns of America, handing over those photos didn't make Joe Darby a hero. It made him a traitor.
By Wil S. Hylton

They shut him up. Fast. You never even saw him. No footage of him coming off the plane, no flags or banners waving, no parade in his honor. He came home from Iraq in May, but there wasn't even a formal announcement. In fact, you're not supposed to know he's here.

He lives in a secret location. It might be just down the street, or it might be halfway to nowhere. Maybe he was sitting at the next table last night, having dinner right beside you. You have no way of knowing: Nobody knows what he looks like. The only picture most of us have seen is the one from 1997, the high school yearbook portrait, with his hair parted in the middle and the impish smile on his face. That was before he lost the hair, before he gained the weight and his chest filled out, before he got married and became a man. But that was the picture that ran in all the papers when the scandal broke. It was the only one that slipped out.

He hasn't done any interviews or made any statements since it happened, hasn't talked publicly about what he saw in Abu Ghraib prison or what made him turn in those pictures on that January night in Iraq. All we know is that he did turn them in and that everything changed because of it. The rest is speculation. He's been under a gag order for three months.

He wouldn't mind talking, actually; he wants you to know the truth. The desire to tell the truth was how he got into this thing in the first place. He was the guy who stood up to evil when everyone else fell silent, the guy who put himself on the line when nobody else would. No wonder they won't let him talk. No wonder he can't say what he knows. It would be easier if he could, if Joe Darby could tell you himself, but this will do for now.

+++++

He came off the plane changed. He was smaller, somehow, and thinner, and his face was drawn and gray, and as he descended from the roaring C-5 to the shimmering tarmac in the afternoon light, a sea of military brass surrounded him and pushed him into a van as the jet rolled on to the gate without him, with the other soldiers inside going home.

Joe Darby wasn't going home. That much he knew. He didn't know where he was going, or who would be there, but he knew that home was out of the question. Nothing would be that simple anymore. That was the irony of it. In Iraq, everything had been less complicated. He had been cut off from all the television news and the Internet buzz and the e-mail, even from his DVDs and video games, cloistered away in some private orbit with only his thoughts and memories. Now, in the States, in the van, in his desert fatigues with his day bag in his lap and his tired eyes flattened by the long hours of flight, he stared out the window at the air base whizzing by, and he knew that the easy part of his journey was over.

Coming back was like parachuting into a jungle with only glimpses of what lay below. What would people think? The military had been kind to him; but then, the military knew the truth. It was easy to be kind when you knew the truth, when you knew what else happened at Abu Ghraib, how far the abuse had gone, how much farther than all those photos in the news, farther than all the rumors and gossip, farther than almost any decent person could imagine. It was easy to be kind when you knew the depths of the depravity he had found in that cold concrete prison with the fresh coat of yellow Coalition paint and the slow fans chopping overhead. But the public didn't know all that. The public didn't know the truth. Oh, they knew about the piles of naked prisoners, and the hooded figure attached to electrical wires. They knew about the inmates being forced to imitate sex acts, and being terrorized by attack dogs. But how would they feel when they knew the rest? That was the real question.

As the van pulled up to a building, the officers told Joe to get out. He slung his day bag over his shoulder and stepped down, into the light. There was a glass door in front of him, but he couldn't see inside. One of the officers told him, "Open it."

Joe Darby was about to step into the rest of his life.

+++++

No marriage is perfect, but Bernadette and Joe were trying. They had married right after high school and moved from the Appalachian Mountains to the D.C. suburbs for a fresh start—until, after a few years, they realized that being close to home was more important than any adolescent notion of escape. So in the spring of 2001 they moved back, packing their bags and boxes into a U-Haul van and taking a small apartment in Corriganville, Maryland, just across the border from their families in western Pennsylvania.

From the beginning, Bernadette and Joe wore down the road with their visits home. For one thing, Joe's mother had fallen sick with cancer, so he felt a responsibility to be around as much as possible, cooking and cleaning and helping with the bills. But also, he and Bernadette just liked being around their families, especially Bernadette's.

The Mains family was close by any standard, but after Bernadette's mother died in 1998, they had only grown closer. There were three sisters—Virginia, Maxine, and Bernadette—and together they made a complete set. Bernadette was the youngest, beautiful and headstrong. The other sisters called her "Tut." Virginia was the oldest and most reserved, a wellspring of sensible advice her sisters often ignored, then wished they had followed. The family called her "Wood." And the middle sister was Maxine, the centerpiece of the family in many ways, the one who kept everyone else laughing with her biting, honest humor. Maxine could talk Bernadette out of something, and Virginia into something. Her nickname was "Bean." All three sisters looked up to their father, Dave, with a deference that bordered on anachronism. He was the intermediary in every squabble and the first to hear good news.

For Joe, Bernadette's sisters were almost like sisters of his own. At times he and Maxine might trade sharp words about whose pasta sauce was better or who knew jack and who didn't, but even this was more like a sibling rivalry than anything else. When Joe and Bernadette would get into a spat or Maxine and her husband, Clay, would grate on each other's nerves, you could find Joe and Clay an hour later at Hooters, drinking beer and cooling off while their wives got together to gossip about them, about what a pain they were, what a couple of overgrown boys, even while secretly wishing they would hurry home and sit on the floor and play their stupid PlayStations again with the volume cranked up and Maxine's daughter, Vanessa, climbing all over her favorite uncle, Jo-Jo. In the summers, they would all barbecue together or scoot out of town to the Maryland coast, where the girls would take long walks and play with the kids while Joe and Clay headed off on deep-sea-fishing trips, coming home with flounders and five-pound sea trout that either Joe or Maxine would fry for dinner, depending on who won that argument. Things were pretty good.

In fact, before Abu Ghraib tore their world apart, the biggest problem in Bernadette and Joe's life, aside from the occasional shortage of cash or the dumb squabbles that bubble up in any normal relationship was the problem of Joe being in the military. Bernadette hated the military. That's the word she uses. "I hated the military," she snaps. "I despised the military. I fought with Joe to get out. I hated the deployments."

It was a fair way to feel. For a guy in the Reserves—a young guy from the sticks, without any money or a jump on life, a guy hoping to start a family and wanting a little cushion of cash, a guy struggling to make ends meet as a big-truck mechanic, for a guy who signed up to spend one weekend a month and two weeks a year running exercises at a military base near home—Joe was spending an awful lot of time doing an awful lot more than that. Like, for example, going to Bosnia. For eight months. Or, you know, Iraq. For another sixteen. With only eight months in between. Actually, by the time Joe arrived at Abu Ghraib last fall, he had spent the better part of three years deployed, away from Bernadette, her family, his friends, and even his own mother, whose health wasn't getting any better with time. He and Bernadette were just 24 years old, and the last time they had really been together, they had been only 21. If Joe had known back then what it meant to enlist, he never would have done it. Even if he'd wanted to, Bernadette wouldn't have let him.

Being married to an active reservist, she discovered, was almost like not being married at all, except scarier and lonelier and more frustrating, and you had to hurry home from your sister's house after dinner sometimes just to sit around and wait for the phone to ring. So really, when Bernadette says she hated the military, what she means is that she loves her husband. It was simple: Joe was hers, and the military took him, and so what Bernadette hated was not the military so much as what it had done to her, what it had done to them, what it took away and wouldn't give back, which was not only Joe but time itself.

+++++

And that was before the call. Bernadette will never forget the call. It was a Sunday morning, and she was at home in the little apartment in Corriganville, enjoying her day off, when the phone rang. She felt a knot form in her throat, something only a military wife can understand.

"Hello?"

"Is this Bernadette Darby?"

Deep breath. "Yes."

"Are you related to Joe Darby?"

"Yes..."

It was a reporter from the Baltimore Sun. He only had a few questions, he said. There was going to be an article in The New Yorker this week, and Joe's name was going to be in it. Joe was the one who had turned in the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison. Did Bernadette know that? Had she seen the article? Did she have anything to say?

Bernadette said no. She didn't have anything to say about Abu Ghraib, and she didn't know much about it, and she didn't need to, because she loved Joe and trusted him to do the right thing. He was a good, honest man. She got off the phone as quickly as she could.

