Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Note: All names have been changed to protect privacy

Morning Interview with H.A.

Editors Note: It’s almost 11pm, and I am leaving tomorrow morning at 7:30 am to go for the day to Petra.  I am exhausted, emotionally and physically, though I have done nothing more physical than sit in a chair and paint for days.  I also just lost about an hour’s work on this blog, so I am going to try to reconstitute it, but I am sending out my apologies in advance if it is a bit disconcerted tonight. 

H.A. is a legitimate hero.  He is one of the prisoners whose photograph standing on a cardboard box hooded and attached to electrical wires has become the icon of this war.  But H.A. is not just the person under the hood; he is also the founder of the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons, an organization that helps survivors of torture in the prisons in Iraq cope with their many physical, mental social and financial hardships.  The organization has 49,000 members and is completely non-sectarian and non-political.  The AVAOP never asks someone if they are Sunni, Shiite, Christian, Kurd, as, according to H.A., they are all Iraqis. I only had about an hour with H.A., and T. arrived half way through that time.  The interview was not about his prison experiences, as those have already been pretty well documented.  Instead we discussed his organization, and human rights organizations in Iraq in general.  Ali claims that most of the human rights organizations in Iraq today are actually fronts for partisan factions.  Here is the drawing I did.

Mid-morning Interview with J.A.H.F.

We talked with J. for a long time yesterday.  I did not put much in my blog about him, instead I made two drawings.  Here are the drawings.

Today’s interview started with a discussion of J.’s 35 days at Abu Ghraib in solitary confinement.  He was given no number, which meant that he was called a “ghost” prisoner, waiting to die.  It was gruesome, to say the least.  I have tried to make sense of this interview, and the days skip around a bit.  As I do not approach this work as a journalist, but rather an artist, what I am looking for are the bits of the recitation that can illustrate for my readers what it was like for Jabar rather than list event, time, place, etc.    

Why were you a ghost at Abu Ghraib?

I was being prepared for death.  From their questions I felt that they believed that I was an important person and should be detained and gotten rid of.

Their intentions were not necessarily to kill the ghosts, but to have no restrictions on what they did to these detainees. 

In Abu Ghraib, I was in a very small room with no windows. I was naked most of the time.  (J. describes his cell as a “cage” much of the time.)

A soldier was introduced as the man who was responsible for my interrogation. 

The soldier came in the cage, the Lebanese translator and interrogator remained outside at the door. The interrogator said the soldier would shoot me if I didn’t do what they wanted.  The soldier pushed me to the floor.  I fell.  My knees were on the floor, my hands tied behind my back, I was naked.  They took pictures of me in that position.  There was a bag on my head.  At that point I felt nauseas, I could not breath, and I had chest pains.  A doctor was called, and he took my pulse and blood pressure.  He told the interrogator to leave me alone, because with 5 more minutes I would die.  He put a tablet under my tongue, and he gave me an inhaler.  The interrogator left me, but did not go away.  They stopped abusing me. 

They left me, I was left.  My handcuffs were removed, they had bruised me badly.  I was bleeding all over, my face, my hands, my armpits, my feet, my legs.  They left me there for three days then 2 interrogators came back, with a translator.  They took me again to the interrogation room.  They told me they had good news for me.  They were sure that I did not hit the American forces or kill any Iraqi soldiers but then said that I am a liar and a terrorist.  They asked me one question: do I know S.N.? The language and translation was difficult, so I repeated again are you asking for S.N.?.  I said I did not know this name. The interrogator told me that I am a bad student, and I would go to hell. He said that I failed my test, and that I would go to hell.  I had a friend named Monthel, we worked at the same place.  He said, “We killed M. and we will kill you in the same way.”  The photo shows M. dead, on the floor, in ice, with G. next to him.  M.’s face is beaten.  They showed me the pictures which I saw again later when they were in all the media.  And they left the room. 

One interrogator stayed with me along with a Lebanese translator.  They tried to take information from me.  Because I knew nothing I answered truthfully and the interrogator left the room.  The translator and I stayed and they locked the room from the outside.  They hoped that the Lebanese translator would influence me because he was an Arab, and that I would confess.  They hoped he could pull words out of me.  I treated him with a bit of sarcasm and a bit of anger, because he is an Arab.  How can he work for the Americans?  He knocked on the door and went out with the interrogator.  They took me to the dark room and left me there. I could not stand up for many days, and then it was hard for me to walk.  The doctor told me I had lost a lot of weight, and that according to the Geneva conventions, I must eat.  Food was brought to my cage, and G. kicked the food; I ate the food.

