Standard Operating Procedure - English Transcript

It was a Charlie Foxtrot, without a doubt. Without a doubt. I've never seen anything like it. I never thought that I would ever see American soldiers so depressed and morale so low, and it was just unbelievable. Everything about it. You got to consider yourself dead. And if you come back, you're just a lucky ***. You know, but if you're there and you consider yourself already dead, you can do all the *** you have to do. I wouldn't recommend a vacation to Iraq anytime soon. JANIS KARPINSKI: When Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed, there was a great deal of information seized. This was a key operation. We no longer have to worry about Uday and Qusay, but we need to use this information to find Saddam. After that big event, the Secretary of Defense came to visit us. He wanted to see the prison. He wanted to see the progress. He wanted to... Of course, every trip out there by anybody included a trip to the torture chambers and the hanging facility. So we scheduled different events. The first stop was Saddam's hanging chambers. We were preparing to continue his walking tour and he said, "No. I don't want to go anywhere else. "Let some soldiers come over here and we'll take some pictures. "I don't need to see anything else in the prison." And then he left. Enter General Miller, the guru of interrogation and obtaining actionable intelligence. And he arrives the day after Rumsfeld's visit. He was gonna "Gitmo-ize" the operation. Contract interrogators, military people that had experience in Afghanistan or down at Guantanamo Bay, they all arrived after Miller's visit. He gives an in-brief. He's not afraid to say, "You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. "They have to know that you are in control." Cell block 1A transfers to the control of the military intelligence brigade commander, Colonel Pappas. Cell block 1B, several days later, under the control of Colonel Pappas and away from me. They're going to use those cells exclusively for higher value security detainees. Abu Ghraib was becoming exactly what General Miller said he wanted to make it the interrogation center of Iraq. SABRINA HARMAN: "October 1, 2003. First day at the prison. "It's 9 p.m., and we can hear shots. "No white lights are allowed to be on at night. "No leaving the building after dark. "I hope we ain't here long. "We drove in and two helicopters were landing, "taking prisoners off. "I'm scared of helicopters because of the dream. "The tail was swaying back and forth. "Then a huge flame shot up, and it exploded. "I have a bad feeling about this place. "The prison is called Abu Ghraib. 30,000 people were murdered here. "There's a chamber where these men were hung. "I'm not sure about ghosts, but it is freaky. "I'm hoping to be home for Christmas, or soon after. I love you. Sabrina." We're coming up the road, we see this huge structure. It's like six football fields. Then we seen this sign saying like, "Fallujah," right there, next town over. We're like, "Yo, we right in the heart of it right now." We get inside, it's nothing but rubble, blown-up buildings from shelling, dogs running all over the place, burnt remains. The stench was unbearable. Urine, feces, body rot. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch anything. And then we had to move into prison cells ourselves. You're walking around in your compound. Next thing you know, (IMITATES MISSILE SOUND) Boom. Incoming. Everyone's yelling, "Incoming." Like, boom, "Incoming, incoming!" You got to run. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. ***, you're getting mad, 'cause it happens over and over and over and over and over again. After a while, the fear goes away and you just get angry. It's like, "Damn it, can we shoot back?" One pierced the roof of the prison right to the floor, but it didn't explode. Boom! Ting-ting-ting. Land on the floor. Soldiers in there are like, "Holy crap." (EXPLOSION) Well, they ain't say, "Holy crap." Now, you know what they said. When you walk from the main portion of the prison, and you get to 1A1B, they already had intelligence detainees down there. That's when I saw the nakedness. I'm like, "Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?" You know. "Hey, that's the MI. That's what the MI does. "That's the MI thing. I don't know." "Why these guys have on women's ***?" He's like, "This is to break them." There's guys naked, guys in women's ***, guys, you know, handcuffed in stress positions, you know, in isolation cells, no lights, no windows. You open the door, turn the light on. "Oh, my God, Allah." Click, turn the light off, close the door. It's like, "Whoa, what is that?" It was like, "Hey, that's Military Intelligence. "You know, just stay out their way." And from then on, I was like, "Something's not right here." I was working out of operations. Some nights I'd get off work at 10:00. Some nights I'd be working all night. Depends on how many prisoners we got in. Sometimes we'd get up to 200 that evening and I'd be there till 6:00 the next morning, and then I had guard duty at 6:00 a.m. and I'd get off guard duty, get a couple hours sleep and then go back to work. Usually I'd go over to the hard site after my work day ended. You know, it'd just be Megan and Graner and Freddy, maybe up in the office watching a movie on his laptop. Some nights I'd go up there and there would be different people in stress positions here and there and got them up on MRE boxes doing squats or running up and down the tier, or something. We thought it was unusual, and weird and wrong, but when we first got there, the example was already set. That's what we saw. I mean, it was okay. The first thing that I noticed were... Was this guy. He had underwear on his head and he was handcuffed backwards to a window. And they were pretty much asking him questions. That's the first time I started taking photos. I wrote a letter home to Kelly, who is my wife. HARMAN: "October 20th, 2003. "I can't get it out of my head. "I walked downstairs to find the taxi cab driver handcuffed backwards "naked with his underwear over his head and face. "He looked like Jesus Christ. At first I had to laugh, "so I went and grabbed a camera and took a picture. "One of the guys took my asp and started poking at his ***. "Okay. That's funny. Then it hit me. "That's a form of molestation. "I took more pictures now to record what's going on. "Not many people know this *** goes on. "The only reason I want to be there is to get the pictures "to prove that the U.S. is not what they think. "But I don't know if I could take it mentally. What if it was me in their shoes? "I thought I could handle anything. "I was wrong." If I come up to you and I'm like, "Hey, this is going on," you probably wouldn't believe me unless I had something to show you. So if I say, "Hey, this is going on. Look, I have proof," you can't deny it. (CAMERA CLICKING) Gus was the prisoner with the leash. We thought he was maybe part of the Iraqi army, because he was always, like, you know, "Saddam's going to come back and kill all of you. I hate you." And all this stuff. He had all this anger. And so we thought he was someone maybe pretty important. And then we found out the history of his arrest and why he was there. And he had gotten drunk and beat someone up. He was just a regular prisoner, like we'd find at one of our county jails, or something. Once he came over to the hard site, he stopped eating. And we had to pump him, you know, five to eight IV's a day or bags of IV fluid a day just to keep him alive. Gus was being verbally threatening and not following any directions. Graner put the leash on him. And then he crawled out on his own after that. And then he handed the leash to Lynndie. And that's when he took the pictures. And then the guy got up on his own after that. They were trying to say