Home > Behind the Walls of Abu Ghraib
By T. Trent Gegax
Newsweek
"Could you stand there while he’s in the shower?" Army Reserve Spc. Diane Liang recalls the plain-clothed American official asking her. "He’ll feel more humiliated if there’s a female present." As a member of the 372nd Military PoliceCompany, Liang was assisting with interrogations last January in Tier 1A of Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. When she walked over, she saw a nude man in a stall with cold water streaming over his head. For 30 minutes, Liang watched the shivering prisoner get "softened up" by the "OGA" [Other Government Agency official, often code for CIA] and two Military Police [MPs].
Liang, 23, has not been investigated or tried for anything related to the abuse scandal. By her account, she is a witness whose participation in the most controversial interrogation techniques was limited to being used passively to humiliate Iraqi prisoners.
She never learned the name of the OGA who asked her for assistance. But her personal account of four months at Abu Ghraib, where she worked the 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift, adds a new dimension to the disturbing photos and videos still emerging from the prison.
The chain of command was obvious to Liang, who came home in January after fulfilling her 22-month active-duty contract with the Reserves. MPs were directed by OGAs and military intelligence officers, she said. But orders were couched as repeated suggestions on how to "break down" prisoners: "[Play] loud music, yell at them, scare them, give them cold showers and don’t let them have towels or clothes," Liang told NEWSWEEK. The OGAs would disappear only to return hours later for a new round of interrogation. "He’s still not talking," Liang recalls an OGA saying to her. "Do something more." This was the drill, day and night.
The bad stuff happened after dusk, she said. While daylight brought a string of visitors-medics, Red Cross officials, high-ranking officers-the dogs came out at night. The second-shifters brought in DVD movies to watch on their computers. Liang said she saw an image on the laptop of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr.-one of those awaiting trial after investigators described him as one of the ringleaders in the alleged prisoner abuses. The photograph was of a snarling military dog held inches from a prone Iraqi prisoner’s face. At the 4 a.m. shift change, she asked, "Why dogs? "The prisoner had been handcuffed and scared with the dogs so he’d break, someone told her. It was common to arrive at work and see a prisoner standing on a box, naked, shivering and wearing a hood, she told NEWSWEEK. One morning she came in and saw blood on the walls, although nobody could explain exactly how it got there.
Pummeling and humiliating and photographing Iraqi prisoners, Liang said, was the product of vague guidance, poor discipline, frustration that came with open-ended deployment, and boredom run amok. "I think it was just out of curiosity and boredom and anger," she said. "You’re there 12 hours a day, every day, and you’re pissed off at everything going on around you. We were told we were going home in September. You want to take out your anger against other people in the unit, but you can’t do that. So some people took it out on the prisoners. What they [the MPs] did was wrong, but not everyone realizes that everyone in there attacked the Coalition forces and tried to kill us."
Some abuse photographs lacked context, Liang told NEWSWEEK. Take the widely-published image of a prisoner with his arms pulled behind his back and handcuffed to a bed, women’s underwear pulled over his head. He was called "S—tboy," for his habit of smearing excrement on himself and the walls. "People don’t know what kind of people were put inside that cellblock," Liang said. "They were crazy people. ’S—tboy’ would smear it all over himself. That was the reason he was handcuffed." Liang said he spit on her as she tried to feed him. The underwear? "Just to make a joke," she said, adding that she can’t recall who was responsible for it.
Another "crazy" man, in his late 20s, was brought in for allegedly looting. His refusal to eat meant the MPs fed him intravenously. He would babble over and over again: "I refuse to eat! Saddam’s going to come back and kill us!" The guards invented nicknames for prisoners based on movie and television characters, Liang said. There was "Gilligan," a tiny, dim guy. There was "The Claw," whose birth defect made one hand resemble a bird claw. There was "Froggy," a man with bulging Marty Feldman eyes. And there was "Mr. Clean," who bathed obsessively. (After Mr. Clean tried to kill a guard with a pistol someone had slipped into his cell, his nickname became "Trigger.")
The company’s training was less than adequate, Liang believes. In two years with the Reserves, she says, she never heard the words "Geneva Conventions," nor did she receive more than a few days of training on how to guard enemy prisoners of war. The rules were ostensibly straightforward, and inevitably broken. MPs couldn’t curse at or have physical contact with prisoners. Yet the OGAs often walked into the cellblock pushing and slapping uncooperative prisoners, said Liang, sometimes even violently ripping their clothes off. "They brought in people hooded," she told NEWSWEEK, "and when the prisoner wouldn’t cooperate in the interrogation, the OGA people would say, ’We need him to talk, soften him up a bit.’ Some of them smiled when they said it. It was like they were leaving it up to us." According to Liang, the OGA and MI told the MPs which prisoners got blankets and the Qu’ran and which prisoners to "break." "There are many things that we didn’t want to do to these people," she said.
Soldiers like Liang realized in January that something was brewing when officers from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division began poking around Abu Ghraib. CID agents roamed soldiers’ quarters, randomly stopping people for questioning. Word was that it involved prisoner abuse and taking pictures. "People were just saying, ’This was bound to happen,’" she said.
Today, Spc. Liang lives with her parents in Rockville, Md., and will begin classes next month at the University of Maryland. She’s been at home, watching movies and looking for part-time work. A naturalized Chinese immigrant, she emigrated from Hong Kong when she was 10 years old.At 20, she joined the Army Reserves to chase the adventure she saw in a television commercial. "It’s not something I’m used to seeing at all," she recalled of her days at Abu Ghraib. "I was like, what’s going on? Why are these people naked?" She nurses a little annoyance. "I’m not embarrassed," she said, "but I don’t tell people that I’m with the 372nd [MP Company] because people are going to ask questions." Those won’t likely stop until what happened at Abu Ghraib is fully understood.