Testimony Details Last Hours of Iraqi Prisoner's Life

By Richard A. Serrano
Los Angeles Times

Staff Writer

5:37 PM PDT, May 17, 2004

WASHINGTON — When CIA officers brought the Iraqi detainee to Abu Ghraib prison, his head was covered with an empty sandbag and Army guards were ordered to take him directly to a shower room that served as a makeshift interrogation center at the overcrowded, shell-damaged facility outside Baghdad.

An hour later, in the midst of intensive questioning by military intelligence officials, the prisoner collapsed and died. Only then did interrogators remove the hood to reveal severe head wounds that had never been treated.

The dead prisoner, whose identity has not been made public, would become famous around the world in the photograph of the body wrapped in plastic sheeting and packed in ice - among the grisliest images yet made public in the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

An account of his final hours - and of the failure to provide medical attention to a severely wounded prisoner - is contained in sworn testimony statements provided to Army investigators by military police guards at Abu Ghraib.

Even after the prisoner died, the documents say, officials continued to pursue their own agendas: They haggled over who was responsible for the body. Eventually, the body deteriorated to where it had to be disposed.

The official documents describing the grim episode were based on testimony at a secret military court hearing held last month on the charges against Sgt. Javal Davis, one of seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company accused of beating and humiliating Iraqi detainees.

"He wasn't dead at first,'' said Spc. Jason A. Kenner, explaining that guards were told not to remove the prisoner's hood when they took him to the shower room.

"We didn't know how much he was injured. He went into the showers for interrogation, and about an hour later he died on them. I was sent to find out what was going on. Later that day, they decided to put him on ice."

"After he passed [away], the sandbag was removed and I saw that he was severely beaten on his face," Kenner testified. "At the time, they would interrogate people in the shower rooms. He was shackled to the wall. The shower room was just used because there was no other space available."

Another guard in the 372nd Company, Spc. Bruce Brown, said: "I heard of a dead detainee being stored in the hard site. We would spray air freshener to cover the scent. They finally took the body away.''

In their testimony, Kenner and Brown agreed that the CIA brought the prisoner to Abu Ghraib and ordered guards to take him to the interrogation facility without removing the hood. They disagreed on who was involved in the subsequent questioning: Kenner said it was the CIA alone, while Brown said the CIA and military intelligence officers worked together.

Both Kenner and Brown referred to the CIA by its commonly used pseudonym, the OGA, or Other Government Agency.

A CIA spokesman said he could not comment because the incident is under investigation by the agency's inspector general's office in conjunction with military investigations.

In other testimony at the Davis hearing, other guards said military intelligence officers routinely deprived prisoners of food, sleep, clothes and cigarettes, and sometimes sunshine, and expected guards to treat prisoners just as harshly or worse.

Separately, a key defendant in the scandal said in a sworn statement to Army investigators that mistreatment of prisoners was known and condoned throughout Abu Ghraib and no one ordered a halt to the abuses - or to photographing humiliated inmates.

"Everyone in the company from the commander down'' knew what was going on, said Pfc. Lynndie England, the Army soldier seen laughing, smoking and flashing the thumbs-up in front of naked male Iraqis. "The pictures were shown to anyone who wanted to see them. Cpl. (Charles) Graner told me he showed them to his platoon sergeant and platoon leader.''

England said guards forced detainees to crawl on their hands and knees on broken glass, threw a nerf football at handcuffed prisoners and forced male detainees to wear women's sanitary "maxi pads.''

She also said Graner, her lover with whom she is now pregnant, applied needle and thread to prisoners after beating them.

"Cpl. Graner would personally stitch up detainees if the wound weren't too bad,'' she said. "He would take pictures of his work. One particular incident Cpl. Graner ran a former Iraqi general into a wall and split his lip. Cpl. Graner stitched up his lip.''

England, interviewed at Ft. Bragg, N.C., on May 5, said she did not believe the guards went too far in punishing detainees, and said that much of what happened at the prison's notorious Tier 1A was done in sport.

"We thought it looked funny so pictures were taken,'' she said. It was "basically us fooling around.''

England described abuse by all seven defendants, including herself, except one - Spc. Megan Ambuhl, who is not seen in any of the prison photographs. ``She rarely participated,'' England said. "She really wasn't part of all this.''

As have other defendants, England described Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan L. (Chip) Frederick II as the leaders of the rogue guard unit, and said Davis was close behind.

"He was the intimidator,'' she said. "Very big. He would push them around or into walls. He also stepped on their toes. He would help with rowdy detainees.''

"Personnel from MI (military intelligence) and OGA would tell us to keep it up, that we were doing a good job,'' she said. "I was just told we were doing a good job.''

She said there were many other abuses, but "I can't remember all of them.'' And yet she felt no guards should be punished because "we did what we were told.''

That excuse is at the heart of the defense of the seven accused guards. At the court hearing for Davis on April 7, Sgt. Hydrue S. Johnson described how he said intelligence officers held sway over guards.

A member of the 372nd Military Police Company that also was home to the seven guards now being prosecuted, Johnson testified that military intelligence officers never explicitly ordered guards to "rough up'' detainees. But he said guards throughout the prison looked to the MIs for guidance on how to treat them.

"I did not question anything of MI personnel,'' Johnson testified. "They were there longer than me. I did not question them.''

With the first court-martial scheduled for Wednesday, when Spc. Jeremy Sivits is expected to plead guilty and begin helping prosecutors in trying to convict the others, the statements by England, Johnson and others reflect the effort by some guards to show that prison interrogators must share the blame for abuses.

The interrogators helped establish a climate of abuse and Army supervisors did not intervene to stop the misconduct, they said.

Brown said he had "little to no contact with MI'' officers. ``I would only see them in passing, and said hi or bye,'' he said.

But, he added, "there were situations where they gave us ideas on how to treat detainees. They had sleep management plans and eating plans.''

Kenner said intelligence officers ``would take away their clothes and the detainees would sleep in their cells naked.''

Sgt. William A. Cathcart, also of the 372nd, said he routinely asked MI and OGA officers how to properly handle detainees but he ``got no response.'' Intelligence officers told him the interrogators were putting together a formal SOP, or standing operating procedure, ``but I never saw it.''

Still other guards testified that they would never have followed any direct encouragements to abuse or humiliate detainees, such as making them masturbate in front of others.

``If an MI (officer) told me to make detainees masturbate together, I would cut off his air supply,'' said Joyner. ``This is not acceptable instruction to me. There is no special training to know this behavior is wrong, except `life.' ''