that she was dragging him, which never occurred. I was there, and I know it didn't happen. It may have been unorthodox, but he came out of the cell and he didn't hurt anybody, and he didn't get hurt. Graner had the camera in his cargo pocket. And he asked me and Ambuhl to come downstairs with him. When he opened the door, Gus was in there, he was naked. He didn't want to stand up, so that's why he brought the tie-down strap. So he put it around his neck. So he's gonna make him crawl out. And I guess he got about halfway out of the door. Graner told me to hold onto the end of the tie-down strap, so I did. I just grabbed it. You can see the slack on it. People said that I dragged him, but I never did. (CAMERA WHIRRING) Graner took three pictures back-to-back. You can see Megan on the side standing. He would've never had me standing next to Gus if the camera wasn't there. I'm a 95 to 100 pound female, short female, at that, holding a strap that's attached to his neck. I'm dominating him. Maybe that's what Graner was going for. Maybe it was for documentation, maybe it was for his own amusement. I don't know. I don't know what was going through his head. But he took it. In all the years as a cop, I'd say over half of all my cases were solved because the criminal did something stupid. Taking photographs of these things is that one something stupid. BRENT PACK: They gave me 12 CDs and said, "There's thousands of pictures from Abu Ghraib. "We want you to find all of them that depict possible prisoner abuse "or people that were in the area at the time that the abuse was occurring. "And we need to know exactly when the pictures were taken." The pictures spoke a thousand words, but unless you know what day and time they're talking, you wouldn't know what the story was. I started lining pictures up based on subject matter. Put these on a time line so that the jury could see when did the incident begin and when did it end. How much time elapsed in between these photographs. How much actual effort did these people put into what they were doing to the prisoners. Who else was there in the room at the time that it occurred? How could all this go on without anybody noticing it? When you look at this whole case as one great, big media event, you kind of lose focus. These pictures actually depict several separate incidents of possible abuse or possible standard operating procedure. All you could do is present what you know to be factual. You can't bring in emotion or politics into the court. LYNNDIE ENGLAND: When I was in the brig, every single woman there was in that brig because of a man. Different reasons, yes, but it was because of a man. And when you join the military, no matter what anybody says, it's a man's world. You have to either equal a man or be controlled by a man. If you want to be their equal, you got to be strong. They're going to try to control you. You need to step up and tell them, you know, show them who's boss. "I'm not gonna take that. I'm not gonna let you power me. "You know, control me because I'm a woman and you're a man. "It's not gonna happen." Even though it's the military. I mean, hell, if you're in the military, you got a gun. Use it. If I would have thought about that then, by God, I would have. But I was blinded by being in love with a man. Graner, he's really charming. If you didn't know him and you just meet him, you'd be drawn in to him. And in a crowded room, he'd be the one to look at. He would draw the attention. If the attention is not on him, he'll get it there. That's what he does. He thrives on that. If you're not paying attention to him, he'll make comments about you and this and that, you know. Whatever you wanna hear, he'll say it. And he knows. He knew. And I was, what, 20 years old when I met him? He was 34. He had 14 years more experience than I did. So he knew what to say, what to do. And I was dumb enough to fall for it. I should have listened. Everyone tried to tell me, "He's too old for you. He's a bad guy." But I didn't believe them because I believed him for some reason. Can't figure it out now. The population was just simply growing but nobody really had a plan on how you release a formerly known as "suspected terrorist" or an "associate of a terrorist." General Wojdakowski told me after the first intake of prisoners that this was going to go on for several weeks and at the end of it we might have 1500 or more security detainees that we would be responsible for. And I said, "Don't you think you should have shared that information with me, sir? "You know, I mean, we don't have any resources to provide "for the 200 prisoners in the cells out at Abu Ghraib. "And now you're going to give us 1500 more. "What's the release procedures?" He said, "You are not to release anybody. Do you understand me? "If any one of these prisoners gets released, or ends up out on the street, "I'm coming after you." They would go out in the middle of the night and sweep up every single, you know, fighting age male and lock them all up. That's why you hear the stories about sons and fathers and, you know, nephews all getting locked up. That's what they would do. Imagine someone coming to your town and taking all the men in it. They would come in, like, on cattle trucks, and just like cattle. I mean, you come to the back door, I mean, you hear a *** on the door you know, ***, ***, ***, here come the deuce and a half truck full of scared individuals coming to jail. Were like, "They come get me in middle of night. "Mister, Mister, what, am I in trouble? What I do? I'm not terrorist." You know, they were like taxicab drivers and welders and, like, bakers, and they're at Abu Ghraib. We had kids. If we can't get the insurgent leader, we took their kid. "Akbar, I have your son. Your son is in jail. "Turn yourself in and we'll let your son go." I call that kidnapping. It got filled up so fast that we couldn't take the children out anymore and they had to stay in their cells. You feel bad for them holding a child for no reason just 'cause of who your father was. You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the MREs to make their time go by better, I guess. But there's only so much you can do or so much you could feel. HARMAN: "The lights went out in the prison "so here we are in the dark. "I hear, 'Missus! Missus!' I go downstairs and flash my light "on a 16-year-old sitting down smacking ants. "Now these ants are Iraqi ants. Large. "So large they could carry the family dog while giving you the finger. "All the ants in the prison came to this one boy's cell "and decided to take over. "All I could do was spray Lysol. The ants laughed at me and kept going. "So here we were in the dark with one small flashlight "beating the ants with our shoes. "So that was the start of my shift. "They've been stripping the ***-up prisoners "and handcuffing them to the bars. "I get to laugh at them and throw corn at them. "I kind of feel bad for these guys "even if they are accused of killing U.S. soldiers. "We degrade them but we don't hit them, and that's a plus. "They sleep one hour, stay up for one hour then sleep one hour. "This goes on for 72 hours while we *** with them. "Most have been so scared they *** on themselves. It's sad. "Pictures were taken, you have to see them. "A sandbag was put over their heads while it was soaked in hot sauce. "Okay, that's bad, but these guys have info. "We were trying to get them to talk. That's all." TIM DUGAN: The big word that always comes up for me is "surreal". Everything that you saw, everything that was going on. A bunch of unprofessional schmucks that didn't know their damn job. All thrown together, mixed up with a big-*** stick and what you get out of it is the *** you see on the news from Abu Ghraib. It's disgusting. Pisses me off. Because the whole time we're screwing around and not doing the damn job, Americans are dying. DUGAN: