Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch

Standard Operating Procedure by Philip Gourevitch

Author:Philip Gourevitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.


13.

On the same night that Charles Graner photographed Lynndie England with Gus on the leash, Chip Frederick and Javal Davis and another MP delivered two hooded and handcuffed prisoners to Tier 1A from Davis’s cell block, where they had been accused of raping another inmate, an adolescent boy. Rapes and other forms of assault, confirmed or alleged, were a constant problem at Abu Ghraib, particularly in the tent cities of Camp Ganci and Camp Vigilant, and just as there was nowhere else to isolate the mentally ill, the MI block was often the repository for prisoners suspected of such crimes against one another. Of course, boys weren’t supposed to be in the general prison population, and Frederick had removed the accuser, and placed him on Tier 1B where, England said, “He gave him water and candy and all kinds of stuff to make him feel comfortable.” Then Frederick joined Graner and England in roughing up the accused men, stripping them and running them through a strenuous PT regime, before locking them in separate cells and ordering them to confess. But it hardly mattered what the men said—“The boy kept identifying them as the ones that did it,” England said—and the next night their ordeal continued.

By then the word had got around that there were a couple of prison rapists on the block, and some MI men had come to have a look at them—Specialist Roman Krol, an interrogator, and two analysts, Specialists Armin Cruz and Israel Rivera. They found Frederick and Graner PTing the two men, and since there was nothing else to do, Roman Krol said, “We just stayed to see what was going to happen. Just curiosity, I guess.” Then another MP showed up, Specialist Matthew Smith, who worked as a convoy driver and gunner. Smith was a buddy of Graner’s who would often stop in for a visit at the hard site. He got hold of a megaphone and started yelling at one of the prisoners, while the other one kept doing push-ups.

Lynndie England was upstairs, in the office with Megan Ambuhl, who was playing spider solitaire on Graner’s computer, and at some point they stepped out to see what was happening. Graner shouted to England to grab his camera and get some pictures, but Krol didn’t hear him. There was so much yelling going on—“random stuff that made no sense,” Krol said, “just like word diarrhea”—and he soon found that he and his MI buddies were joining in: “Just yelling vulgarity, ” he said, “you can imagine.”

The yelling was loud and relentless—six soldiers and an interpreter bearing down on two naked prisoners—yelling for yelling’s sake. Even as he took part in it, Krol wondered what the idea was. People were barking, “Confess, confess,” but this wasn’t an interrogation; it was jailhouse justice. “Everybody knew that this was a wrong thing to do, even though the rapists deserved it,” Krol said. “I think they just wanted to punish them in front of everybody so this wouldn’t happen again.



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