Spiegel (Ger) : The Prisoner and the Guard : A Tale of Two Lives Destroyed by Abu Ghraib

From Der Spiegel (Germany), a very sad story, one of the saddest stories I've ever heard, because it not merely the story of two human lives ruined. It is the story of the ruination of America under a dangerous and perverse administration. But the story centers on two people: Sgt. Javal Davis, a military guard from Roselle, NJ, who found himself "just following orders" that made him brutalize people; and Ali al-Shalal Abbas, "Hajj Ali," a produce retailer, the proud founder of the Al Madifai soccer league--a neighborhood league for local residents, and the prisoner, he believes, who has become the icon for American cruelty in Iraq.


Some excerpts below, but go and read the entire article. It's chilling.

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.
...
When he left for Iraq in May 2003, Davis believed that he was going there to hunt down terrorists and uncover nuclear weapons, and that he would be back home soon, just as his president had promised.

His president, we know (and always knew), lied about the weapons of mass destruction. There were no nuclear weapons. There was no program to manufacture nuclear weapons. There were no chemical or biological weapons. There was no infrastructure to support such high-tech activities.

But Javal Davis’s president, we also know, lied about much more: about being committed to human freedom and democracy, about believing in the fundamental rights of all people. Javal Davis’s president believed in hegemony above all else. And the real crime, and the real tragedy is that it was not even American hegemony that Javal Davis’s president believed in, but the hegemony of an economic system. Javal Davis’s president, and his cronies in the Project for a New American Century, do not believe, for all their lip service, in “American values” at all—they believe in the maintenance and expansion of global, laissez faire, un-regulated, “free-market” capitalism, and little else. And there’s no lie too big to deter them from this belief.

What chance, in such a case, does an innocent person like Hajj Ali have?

They tear off his underwear. Hajj Ali trembles with fear, his hands and feet are bound, and six or seven soldiers push him around. Then one of them tells him to walk up the stairs. Hajj Ali lets himself drop to the floor, crawling and squirming, his wounded hand throbbing with pain. An interpreter tells him to bark like a dog, and Hajj Ali complies."Bow-wow." "Louder!" "Bow-wow!" He keeps collapsing, barely able to move forward. After a few steps, they start whipping and kicking him, yelling "faster!"
...
Some prisoners are naked and wear sandbags over their heads. Others are chained in positions that force them to stand for hours on end, or they squat, naked, penned into dark, toilet-less dungeons. The stench in the wing is worse than at a sewage treatment plant."What the hell is going on here?" Davis asked his major, but the officer merely shrugs his shoulders and tells him he should ask the people from military intelligence. "You're a big boy, scare them, be mean," says the Italian from intelligence, the commanding officer in the high-security wing. "Make sure they have a rough night, soften them up. Yell in their ears with your megaphone."
...
Maybe this is a test, Davis thinks to himself. Maybe this is what God wants him to do: to obey every command and never think twice.
...
Davis has trouble differentiating between guilt and innocence. These people are terrorists, killers, bombers. Why else would they be here? But, then again, there are also the brothers and cousins of suspects; and there are the children with whom he plays soccer in the hallways.During breaks, he sits on a chair at the end of the hall and eats his mother's chocolate chip cookies and, afterwards, he prays. Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. Javal Davis believes in the Last Judgment, and he wants to be standing on the right side when that time comes.
...
Hajj Ali squats in cage 49, diagonally across the hallway from the shower room at the end of the corridor. He hasn't eaten in days, he has been naked for days and he has pulled a sock in lieu of a bandage over his throbbing left hand.
...
Interpreters keep appearing at his cell door, asking whether he is finally ready to talk, and each time he turns them down, he gets another beating. On some days he spends eight hours praying to, and praising, his God.
...
The guards repeatedly drag him from his cell, lock him up in the shower room and force him to squat there for hours on end. The days are filled with interrogations that lead nowhere, and in the end they always pour sewage over Hajj Ali. They call the procedure a "shower."

Donald Rumsfeld gets personally involved, and sends a right-hand man to "Gitmo-ize" the POW camp at Abu Ghraib. And all hell breaks loose.

After a visit by Geoffrey Miller, the commander-in-chief at Guantanamo Bay, more and more investigators, analysts and interpreters have been coming in and out of Abu Ghraib. They bring along their dogs, and these people are clearly the ones in charge now. They wear no name tags, and they address each other with code names, like DJ, John Israel, James Bond. They begin to apply pressure.
...
They have recently begun stacking prisoners in piles -- heaps of naked, hooded men -- and they keep dragging prisoners through the corridors on dog leashes. Hajj Ali stands at the bars of his cells, and the things he sees are almost more unbearable than what they do to him.On one occasion, a boy stands in the hallway in front of his cell, begging the guards to take him to the toilet. But they blindfold him and lead him around, fetch his father and force him to lie down at his son's feet. Then they tell the boy: Okay, now you're standing in front of the urinal.
...
The high-security wing is overcrowded. More and more insurgents are brought in every day, and almost all of them are kept naked. "Prepare them for hell on earth," the people from military intelligence say. "They don't deserve anything better. "The intelligence agents pat [Davis] on the back: "Good job, man, you're saving lives. You're breaking them down more quickly."...Hajj Ali watches as Ivan Frederick traces the shape of a cross on a prisoner's chest with his finger and then beats him unconscious, watches as Frederick pulls off another man's hood and shows him how to masturbate, then tells the man to masturbate and forces another prisoner to kneel in front of him and open his mouth. "Look," says Frederick, "look at what these animals do when you let them out of your sight."
...
Javal is agitated when he goes to his cell that night. He brushes his teeth, showers, washes his uniform more thoroughly than usual and then goes to bed. How could this have happened?

A few bad apples? Yes, in the Bush administration.

Rogue soldiers? No. A rogue President.