Bernadette stood alone in the apartment, blood pounding in her head. What the hell was that? Joe had done what? A little later, she called her father, but even as she punched the numbers, she felt her anxiety rising again. What if he didn't support Joe? He would, of course. She knew he would. He had to. But what if he didn't?

By the time Bernadette hung up with Dave a few minutes later, he still had no idea why she had called. It had all come out in gibberish, something about Joe and Iraq and those torture photographs on TV, but Dave couldn't make any sense of it. He kept asking Bernadette to slow down, but she couldn't seem to explain. Dave said, "I'm sure Joe didn't have anything to do with that," but he could tell she wasn't convinced. He went to bed that night with no idea what had happened.

For Bernadette, there wasn't any going to bed. The phone kept ringing, reporter after reporter, far into the night, but still no word from Joe. She finally turned off the ringer at two-thirty and tossed around till seven.

In the morning, it was everywhere. There was the article in The Sun, and the New Yorker story, and all day long at Bernadette's job at the hospital, her phone was ringing like nuts, reporters blaring the same three or four questions: "Why did your husband do it? What kind of a man is he? What can you tell us about him? Do you have any comment?"

Bernadette had spoken with Virginia right before talking with her dad. "Just be careful what you say," Virginia had warned. "Tell them you support Joe, but you can't answer any questions." So that's what Bernadette did. She said it again and again, and then she said it some more. Each time the phone would ring and another reporter began the routine, Bernadette would interrupt and repeat the lines. It was a workday, but she wasn't getting any work done. A TV crew from D.C. tried to get into her part of the building, but the hospital staff kept them out. The phone receptionist tried to screen the calls that were coming through the switchboard, but they couldn't stop her cell phone from ringing. So she kept at the routine, saying the same words over and over and over, until she picked up the phone ready to go through it for the hundredth time that day, and as she brought the phone to her ear, Joe said, "Hey, how's your day going?"

Bernadette wanted to scream. Halfway around the world and just as unflappable as ever. "You're asking me how my day was?" she shouted. "Don't you know?"

"What?"

"Joe! They're saying you turned in those pictures!"

A pause.

"Oh, shit," Joe said. "I'll call you later."

+++++

Up in Pennsylvania, Maxine was visiting Virginia that afternoon, getting away from her own house, where Clay had taken over the living room with his video games, blasting the volume at ridiculous levels and driving Maxine crazy. For Maxine, Virginia's house was always quiet, a getaway from the rest of the world, and the two of them had just said hello when they got a call from Bernadette. She sounded frantic.

"They're everywhere!" Bernadette said. "I'm at my landlord's house right now—I can see them across the way, at my apartment. They're waiting for me! They've been calling all day at work. My cell phone won't stop ringing!"

It was the first Maxine had heard about Joe's involvement with the scandal, but Virginia brought her up to speed quickly. "He's a hero," Maxine said flatly, when she heard. Then she called Clay right away, and they agreed that it was just like Joe to do this. It was almost funny in a way. Joe could be as stubborn and bullheaded as anything—just ask the other guys in his company. Some of them had obviously known about the abuse and said nothing. But not Joe. Good old Joe. You could always count on that fool to speak his mind, whether you wanted him to or not.

Clay and Maxine didn't spend much time laughing, though. Something had to be done for Bernadette, and they agreed that the first thing would be to get her out of her apartment, away from those reporters, to pick her up and bring her back to their home for a few days, at least until the buzz died down. The trouble was, Bernadette had to work all week. It was only Monday. The drive was an hour each way.

"That's fine," said Clay. "I'll drive her down every morning and pick her up every evening." He didn't even hesitate. Maxine felt like crying.

Soon the three of them were in Clay's red Explorer, ready to go. Privately, Clay was amused. It felt like some kind of military maneuver, or something from one of his video games. Extracting a media hostage. They stopped off at Knapp's Snack Shack for mozzarella sticks on the way.

It didn't take long at Bernadette's place to see how overwhelmed she was. It was one thing to hear about it over the phone, another to go inside and see how bad she looked, the fear and anxiety forming circles under her eyes, her cell phone ringing nonstop. As soon as they came in the door, a producer from the Today show arrived with flowers, then a reporter from the Associated Press right after that, all in the span of less than five minutes, while Clay hopped from one foot to the other, getting more agitated with every passing second.

Once Bernadette had packed her bags, they all hurried out to Clay's truck, slamming the doors and speeding off, the tension slowly draining from their shoulders as they went, as they got closer and closer to home, starting to laugh about it somewhere near the Pennsylvania line, joking about the movie they would make out of this and which actor would play each one of them. Everyone in the truck that night was aware that this would be one of the most memorable experiences of their lives. But it still hadn't occurred to anyone that it might also be one of the worst, a shitstorm of celebrity that would last days and weeks and months, that it would wreck old friendships and alienate family, that their neighbors would turn on them and vandalize their house, that the police would refuse to help, that Bernadette would never work another day at her job—or spend another night in the little apartment she was leaving behind.

+++++

Central Appalachia is a special kind of place, lost in time and space. Cut off from the corridors of traffic that run up and down the East Coast, the coal-mining towns nestled in these green hills fueled the nation through the industrial revolution. For 150 years, miners crossed the mountains just to get here, then they stayed, building cities around the vast deposits of anthracite and bituminous coal, starting families, thriving in the industry's heyday, and then crumbling under its collapse.

Today the poverty in places like Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where Joe Darby was born and most of his family still lives, is far worse than the national average, with unemployment a third higher. Perhaps more important, the jobs that can be found are often harder on families than the mines ever were. If it was tough to send a young husband into twelve hours of darkness for a paycheck, it must be even harder to ship him off for weeks at a time behind the wheel of a big rig or months on end doing a stint in the service. And yet for many families in this part of the country—for guys like Joe Darby—few other options exist. Long good-byes have become a part of the rhythm of life.

It was no coincidence that Joe lived only a short drive from many of the men and women in those photos from Abu Ghraib. It was no coincidence that he knew Lynndie England and Jeremy Sivits, who lived just a few miles from his house. They were in his local unit, the 372nd Military Police Battalion. They trained together, deployed together, lived together on assignments, and when they finally came home on leave, passing through the streets of their small towns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the flags and banners that hung from storefront windows were there for all of them.

Outside these communities, in most of America, the pictures from Abu Ghraib met with instant outrage and contempt, and Joe Darby became a hero. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld praised his actions as "honorable and responsible." The House Armed Services Committee praised him for risking his career in pursuit of "what is right." But inside the little towns of Jenners and Somerset and Windber and Johnstown, many neighbors weren't so quick to celebrate. Abu Ghraib became a litmus test of the American mood; reactions split along political and economic lines. On campuses and in the halls of government, even within the upper echelons of the military command, few would question what Joe had done. But in his own hometown, plenty of people did. Some had seen the face of battle themselves and had made their own moral compromises, which were easier not to remember. Others had family members who served in the first gulf war and had a hard time feeling sorry for Iraqis. Still others had relatives in Iraq this time, some of whom would never come home. So if a few prisoners got beaten up, if they were humiliated or even abused, well, shit happens all the time. War is war. Joe Darby's decision didn't make him honorable; it made him a traitor.

In another place, in a private moment, looking at those same pictures, who knows—maybe even Joe Darby would have shrugged his shoulders and looked the other way. But the thing is, when called upon to act, he didn't look the other way. He saw the pictures, and he couldn't forget.

He never wanted to see them. They almost literally fell into his lap. It was early January 2004, and his unit had been at Abu Ghraib for three months, when one of his unit members, a guy named Charles Graner, handed him a couple of CDs to duplicate. So Joe went down to the Internet café near the sleeping quarters and started duping the discs. Graner hadn't given him any warning about special files or secret folders, and Joe was sitting there scrolling through the images, mindlessly, when bam!, the first hideous photo came up. Then another. Then another. Then another.

"He said, 'What the heck is this?' " remembers Janis Karpinski, the Brigadier General who ran Abu Ghraib. "It was very innocent. He was absolutely shocked by this."

