The C-130 took Ford to Kuwait, where he cooled his heels inside transient tents for two to three days and waited for the 223rd to issue him an order. The order never came -- in violation of Army regulations -- but eventually he boarded another aircraft, still accompanied by Madera and the other officer but now acting on his own volition, and flew to the Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany. "The first thing they kept asking me at Landstuhl was, 'Where are your orders?' How'd you get out of theater?' I mean, I was probably asked that 50 times when I was there. Everybody asked me that. They have a reception group that meets you there and even the Air Force people when I was getting off the plane said, 'We don't know how you got on this plane because you don't have any orders. We don't have a single set of orders for you.'"

According to a senior official at the California National Guard headquarters in Sacramento, Ford should have had what is known as a "medevac" order from his unit in Iraq (205th M.I. Brigade) in order to leave the country. No one is allowed out of a theater of operations without either a medevac order or a standard set of written orders authorizing travel to a destination. Ford had neither, which is a violation of Army policy.

After a brief stay for evaluation at Landstuhl, Ford says, he was flown to the United States, where he went first to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and then to Fort Lewis, Wash., where he was placed in the Madigan Army Medical Center. At Fort Lewis, Ford filed a complaint with the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, or CID, in which he cited both the uninvestigated "war crimes" allegations and the retaliation that he says followed.

At every stop along the way, from Kuwait to Germany to the United States, Ford was evaluated by Army mental-health professionals and given a clean bill of health. Doctors at each location confirmed Madera's original diagnosis -- that he was mentally stable. Ford supplied me with documents from all of the hospitals he visited, showing diagnoses of "normal," "not delusional," "not paranoid," "no evidence of hallucination," "stable mental condition," and other similar remarks. There is nothing to suggest that any of the Army medical personnel who evaluated Greg Ford after he made his allegations in Iraq felt that there was anything wrong with him. Tsai at the Army Regional Medical Center in Landstuhl, Germany, gave Ford a final diagnosis of "Stable Mental Condition." Dr. Thomas Hardaway of the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, wrote, "there was not any indication of overt paranoia or delusional quality to what he was saying about his circumstances." He went on to say, "There is nothing on my initial screening evaluation indicating any overt pathology or personality problems ... Release patient from Behavioral Medicine Clinic."

Finally, in February 2004, eight months after he blew the whistle, Ford was released from active duty and given an honorable discharge, and in October, 10 months after his initial application, he was formally retired from the Army.

Even if Ford's allegations of prisoner abuse turn out to be false, the Army's treatment of him betrays an outrageous attempt to cover up a potential scandal and a blatant disregard for its own rules. According to both Ford and a credible witness, Marciello, Ford was strapped to a gurney and bundled off to a mental ward on the basis of a coerced diagnosis for an indefinite period of time, all before any investigation was even started, much less completed. When a CID investigator finally began pursuing the matter in the fall, Artiga told the investigator that the 223rd had "looked into it" and found "nothing wrong." If what Ford and his witnesses say turns out to be true, then the officers involved could face criminal charges ranging from threatening and intimidation, perjury, and assault to false imprisonment, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The list of potential breaches of Army regulations is just as long, including "conduct unbecoming of an officer," a serious offense in the military.

In addition to Ford and the other soldiers treated by Tsai, other Army whistle-blowers have also reported this type of mistreatment. According to a May 25 report by United Press International, Julian Goodrum, a decorated lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves, was allegedly locked in a psychiatric ward as punishment for filing a complaint over the death of a soldier in his command. He had also testified before Congress about the poor medical care Reserve soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan were receiving at Fort Knox, Ky. After he escaped from the locked ward, he was charged with being AWOL and was even given a $6,000 bill for room and board during his involuntary hospital stay. Still another whistle-blower, Sgt. Samuel Provance of the 205th M.I. Brigade, was stripped of his security clearance and assigned to administrative duties in Germany after reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib. Provance told me in recent e-mails that he has been harassed by other soldiers and commanders since he made his allegations and has become something of a pariah in his unit.

In August 2004, Ford filed a report on his allegations of war crimes and abduction with the Sacramento office of the FBI. That office forwarded the report to the Bureau's headquarters in Washington, which in turn passed it along to the Department of Defense. Ford says he met with investigators from the DoD's Office of the Inspector General in the last week of September. "It was obvious from their line of questioning that their mission was to cover up for DoD and the Army," Ford said. Special Agent Karen Ernst of the FBI's Sacramento office told me that the Bureau "may" have jurisdiction in the matter and is prepared to step in if the DoD "drops the ball on this." Although she would not offer an opinion of Ford's case, she did say that they only file reports if they believe the allegations have "some merit."

The Department of the Army Office of the Inspector General has also launched an investigation into Ford's allegations. Although by policy they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a current investigation, Ford said that investigators have flown out to California to interview him and have conducted several follow-up interviews as well as requested documents and e-mail records from him. Requests through the Freedom of Information Act to the Army or the DoD for any reports relating to Ford and his allegations have resulted in a flurry of letters stating essentially that the case is "complex" and that it will take additional time to compile all of the requested documents.

Neither the California Office of the Adjutant General in Sacramento nor the state's Judge Advocate General (JAG) office would officially comment, but staff at both places told me off the record that they hoped Ford would be vindicated and the officers in question punished for "abuse of authority."

According to an Army CID special agent who is familiar with Ford's case, "This is a classic case of a whitewash. A coverup. The agent in Iraq never even looked at the 15-6 investigation the 223rd supposedly did. No one was ever interviewed until Abu Ghraib hit the fan." When I asked him whether the CID was complicit in an Army coverup of the case, he said, "Absolutely ... Do you have any idea how ugly this case could get if they ever really looked into it? It would open up a whole can of worms that they just don't want to touch." The agent, who refused to give his name for fear of retaliation, added, "Based on everything I know about this case, I believe Ford. I have seen too many similar cases not to. It fits the pattern. Everyone involved in this blatant coverup should be criminally prosecuted. For this to have dragged on for over a year without being investigated is ridiculous." In September, the CID conducted two telephone interviews with Marciello, but no one else in the 223rd has yet been interviewed, including myself.

His nightmarish experience with the Army in Iraq has changed him forever, Ford told me as we sat on a bench near the fountain in front of California National Guard headquarters in Sacramento. He said that he intended to devote the next few years, and maybe even the rest of his life, to working with individuals and organizations in the fight for human rights and dignity. He specifically mentioned Amnesty International and the World Organization for Human Rights. The latter has formally requested that Attorney General John Ashcroft file criminal war-crimes charges against high-ranking administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush, over the revelations coming out of Abu Ghraib. Ford said he hoped to join in pushing for that action.

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