I just finished making the two drawings above.  Note: The former detainees often say that they cannot repeat the words that the interrogators and translators said to them as they are too shameful.  I think that the language used by the translators and interrogators was probably very crude.

The interview continues:

I was in a small cell, with no windows for 35 days. On the 17th day, I remember it was very cold because I had no clothes and there was a mattress but the soldiers had wet the mattress and the floor and I tried to sleep on a small section of the mattress.  I had a blanket.

In the middle of the night I heard, “Wake up, wake up.”  I was taken out of my cell and to a door that had vertical metal bars and some horizontal metal bars.  I was made to put my hands through the bars behind my back, very high.  My hands were tied together behind the bars.  I was standing on one of the horizontal bars, and I was forced to take my feet off this bar.  I was only being held up by my tied hands.  I was in terrible pain.  I screamed out to the Egyptian translator that I was going to die. I felt that I was going to die.  I was sweating.  He would not help me.  I pleaded with him because he is an Arab, and I thought he would help me.  I passed out, and when I came to I was on the floor.  I do not know who untied me, or how long I was out.  My shoulders were dislocated.

There are two other stories that J. related that I cannot put up on the web quite yet. 

Late Afternoon interview with A.A.S.

We interviewed A. yesterday, and he is described in yesterday’s blog.  T. needed some clarification about certain aspects of his story, and I was very moved by the story of how he lost his two sons, and was interested in listening again. The translator agreed for me to draw her as A. would not let me draw him.  Here is the picture:

I have so many thoughts about this very dignified and courageous man who seeks some kind of justice.  He said today that one of his sons called him this morning and told him that three corpses were found on his property yesterday. He is very worried about his family, and cannot wait to return tonight.  The night his two young sons were killed by a helicopter when it shot at his sweets store, he was arrested and went to prison for 131 days.  Among all the other horrors A. suffered, he was not able to bury and grieve for his dead children at home. 

Tonight at dinner the Iraqis were all over the place with their cameras.  They wanted to take my picture, and the pictures of each other and the rest of the American crew.  In a weird way it seemed like the end of a retreat where new friends were made, and everyone was exchanging phone numbers and emails and promising to write.  I don’t know how much actual help this whole process has been for them, or what kind of effect it can have for human rights in Iraq or awareness in the United States.  The stories were very hard to tell, that was very evident.  Many of the Iraqis told us that having to recall their time in prison, something they try not o do, will bring back the pain and the nightmares.  One man, the very sad one on the second day of interviews, said he has been depressed since leaving prison, that he cries all the time, that he has no motivation.  Their journey has been a difficult one, and I pray that this week lessened the burden of their pain even just a bit.  I am not convinced that the law suit will bring them any real justice, and I fear for their return to Iraq.  Each person I talked to was so very human, so very real.  They leave tonight at 2am, on what they hope will be no more than a 20 hour trip back to Baghdad.   It is all much much more complicated than it was before I got here.

March 14, 2006 - previously blocked additions to these interviews

There was a young boy also being held in a solitary cell near me.  I think he was about ten from his voice, 9 or ten, but I never saw him.  Sometimes during this time we would hear the Egyptian translator say to him, “Sing for me.” And if he did not sing the translator would yell at the boy.  The boy would sing, and he had a very lovely voice, but very sad, and he would sing famous songs that are very sad.  The boy’s father must have also been alone in a cell, because the boy would sing traditional songs whose lyrics told of a son telling a father not to worry, “Don’t worry father, I will be o.k., things will be o.k.”  When I heard the boy sing these songs I would cry, I could hear all the prisoners cry. 

The Story of Nour

There was a female prisoner named Nour.  I think she had blond hair, but I only saw her from behind one day when they were cutting her hair off.  She screamed out a prayer asking help from men.  “Who will help me?” It is a very old prayer, a very common prayer.  But her voice went in and out because of the weight on the men on top of her at once.