Abu G. had been hit by a mortar barrage killed two Americans and wounded about 16. We went to do an interrogation on the Wolf, the cell leader of that group of people that mortared the prison. There was two female specialists, one was an interrogator, one's an analyst. They took all of his clothes off and got him totally naked, which we weren't supposed to do. When we got done with the interrogation, I'm like, "So, what's the scoop with the guy being naked? "I mean, what's going on?" Trying to think how they put it. The Arab position on the females, they're a subservient role in their culture. And to try and break that down so they'll cooperate with the female interrogator, they interrogate him nude. I went back and I asked my section sergeant. And he's like, "Yeah, we're not really supposed to do that "but we let the females do some things like that "you know, to get over the Arab culture thing." And I'm like, "You just said we weren't supposed to be doing that." And he's like, "Well, they're allowed to do it, but you can't do it." I said, "Okay. What am I supposed to do?" And he's like, "Well, you know, "if I was you, I wouldn't be around that kind of stuff." It's not like they were trying to hide anything. And that's what stands out to me is if you know you're doing something wrong, dead wrong you're gonna hide it. You're gonna do your best to conceal it so people that know better don't see it. As I walk in, here's a guy in his black PT shorts and T shirt and shower shoes and there's another guy off just with his pants and his shirt. Each one had a naked detainee. Someone says, "We're MI. We know what we're doing." And I'm like, "Okay." You know, because I had no idea. They're not wearing rank. I don't know what rank these people are. And they'll put their handcuffs above their head, stretch them out that way, you know, stretch them out long. Then they started handcuffing them together. I'm like... The whole time they're yelling, "Confess. Confess. Confess. "You know you did it. Tell us what you did. Confess." Then they start handcuffing them into what appeared to be simulated *** positions. And, I'm just like. I thought I had missed something. Come to find out, what's going on is, these guys were accused of raping a teenager inside the jail. No military intelligence value. Cruz is yelling at him, "Get undressed, get undressed!" And the guy's like, "No, mister, no." So after they're undressed, they throw water down on the floor and they make them low crawl making him try to drag his genitals onto the concrete. And I'm like, "What is going on here?" I said, "Is this the way you all interrogate people?" He goes, "There's a lots of different ways we interrogate people." So I said, "I've had enough," and I left. The next morning, the lieutenant's right out back. I said, "Sir, military intelligence over at the hard site. "They are doing some pretty weird things with naked detainees." He told me I had no business being over there. And he also told me, "Stay out of MI's way and let them do their job." ROMAN KROL: Okay. Okay, on the right, in black trunks, it's Cruz. Right next to him, myself. To the left against the wall, Graner and we're looking at the two detainees handcuffed on the floor. Can't see anything else, actually. It was never intended as an interrogation. It was never an interrogation. The yelling was just for show, I believe. To show the spectators this would be done to anybody who breaks the rules. Abu Ghraib was mortared almost every day. People were dying there. So my frustration level was really high. And when I heard about detainees that *** a little boy, I just completely went nuts. Right before I left, I was so pissed off that I had a bottle of water and I splashed some of them just to show, pretty much, my hate. KROL: At one point, there was a Nerf ball brought in. Everybody was throwing it to each other, playing catch. Here, I'm going to get it. Once, I threw the ball, it hit one of them in the leg, actually. It's a Nerf ball, so it can't bring any pain anyway. Graner wanted me to take some pictures. He didn't tell me which ones to take or not to take. So I was just walking around, and... "Just take one," you know? MI came in and they got involved. They wanted to mess with them, too. They didn't like it that they were raping the 15-year-old boy. They were roughing them up, having them run up and down the tier, crawl, run into walls, stuff like that. And then they handcuffed them together. That's Graner with his hands on his hips and the gloves on his hands. The two guys in the background are the MI guys. They didn't wanna be in the pictures. They were mad. But I was like, "Well, hey, you know, don't tell me. Whatever. "Just taking pictures." I'm not gonna even comment on picture taking. The whole time I was there I didn't see any pictures being taken. Even though I was in a few of them I didn't see a flash or anything. Because if I did I would have said something to these guys. First of all, there's a big sign, "No photography". And besides photographing something like that is just stupid. I received a 10 month sentence, a demotion to E1 and a bad conduct discharge. I was more humiliated by that sentence than actually punished. Eight months in jail for pouring water on somebody, and throwing a Nerf ball at somebody. That's humiliating. People laugh at that. So I go back home to my prison cell and I got one of the terps, interpreter, sitting outside waiting on me. And he's like, "Mr. Dugan, I'm so pissed. I'm just so pissed. I'm pissed off. "The general that you guys did, he wanted to tell us where Izzat was." Well, that's great. And he's like, "No, the interrogator wouldn't ask him where Izzat was." He's the vice president of Iraq, Saddam's number two guy. Ten times the general said, "I'll tell you where Izzat is. I'll tell you where Izzat is." And then he never asked the question. HARMAN: He was standing just in front of his cell at attention. I mean, he wasn't handcuffed or anything. He was like a grandfather. Very respectful. They shaved his eyebrows for some reason and he was so upset. And I told him not to worry, that it made him look younger. I just felt really bad for the guy. Four days later, we were gonna do him and the Army kid takes off the sandbag and the dude looks like Yoda. I mean, he's got no eyebrows, he's got no hair. I'm like, "Who the hell is that?" You know. And he's like, "That's the freaking general," you know. And I'm like, "***." And I thought he was playing a joke on me. "Damn it, I don't want this ***. "I wanna do this guy, I wanna get this stuff. I want to find out fricking Izzat." He's like, "This is the fricking general, I'm not kidding you." Never got him. That general wouldn't say nothing else about it. He had a serious resolve that he wasn't gonna cooperate anymore. We got promoted from babysitters to condition-setters. We got implemented into the plan. The military intelligence people would come up there and say, "Hey, play music at this time. Play it loud. "And if you got to, take the megaphone and stick it right in front of the door. "And turn it all the way up so the guy can't pray, "you know, he can't sleep. Totally disorient him." So I played this song called Hip-Hop Hooray over and over and over again. * Hip-hop hooray Ho * That's what it sounded like. After a while, the Iraqis were saying... * Hey, ho This is not working. So, I changed it and I put on heavy metal music. I put on Metallica. Like, Enter the Sandman, this very loud song. Then they were screaming like, "I don't like it." But after a while it didn't... They were numb to that. I guess they were so deaf from the guitar, the A chord that they were able to, you know, sleep. Go figure. I put in country music. That worked. They couldn't stand it. They're like, "Oh my God, Allah. Allah." You know, "Cut it off." By the time the interrogators would come