He was also unsure what to do about it. He took the discs back to Graner and told him what he'd found, but Graner just said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it," adding, "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'"

Then the discs disappeared. Days went by and nothing happened, and Joe kept thinking about it. Well, how could he forget? Graner's comment was bad, but the pictures were a whole lot worse, some of the same images that the world has now seen on 60 Minutes II and in newspapers and magazines, pictures of hooded figures, naked prisoners piled up, and detainees being terrorized by dogs. It was enough to unsettle him at the most elemental level, not only as a military policeman but also as a man. Maybe in another time, in another situation, with pressure from the rest of his unit to keep quiet, Joe could have found a way to move on. But the way it unfolded, finding it alone and then looking at the rest of the unit each day, wondering which ones knew and which were guilty, he couldn't keep it to himself. He decided to take the next step.

Late one night, he slipped a copy of the disc under the door of the army's Criminal Investigation Division. It was an act of conscience unobstructed, one of the most dangerous things in the world.

+++++

Back at Maxine and Clay's house, it didn't take long for the storm to catch up with Bernadette. Any fantasy she had entertained about escape to the hills was dashed at 7 A.M., when her cell phone started ringing and wouldn't stop for the rest of the day. At first, Bernadette just pretended to be Maxine, telling the reporters, "My sister isn't doing any interviews," but that didn't even make a dent. They just called back a few minutes later, then again a few minutes after that. Finally, Maxine got fed up and called a local TV station. "If you guys want to interview somebody," she said, "here's my address. I'll be here."

By noon, the house was surrounded by TV trucks and cameramen setting up lights and microphones. As soon as Maxine stepped in front of the first camera, she could feel the quicksand at her ankles. Every time she finished with one reporter, two more would arrive, then four more after that. How many times could she say the same thing? Afternoon fell and evening came and the reporters just kept coming, through sunset and into the night, newspapers and magazines and TV stations from New York and Washington, D.C., all the major dailies and the weeklies, too. Upstairs in the bedroom, Clay and Bernadette gazed out the window in awe, watching the line of reporters inch forward, single file, toward Maxine. Diane Sawyer's people called. Katie Couric's, too.

As the week wore on, it barely slowed down. In some ways it even got worse. No one slept, and the phones rang all night, and as the articles began to appear, the family realized that some journalists don't care what they say or how they make you feel. There was the writer from The Washington Post who asked a bunch of questions about Joe, then wrote an article about Maxine instead, about how small-town she was and how she'd never left Pennsylvania, which wasn't even true, and how her house was a mess, which was only true that week, and only for the obvious reasons, and nobody's business anyway. Then there was the team from ABC, calling so often it became like a joke. At one point, Clay counted fifteen calls from ABC in the span of a single dinner. But the worst was the guy from the New York Post who parked his white Mustang across the street, banging on the door every thirty minutes and demanding an interview with Bernadette. "I know she's in there," he would say. "I'm not leaving until she comes out." Sure enough, he didn't. He sat there for hours, watching every move they made and rushing to the door whenever anyone opened it. Well into the night, he was still there, and when Virginia came by to pick up her son Billy, Maxine brought him out with a blanket over his head, but the Post guy sprang out of his car, rushing toward them, and Billy started screaming and crying and Maxine shouted for help from the police officers who were standing across the street, but they just stared at her, then looked away. "It's a public street," they said.

That was the real hell of it. The media blitz was bad, but at least it was in their faces. You could see it coming and knew what to expect, which was a total disregard for privacy. It was bad but predictable. By contrast, the rest of the community, from the cops to the checkout clerk at the grocery, had become a terrifying mystery. There was no way of knowing where anyone stood, how they felt, or what they might do. Forget about the families of Joe's unit. Bernadette knew they would hate her, but there were only so many of them. It was everyone else she was worried about. There were thousands of people in this stretch of valley, and she had lived here for most of her life. She knew some of them wouldn't support Joe. They wouldn't feel any sympathy for the Iraqis in those pictures, and they would consider Joe a traitor for blowing the whistle. Bernadette could see that coming. But the question was, how many were there? And which ones would they be?

Each day, she would catch another snippet of the hostility brewing around her. There was the candlelight vigil in Cumberland, Maryland, to show support for the disgraced soldiers, including the ones who did the torturing, about a hundred supporters standing in the pounding rain, as if beating and sodomizing prisoners were some kind of patriotic duty. Or the 200 people who gathered one night in Hyndman, Pennsylvania, waving American flags to honor Sivits, the first soldier tried in the scandal. They posted a sign in Hyndman. It said JEREMY SIVITS, OUR HOMETOWN HERO. And the mayor told reporters that even though Sivits would sometimes do "a little devilish thing," on the whole he was "a wonderful kid."

Where were the signs for Joe? Bernadette had to wonder. Where was his vigil? Where was his happy mayor? Where were his calls of support? Down at the gas station, Clay overheard some guys say that Joe was "walking around with a bull's-eye on his head," just casually, just like, oh, everybody knows Joe's dead. Some of Bernadette's family even let her know that other members of the family were against her now, that they couldn't support a traitor. The more Bernadette heard, the more paranoid she became. How serious was this? Her nerves were so fried from the media onslaught that she couldn't be sure what was serious and what was just talk. Had those cops really ignored Maxine because they were against Joe? And if so, what else would they ignore?

Bernadette felt unhinged. As days passed, she began to cry more often and to beg God for help, praying that Joe would come home or at least call again. She felt like she was sinking, this young woman who had been so vibrant and fiery just days before, now collapsing inside. She would dream of herself in a desert at night, hunting feverishly for water. She began to have trouble putting on her clothes, and her sisters would have to help. She wondered about shadows in the street and the things that might be in them. She began to fantasize about the hospital and what it would be like to go there, safe and away from everything.

In an effort to keep herself upright, she decided to go back home to the little apartment she shared with Joe and see her cats, to feed them and give them kisses. Clay agreed to drive her down, and Maxine and the two kids, Vanessa and Billy, piled into the back of the car, driving down the old, familiar road together, the one Bernadette had traveled so many times with Joe, visiting their families.

When they got to Bernadette's apartment in Corriganville, they went inside, and the cats rushed to Bernadette, and she held them in her arms and talked to them while Maxine and Clay tried to give her space.

And then the phone rang.

It was a major from the U.S. Army, and he was coming over. Within a few minutes, everything began to shift around Bernadette, and it was hard to tell what was happening. She found herself in the passenger seat of an unmarked government vehicle, speeding down the highway to some unknown destination, Clay's truck right behind her with Maxine and the kids packed inside, the whole group snatched up by military protective custody without any prior warning or even a clear idea of why. Bernadette called Virginia and said, "We're in protective custody now. I don't know where we're going, but we'll call you when we get there."

The whole thing felt insane. Could all this really be happening? Did they know something she didn't?

+++++

Well, yes. Quite a few things, actually. Like, one thing Bernadette didn't know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven't been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is "a good deal more terrible" than what you've seen. But you don't hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what "more terrible" means.

You don't hear anybody explaining, for example, how Private Lynndie England, the woman in so many of those pictures, the one smiling and laughing and giving the thumbs-up, wasn't even supposed to be in the cellblock, how she didn't have any police authority and shouldn't have been dealing with inmates in the first place. You don't hear much of anything about her job, because the truth is, her job was something else entirely. Lynndie England was an administration clerk; not an MP like Joe but the equivalent of a secretary. "She was assigned to an MP unit," says Blake Ellis, a paralegal with England's defense team, "but she wasn't an MP. She did not have any police authority. She was not supposed to be walking tiers or working with inmates."

If you don't believe him, how about the brigadier general who ran the whole prison? Janis Karpinski says that England had absolutely no business working with inmates and suggests that the only reason England was on the cellblock was because her boyfriend, Charles Graner, had invited her. "Graner's original claim, before he clammed up," Karpinski says, "was that the interrogators told him to get a female over there and he thought of her immediately."

Sound like procedure to you?

