The death of Iraqi prisoner No. 0310337

By DEBORAH HASTINGS

Always, there was the heat. Steaming like a cauldron at 125 degrees during the day, parboiling at 90 degrees after dark. Enough to induce around-the-clock anger and misery. Enough to set anyone on edge.

No one wanted to be at this god-awful place, not the U.S. Marines who were the guards and certainly not the captured Iraqis who were the prisoners.

Their accommodations were three stone buildings gouged by looters of every semblance of modernity. For bathrooms, the Iraqis got empty Meals Ready to Eat boxes. The Marines dug a trench.

This was life at the Camp Whitehorse detention center outside Nasiriyah, as described in military documents and photographs obtained by The Associated Press.

The Marines spoke English. The Iraqis spoke Arabic. There were no translators. The uneasy residents lived in separate rooms connected by a breezeway. Some 20 men of the 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment occupied one; about a dozen prisoners occupied the others. Everything around them - the dirt, the sand and the sky - was the same lifeless color.

Nagem Sadoon Hatab arrived on June 3, 2003. He was rumored to be an official of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party, as well as a shooter in the ambush of Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s U.S. Army convoy.

He was irksome from the time he arrived, Marines later testified. He didn’t move fast enough when they ordered him to strip. He sat when they ordered him to stand.

Two days later, he was naked in the dirt, curled in the fetal position, covered in his own waste. A Marine who came on guard duty prodded Hatab with a booted foot. No response.

The 52-year-old was dead. He became entry No. 1 on a list of at least 16 Iraqi prisoners whose deaths have been investigated as homicides by U.S. military investigators.

His death came 10 months before shameful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison slammed into view - long before President Bush said he was "disgraced" by images of abuse and snarling guard dogs and sexual degradation.

There would be no graphic photographs from Camp Whitehorse. But there would be testimony about beatings and confusion and untrained Marines. There would be photographs of the compound, and witness statements showing things gone wrong in an equally terrible place.

The discovery of Hatab’s body shot up the chain of command and orders came down: Post a guard; everyone submit written statements; an investigation would begin immediately.

And it did.

Lt. Col. Kathleen M. Ingwersen of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology arrived from Landstuhl, Germany, to perform the autopsy at Tallil Air Base in Iraq. By the time she arrived, records show, the corpse had been unrefrigerated for more than 100 hours.

Working under considerably less than optimum conditions, she noted the body had extensive bruising and found seven cracked or fractured ribs. Hatab also had a broken hyoid bone - the free-floating, wishbone-shaped bone supporting the tongue. That, she said, caused him to slowly asphyxiate after he was dragged by the neck to an outside holding pen.

She declared the death a homicide.

The Marines running the detention center, all reservists except the officer in charge, were interrogated several times, without legal counsel, in a five-star Kuwaiti hotel by special agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, records show.

The agents asked who had scrawled "Terror Dome" on a jail wall. The Marines said they didn’t know. The agents yelled and called them liars, according to later testimony. They threatened to prevent one Marine, born in the Dominican Republic, from gaining U.S. citizenship.

Eventually, eight Marines were charged with crimes including dereliction of duty, cruelty, maltreatment and assault. Two were charged with negligent homicide - one for ordering Hatab dragged by the neck, the other for doing it.

But by early this year, the case was falling apart.

Col. William Gallo presided over Article 32 hearings (the equivalent of preliminary hearings) at Camp Pendleton in California. He found that prisoners generally were well treated at the makeshift prison. Of hundreds who passed through, Hatab was the only one to die there.

Gallo said Hatab had been illegally assaulted. But he couldn’t determine, based on the evidence presented, which attacks - if any - were lethal. Hatab’s hyoid bone, Gallo wrote, could have been broken during an assault that occurred several hours before the prisoner was dragged by the neck.

Ingwersen’s methods and conclusions, Gallo wrote, were "unconvincing at best." Notably, he said, "No laboratory tests on Mr. Hatab’s bodily fluids could be performed because the ice chest in which they were being stored for transit back to Germany was left on the tarmac (at Tallil Air Base) in the hot Iraqi sun and literally exploded from the expanding gases inside."

A Navy pathologist, testifying for the defense, said Hatab could have died of complications from a heart attack and a lifelong asthma condition.

Eventually, all counts against six of the Marines were dropped or dealt with administratively.

Two remaining defendants are scheduled for courts-martial in August and September. One is charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment and assault. The other is charged with dereliction of duty and four counts of assault.

Military prosecutors now have a case in which a medical examiner has ruled the death a homicide but no one is charged with it.

It has never been determined whether Hatab belonged to the Baath Party or whether he helped ambush the 507th Maintenance Company on March 23, 2003, on the streets of Nasiriyah, military records show. What he told Marine interrogators has never been disclosed.

According to witness statements, court documents and interviews with defense attorneys, the story of Hatab’s death begins with the jail itself.

The 2nd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, a reserve unit from New York, had drawn the assignment of fashioning a prison from abandoned Iraqi barracks four miles outside the roiling city of Nasiriyah. It was to be run by Maj. William Vickers, who transferred out before Hatab ever arrived. Nonetheless, he was one of the original eight defendants.

The 2-25 was an infantry unit. Two members - Sgt. Gary Pittman and Lance Cpl. William S. Roy - had been civilian jailers, but none had been trained to operate a prisoner-of-war camp on foreign soil.

"No one could get any information on how to run the detention facility," Vickers’ lawyer, retired Marine Col. Jane Siegel, said during a Camp Pendleton hearing.