to take them out the cells they were more than ready to go. Like, "Please take me." Sometimes MI would come in, say, "Hey, we're gonna interrogate this guy today. "Get him out and you can start... Soften him up a little bit." Scream at him, yell at him, make him do PT. Handcuff him in a awkward position for a while. Completely strip him and have a female do it because that would embarrass the person or humiliate them even more. We didn't kill them. We didn't cut their heads off. We didn't shoot them. We didn't cut them and let them bleed to death. We just did what we were told, to soften them up for interrogation. And we were told to do anything short of killing them. We would make them stand in awkward positions for hours at a time to stress them out and to strain them. And we would have them crawl up and down the tier. We'd pour cold water on them. Point at him and laugh at him while he was in the shower naked. Shower him with all his clothes on. Cut off all his clothes with a knife. Burn him with a cigarette. We'd just do what they want us to do. If they want us to PT the guy that's what we do. If they want us to keep him up, that's what we do. They say, "I want him to be awake." They say, "He's dirty. I want him to shower a lot." ERROL MORRIS: Did any of this seem weird? Not when you take into account that we're being told that that's helping to save lives and you see that people are coming in from right outside the wire with their body parts missing and they need to know who's doing it so they can stop it. And these are your battle buddies. Gilligan was the one on the box with the wires. He was accused of killing two CID agents. It was his box. He had to hold it, he had to stand on it. It was cold so he had a blanket on. I mean, he was never physically ever touched that I saw. He was just very, very tired. HARMAN: He kept giving us different names, so Graner nicknamed him "Gilligan." When I got there he was in the shower. There was wires on his fingers and he was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off. There was no electricity going through the wires and to say, "Hey, if you fall off you're gonna be electrocuted." I mean, that would keep anybody awake. So, it was part of the sleep plan. You had to keep him awake. It would have been meaner if there was electricity and he really could be electrocuted. It was just words. The wires were taken off after photos were taken. You'll see Sergeant Frederick in it. That's the one I took. And the one where I'm outside the shower looking in I took that one. He became one of our workers so he was let out, like, every day. He was, like... He's kind of fun. But I think it was proven he was innocent. We'd give him an extra meal for helping out and cigarettes, that kind of stuff. He was about 25. 24, 25. Young guy. Pretty decent. Each of the pictures had file time stamps but they were all off anywhere from a year plus to a couple hours. And every time they got copied to a CD from one computer to another, the times would change based on that computer's time setting. But the one time setting that did stay constant is what we call metadata. Metadata's a big, two-dollar word for information about information. Pictures have information inside the file that tells you about when that file was created, what software created it, the exposure settings and the date and time that the camera thought it was when it took the picture. I was really elated to see that the metadata was still intact. The three main cameras belonged to Graner, Harman and Frederick. Graner's camera, the Sony FD Mavica, that took most of the pictures. There was a Sony Cybershot I believe belonged to Harman. And Deluxe Classic Cam, which belonged to Frederick. I then realized that these people were actually taking pictures of the exact same incident almost at the exact same time. Found a total of eight separate time-synch incidents where I could say, "This camera thought it was this time. "This camera thought it was that time." Once I was able to adjust it, all the pictures just seemed to line up. There was a guard log where they recorded incidences that occurred at the jail. It actually confirmed the time line was accurate. Sabrina Harman's camera thought it was 2002. I had to adjust her camera one year, nine months, 11 hours, 29 minutes. Frederick's and Graner's were only seven or eight hours off. Nobody really got any intelligence there. Very few of us. Most of our interrogators were 18-year-old kids that are reservists. And if you think about it, you got a 45 to a 65-year-old one, two, or three, or four-star general that you're gonna be talking to. And you're 18 years old, just got out of high school, joined the Army and went through interrogator school. What the hell are you gonna ask that 55-year-old general that's seen the world, done everything and been everywhere? You know, these kids are intimidated as hell. And the generals and the colonels and these older guys know it. And it's like, they laugh at them. DUGAN: So I'm working this guy, not getting crap out of him. His brother was also captured with him. So I went into the hallway and decided I'd see what was going on with his brother. There's six interrogation booths, and each one has a two-way mirror so you can view what's going on with the interrogation. You got an Army female and an Army male playing grab-*** and not asking the detainee questions. There was a guy coming on to a girl and a girl being receptive when they're supposed to be interrogating this schmuck. And I said, "Hey, why don't we, like, switch guys?" So this new detainee's in my booth and I say, "Listen. I've been sitting here for two hours, "and I've actually been sitting here for two days "'cause I was standing outside a two-way mirror "watching you with the other guys, okay? "I know you know all kinds of crap. "And I know that you're pulling a lot of *** "on these Army kids." I said, "I'm not gonna put up with your ***, okay? "It takes me three minutes and 47 seconds to smoke this cigarette. "I'm gonna go outside, I'm gonna smoke this cigarette, "and when I come back in "you're gonna tell me every damn thing I wanna know. You understand me?" I said, "Do I look like I'm in the fricking Army to you?" And I put my fist through the plastic table and I went outside to smoke my cigarette. Then after about a minute and a half, there was crying and yelling coming out of my booth. And my terp was standing near the doorway and he's like, "You scared the *** out of this guy. "He don't know what you're gonna do. "He'll tell you anything you want. I mean, whatever you want to talk about." So I walked back in there real calm and I sat down in the corner and I said, "So, what's your decision?" KARPINSKI: My prisons were spread all over the place, so I was on the road quite a bit. One time I arrived down at Abu Ghraib and Lieutenant Wood said to me, "Oh, ma'am, we have an interrogation going on. "Would you like to come over and see it?" She took me over there and we stood in the hallway and I observed it, and it looked perfectly normal. I've wondered many times if they didn't take me in there specifically so I would be able to say, "Yes, I saw an interrogation, and, yes, it looked perfectly normal." It's kind of funny how when, say, General Karpinski or some other big shot would come look at the prison we'd... You know, have a dog-and-pony show. And everybody would get their mattresses back. Everybody would get their clothes back. And then as soon as the people left, whoever was deprived of certain things got deprived of it again. That just seemed normal to deprive people of something if they're not cooperating with you. JAVAL DAVIS: CIA, Iraqi Survey Group, DIA, FBI, Task Force 121, the other government agencies, that's what we called it, the OGA. They had no rules. We called them the ghosts 'cause they'd come in, you don't know who they