Then there's Sivits. Guess what? Not an MP, either. No business being in a cellblock, no business interacting with detainees. This is a prison with 300 military police on duty, and they've got a mechanic up at one in the morning taking pictures while they terrorize prisoners.

Sound kosher?

All this in a prison, by the way, that was overcrowded by about 350 percent. According to Major David DiNenna, who served under Karpinski in Abu Ghraib, "Towards the end, we had over 7,000 prisoners. We were only supposed to run 2,000." Karpinski says the same thing.

Or how about this: children. Little kids. In the prison. Sure, the army will say they weren't little, but they were, and they still are. According to Florian Westphal, at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, there have been at least 107 juveniles in American custody this year, and according to an army spokesman at the Pentagon, there are still "about sixty juveniles under the age of 18"—but he insists that "the youngest would be 14." As if 14 isn't young. As if 14 is a perfectly reasonable age to be housed in an adult prison.

Not that it's even true.

At least one person from Abu Ghraib says the kids in custody go far younger than that. And this person ought to know. After all, it was her prison—that is, until military intelligence and private contractors took it away. "There was one kid in there, he looked like he was 8," remembers General Karpinski. "His hands were on the bars, and he was clearly a juvenile. So I touched his hands, you know, and I spoke to him in Arabic to the extent that I could. I asked him how old he was, and he said that he was almost 12 and that he wanted his mother and could his mother please come, and he was crying, and he was grabbing my hand so hard. I asked him, what did he do? What was he there for? And he said he was bringing some food, and all of a sudden these soldiers came, and there was a lot of noise and a lot of shouting, and him and his brother were just playing there, just bringing some food to these people. So I asked him, 'Do you know about any weapons? Saddam? Planning?' He was swearing to me, 'No, no,' and crying. His brother was with him in the cell, and I asked him how old he was, and he said 15."

So it's tough to know exactly how old the kids in Abu Ghraib really are and how many of them are in there, just like it's tough to know how they're being treated. Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the Abu Ghraib scandal in The New Yorker, claims that video exists of young Iraqi boys being sodomized. But Hersh hasn't come forward with the video, and neither has anybody else. Even if he's not right, there's no question that other prisoners were sodomized by U.S. soldiers. There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn't see those pictures on the news though, didn't hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba's 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are "confidential." Just like all the pornography coming out of Abu Ghraib is being kept from you, the videos of Lynndie England fellating an unidentified man, the pictures of soldiers having sex. The members of the United States Congress apparently couldn't tell who the man was when they watched the highlight reel on a loop in a dark room on Capitol Hill one afternoon in May, an event that one Congressman calls "Bizarro World," with representatives coming and going while hundreds of pictures and videos rolled by, people like Nancy Pelosi sitting in front of a screen of depravity, with a military minder occasionally interjecting, "This one's from Tier 1A."

That wasn't on 60 Minutes II, either.

Just try calling your senator and asking him about that. Ask him what he saw. Any children? Pornography? Sexual abuse? Richard Durbin: No comment. Lindsey Graham: Can neither confirm nor deny. Joseph Lieberman: No response. Sam Brownback: No response. Carl Levin: No comment. Joseph Biden: No comment. Ron Wyden: Can neither confirm nor deny. Tim Johnson: Can neither confirm nor deny. Jon Corzine: No comment. Chuck Schumer: No response. Barbara Boxer: No comment. John Warner: No comment. Lincoln Chafee: No comment. Dianne Feinstein: No comment.

It's an election year, by the way.

And so, what Bernadette didn't know when the military escort came to get her—what she couldn't possibly imagine—was that she didn't need any help. All she needed was the truth. Because the irony of all this is that the people in Somerset County who turned their backs on Joe, well, those people would probably feel very different if they knew the rest of the story. That it really wasn't about softening prisoners, gathering intelligence, or trying to win the war. That it wasn't even about losing control in the heat of the moment. It was about getting up in the middle of the night and going somewhere you weren't supposed to go, then beating and raping people there. It was premeditated violent crime. And as long as that stays hidden, so will Bernadette and Joe, outcasts in their own community, two more victims of Abu Ghraib.

+++++

The day they went into custody, they spent the night in a hotel near Frederick, Maryland, squeezed into a room together, Clay and Maxine on one bed, Bernadette and Vanessa and Billy on the other. In the morning, the major came to get them. They packed up their bags and drove through the Appalachians, past the valleys and lowlands, through fields of young corn, arriving at an air force base in the late afternoon. There was juice and coffee in the waiting room, and Vanessa peppered the officers with questions until a van pulled up outside.

When Joe came through the glass doors, he was bleary-eyed and confused. Bernadette ran to greet him. Clay and Maxine stood back, holding Vanessa close. Bernadette's kisses covered Joe, but he hardly moved. None of it made sense to him. Why was he here? Why were they?

It was three hours before Joe seemed to come alive, playing with Vanessa and asking questions about what had happened, where things stood back in Somerset. In time, they moved to a new location, then another. Clay and Maxine eventually drove home, back to the ringing phones. But Bernadette and Joe stayed under lock and key, surrounded by military guards.

Three months in protective custody have been a mixed blessing. The house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a chandelier. That's all you need to know. That, and also that it's the nicest house they have ever had. They've made friends with the security detail and will probably stay in touch, and Joe changed his appearance, just a little, just to be sure.

It's not a bad life, really, being swept off the floor of reality. The army provides a daily stipend for their groceries, and they've had more free time than you can imagine, almost enough time to make up for all the nights together they've lost. But the investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal will be over someday soon, and Joe's gag order will be lifted, and they will emerge back into the world. The reporters will all come flocking to them again, and the phone will return to ringing, but this time Bernadette and Joe are ready. They've had three months to think about it, and they have a lot to say. There is still a lot more to know. They want you to hear it.

Wil S. Hylton is a GQ writer-at-large.

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Fri Aug 20, 2004 6:52 am; edited 1 time in total

http://www.latimes.com

THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Report on Iraq Abuse Will Widen the Blame
Intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib are implicated, but military brass outside the prison are not, officials say.

By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — A long-awaited report on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal will implicate about two dozen military intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors in the intimidation and sexual humiliation of Iraq war prisoners, but will not suggest wrongdoing by military brass outside the prison, senior Defense officials said Wednesday.

The report will recommend disciplinary action against two senior prison officers: the colonel in charge of the military intelligence brigade that oversaw interrogations at the compound near Baghdad and a general in charge of a reserve military police brigade in charge of the prison.

It also will recommend that the intelligence soldiers face criminal abuse charges similar to those lodged earlier against seven reserve military police soldiers, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But in the end, Defense officials said, the report implicates no one outside the prison.

"The report is going to say responsibility for Abu Ghraib stops at the brigade level," a senior official said.

The scandal has drawn international condemnation and questions about U.S. interrogation and detention policies. It also has cast a legal cloud over U.S. moves to begin trials for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Defense attorneys in those cases, which begin next week, may submit evidence of abuse to question the legitimacy of confessions and other government claims.

But one senior Defense official said the new report, by Army Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, will make clear when it is released next week that "no one in Washington said, 'Stack people on top of each other, naked.' " That image was supplied by one of the graphic photographs that helped fuel the scandal.

In his report, one of 11 ongoing internal military inquiries into prison abuse, Fay was given the authority to recommend action against senior military brass up to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was the top ground commander in Iraq at the time. The results were delayed while a supervisor to Fay — Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, the Army's deputy training commander — was brought in to facilitate questioning of the most senior officers.

Some on Capitol Hill said they were dismayed that the investigation failed to implicate more senior military officers or Bush administration officials. The administration has portrayed the abuses as isolated incidents committed in disregard of established procedures. But critics have questioned whether administration policies favoring more aggressive interrogations contributed to a climate in which abuses occurred and whether Fay's findings might be part of a lax Pentagon response.

"I'm a little shocked, I guess, that it doesn't go higher than that," a senior congressional aide, speaking on condition of anonymity, said when told of the initial news reports, adding that the findings weren't dramatic. "It's not big stuff."

However, others said the prison scandal was fueled in part by the political season.

