Eight Days in an Iraqi Prison (Very Long)

Newsday ^ | 4/23/03 | Matthew McAllester

[saquin]

By Matthew McAllester
Staff Correspondent

April 23, 2003

PART ONE: NIGHT

The first inmate I saw in Abu Ghraib prison did not wear a blindfold. He could barely see through his eyes. They were swollen ovals of purple and blue. Someone's fists, I supposed, did that to him.

His shoulders slumping forward, he walked behind a guard into the cell block where we were being processed and was told to stand in the corner like a naughty school boy. He wore blue-and-white-striped pajamas and turned his face to the cinder-block walls, silent and stripped of any dignity.

That man, I thought, is my future.

And I was right. Out of the five of us picked up hours earlier from our Baghdad hotel by Saddam Hussein's security police, I was the second to be called into a cell that was the reception area of this wing of the vast prison. I was the second to have all my possessions registered and stored, and I was the second to be told to strip to my underwear and put on the same type of pajamas the broken man in the corner was wearing.

By that stage, within my first hour in Abu Ghraib, I already had lost the possibility of resistance and the power of self-determination.

"We're in the worst prison in the Middle East," I had whispered to Molly Bingham, a freelance photographer from New York who was rounded up in my group. We sat on the floor in the corridor outside the processing cell.

Perhaps I shouldn't have told Molly that. She was new to Iraq, I knew, and what I had told her wasn't exactly comforting. I just needed to share the rising horror I was trying to control, knowing that we were in the depths of a prison known for years to human rights groups as a center of torture and execution. It was part of this feeling of silent togetherness that the five of us would foster over the next days, a feeling that I suspect we will always have.

[saquin]

I don't know if this has been posted here before (I did a search and didn't find it) but it's very interesting. It's by one of the Newsday reporters who were held in Iraq, and whose whereabouts were unknown for about a week. This very long article was a special 20-page pull-out section of the Sunday Newsday several weeks ago. I found it fascinating. It's posted on the website in 8 chapters. Anyone who has the time should read it.

[gramcam]

Thanks MUCH... for posting this.

[gcruse]

It was a long, too long, interesting read of someone who learned the wrong lessons in prison and still doesn't get it.

[arjay]

Good read. Thanks for posting it.

[McGavin999]

Interesting, too bad he didn't learn anything. What a wasted opportunity.

[secretagent]

bttt