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Friday 25 June 2004
MP Captain Tells of Efforts to Hide Details of
Detainee's Death
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post More news
about possible war crimes
Baghdad - The company
commander of the U.S. soldiers charged with
abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison testified
Thursday that the top military intelligence
commander at the prison was present the night a
detainee died during an interrogation and that
efforts were made to conceal the details of the
detainee's death.
Capt. Donald J. Reese,
commander of the 372nd Military Police Company,
said he was summoned one night in November to a
shower room in a cellblock at the prison, where
he discovered the body of a bloodied detainee on
the floor. A group of intelligence personnel was
standing around the body, discussing what to do,
and Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of military
intelligence at the prison, was among them, Reese
said.
Reese said an Army
colonel named Jordan sent a soldier to the prison
mess hall for ice to preserve the body overnight.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan was head of the
interrogation center at the prison, but it was
unclear whether he was the officer to whom Reese
referred.
No medics were called,
Reese said, and the detainee's identification was
never recorded.
Reese testified that he
heard Pappas say at one point, "I'm not
going down for this alone."
An autopsy the next day
determined that the man's death was caused by a
blood clot resulting from a blow to the head, and
the body subsequently was hooked up to an
intravenous drip, as if the detainee was still
alive, and taken out of the prison, Reese
recalled. There is no known record of what
happened to the body after that.
Reese's testimony came
during the first day of an investigative hearing
for Spec. Sabrina Harman, one of seven Army
reservists from the 372nd charged with abusing
detainees at the prison late last year.
During investigations of
alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib, statements by other
witnesses have described the death of the
detainee, and the corpse appears in photographs
documenting abuse at the prison. But no testimony
or evidence had previously indicated Pappas was
in the shower room on the night the detainee
died.
During an earlier hearing
for another soldier in the 372nd, Spec. Jason A.
Kenner testified that a Navy SEAL team and
officers from other government agencies -
referred to as OGA, a common designation for CIA
operatives - brought the detainee in alive with a
bag over his head. Kenner said he later saw that
the man had been severely beaten on his face.
Intelligence officers
took the detainee to a shower room used for
interrogations, Kenner said, and shackled him to
a wall. "About an hour later, he died on
them," Kenner testified. "They decided
to put him on ice. There was a battle between
[OGA] and MI [military intelligence] as to who
was going to take care of the body. A couple days
later, he was finally disposed of."
Harman appears in two
photographs that military prosecutors are using
as evidence against her, including one in which
she is smiling and giving the thumbs-up with the
corpse in the shower room.
The Army has accused her
of taking photographs of a pyramid of naked
detainees and photographing and videotaping
detainees who were ordered to strip and
masturbate in front of other prisoners and
soldiers, according to her charge sheet. She is
also charged with jumping on several prisoners as
they lay in a pile; with writing
"rapist" on a prisoner's leg; and with
attaching wires to a prisoner's hands while he
stood on a box with his head covered. She told
him he would be electrocuted if he fell off the
box, the documents allege.
A former pizza shop
assistant manager from Alexandria, Harman, 26,
told The Washington Post last month that members
of her military police unit took direction from
Army military intelligence officers, CIA
operatives and civilian contractors who conducted
interrogations at the prison.
She was not called to
testify on Thursday, but Reese said military
intelligence clearly controlled the cellblock
where Harman and other members of her military
police platoon worked the night shift.
"My MPs, they were
directed by the MI people for what they wanted
and how they wanted it," he said.
Earlier this week, a U.S.
Army judge accepted a request by attorneys for
three other soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib
case to question the top commanders in Iraq and
their subordinates. The judge issued the rulings
at pretrial hearings for Sgt. Javal S. Davis,
Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. and Staff Sgt. Ivan L.
"Chip" Frederick.
Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits,
the first soldier to face a court-martial,
pleaded guilty last month and was sentenced to a
year in prison.
Defense witnesses
testified that Harman was a good soldier, quiet
and well liked by the Iraqis she encountered when
the 372nd was based in Hilla, south of Baghdad,
before being transferred to the prison.
"She was very
friendly," Sgt. 1st Class Shannon Snider
testified at the Article 32 hearing, the military
equivalent of a preliminary hearing to determine
whether there is enough evidence to convene a
court-martial. "Anytime we were out on the
streets in al-Hilla, people would ask, 'Where's
Sabrina? Where's Sabrina?' "
Reese said he never had a
problem with Harman. "She did a good
job," he said. "I never witnessed
anything hostile. I never saw any show of
force."
Harman's hearing was held
in a small courtroom at Camp Victory, a U.S. Army
base near Baghdad International Airport. Harman,
petite with her brown hair pulled back into a
tight bun, listened quietly as the charges
against her were read. When the investigating
officer asked her a question, she answered,
"Yes, sir," barely above a whisper.
Throughout the hearing, she scribbled notes on a
white legal pad. Graner and Spec. Megan Ambuhl,
also charged with abuse, sat in a corner at the
back of the courtroom.
Two other soldiers
testified that they saw detainees being abused
but only one reported it to a superior. Both said
Harman was present the nights they saw detainees
being mistreated.
Spec. Matthew Wisdom, a
military policeman, said he saw Frederick strike
a detainee in the chest.
Spec. Israel Rivera, a
military intelligence soldier, said he also was
bothered after watching the military police
soldiers order three naked detainees to crawl low
enough so that their genitals would scrape the
floor.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Testimony Ties Key
Officer to Cover-Up of Iraqi Death
By Dexter Filkins
The New York Times
Friday 25 June 2005
Baghdad - The company
commander of the unit charged with abusing
prisoners at Abu Ghraib testified Thursday that
the top military intelligence officer at the
prison was in the cellblock the night a prisoner
died during interrogation.