"It's an election year. This is going to go on and on until November," said Dana Dillon, a military analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank.

"Unless there is demonstrable evidence that somebody ordered these things carried out — and that seems pretty incredible — I don't think it will go beyond" the military police brigade general, Dillon said.

Another military investigation into prison problems drew criticism when it was released last month.

The investigation, a review of the detention system by the Army's inspector general, concluded that instances of misconduct were "aberrations," a finding that was widely denounced as a whitewash.

The Fay report recommendations would significantly expand prosecutions for abuses at Abu Ghraib, going beyond the seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company charged with committing abuses to military intelligence officers and contract interrogators for the CIA and possibly other agencies. One of the military police soldiers has pleaded guilty, drawing a one-year prison sentence.

The recommendations for the additional prosecutions were first reported last week by the Baltimore Sun.

Fay's report also will recommend disciplinary action against Army Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Members of the brigade were implicated this month during a preliminary hearing in the court-martial of Pfc. Lynndie R. England, one of the seven MPs charged with abuse.

According to testimony, the intelligence officers participated in some of the abuses and instructed MPs to help collect intelligence.

The Fay report also is expected to recommend discipline for Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, a reserve unit in charge of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, for her alleged lax oversight of the compound, the officials said.

Karpinski and Pappas are not likely to face criminal charges that could result in jail time, another senior Defense official said. But if the recommendations for discipline go forward, they would face the prospect of career-ending reprimands and relief of their commands.

Both were disciplined as a result of recommendations this year in an investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Pappas received a letter of reprimand for failing to ensure that his troops protected rights for prisoners guaranteed by the Geneva Convention. Karpinski was suspended for failing to maintain order. She is protesting her suspension.

Karpinski, reached Wednesday night, called the Fay report "another whitewash," based on media reports. She said responsibility for the abuses went much higher than those implicated thus far, reaching at least to Sanchez during his time as ground commander.

Addressing the recommendations for action against her, Karpinski indicated that senior commanders were making her the scapegoat while evading responsibility.

Pappas could not be reached for comment.

The Fay report is expected to lead to a series of rare election-season hearings in the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), the chairman, has promised to hold hearings soon after its release.

Warner has scheduled two hearings for Sept. 9 to examine the Fay report and the results of another investigation.

Results are expected soon from an internal Pentagon inquiry headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger that is examining how the Pentagon dealt with the prison abuse scandal and reviewing other investigations. Schlesinger's report is considered the only one that could lead to recommendations for action against senior military or civilian Defense Department officials.

At Abu Ghraib, two prisoners were killed and five were wounded Wednesday when U.S. troops opened fire on inmates to break up a brawl, military officials said. The U.S. Central Command said "lethal force" against the inmates was required to break up the early-morning fight.

Alpha · Last edited by Alpha on Fri Aug 20, 2004 3:12 pm; edited 1 time in total

The Zionists and Torture in Iraq

Seymour Hersh and the Missing Zionist-Israeli Connection

By James Petras

Al-Jazeerah, August 17, 2004

An Exposé of an Exposé:

As I read Hersh's highly publicized and influential reports in the New Yorker Magazine on torture in US occupied Iraq (1), it became increasingly apparent that this was not a thoroughly researched exposé of the higher ups responsible for the policy of torture. Hersh s reportage was a selective account guided by selected question about selected officials. As one reads through Hersh s version of events with increasing incredulity it is clear that Hersh hangs his whole argument and exposé of US officials involved in the use of torture on one person Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - (important to be sure) and not on the other top Defense officials who were extremely influential and responsible for war policy, establishing intelligence agencies and co-coordinating strategy and tactics during the occupation. Rumsfeld was part of an elite, which sanctioned and promoted torture. Throughout his exposé Hersh deliberately omits the role of the Zionists (Wolfowitz, Feith numbers 2 and 3 in the Pentagon) who supported and promoted the war, torture-interrogation and particularly Israeli experts who led seminars teaching the US Military Intelligence their torture-interrogation techniques of Arab prisoners based on their half-century of practice.

In looking for documentary sources of torture interrogation Hersh relies on academic texts and 20 year old CIA manuals, not Israeli practice widely disseminated by the Mossad and Shin Bet advisers presently involved in torture in neighboring Palestine and Iraq today.

Hersh is presented in the mass media as an iconoclastic, investigative journalist, a role which gives his reportages and exposés a great deal of credibility. Yet it was Seymour Hersh who publicly defended torture of suspects and their family members as a method of interrogation, citing the Israeli examples in the wake of September 11, justifying torture in the same way as the Pentagon now justifies the torture of Iraqi suspects. Instead of citing an obscure professor at the University of Chicago, Hersh should have cited the influential tract defending torture by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz (a fellow Zionist) widely read by the civilian militarists who run the Pentagon, and direct the chain of command leading to interrogation through torture.

Hersch s account fails to provide a political context in the Pentagon and in the Middle East for the systematic use of torture. To understand the issue of the US practice of torture and violent abuse of Iraqi prisoners and civilians requires an examination of the ideological demonization of the Iraqi population the Arabs and the US unconditional political and military support for the state of Israel, the principal long-term large-scale practitioner of torture against Arabs. The most vitriolic systematic denigration of Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East is found in the writings an speeches of influential US-based Zionist ideologues, like the Pipes (father and son), the Kristols (senior and junior), the Kagans, Cohens, Goldhagens and others. The first step toward justifying torture is to dehumanize the victim, to label them as untermensch (congenitally violent savages). The Zionists in the US were merely following the pronouncements of their ideological mentors in Israel who not infrequently proclaimed that the only thing the Arab understands is force (Sharon, Golda Meier, Dayan, Rabin etc&). The Zionist ideologues in the Pentagon were influential in arousing hatred of Arabs in several ways. First in their defense of Israel they deliberately distorted the nature of Israel s colonial war, blaming the Palestinian victims for the systematic violence which Israel inflicted on them. The ideologues defended every Israeli violent action: the massacre in Jenin, new Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the murderous assault on Rafah, the killing of UN aid workers and peace activists, the monstrous wall ghettoizing a whole people, the mass murder of hundreds of Palestinians and destructions of thousands of homes in Gaza. Israeli violence against Palestinians made a deep impression on US Zionists who generalized and deepened their animus to Arab Muslims throughout the Middle East, but particularly in Iraq where they were in a position to implement their policies.

The Zionists and Torture in Iraq

The Pentagon s main source of intelligence and propaganda for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was in part derived from the Office of Specials Plans (OSP) and Counter-terrorism Evaluation Group established by ultra-Zionist Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense (third in the Pentagon hierarchy) with strong support from Wolfowitz, Abrams and Rumsfeld. Feith put fellow Zionist, Abram Shulsky in charge of OSP. The Special Group bypassed normal CIA and military intelligence agencies and secured its own intelligence prior to the war and was involved in securing intelligence during the first stages of the occupation (before it was dismantled). As the Iraqi resistance increased its effectiveness and the US justification for the war (weapons of mass destruction) was proven to be a total fabrication of the Special Group, the top echelon of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld and the Zionists grew desperate they collectively passed the orders to intensify and extend torture to all Iraqi suspects in all the prisons. It is a gross simplification to say that the line of command was limited to Rumsfeld, when Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams were also intimately involved in everyday policies prosecuting the war, defending the occupation and controlling intelligence.

Even more than Rumsfeld, the Zionist zealots in the Pentagon were the most ardent promoters of introducing Israeli methods of torturing and humiliating Arab suspects, lauding Israeli successes in dealing with the Arabs . They, not military intelligence, promoted the use of Israeli experts in interrogation; they encouraged Israeli led seminars in urban warfare and interrogation techniques for the US military intelligence officers and private contractors.

Nothing about the responsibility of the Pentagon Zionists in the torture of Iraqis appears in Hersh s expose . The glaring omissions are deliberate as they are obvious form a systematic pattern and serve the purpose of exonerating the Pentagon Zionists and Israel and hanging the entire responsibility for war crimes on Rumsfeld.