are. Whoever their prisoners were, you never logged them. "How's it going there, soldier? "You know, here's this guy, don't log him in the book. "He's not here, hasn't been here. "Just put him in a cell in there and, you know, don't mark it. "When the Red Cross comes here, move them another place. "When the Red Cross goes to the other place "move them back to where they were. You know, 'cause they don't exist here." I'm used to being out in the road, you know. "Hey, soldiers, go do this." "Roger that, sergeant, airborne. See you later, we're done." But now we're a part of this big high-profile operation. You know, we're getting, like, the deck-of-card guys, the guys who were on the deck of cards. We're getting them. Like, whoa, we have a big job. Wow, we got to guard these guys now? JAVAL DAVIS: That's when things changed. They'd take them into the shower room, put a sheet up over the door, stick them underneath the shower spigot. Or stick them in the garbage pails with the ice. Then have at it. A burlap sack on their head the wetness, it's sticking to your nose, sticking to your mouth. Makes them feel like they're drowning. Open a window while it's, like, 40 degrees outside and watch them disappear into themselves. For hours and hours and hours, all you would hear is screaming, banging. When they were done, eight, ten hours later, they'd bring their guy out. They'd be halfway coherent or unconscious. Put them back in their cell, and then, "We'll be back for them tomorrow." I know what it sounds like to hear, you know, skin smacked or punched. I know the difference between someone screaming because they're upset and then someone screaming because they're in pain. You know, I know the difference. It was early in the morning like 4:30, around that time, so everything was silent. OGAs were, "Okay, we have another special prisoner here." He was wearing only a shirt. So he came in, he was shackled, handcuffed and everything, with a hood on. When he came in, we didn't ask, we didn't ask nobody who this guy was, what he did. That wasn't our business. Two soldiers took him straight to the shower where he was interrogated by one OGA. He was there quite a while. I think he was there about an hour and a half. All of a sudden, the OGA guy opened the door and said, "Can you help me here? "Tie him a little higher 'cause he don't want to cooperate now. "He's, I guess..." You know, he was just sagging. There were some CIA guys there. I think they were CIA. Well, yeah, they were. But at the time, we didn't know what agency they were with. They asked us to handcuff him to the window, so he has to hold himself up 'cause he was playing possum. Now I'm just holding him by the jumpsuit. I'm not holding him under the arms or anything. And his jumpsuit is riding up his crotch and I commented and said, you know, "Damn, this guy's pretty good at playing possum." 'Cause I know I'd be howling like a, you know, whatever with this riding up my crotch like his jumpsuit was. Everybody just kind of laughed and nobody really thought anything of it. And I remember how, like, far back his arms were going and it was just a really awkward position. Again, you know, I was like, "You know, this guy's pretty damn good "'cause, you know, his arms are almost about to break. "I'm surprised they haven't broken. I'm waiting for the pop." And then all of a sudden, just like, I guess, blood started pouring out of his nose and mouth. And so we realized something was, you know, was wrong. That's when I went and raised the hood. And that's the first time I saw his face. I was surprised 'cause his face was totally messed up. He got huge black eyes with bruises everywhere. And I was like, "Whoa, what happened to this guy?" And then one of his eye was open. So I kind of, like, did the thing like Pierce so he could move his eyes. And nothing. He was just looking down like this. And I was, "Whoa, this guy's... This guy is not even alive." This whole time we were messing with this guy, you know, carrying him and lifting him and this entire time the guy was dead. I even got some blood on my uniform 'cause he was dripping. It kind of felt bad, you know, 'cause I'm like, I know I'm not part of this, but, you know... But it kind of make you feel like you are 'cause you're there with the guy. Colonel Jordan, he was in charge of the MIs, he came in, the medics came in, Captain Reese came in Captain Brinson, the first sergeant, Sergeant Snider, everybody showed up. You had the entire chain of command right there, trying to figure out what was going on. We checked him and, you know, sure enough he had died. (SIGHING) And we kind of... I don't know, I walked out of the room, just kind of like, you know... (HUMS) You know, like nothing happened. And then I asked one of the CIA agents you know, I was like, "Well, what do you guys normally do "in a situation like this?" They were kind of, not panicky but, you know, they were on their phones calling whoever, to see how to, you know, see what to do or what not. JEFFREY FROST: Well, what do we do with him? We can't take him out in a body bag 'cause that may start a riot. So we had to keep him there overnight. And so we got a body bag. We got a bunch of ice. Iced him down. Left him in the room where he was at. And then we shut and locked the door. I remember saying to the NCO, "You need to take the spare key and hold on to it "or someone will probably go in there and, you know, mess with him." We should have just taken both keys and held on to them instead of leaving one there. But I guess he, you know, had to leave one there in case they wanted to come take the body that night or something. FROST: It was pretty much supposed to be, you know, hush-hush. Didn't want the word to spread around. HARMAN: "It was a crazy day yesterday. The guy they brought in died. "He was beat pretty bad. I'm not sure what happened. "It was on the shift before us. "They stuck him in a room next to where I was working last night "and put him in a body bag on ice. How *** gross. "He's already been defrosting for 24 hours." Captain Brinson had a meeting in the main office with all of us. And he said that there was a prisoner who had died in the shower and he died of a heart attack. HARMAN: Sergeant Frederick got the key, and we just checked him out. He started to melt, and it started to smell. He was there for at least 24 hours prior to us getting there. So he was there for a pretty long time. His knees were bruised, his thighs were bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on his wrists. It was kind of obvious, after you just kept looking that there was no way he died of a heart attack. MORRIS: You've gotten into trouble because of the thumb. HARMAN: I can understand. It does look really bad. But whenever I would get into a photo, I never know what to do with my hands. Any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up, 'cause it's just something that automatically happens. Like when you get into a photo, you wanna smile. It's just, I guess, something I did. He was a ghost detainee, so he wasn't supposed to be there. They didn't want him to be in there when the Red Cross came so we had to do something. So someone came up with the idea to take him out of the body bag, dress him in the orange jumpsuit, put his dead body on a gurney, stick a IV in his dead arm and take him out of the facility. DAVIS: From that point on, we never heard anything of it. It was just... The guy died, they put him in a body bag, put him on a gurney, he was gone. Go about your business, keep working. Disappeared. He dissolved into thin air. (DAVIS MAKES SWISHING SOUND) They tried to charge me with destruction of government property which I don't understand and then maltreatment of taking the photos of a dead guy. But he's dead. I don't know how that's maltreatment. And then altering evidence for removing the bandage from