May 22, 2004
DETAINEESTestimony From Abu Ghraib Prisoners Describes a Center of Violence and Fear
By STEVEN LEE MYERS|
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ASHINGTON, May 21 — It was one night in November when the guards came another time for Amjed Isail Waleed. He was in Room 1, he recalled later, when "they told me to lay down on my stomach and they were jumping on me from the bed onto my back and my legs."
The assault was only beginning. He was already naked, and his hands were bound and tied to a cell door. One guard urinated on him and laughed. Two women hit his penis with a sponge ball. One — "with blond hair, she is white" — fondled him, he said.
At some point in the night, the guards broke a phosphorescent light stick — "the glowing finger," he called it — and poured its liquid on his body "until I was glowing and they were laughing."
"They took me to the room and they signaled me to get onto the floor," he said. One of the guards, he said, sodomized him with a nightstick.
"And I started screaming, and he pulled it out and he washed it with water inside the room," he said. All the while, he concluded, "they were taking pictures of me."
Mr. Waleed's account of that night, rambling and disjointed at points, came in sworn testimony that he gave to military investigators looking into the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. His testimony, and that of 13 other prisoners, was part of hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The New York Times after the testimony appeared Friday in The Washington Post.
Although much of the abuse has already become public, the testimony provided graphic and gruesome details of behavior by guards that included intimidation, violence and sexual assault that has so far gone beyond any of the criminal charges yet filed in the affair.
At times the abuse seemed calculated, at times capricious. To the Iraqis, it was always terrifying.
Another prisoner, Abd Alwhab Youss, said the guards took away his clothes and mattress after finding a broken toothbrush they suspected that he might use as a weapon. The next day he was handcuffed to a cell door for two hours before being taken to a closed room, where guards doused him in cold water and forced him to submerge his head in what he was told was urine.
"After that, they beat me with a broom and stepped on my head with their feet while it was still in the urine," he said in his statement, made Jan. 17. He said they assaulted him with a broom.
Not all of the sworn statements have been verified, though several of the incidents form the basis of the charges against seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Some of the prisoners also provided at least partial corroboration of testimony by others, including Mr. Waleed's account of being beaten and sodomized.
"That was Ramadan, around 12 midnight approximately, when I saw them," said Kasim Medahhi Hilas, who also testified that on another occasion he saw a prison interpreter, identified as Abu Hamid, raping a young male prisoner. "The female soldier was taking pictures," he said.
Mustafa Jassim Mustafa, who was in a cell opposite and above Mr. Waleed's, identified one of the guards as Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr. However, he said he saw the guards sodomize Mr. Waleed with the phosphorescent light.
Many of the statements also described activity depicted in the now-notorious photographs. Those include the prisoners being forced to masturbate, pose in sexually provocative positions and arrange themselves into piles on the floor.
The testimony also gave identities to those who for the most part have remained nameless victims. Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh testified that he was the prisoner in the photograph showing a man standing on a box, his arms outstretched and his body draped with a blanket.
"Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head," he told investigators. "Then he was saying, `Which switch is on for electricity?' "
Ballendia Sadawi Muhammad, identified by another prisoner as an Iranian, said three guards removed him from his cell one day and handcuffed him. When he emerged, he said, two dogs attacked him, biting him on each leg and requiring at least 12 stitches on his left leg. He testified that the soldiers then punched and kicked him. "All I saw was his boot hitting my face and my mouth," he said.
In addition to being stripped naked, the prisoners described a series of abuses, including beatings and threats, that occurred over several nights. Some said they were handcuffed to doors or beds and forced to stand for hours, often in pain. The guards forced them to bark and rode them like animals. Some said they were not fed for prolonged periods. Another said Specialist Graner threw food into the toilet and ordered him to retrieve it.
Another prisoner, Ameed Saeed al-Sheikh, said guards forced him to eat pork and drink liquor, despite Islamic strictures. According to his account, a hostility toward Islam coursed through much of the abuse.
"They ordered me to curse Islam and because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion," he said, referring to an injury he previously suffered in circumstances not made clear. "They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive. And I did what they ordered me."
The motives behind the abuse described in the prisoners' statements was not always clear from the testimony.
Some said they were abused during or shortly after interrogations, while others described what appeared to be efforts to keep them awake at night, including being doused in water. Mr. Sheikh said he was sent to Tier 1A, the section reserved for the most serious detainees, a day after being arrested and sent to Abu Ghraib. In his testimony he refers obliquely to being interrogated about pistols he evidently possessed at some point.
Other abuses appeared to stem from incidents inside the prison. An American interpreter who also testified, Adel L. Nakhla, said some of the worst abuses, including those involving groups of prisoners forced to masturbate, came on a night in November when guards began questioning prisoners about a rape in the prison.
Some statements appeared to support assertions by the Pentagon that the abuses were aberrant behavior carried out by a small group, though routinely and apparently with the knowledge of interrogators with military intelligence units.
A couple of prisoners singled out Specialist Graner and another of those charged, Sgt. Javal S. Davis. They said the worst abuses occurred at night. "The evening shift was sad for prisoners," said Shalan Said Alsharoni, who was one.
The treatment, to the prisoners, stoked fear and dread and prompted humiliation and despair.
"I was trying to kill myself," Hussein Mohssein Mata al-Zayiadi replied when an investigator asked how he felt about being forced to masturbate and become part of a pile of naked men, "but I didn't have any way of doing it."