A Close Look at Hersh s Method

A close reading of Hersh s series of articles in the New Yorker reveals his premises and political perspectives, none of which have anything to do with democratic values or concern with human rights.

Hersh s principal concern is that Rumsfeld s blanket order to use torture disrupted the operations of an elite group made up of professional commandos involved in a secret special access program designed to murder, kidnap, torture terror suspects throughout the world. In other words by involving thousands of everyday US soldiers (referred to by one of Hersh s sources as hillbillies ) as torturers in Iraq Rumsfeld was endangering the operation of professional killers throughout the world. Hersh s second major concern was that the discovery of the torture would hurt America s (sic) prospects in the war on terror in other words a tactic he attributed (solely and wrongfully) to Rumsfeld was endangering the US empire-building capacity. Hersh s empire-centric view refuses to recognize the elementary rights of self-determination and international law. Hersh s third apparent concern is with Rumsfeld s bypassing the CIA and other intelligence agencies and attempt to monopolize intelligence. This is a bit ingenuous. Wolfowitz and Feith set up the special intelluigence agency that fed Rumsfeld the fabricated intelligence, they promoted Chalabi (known throughout Washington intelligence circles as totally unreliable) as an impeccable source of inside information , in Saddams non-existent weapons of mass destruction knowing in advance that they were passing phony data . As Wolfowitz latter cynically admitted the decision to launch the US invasion over banned weapons was because it was the only issue they could agree upon.

Hersh is not stupid, he knows what everyone else in Washington and out of government knows: the Zionists in the Pentagon were pushing for war with Iraq before 9/11 (even before they took office in Washington and were working with the Israeli state) and were intent on having the US destroy Iraq, at any price including the loss of American lives, budget busting deficits, imperiling oil interests and jeopardizing US global imperial interests.

They launched the invasion bypassing the military central command by deliberately falsifying the response of the conquered Iraqi people ( they will welcome us as liberators Wolfowitz and Perle) and intent on destroying civil and state structures (the so-called de-Baathification purges) in order to forever undermine Iraq s capacity to challenge Israel s domination of the Middle East.

None of Hersh s questions explore these well known facts about who is responsible for the atrocities against Iraqis. He didn t have to cite unnamed intelligence or Pentagon sources General Anthony Zinni and many non-Zionists insiders, as well as the CIA and Central Command knew about the Zionist promoters, plans and moreover knew the role Feith played in pushing for harsher interrogation techniques. But Hersh ignored these questions, those Zionists and their ideological supporters and advisers who did everything possible to undermine any Iraqi economic recovery and capacity to run their own education, health and electoral systems. De-Baathification was meant to turn Iraq into a backward tribal, divided desert country run by their protégé Chalabi, the only candidate who would recognize Israel, supply it with oil and support Mid-East integration under Israeli hegemony. The Zionist Pentagonistas succeeded in securing the war, they succeeded in destroying basic Iraqi social services, they destroyed the state (courts, military, civil services). However in their blind subservience to Israel they overlooked the fact that the disbanded professional soldiers and purged civil leaders and professionals would become part of an experienced armed resistance, that Iraq would become ungovernable, that US rule would crumble, that the US would become bogged down in a politically lost war, that its puppet regime would have neither legitimacy nor popular support. The Zionist did what they thought was best for Israel, even if it provoked greater opposition world-wide, including in the US, where a majority have turned against the occupation by May 2004. Only the Israeli transmission belt, AIPAC would cheer Bush and his continuation of the occupation and pledge allegiance to the Israeli war against Palestinians. When their self-serving prediction of an Iraqi welcoming committee turned into a valiant popular anti-colonial war, Feith and his underlings called for greater use of more forceful interrogation methods Rumsfeld and Feith encouraged Israeli type torture to humiliate the Arabs . Meanwhile Kagan s call to bomb the Arab street was tried and failed to intimidate the Iraqi resistance.

Hersh s exposé of Rumsfeld as the only top culprit turns up at a convenient moment: when US policy has failed and most knowledgeable officials are moving closer to identifying the role of the Pentagon Zionists. It was clever by half: Rumsfeld was universally despised in Congress, among the professional military and a host of others for his policies and arrogant public face. Even in exposing Rumsfeld however Hersh is careful to do so in a fashion that allows his Zionist colleagues to continue in office unscathed.

Hersh justifies some of Rumsfeld s acts of illegal terror by describing legalistic obstacles to eliminating terrorists. Hersh s support for Rumsfeld s resort to unaccountable commandos engaging in assassination, kidnapping and torture of suspects around the world is in effect a way to condone those tactics after Rumsfeld leaves office. If Rumsfeld resigns, torture will continue under colleagues Feith and Wolfowitz. Hersh drags in a fifth level functionary working under Feith, Stephan Cambone, who he tells us was deeply involved in the torture of prisoners more involved than his Zionist superiors? We might ask the peerless investigatory journalist: How is it that Hersh blames those above above (Rumsfeld) and those below (Cambone) but never focuses on Feith and Wolfowitz who designed and directed policy?

In setting up Cambone for the exposé, Hersh profiles Cambome in terms that fit with greater pertinence the Zionists: He advocated war with Iraq (following Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle and Abrams); he disdained the CIA who the Pentagon Zionists viewed as too cautious ; he attacked the CIA for not finding WMD. Since Cambone functioned under Wolfowitz and Feith he was simply repeating what his bosses wanted to hear and perhaps that s why they entrusted him with the relevant dirty tasks of extracting intelligence via torture.

Hersh tries to link Cambone with the extension of the torture practiced selectively by the Special Agency Program. SAP was already operative before Cambone took office and its operations were under the direction of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams. Hersh s dating of the torture in August 2003 with Cambone and Major General Miller (from Guantanamo) assignment is false. It started earlier under the SAP and with Israeli trained interrogators. Moreover the Pentagon headed by the same three (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith) ordered Miller s use of torture on suspects at Guantanamo who moved him to Iraq as a reward for exemplary work. Hersh does not explore Miller s links with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith before going to Iraq. He simply aborts the analysis looks at the middle and lower levels of power: Cambone, Miller, interrogators, and enlisted soldiers. Out of this framework Hersh comes up with a detailed piece of selective investigatory journalism. Hersh exposes some but covers up for those most actively involved in invoking the war and directing it in a way that served Israeli interests. The cost in US lives and the degradation of young US servicemen forced to assume the role of torturers is of little concern to the Pentagon Zionists. Even after all the exposés of torture, killings and rapes, major Zionist ideologues like Kristol, Krauthammer, Rubin, Perle, Kagan and Frum have launched attacks on Bush for backing off from the war.

The Pentagon s Zionists are under attack. In the face of the US debacle in Iraq, the anti-Zionist coalition found in the State Department, the Military, the CIA and elsewhere have launched a counter-offensive. Marine General Anthony Zinni, Senator Fritz Hollings and other prominent political, diplomatic and military leaders have openly identified the role of the Pentagon Zionists in launching and directing the war to favor Israel. The most recent and visible move was the marginalization of the pro-Israel Chalabi the protégé of Wolfowitz, Feith and Abrams. The raid on his house and the carting off of his records, ostensibly to investigate financial irregularities is a symbolic setback. So is the US abstention in the Security Council on Israel s rape of Rafah much to the chagrin of the Israel First crowd at the AIPAC convention. In response all the major Jewish organizations and publications from the Forward, Anti-Defamation League, AJC and others have denounced the critics of the Pentagon Zionists.

Hersh attempts to head off the anti-Zionist headhunting coalition by focusing on the two Goyim Rumsfeld and Cambone has been to no avail. The knives are drawn. Because of Zionist power in and out of the government, the anti-Zionist coalition and their supporters use code words, the most common of which is neo-conservative , which everyone now knows means Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams and other Zionists in and out of the government. AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League and other Israel Firsters sensing the danger to their co-thinkers have turned to labeling critics of the neo-conservative militarists anti-Semites and arousing Congress members, the media and their propaganda machine into silencing the coalition into submission..

