Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The lives of two men -- an Iraqi prisoner and an American guard involved in his torture -- were destroyed in the prison. Nine U.S. soldiers have been sentenced in the scandal, but both men say that's not nearly enough.
Oct 1, 2005 | On the day he lost his innocence before the eyes of the world, Sgt. Javal Davis was sitting in the mess hall at Victory Base in Abu Ghraib prison, eating a plate of rice and tuna fish. Davis ate mechanically, ignoring what the other soldiers were saying, occasionally glancing up at a TV screen.
It was April 28, 2004. Insurgents were still launching the occasional rocket-propelled grenade at their base near Baghdad, and CNN was broadcasting images from home: basketball, the White House, Wall Street. It was a normal day at Victory Base. But then the room suddenly went still.
There was a man on the screen, his arms spread out and attached to electrical wires, his head covered with a sandbag. The headline read: "Scandal at Abu Ghraib." Other images followed, images of prisoners on dog leashes, of piles of naked, intertwining bodies.
Someone turned up the volume, and Javal Davis heard the reporter mention his name. A photo from his high school yearbook flashed across the screen, a picture of a tall black boy with a friendly face and a big smile. Then the secretary of defense appeared, talking about seven degenerate soldiers who had brought shame upon the United States.
Now, 14 months later, Davis sits in his attorney's office in Newark, N.J. He has had a dragon tattooed onto his upper arm and has grown a beard that seems out of place on his youthful face. Davis is unable to look directly at his conversation partner, and he rubs his fingers together when he speaks. The first of the nine Abu Ghraib soldiers America took to court, he pleaded guilty to assault, dereliction of duty and lying to investigators and was sentenced to six months in prison. He was released four months ago.
All nine of the accused have now been sentenced. Charles Graner received 10 years in prison; Ivan Frederick, eight. Lynndie England was sentenced this week to three years in prison by a military court in Fort Hood, Texas.
Davis says that his country punished him for crimes over which he had no control. Instead, he says, the people who were responsible for creating the system of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib should be brought to justice. Davis wants to talk and wants to set things right. He leafs through a white binder on the table in front of him. It contains documents from his life, and occasionally he picks out one of them -- an employee-of-the-month award, college transcripts, a character reference from the mayor of Roselle, N.J., where he is from.
"Am I a bad person?"
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Hajj Ali sits on the sofa in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan. He was released from Abu Ghraib 16 months ago. It's a beautiful summer day, but he keeps the curtains drawn -- girls are lounging in bikinis at the pool below.
Hajj Ali reaches for a pack of cigarettes with his right hand and uses his lips to extract a Marlboro. Then he starts up his laptop and calls up an Iraqi Web site, albasrah.net, that shows the pictures from Abu Ghraib. He scrolls through the site, pausing occasionally: "Here," says Hajj Ali, "this is Abu Hudheifa, the imam, lying in the hallway with his gunshot wounds. Or here, Sabrina Harman, bending over the dead from the shower room."
Hajj Ali speaks slowly and quietly. His voice sounds a little hoarse.
"Graner," he says, "that pig."
He scrolls down to a picture of a man standing on a box wearing nothing but a black blanket, his upper body bent forward slightly, his arms attached to wires and a hood over his head. Hajj Ali swallows and zooms in on one of the hands. "Look," he says, "something isn't right about the hand; it seems injured."
Hajj Ali is convinced that he is the man in the picture.
It's an image one sees all over Iraq today. It hangs on building walls and in mosques. The hooded man is an icon. His image is a symbol of all the abuses America has committed against his people.
Hajj Ali says that it's a good thing these images exist. Without them, the world would never have learned about Abu Ghraib. No one would have believed us, he says. He uses his lips to fish another Marlboro from his pack, lights it, and tells his story.
When the Americans came, he says, he knew they would pick him up sooner or later -- many had already been taken away in the preceding weeks. It was Oct. 14, 2003, a Tuesday, five months after the end of the war, and the smell of winter was already in the air.
On the day of his arrest, Hajj Ali was wearing a green shirt over his dishdasha. He was on his way to his parking lot, where he rented parking spaces to people visiting a mosque on the outskirts of Al Madifai near Baghdad. Hajj Ali heard the sound of heavy engines behind him and he turned around to see a group of Humvees bearing down on him. He was quickly encircled, and 20 soldiers jumped onto the sidewalk, pulled out their weapons, handcuffs and a hood, and pushed him to the ground. "Are you Hajj Ali?" they demanded.
Then everything went black.
Ali al-Shalal Abbas, nicknamed Hajj ever since he completed the pilgrimage to Mecca a few years earlier, lay in the truck bed, trying to remain calm. Don't be afraid, he said to himself, you haven't done anything wrong.
He heard passersby yelling as the truck drove away. He is a respected man in this section of Abu Ghraib, a city of 300,000 not far from Baghdad. Before the Americans came, he was a mukhtar -- a sort of community representative to the authorities. Hajj Ali cannot say how long the trip took. All he sensed was the odor of gasoline, the jolts of bumpy roads and the pain in his left hand, which he had injured at a wedding when he shot into the air with his father's shotgun. The magazine exploded, severing his tendons and slicing off two fingertips; the wound was still fresh.
At some point he was pushed out of the truck and chained to a fence, and he heard Iraqis in the dark. Hajj Ali asked: "Where are we?"
"I think this is Abu Ghraib," another man whispered.