his eye to take a photo of it and then I placed it back. When he died, they cleaned him all up and then stuck the bandages on. So it's not really altering evidence. They had already done that for me. In order to make the other charges stick, they were gonna have to bring in the photos which they didn't want to bring up the dead guy at all, the OGA, 'cause obviously they covered up a *** and that would just make them look bad. So they dropped all the charges pertaining to the OGA in the shower. Camp Ganci had a huge riot. It was a female MP. She got smashed in the face with, like, a cinder block or something like that. They were gonna break out of the tent encampments, get the MPs, and hold them hostage. We brought them down the hallway, put them on the floor. That's where I come in. I can't go to sleep at night worrying about the detainees trying to kill me when I got people outside the walls trying to kill me. This has got to stop. These guys are gonna have to... They got to know. So I lost it. Threw the guys on the floor, I fell on the pile, did like a WWF, you know, just jumped on them a little bit. I wanted to do more, I was mad. I'm like, "You done hurt one of our soldiers, like, that's it." So I stepped on the finger, stepped on the guy's finger, stepped on the guy's toe. I wanted to hurt him, the gentleman who hit the female in the face with the brick. I wanted to hurt him really bad. I finished my day in the motor pool and I had generator detail that night. Just sitting there at night, it gets very boring. Computer system was very slow. I was waiting for e-mail to come up. And Sergeant Frederick walked in. He had to print out some papers and stuff. And we started talking. He got a call on the radio that he had some individuals he had to in-process. He said, "Come on, you walk down to the holding cell with me." So I walked down with him. And they had the seven individuals there. And I said, "Hey, Freddy, "you want me to grab one of the detainees and take him down for you?" He said, "Yeah, go ahead." And as I'm getting closer to Tier 1 Alpha, I could hear Graner yelling. And I'm like, "Where do you guys want him?" They said, "Just put him on the floor." So I pushed him onto the floor with the other guys. And that's when all the pictures and stuff started happening. That's when Javal was stepping on the fingers and stuff and on the toes, and Lynndie was also. And that's when all the pictures started and Graner asked me to take the staged photo of him with the one detainee where he was cradling the detainee's head and he was acting like he was gonna strike the detainee. Never struck him. As soon as I took the photograph, he laid the detainee down. And then they start the stripping of the detainees and taking more photographs. Graner walks over to one of the detainees, punches him in the temple, for what reason, I don't know. I mean, hits the detainee hard. And, after he does that, Sabrina matches up the numbers, says, "This guy's in here for ***." So Graner rips the leg open on the jumpsuit that he had. Sabrina writes, "I am a rapeist," on him. The guy hasn't moved for, like, two or three minutes. I kind of look at him and I said, "Hey, Grane, something's wrong with that guy." And I walked over and I lifted the sandbag, up to where I could see his eyes. The guy was unconscious. I said, "Graner, you knocked that dude out." And he kind of shook his... And after he punched him, he kind of shook his hand and he said, "Ouch! Damn, that hurt." And he didn't seem too concerned about it. And then I walked back over by Freddy. We were standing there. And Freddy looks at me and he says, "Hey, watch this." Goes over, gets the guy that I escorted down, lifts the guy up, marks an "X" on his chest punches the guy right square in the chest. I'm like, "What? "Who are you and what did you do with Freddy?" Then they started the whole one facing the wall on his knees and setting the other one on top of him. They had flex-cuffs, which are, more or less, big zip ties. And I told Graner, "This guy's gonna lose his hands "if we don't get them off of him. They're purple." I said, "Well, I got my Gerber on me. "I can probably get them with that, "but we're gonna have to stand him up." It took a little while, but I finally got them off of him and then the blood started flowing back in his hands. And as far as I know, the guy kept his hands. That's when Graner and Freddy started with the human pyramid thing. Graner told me that he was doing what he was told that's why he was doing it. And as I was leaving the tier that night, I was told that I didn't see ***. And me being the person that I am, I try to be friends with everybody. I said, "See what? I didn't see nothing." I was always asked by CID, "Why didn't you report this? "Didn't I feel that it was morally wrong?" I said, "Yes, but when you're in war, things change." We were told, "No pictures of prisoners." I was asked to take it. I'm a nice guy, so I took it. I try not to have anybody mad at me. That's the way I've always been. But I guess being a nice guy doesn't always pay off. Some people ask me now why I'm not as nice as what I used to be. I say, "Put yourself in my shoes. "Go through what I've went through in the last two and half, three years. "See how nice you'll be." HARMAN: Sivits just happened to stick around for maybe five minutes. I mean, he never hurt anyone. He got a year in jail for nothing. Just for being there. He shouldn't have got any time at all. I don't think he would've even been charged if he wasn't in that video. MORRIS: Who took the video? I did. The last thing I remember was one guy standing and one guy kneeling. And the one guy had his hand on the other guy's head. And that's the last photo that I took. Then we left to go use the phones. It was Kelly's birthday, so I went to make a phone call. Me and Megan were still upstairs in the office. And we walked out and they were throwing them into a dogpile and taking pictures from the top tier. About that time, Graner and Davis and Frederick started jumping on the dogpile. And that's when I went downstairs with a camera. Graner said he wanted some taken down there, too. Me, Freddy and Sabrina were taking pictures, three different cameras that night. They were lined up against the wall, and Graner started taking them one by one. We didn't know what he was doing. Nobody knew. He didn't say anything. And then he told us that he was piling them in a pyramid. And we're like, "Okay, why?" He's like, "To control them, so they're all in one area." So we're like, "Okay." Freddy is the one that started them ***. I don't know why, but he did. He started the one and then he wanted to see if the others would do it too, I guess. I don't know. But he had them all doing it at the same time. At one point, six of the guys stopped and the one guy kept doing it for like 45 minutes. No joke. The one guy that was still ***, that was the one picture with me in it. He wanted me in it, and I didn't want to be in it. I was like, "I'm not going over there." MORRIS: Who wanted you in it? Freddy. And then Graner joined in. Graner was like, "Yeah, just come on." I was like, "No, I don't want to go over there." And he's like, "Come on, just do it for me," and this and that. And I'm like, "Fine." MORRIS: Was this your birthday? They brought them in after midnight. So, yeah. MORRIS: Which birthday? 