But the Coalition is gaining influence Bush is insisting on handing over symbolic power to Iraqi Shias in a subtle game of cooption promoted by the State Department. Already the Zionists led by Kagan and Kristol have all but called Bush a traitor and coward for retreating.

The photos of torture, which have discredited the war policy, threaten to isolate the Zionist zealots. Faced with the indignation of the whole civilized world at the war crimes, the progressive Zionist apologists, like Hersh, take to isolating blame on Cambone and Rumsfeld and minimizing the responsibility to a few soldiers in a cell block , as did Senator Lieberman while the AIPAC elite cheer Bush on with the war ignoring the muck and blood of torture.

Rumsfeld has shrewdly tied his future to his Zionist partners in the Pentagon and outside, counting on riding on their coat tails and reaping the support of the powerful Jewish lobby and their leaders in the Israeli state, who stand behind them. He has few other influential allies.

Conclusion

In the final analysis even if Wolfowitz, Feith, Abrams, Rubin, Libby and the current crop of Zionist Pentagonistas are forced to resign it will only be a temporary setback. The Zionist political organizations remain intact, their influence over Congress remains overwhelming and they have pledges from both major presidential candidates that Israel s cause is America s cause (Bush and Kerry). The Zionist juggernaut grinds on, securing sanctions against Syria and calling for the bombing of Iran s supposed nuclear facilities. If you can t find a real threat to the US maybe the next crop of Zionists in power will cook up another consensual pretext . Holbrooke and Sandy Berger can tutor the US on multi-lateral wars of aggression.

Meantime among those who still deny Zionist power in US foreign policy, one only has to read the accounts of the AIPAC conference in Washington in May 2004. At a time when Israel was killing children in the streets of Rafah and destroying hundreds of homes under the horrified eyes of the entire civilized world, when an indignant UN Security Council finally rose to its feet and unanimously condemned Israel, US Congressional leaders and the two major Presidential candidates pledged unconditional support to Israel, evoking the bloodthirsty cheers of investment brokers, dentists, doctors, lawyers the cream of the cream of American Jewish society. The cause of Israel is the cause of America rings out from the mouth of every candidate as the Israelis bulldoze homes and snipers shoot small girls on their way to buy candy. Its almost as if Sharon wanted to demonstrate the power of the Zionists in the US, timing the vile destruction of Rafah to coincide with the AIPAC convention and the disgusting appearance of the spineless American politicians supporting ongoing crimes against humanity. Not one voice was raised in even meek protest. To those who claim that the Zionist are just one of a number of influential lobbies try explaining the unconditional support for Israel s genocide of the Palestinian people by the most powerful politicians in the US.

It is almost a perverse pleasure to watch Sharon smear the muck and gore of Rafah on the groveling faces of US politicians they deserve each other. But for those of us who support a democratic anti-imperialist foreign policy this is one of the most humiliating moments in US history. Something we won t read in the exposés of Hersh or the erudite Zionist treatises in defense of endless wars.

(1) Seymour Hersh, Torture at Abu Ghraib: American soldiers brutalized Iraqis. How far does responsibility go?, New Yorker, May 10, 2004; The Gray Zone: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib, New Yorker, May 25, 2004, and Mixed Messages: Why the government didn t know what it knew, New Yorker, June 3, 2004.

Alpha

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/07/03/breaking-news-bbc-airs-israeli-torture-connection-to-iraq.php

Alpha

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3579792.stm

Alpha

Here is an AP article as well:

Analysis: Doctors a Part of Iraq Abuse

1 hour, 49 minutes ago

By EMMA ROSS, AP Medical Writer

LONDON - Doctors working for the U.S. military in Iraq (news - web sites) collaborated with interrogators in the abuse of detainees at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, profoundly breaching medical ethics and human rights, a bioethicist charges in The Lancet medical journal.

AFP/File Photo

In a scathing analysis of the behavior of military doctors, nurses and medics, University of Minnesota professor Steven Miles calls for a reform of military medicine and an official investigation into the role played by physicians and other medical staff in the torture scandal.

He cites evidence that doctors or medics falsified death certificates to cover up homicides, hid evidence of beatings and revived a prisoner so he could be further tortured. No reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel until the official investigation into Abu Ghraib began, he found.

"The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations," Miles said in this week's edition of Lancet. "Army officials stated that a physician and a psychiatrist helped design, approve and monitor interrogations at Abu Ghraib."

The analysis does not shed light on how many doctors were involved or how widespread the problem of medical complicity was, aspects that Miles said he is now investigating.

A U.S. military spokesman said the incidents recounted by Miles came primarily from the Pentagon (news - web sites)'s own investigation of the abuses.

"Many of these cases remain under investigation and charges will be brought against any individual where there is evidence of abuse," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, U.S. Army spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq.

In a related matter, two military officials in Washington said Thursday that a high-level Army inquiry will cite medical personnel who knew of abuse at Abu Ghraib but did not report it up the chain of command. The inquiry also will criticize senior U.S. commanders for a lack of leadership that allowed abuses to occur, but finds no evidence they ordered the abuse, said the sources, who spoke condition of anonymity.

Photographs of prisoners being abused and humiliated by U.S. troops in Iraq have sparked worldwide condemnation. Although the conduct of soldiers has been scrutinized, the role of medical staff in the scandal has received relatively little attention.

"The detaining power's health personnel are the first and often the last line of defense against human rights abuses. Their failure to assume that role emphasizes to the prisoner how utterly beyond humane appeal they are," Miles said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He said military medicine reform needs to be enshrined in international law and include more clout for military medical staff in the defense of human rights.

Miles gathered evidence from U.S. congressional hearings, sworn statements of detainees and soldiers, medical journal accounts and press reports to build a picture of physician complicity, and in isolated cases active participation by medical personnel in abuse at the Baghdad prison, as well as in Afghanistan (news - web sites) and at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.

In one example, cited in a sworn statement from an Abu Ghraib detainee, a prisoner collapsed and was apparently unconscious after a beating. Medical staff revived the detainee and left, allowing the abuse to continue, Miles reported.

Depositions from two detainees at Abu Ghraib described an incident in which a doctor allowed a medically untrained guard to sew up a prisoner's wound.

A military police officer reported a medic inserted an intravenous tube into the corpse of a detainee who died while being tortured to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital, Miles said.

At prisons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, "Physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke or natural causes without noting the unnatural (cause) of the death," Miles wrote.

He cites an example from a Human Rights Watch report in which soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated he died of "natural causes ... during his sleep." However, after media coverage, the Pentagon changed the cause of death to homicide by blunt force injuries and suffocation.

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist at Harvard University-affiliated Cambridge Hospital who wrote a book on doctors and torture in Nazi Germany, called the Lancet analysis "a very good, detailed description of violations of medical policies involving medical ethics."

In a July 29 New England Journal of Medicine (news - web sites) essay, Lifton urged medics to report what they know about American torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons, and said in an interview Thursday that a non-military-led investigation of doctors' conduct is needed.

"They made choices," he said. "No doctor would have been physically abused or put to death if he or she tried to interrupt that torture. It would have taken courage, but it was a choice they had."

The World Medical Association, an umbrella group for national medical associations, reiterated its policy of condemning any doctor's involvement in abuse or torture of detainees.

In an editorial comment, The Lancet condemned the behavior of the doctors, saying that despite dual loyalties, they are doctors first and soldiers second.

"Health care workers should now break their silence," the journal said. "Those who were involved or witnessed ill-treatment need to give a full and accurate account of events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Those who are still in positions where dual commitments prevent them from putting the rights of their patients above other interests should protest loudly and refuse cooperation with authorities."

Johnson, the Army spokesman, said the U.S. military "will allow no actions that undermine or compromise medical professionals' commitment to caring for the sick and wounded, regardless of who they are or their circumstances."

In his article, Miles dismissed Pentagon officials putting the blame for the abuse on poor training, understaffing, racism, pressure to procure intelligence and the stress of war.

"Fundamentally, however, the stage for these offenses was set by policies that were lax or permissive with regard to human rights abuses, and a military command that was inattentive to human rights," Miles concluded.