His testimony suggested
the officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, was aware of
efforts to conceal the death.
Testifying at a hearing
for one of the seven accused members of his unit,
the 372nd Military Police Company, Capt. Donald
Reese said that one night in November 2003, he
saw the bloodied body of an Iraqi prisoner who
had died during interrogation inside a shower
stall in a prison cellblock. He said a number of
officers were standing around it, discussing what
to do.
One of them, he said, was
Colonel Pappas, the head of the military
intelligence at the prison. "I heard Colonel
Pappas say, 'I'm not going to go down alone for
this,' " Captain Reese testified.
An autopsy the next day
established the cause of death as a blood clot
from trauma, he said.
The hearing was for
Specialist Sabrina Harman, 26, of Alexandria,
Va., who appears in some of the photographs of
the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib showing a human
pyramid of detainees. Specialist Harman also
appears in a photograph with the dead detainee
referred to in Captain Reese's testimony, his
body packed in ice. She has been charged with
conspiracy, dereliction of duty, cruelty and
maltreatment, making a false statement and
assault.
In addition to Colonel
Pappas, Captain Reese testified that among the
others in the room were members of the Central
Intelligence Agency. He also said there was a
female major present, as well as a man named
Jordan. It was not clear whether he was referring
to Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the head of the
interrogations center at Abu Ghraib.
Captain Reese, whose
testimony lasted several hours and was covered in
a news pool report, said he had been told the
detainee had died from "a heart
attack." But, he said, the body was
"bleeding from the head, nose, mouth."
The testimony appears to
be the first to suggest that a senior officer was
aware of a suspicious death immediately after it
happened, and that he was involved in or knew of
attempts to hide it. The testimony also offered a
wealth of details on the case, from a request for
ice to preserve the detainee's body to an attempt
to spirit it out of the prison, connected to an
intravenous drip to make it appear the dead man
was simply ill.
Captain Reese testified
that the detainee had been captured during a
firefight and had died during his interrogation.
"He died in the shower," Captain Reese
said. "I was told that when he was brought
in he was combative, that they took him up to the
room and during the interrogation he
passed."
The body was left locked
in the shower overnight. The next day an
intravenous drip was fitted to it and it was
taken away. "I was told the reason they did
that was they didn't want the other inmates to
get upset he had passed during the
interrogation," he said. He said he was told
the body "was taken to Baghdad
somewhere."
An American military
policeman said in sworn testimony in April that
the man had been brought to Abu Ghraib by
"O.G.A.," initials for other government
agency, or the C.I.A., with a sandbag over his
head. Military guards took the prisoner to a
shower room at the prison, which was used as a
temporary interrogation center, according to the
account by Specialist Jason A. Kenner, also of
the 372nd Military Police Company.
"He went into the
shower for interrogation and about an hour later
he died on them," said Specialist Kenner,
whose account left unclear whether the detainee
had been examined by a doctor or given any
medical treatment before he died.
Captain Reese's testimony
added further details. He said that when Colonel
Pappas and the other officers were gathered
around the body, a man he identified only as
Jordan ordered a lower-ranking officer "to
get some ice out of the chow hall" to store
the body.
"Jordan" and
Colonel Pappas were "talking about the
situation" and the "O.G.A. guys were
visibly upset this had happened." Captain
Reese said the incident occurred after an attack
on the International Committee of the Red Cross
in Baghdad. Meshing with other accounts, he said
the detainee had been brought in alive by Navy
Seals. Captain Reese said the detainee was one of
three men captured; the other two had been killed
in the fighting.
In his testimony, Captain
Reese described the generally abusive atmosphere
at the prison. On his first day there, he said,
he noticed Iraqi inmates with underwear on their
heads. Another inmate, he said, was wearing a
plastic food container as underwear.
"He'd made it
himself, I guess, to cover him," Captain
Reese said. "That was one of the things that
struck me as odd."
Under cross-examination,
he said that some inmates at Abu Ghraib whom he
described as "psychological patients,"
had eaten their own feces. Some prisoners wore
women's underwear, he said, only because there
were not enough men's briefs to go around.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
U.S. Soldiers to Be
Charged in Iraqi General's Death
By Reuters
Thursday 24 June 2004
Denver - The U.S. Army
plans to file charges against two military
intelligence officers in the suffocation death of
an Iraqi general during questioning in Iraq in
November, The Denver Post reported on Thursday.
The newspaper said
negligent homicide and manslaughter charges were
being brought against two warrant officers over
the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush,
commander of Saddam Hussein's air forces.
Chief Warrant Officer
Lewis Welshofer, based at Fort Carson, Colorado
and a member of the 66th Military Intelligence
Group, is accused of suffocating the general in a
sleeping bag while sitting on his chest and
covering his mouth, according to Pentagon
documents obtained by the newspaper.
The other soldier, Chief
Warrant Officer Jeff Williams, was involved in
the interrogation at a U.S. military facility at
Qaim, Iraq, the newspaper said.
The general's death was
among more than 30 prisoner deaths in Iraq and
Afghanistan that the Pentagon said last month it
was investigating.
The treatment of
prisoners came under scrutiny after photographs
of physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi inmates at
the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad emerged
earlier this year.
The general had undergone
more than two weeks of daily interrogations while
in U.S. custody, the newspaper said.
The U.S. military said at
the time that he apparently died of natural
causes after complaining that "he didn't
feel well and subsequently lost
consciousness." But an autopsy released by
the Pentagon in May said Mowhoush died of
asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression.
A spokesman at Fort
Carson said he had no comment.
-------
Jump to TO Features for Saturday June
26, 2004
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