21st. I had heard Graner saying, "Well, this is your birthday present," or something, and I'm like... I don't know why he would have said it 'cause I really wouldn't have wanted that, but, yeah. I mean, he used me. And even though I was stupid enough to fall for it. I mean, now I'll know what to look for. Least he's moved on past me. PACK: This was the infamous seven-man naked-Iraqi stacking. The facial expressions kind of set the tone for what they were thinking and feeling at the time. You look in their eyes, and it looked like they're having fun. This scene is what sealed their fate. Pretty much everybody that participated is in the photograph at one time or another. Here you see Graner in a punching motion. Two cameras actually caught him at the exact same time from two totally different angles. And again you see it where they had the seven men stacked naked with the hoods over their heads. You actually see both of the cameras inside each of the pictures. It's not so much that you're there committing these acts of abuse. If you're in the pictures while this stuff was going on, you were gonna be in trouble. MORRIS: Big trouble. If you make our President apologize to the world, I would say so, yeah. HARMAN: "I haven't slept all night. I just can't sleep. "Six prisoners escaped last night. "That's eight we've lost in three nights. "Something bad is going to happen here. "I hope I'm wrong, but if not, know I love you. "We might be under investigation. There's talk about it. "Yes, they do beat the prisoners. I don't think it's right and never have. "That's why I take the pictures to prove the story I tell people. "No one would ever believe the *** that goes on. No one. "If I want to keep taking pictures of these events, "I have to fake a smile every time. "I hope I do not get into trouble for something that I haven't done. "I love you. Sabrina." I guess reality hit that what was going on wasn't right which, of course, you know from the beginning, but then it's your job. I mean, there's really nothing. You can't just walk away and say, "Hey, I'm not coming back," or "I'm not doing this." 'Cause either way, you're gonna get screwed. We had a Iraqi prison guard smuggle in a pistol, a 9mm and a brand-new bayonet. The prison guard wrapped it up in a sheet shimmied it up to a cell. The detainee went underneath his pillow, pulled out a 9mm, (GUNSHOTS) hit Sarge Cathcart in the vest. Sergeant Elliot had to stick the shotgun inside to get the guy to stop shooting. And all he hit him in was the leg 'cause he was in the corner praying, like, "Allah, Allah." And he was willing to die. All the Iraqi prison guards that were involved, they rounded them all up and fired some, but the Iraqis hired them right back. Not only did you have to risk your life from the shelling on the outside, you was risking your life dealing with the unscreened Iraqi corrections guards. You know. And the detainees. So strike one, two and three. One of them is going to take you out. Not all of them were bad, but a vast majority were bad. The guy who smuggled in the pistol, I thought was a good guy. I thought was a good guard. He turned out to be Fedayeen. Smile in your face, stab you in the back. They rushed in right away and took care of this guy who had just tried to kill us. So... But it doesn't appear when you see a picture that that's what happened. AMBUHL GRANER: Your imagination can run wild when you just see blood. The pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don't see forward and you don't see backward. You don't see outside the frame. HARMAN: "This is the first time I've seen military police dogs here. "Two dogs with two owners go to the man against the wall. "The guy is scared out of his mind. The dogs get closer. "The Iraqi starts screaming and runs straight to Graner. "And one of the guys lets his dog loose enough to bite him in the leg. "The guy is hysterical. The dog got another bite. "Blood was everywhere. "It was teeth marks that looked something like this. "One of our medics came, and he taught me how to give stitches. "It was kind of fun, but I felt horrible for this guy. "The dogs should've never been there." One of the things an interrogator does every time, it's the last paragraph of all your reports, is you evaluate the truthfulness and reliability of the information that was just given you. That's the very last paragraph of every report you ever write. So if I get information through torture I have no way to verify anything because, well, I would just assume that you're going to tell me whatever the hell you want so the pain stops. But if I give you some carrots and I give you some reasons to cooperate with me, usually you're going to get more righteous information. General Sanchez routinely subjected Colonel Pappas to this finger pointing, poking a finger in his chest and saying, "I want Saddam. Find Saddam! "Find Saddam! Do you understand me? "Find Saddam! Find Saddam at whatever the cost." If you poke your finger in somebody's chest long enough, they'll do whatever they need to do to get you to stop doing that. It's a downward spiral. "This isn't working. Try this. This worked in Gitmo. "This worked in Bagram. Try this. It's okay." It doesn't stop the mortars, doesn't get the information they want and it doesn't find Saddam. It wasn't any information they obtained in any interrogation or interview out at Abu Ghraib. It was soldiers on the ground who found Saddam. DUGAN: You ready for this? The farm that Saddam was hiding on, a little tiny farm right next to< the Tigris River. Saddam knocked on the door, and he said, "I'm Saddam Hussein. I'm the President of Iraq. "I am the leader of Iraq and all the people of Iraq are my people. "All the homes in Iraq are my homes." And he went to the kitchen and he made hisself a single egg and he ate the egg and he left. And he came back about four hours later, and he's like, "I'm staying here." And the dude's wife, like, freaked. Saddam was captured on the 13th, Sunday morning. And then on Monday, I had to report to Colonel Pappas' office. He asked if we wanted to volunteer for a special projects team. He'd just got off the phone with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld and Sanchez had authorized all approach techniques on the high value detainees. They said we had the opportunity to break the insurgency right then 'cause of the stuff that was captured with Saddam. And at that time I believed it. PACK: You have to look at exactly what the pictures depict. It was important to separate those that were criminal acts and those things that were not criminal acts. And that's what the prosecution would have to focus on. If somebody was physically injured, you know you have a criminal act. Putting somebody into sexually humiliating positions, you have a criminal act. Making them abuse themselves sexually, you have a criminal act. Standing by and watching somebody hit their head on the wall and taking photographs at the time that's dereliction of duty, so it's a criminal act. The individual with the wires tied to their hands and standing on a box, I see that as somebody that's being put into a stress position. I'm looking at it, thinking, "They don't look like they're real electrical wires." Standard operating procedure. That's all it is. Does this one actually constitute a crime or is it standard operating procedure? That's probably standard operating procedure. The *** on the head are an added touch, but it's no more than sleep deprivation. They weren't being tortured, per se. They were going through discomfort to try to aid in obtaining information. I've been in the Army for 20 years. You know, I've been to Desert Storm One. I spent four months at Guantanamo Bay. People that haven't been where I've been I can't expect them to see the pictures in the same way. I came back from a meeting, it was very late at night. I opened my classified e-mail. "Ma'am, just wanted to let you know I'm going in to brief "the CG on the progress of the investigation at Abu Ghraib. "This involves the allegations of abuse and the photographs." And I sent an e-mail back to him and I said, "I don't know what to say. First I've heard of it." I was preparing in my mind to hold a mini-press conference to tell the truth and to tell it early. To say, "This is what we've uncovered. "We're looking into it because we discipline ourselves. "We're Americans, and