Alpha

Witness to Abuse Trying to Be Heard

By Elizabeth Williamson

HAGERSTOWN, Md. -- In his 33 years, Ken Davis has had two big chances
to change history. The first was 10 years ago in the District, when a
man standing next to him started shooting at the White House. The second
was last year in Iraq, when he saw naked Iraqi prisoners on the floor,
screaming.

Subduing the gunman was easy compared with what the former reservist
for the 372nd Military Police Company is trying to do now: persuade the
Army that it was military intelligence and other intelligence
operatives, not the seven soldiers charged, directing the abuse in Abu Ghraib
prison.

He's gone to Army superiors, three members of Congress and two
reporters with his story. No one from military intelligence has been charged
-- just the seven from the 372nd.

Davis said he has no illusions about what happened. He agreed that the
alleged abuses by his fellow soldiers, documented in sickening detail
in hundreds of photos, were "morally wrong." He also conceded that his
own state of mind became so twisted by the horrors of war that he, too,
might have abused prisoners had he had the opportunity.

But the point, he said, is that those charged didn't act alone.

"It seems they want to sacrifice seven soldiers for the sins of
everyone," he said. "Whoever led them down that path is a culprit as well."

Davis lives with his wife, Kellie, and their three children in a
rambling rented Victorian here, with Barbies in the bathtub, a frisky poodle
in the kitchen and a pile of documents on the dining room table. The
papers include an Army Developmental Counseling Form he received from
Cpl. Charles Graner -- the MP who appears, grinning, in so many of the
photos. In the form, a superior, Capt. Christopher Brinson, tells Graner:
"You are doing a fine job. . . . [Y]ou have received many accolades
from the [military intelligence] units here."

David Sheldon, Brinson's attorney, said his client, who is an aide to
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), has been ordered not to comment during the
investigation.

Davis isn't surprised.

Eating lunch in a favorite shopping mall restaurant one recent
afternoon, Davis remembered the prisoners and tried not to cry. The naked
ones, crawling, an Army boot pushing them to the floor. The one who died in
a riot at Camp Ganci, a tent compound in the Abu Ghraib complex, shot
with live ammunition because the rubber bullets had run out. And the
dead stare of another detainee, the back of his head sheared off by a
roadside bomb meant for Davis's convoy. "It's not what I went over there
for," he said.

His real reason for speaking out, he said, goes like this: "I think
that once I die, I would really like my life to have meant something."

He said he started thinking that way Oct. 29, 1994, when he was with
a buddy at the White House, on his first-ever trip to Washington.
Francisco Duran, an angry Army veteran next to them, pulled an assault rifle
out of his coat and started firing. Davis and another tourist tackled
him.

He joined the Army Reserve after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks
and arrived in Iraq last September, his knapsack filled with pocket
Bibles and toys. His job was to transport dignitaries and prisoners, but
the former Pentecostal minister pursued another mission, too. Photos
show him holding a bedraggled girl; smiling with two boys holding the
religious booklets he gave them.

Davis didn't intend to wind up at Abu Ghraib on Oct. 1. But he was
involuntarily switched out of his Reserve unit, the 352nd Military Police
Company from Rockville, into the shorthanded 372nd from Cresaptown, Md.

Where the 352nd was "a tight ship," he said, his new unit was anything
but. Paperwork and inmates got lost. There never were enough soldiers
or equipment. Discipline and morale was at rock bottom. Intelligence
personnel walked the halls in flip-flops and shorts, tape over their name
tags, doing "basically whatever they wanted," Davis said.

One warm night in late October, according to his statement to Army
investigators, Davis went to find a fellow member of his unit on Tier 1A,
a military intelligence holding area.

Three prisoners were there, he said, with the military intelligence
personnel and Graner. They ordered the prisoners to strip and cuffed them
together in a sort of embrace. Then they made them crawl, their
genitals dragging on the floor, holding them down with boots pressed against
their backs.

Davis said that when he asked about the tactics, a military
intelligence officer told him, "We know what we are doing."

Davis went to his platoon leader, 1st Lt. Lewis Raeder. His statement
says Raeder told him: " 'They are MI and they are in charge let them do
their job,' or words to that effect."

"I don't recall my specific conversation with [Davis], but no one
reported to me any incidents of abuse," said Raeder, who has been
admonished for not training his troops on the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit
mistreatment of prisoners of war and civilian detainees. "MI was in
charge of the prison. MI was in charge of the interrogation. I don't know
what happened down there."

A photo, seen around the world, shows Davis, Graner, the MI group and
the three naked prisoners. Rick Hernandez, civilian attorney for Pfc.
Lynndie England, one of the seven charged, said the prosecution gave him
a copy of Davis's statement for the first time Aug. 6. He said he
believes that Davis's testimony would be valuable. But military prosecutors
have said the focus should be on England, not on personnel who have not
been charged.

"They're still trying to portray the accused as rogue soldiers acting
on their own," Hernandez said.

On Nov. 8, the day photos were taken showing Graner standing over a
pyramid of naked Iraqis, Davis's convoy hit a roadside bomb. He never was
able to check, but he said he thinks the Iraqi who died was one of
those he'd seen on the floor.

"I shut down," he said. "I hated everything. It became real to me that
they're trying to kill me."

In that state of mind, he acknowledged, if he'd had the opportunity
to abuse prisoners, "I cannot guarantee what I would have done."

Two days later, Davis's superiors recommended him for an Army
Commendation Medal. "Sgt. Davis' courage, selfless service and dedication to
duty . . . bring great credit upon himself, his unit and the United
States Army," the citation reads.

In December, Davis's father had a heart attack, and he flew home.
After a checkup for a prior groin surgery, a doctor denied his request to
return to Iraq, pending a decision by an Army medical board. From
February until he left the military last month, he worked at Fort Lee, Va.,
as an aide to higher-ups. Last month, according to his personnel
records, he received a disability discharge.

While at Fort Lee, Davis told his story to a chaplain, a counselor,
superiors. A sergeant sent an e-mail to Iraq. Army investigators, Davis
was told, said "I was of no interest."

Having exhausted the chain of command, in April, Davis contacted his
member of Congress, Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Md.), who had given him a
tour of the Capitol after he subdued the White House gunman.

He spoke with Bartlett and Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), both members of
the House Armed Services Committee, and with Rep. John P. Murtha
(D-Pa.). The lawmakers videotaped his statements. At one point during the
meeting, Davis recalled, Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the Armed
Services Committee, stopped in but "wanted no part of it."

Hunter remembered telling Davis that as part of a criminal
investigation, he shouldn't be discussing the situation, said Harald Stavenas, a
spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee.

Davis said that Hunter, whose son is a Marine serving in Iraq, told
him he understood what he'd been through. "No, you don't," Davis said.
Hunter, Stavenas said, advised Davis "to seek counseling and comfort with
his church group."

On May 27, shortly after the abuse photos came out, Davis gave a
written statement to Army investigators. He pointed out four intelligence
officers in the October photo. Seven soldiers were charged in the abuse,
but no intelligence personnel.

Early this month, an Army prosecutor, Capt. Chris Graveline, called
him. "Why haven't you looked for the people who taught our soldiers how
to do this?" Davis said he asked him. He said Graveline told him he was
new to the case.

Through a Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, Graveline said
he "prefers not to speak to the media about the ongoing prosecution
case."

Since an article about Davis appeared Aug. 7 in The Washington Post,
attorneys and an investigator for defendants Graner, Spec. Megan Ambuhl
and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II have phoned him.

In coming days, the results of an Army investigation examining the
role of military intelligence in the prisoner abuse are due out. Davis
said he finds it strange that nobody has spoken with him for it.

"I don't know if they want the truth," he said, "or if they just want
it to go away."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Would you like to send this article to a friend? Go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/admin/emailfriend?contentId=A17135-2004Aug19&sent=no&referrer=emailarticle

Visit washingtonpost.com today for the latest in:

News - http://www.washingtonpost.com/?referrer=emailarticle

Politics -
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/?referrer=emailarticle

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

Interrogation Abuses were 'Approved at Highest Levels' - page 4