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The journalist T.M. is giving the interview. D., a Christian Palestinian of about 24 or so is translating. D. is a wonderful translator, and I have the impression she is a very smart and sensitive person. I sat in on the lawyers’ interviews only the first day here, Friday. After that they did not want me in the room, as it compromises client-lawyer privilege. T., a journalist with American Prospects Magazine and Marie Claire (She has an article in the current March issue) was invited here like I was by S.B., and is conducting her own interviews. She is collecting information for a book about the role of translators in abuses at Abu Ghraib. I have been sitting in on her interviews.
Interview with A.A.M.:
One wife, 4 children… 11, 8, 6, 3
Three boys, one girl.
Events beginning August 4, 2003, in Mosul, Iraq.
A. is about 5’3” with buzzed dark hair, and a shadow of a beard and moustache. A. wears a sweat suit, kind of. He is not handsome, but not mean looking either, and has a slight paunch. The most striking thing about A. is that he has an amputated arm (below the elbow) and has an amputated leg (as close to his hip as possible, it looks as if nothing is there at all). He walks with one crutch.
Sketch of A. I think I should describe my working method so that what you read has a context. I sit in this hotel room and draw the face of an Iraqi who is telling the most humiliating and degrading story of his life. I try to disappear. I draw, first a small sketch on a scrap of paper, and then a copper plate using a stylus. This plate will be the matrix for a print.
As I listen and draw, I am also inscribing the words I hear into the copper, backwards. I have to write very quickly, so that I do not loose the thread of the story. I need to evaluate what I hear – is this the part I will transcribe, is it a story that condenses the whole experience, or through it will a viewer understand what this is about? So it is a game of waiting and listening. I also have to judge how long the interview will go on to leave enough space for an upcoming story. If there is no room on the plate, I type the story into the computer. I have done very little editing, hopefully it will retain the freshness of the interview.
Also, I am transcribing what A. said, but I cannot verify that it is wholly true, or even that most of it is true. What I know to be true is that this man lost a leg and an arm due to an explosion in Baghdad, and that he has suffered tremendously as a result. I also know that he spent several months in American run prisons, one of which is known to have had a place called “Disco Mosul” (see below). The rest, about how the soldiers purposely infected his wounds and so on sound like urban myth. But who is to tell this man that he exaggerates? I have no way of knowing. I’m just writing what he said. A. was walking home from work and an explosion happened. Maybe on the sidewalk. He fell, he was on the ground and he could not see his hand attached to his arm, and he could see bones and a wound in his leg. He doesn’t know what the explosion was. He was the only injured person. (Almad believes the Americans plant bombs in neighborhoods around Baghdad, hover over the streets in planes or helicopters, and set these bombs off when civilians are nearby.)
One of his friends took him to the hospital. He was sent into the operating room and a doctor began to operate on his hand, trying to save his hand. The American soldiers entered the hospital, and the doctors fought with them. The surgeon fought with the American soldiers because the Americans came in without sterilized clothes.
The doctor argued with the soldiers for two hours; they would not let him operate. And then it was too late for the hand, and the doctor closed up the wounds on his leg. His hand and part of his arm was amputated below the elbow. When he was coming to, he heard the soldiers arguing with his family, the family was kicked out of the room, and the soldiers started to interrogate him right away. A black soldier hit him on the head with a pen. They wanted to know if he knew who set off the explosion, and he said he knew nothing, the bomb went off and he fell to the ground.
They left.
Three hours later more soldiers arrived, 4 or 6 surrounded his hospital bed. One held him from his ear, and shook his head and asked who set off the explosion. Another had a Lebanese accent. They stayed for two or three hours asking the same question over and over again. He told him he had no clue, he just fell to the ground when the bomb exploded. The second day they came back again, different soldiers….they said they would either kill him or take him to prison if he did not tell the truth. He was transferred to the infirmary at Mosul prison. He told about “Disco Mosul.”
His leg got infected, they tried to pull the muscle to straighten the leg and it bled. A nurse who didn’t know what she was doing cut off the stitches, leaving stitches in his leg. It got infected. A doctor said that the nurses were only beginning their training. The nurses and the soldiers in Mosul and then in Abu Ghraib were opening the bandages and pouring cold water onto the wound. This kept it from healing and made it infected. When he was transferred to Abu Ghraib prison they left him out in the sun at the airport for three hours, with nothing on but a hospital gown. The metal brace on his injured leg burned with the heat. At Abu Ghraib they left him out in the hot sun for weeks, and every day would open his wounded leg’s bandages, and pour cold water on the wound so that it would not heal. Eventually a sadistic doctor told him that they were infecting his leg on purpose, so that they could cut it off. Then he was in the hospital, and he was told his leg was infected, that there was no circulation, and when he woke up he no longer had a leg. This was several months after the he was wounded by the bomb. Afterwards, he developed diabetes due to his injuries.