Defense attorneys would not allow their clients to be interviewed for this story. Military prosecutors did not return phone messages from AP seeking comment.

The prison opened in April 2003, days after Army Rangers and Navy Seals burst into Nasiriyah General Hospital and carried out the badly wounded Lynch. An especially ugly battle to capture the town was nearly over, but resistance was far from dead.

Vickers requested an Arabic translator but was denied, military documents show. He requested the jail be turned over to Army military police, who traditionally run such facilities, and was again denied.

A typical stay at Camp Whitehorse’s jail lasted about three days. Then the detainee would be released or sent to a more secure facility. The prison closed last summer.

Witness statements, along with interviews with defendants’ attorneys, indicate that Hatab arrived at the prison in apparent good health between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m.

Two Iraqi brothers accompanied him. All had been rousted from their homes based on reports from local sources that Hatab had bragged about killing Americans. He reportedly sold the brothers an M-16 rifle bearing the insignia of Lynch’s unit.

According to witness statements, Roy was awakened to help process the new prisoners. Also present were Pittman, the new jail commander, Maj. Clarke A. Paulus and others. Paulus is a resident of Buckingham in Bucks County.

Standard operating procedure stipulated hoods, plastic handcuffs and clothing be removed from arriving prisoners. Body searches were conducted. Prisoners were ordered to put their clothes back on. Hoods were retied at their necks and their hands were recuffed behind their backs.

Guards communicated with a few Arabic words they picked up, and when that didn’t work, witnesses said, Marines yelled, screamed and hit or kicked the prisoners.

The three detainees were herded into a small, airless room double-ringed by concertina wire, where they were ordered to stand for 50 minutes of every hour until interrogators and translators arrived. Marine guards later testified that interrogators instructed them to do this to "soften up" detainees.

Roy went back to bed. He reported for guard duty at 4 a.m.

Roy eventually became a key witness and was demoted one rank and given immunity from prosecution for his testimony. But his story has changed several times.

His first statement to investigators was two handwritten paragraphs that did not mention violence. By January 2004, his statements became pages of single-spaced type laden with descriptions of abuse.

In them, Roy said he grabbed Hatab by the neck several times during the four-hour guard shift, trying to make him stand. Pittman, Roy said, side-kicked Hatab in the chest with a "very forceful blow" that sent the handcuffed, hooded prisoner flying more than three feet before crashing onto the floor.

During a pre-trial hearing last month at Camp Pendleton, it was revealed Pittman was also under investigation for allegedly assaulting a prisoner at his civilian job - the New York City federal detention center for 9-11 detainees.

Pittman’s attorney, Marine Capt. W. Anders Folk, says his client disputes Roy’s account, but declined to elaborate. Defense attorneys said recent depositions from other Marines contradict Roy’s statements.

Pittman and Roy went off duty around 8 a.m. Shortly after that, according to testimony, interrogators arrived and spent 90 minutes questioning Hatab.

For the rest of June 4, Hatab appeared to sleep. The next day, he refused to eat or drink. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get up, according to testimony. He suffered severe bouts of diarrhea, fouling his clothes and creating a horrible stench.

His clothes were removed. The guards wanted to bring him outside, but he was too covered by sweat and feces.

Maj. Paulus ordered Lance Cpl. Christian Hernandez to grab him by the neck, according to testimony. Putting one hand under Hatab’s chin and the other behind Hatab’s head, Hernandez dragged the heavyset man outside. Paulus’s attorney declined to comment on the incident.

Hatab was not examined by a doctor, according to testimony.

By late afternoon, guards apparently forgot about Hatab, military records show. Chaos had erupted over reports that protesters from Nasiriyah were marching toward the jail to free their relatives. Paulus took 25 men and set out. The rest took cover with weapons drawn. But the protesters turned back without incident.

In the pulsating adrenaline of a call-to-arms, Hatab remained where he lay, according to testimony. He was still there at nightfall. He was still there at midnight, when the new guard shift came on duty.

Except now he was dead.

Prosecutors brought charges against eight Marines. The most serious:
Hernandez, a Delta Air Lines agent from Queens, N.Y., was charged with negligent homicide for dragging Hatab, and three counts of assault.
Paulus was charged with assault and with negligent homicide for ordering the dragging.
Roy, a county jailer from Troy, N.Y., was charged with five counts of assault.
Pittman was charged with assault.

Three other guards and Paulus’ predecessor, Maj. Vickers of Syracuse, N.Y., were accused of dereliction of duty and other offenses including filing false statements.

Vickers was the first to have an Article 32 hearing before Gallo, who found he "had no previous training to perform this mission, and pleas for assistance from higher and adjacent headquarters were ignored. ... Under the circumstances, I believe Maj. Vickers did what he could."

Two months later, everyone save Pittman and Paulus had been dropped as defendants. Gallo recommended both face administrative punishment rather than courts-martial. He was overruled by Camp Pendleton’s commanding officer, Maj. Gen. William G. Bowdon III.

Pittman will be tried first. His court-martial is scheduled to begin Aug. 23. If convicted, he could receive up to three years behind bars. Paulus could be sentenced to up to five years.

"There’s a lot we don’t know about Mr. Hatab," said Folk, Pittman’s lawyer. "I don’t think it’s ever going to be clear why Mr. Hatab passed away."

Hatab’s badly decomposed body was buried behind Tallil Air Base, where the unclaimed bodies of Iraqis lie covered by dirt, without coffins, under stakes bearing numbers assigned by the U.S. military.

Nagem Sadoon Hatab was prisoner No. 0310337.

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-08092004-345079.html