I put this whole story in the drawing, using A.’s words. A.’s tale contains a truth about war, about its destruction and chaos, and about the human need to create a narrative by which one can put the pieces of a fractured life back in order. If the injured man creates a conspiracy theory to explain his lost limb in a war where a foreign army invaded his country, that is also a kind of truth. He is still very much alive. I have heard and read other testimony of acts as evil as the ones A. describes and I believe those. The difficulty I might have of believing that a nurse could act as cruelly as A. describes is not a basis for judgment. Were I to hear for the first time of the cruelties of the Holocaust, would I believe them? And yet we know that these things did happen.
Afternoon Report
Afternoon interview with J.H.
He is asking what T. is doing, if she will ask for asylum or money for the victims in her book or her articles. She says she is only writing what happened, just describing what she finds out. He asks if she can ask for his things back from the American army, the things that were stolen from his house, including his machete. She says she cannot.
T. is especially interested in knowing about the translators.
J. is a tall thin man in a striped grey suit with a burgundy shirt and grey tie. His shoes and clothes are all new. He has very dark skin, and dark hair and dark day old whiskers. His clothes are new, but there is something so weary and beaten down here. He seems so crushed, so defeated. There is something so terribly, terribly sad about this man. I cannot describe it any other way. He is the saddest man I have ever seen. I want to cry for him and he has not even begun to speak. It is not my place to cry, but to listen.
He was born March 4, 1969. Baghdad. He lives in Alkhaleej, a small place, a nice area, clean. Mixed neighborhood, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds. He is Sunni. His wife is A.S.K., and they have two girls. T. says her name is very pretty, and he responds that he thinks his wife is very pretty. She is a housewife. They have three children: I. a 6 year old girl; A., a 5 year old girl; and A., a 2 year old boy. J.’s education stopped at the end of elementary school. That is it he motions with his hands. He is a soldier. He does administrative work. He joined the army in 1985; he left after the war. Now he has his own business. He works with hardware, sanitary equipment, fixes and installs things like sinks, showers; he is a plumber now.
-- Why were you arrested?
-- I don’t know.
-- Were you ever accused of anything?
-- No, I was never accused of anything.
The night I was arrested, it was 1:30 in the morning. I was in bed with my wife. She was pregnant. My brothers and their wives and children and my parents all live in the same house. I heard helicopters near the house. Then a loud voice saying get out of the house. I grabbed one child and my pregnant wife grabbed the other and we went outside. There were many many American soldiers. There were soldiers on the roof. I thought that this must be something big, that Sadam must be on my roof, but they were only coming for me and my brothers. I was handcuffed and they covered my head with a bag and put me in the back of a truck. It was the worst day of my life. In the prison, a female soldier asked me to take off my clothes. I begged not to. She asked me if I was married and how many children I have, and I cried because I thought about my wife and my children.
In Abu Ghraib, there was no soap, no shampoo, no hot water. In the showers, they would put on very cold water, and count to ten, and then turn it off. It was not even enough to wet our heads. It was very cold. I still suffer from the cold. They would make us leave the tents, and they would go inside the tents, and they would search everything, break things, pile up the mattresses, and throw out our clothes. I was forced to kneel once with my hands over my head. Then I was beaten. My legs still hurt when I stretch them out.
During the arrest, J.’s brothers were taken with him, and two hours later they were let go. His youngest brother could not walk for one week because of fear.
This man is so sad. I think he is going to cry and I don’t want to see that. I want instead to hold him, to tell him that it was only a nightmare, that he is ok now, that his family is ok. I want to explain to him that Americans are good people and that what happened was a mistake, that somehow we as a nation didn’t mean it. I want to say that all Americans would be ashamed if they knew what our country did to people like him. But in the back of my head I do not believe it. Americans really don’t care about the Iraqi victims of this war. Not really, or maybe not enough. I do not hold him, and he continues to tell his story, and does not cry.
He tells of something he saw in prison, at Abu Ghraib: A female investigator called a prisoner, and she pushed him on the floor, and she kicked him, rolling him on the concrete outside, for 50 meters, and then she kicked him back. Then she brought him into the tent, and asked him questions, after which she returned him to the concrete outside the tent and kicked him back and forth the 50 meters again. She told the prisoner that he would be sent to Guantanomo. He said to do whatever she wanted to do to him. She said that in Guantanomo he would be with black American soldiers. She asked him if he could be raped by ten black American soldiers, because that is what happens over there, in Guantanomo.
-Daniel |
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