we know right from wrong." General Sanchez said, "No, absolutely not. You're not to discuss this with anyone." The fear of the truth silenced people. Everybody knew. Everybody that was inside of that prison that stayed there, lived there, worked there, they had the pictures. They would come over and they would get copies from Graner. And he had all these discs so he would make copies. "Well, here you go, here you go, which ones do you want?" Everybody had a copy of a picture. Everybody knew. When those photographs came out, the infamous photographs the day after Colonel Pappas issued a battalion-wide amnesty period. Any type of evidence was destroyed. Burn it, throw it away, erase it off your hard drive and be done with it. He just wiped out every last single defense witness, every last single person that would've been available to come forward and say, "Look, this is what I know," in one day. You know, after the amnesty period, who's gonna want to come forward? Who's gonna want to say, "Hey, I know something. "I know what happened"? No one. Find a way to make it go away and that's what they did. Sacrifice the little guys, that's how they cover it up. I'm a 28-year-old young American. A volunteer soldier. And I'm gonna get everything blamed on me. HARMAN: "Well, sweetie, you married a criminal. Yep, the pictures are out "and I'm under investigation as of 10 a.m. this morning. "So much for turning those pictures in when I come home. "I knew I'd be in trouble just by being there. "But how else would you let people know the *** the Army does? "You think I'd be scared, but I'm not. "I knew I'd go down with them. Wrong place, wrong time. "What sucks is almost the entire company knows what happened, "have seen the pictures and have done nothing." AMBUHL GRANER: My husband is in prison right now. I can't move on from this until he comes home. So, that's pretty difficult. This huge political monster cost Lynndie England three years, Ivan Frederick eight years and my husband ten years. When I went through Desert Storm, we were seen as the rescuers, the heroes. Our mission was to reclaim Kuwait. That was something that was honorable. This war in Iraq, like Vietnam, will probably get remembered as the one time that we not the heroes, we were not the saviors. And these photographs will play a big part in that. War is a stressful time for people. They were getting shelled on a frequent basis at that prison. A young person with no experience in the world being thrown into something like that may get confused. We all say that hindsight is 20-20. And I'm sure they all look back realizing what happened was wrong and they played a part in something that was very embarrassing for the country. But at the time, they were in a war zone where the rules get fuzzy sometimes. Lynndie England, I really feel sorry for that gal. It's obvious she is one of those young people that doesn't have much experience in life. There had been no indication that she would have been involved in anything like this. But she was in love. Ambuhl. She... Well, she knew when the line was drawn and when it was time for her to disappear. Because she would be present during some things and then noticeably absent during others. Um... So she was probably one of the smarter ones. ENGLAND: In the pictures that came out in the media, all you seen was me. You didn't see Megan 'cause that was the cropped picture. Graner told me he just wanted her out of the shot 'cause it was interfering with, I don't know, his picture. Maybe it was to secretly protect her because now that I know that they were closer than what I thought at the time, maybe he was trying to protect her. MORRIS: When did he find out that you were pregnant? Well, when I found out on February 20th, I come back and I told the First Sergeant Commander. And, of course, they wanted to know who the father was. So they knew, and then I told him. At first he sounded excited and then he was just like he didn't want anything to do with me. He didn't want anything to do with the baby. Once the story broke, and it came out that I was pregnant, he denied that the baby was his. He was accusing me of cheating on him, which I never did. So if that's how he wants to play it, then that's fine with me. He'll never see him. It's his choice. I was in the mess hall. I look up and I saw myself and Dan Rather and I'm like, "What the hell?" It's like, "Javal, Sergeant Javal Davis." I'm like, "Whoa. Yo, that's me. "Where the hell did they get this picture from?" They went to my high school. They acquired a picture of me from the newspaper when I was running track, going over a hurdle. They cut my face out and showed me like this. But, in actuality, I was jumping over a hurdle. So they made me look like this mean-*** guy. They're showing naked people in a pyramid and then they show a picture of me. I'm like, "Hold on. If you look at these pictures, "do you see a black guy anywhere in any of these pictures?" There would be no me, no no one else, no shock-the-world, no scandal, if there wasn't any photographs. It'd went away, it'd went underneath a rock, and that would have been the end of it. PACK: Photographs are what they are. You can interpret them differently, but what the photograph depicts is what it is. You can put any kind of meaning to it but you're seeing what happened at that snapshot in time. You could read emotion on their face and feelings in their eyes, but it's nothing that can be entered into fact. All you can do is report what's in the picture. Somebody caught our administration with their pants down. That's it. They're pissed off at that. You can kill people off-camera. You can shoot people. You can, you know, blow their heads off. As long as it's not on camera, you're okay. But if it's on camera, you're done. You know, torture didn't happen in those photographs. That was humiliation. That was softening up. Torture happened during interrogations. Guys going through interrogation, and they're dead, and they were killed, and they died. That's where the torture happened. We don't have photographs of that. I just thought it was a bunch of schmuck MPs acting like idiots. I don't think so anymore, not at all. I think you got a bunch of kids getting shammed. It's just cover-ups and people are afraid of culpability and ramifications of their actions, so there's nobody saying crap. Except they're throwing a lot of people under the bus. I received a phone call from a Pentagon reporter who said, "You were relieved from command." So I said, "I haven't heard about it." I didn't hear from General Helmly. He didn't call me. He didn't summon me to Washington D.C. to be in front of his desk so he could relieve me. This is cowardice of a different kind. You're afraid to look Janis Karpinski in the eye? I got a letter 10 days later from his office relieving me from command of the 800th MP brigade. My name was a good name in the military until I did what I did. My uncle died in Vietnam 13 years to the day till I was born. My dad has two bronze stars for valor from Vietnam. My grandfather's got a bronze star from Vietnam. And then I come along and get involved in that. That just put that name in the mud. You're taught from the very beginning that you have to follow your orders. And if you don't you're gonna get in trouble. And if you do, obviously you end up in trouble. You know, it's easy for retired colonels and generals, and majors, or whatever to stand there and say, "Well, these people should have known illegal orders "and they should've stood up to these lieutenant-colonels and majors. "And they should-a stood up to them at the time in a war zone "where, you know, lives were at stake." And it's just kind of unrealistic to think that... That that would happen. You were getting shelled every day, shot at every day. Detainees, you know, putting together shanks, weapons, starting riots. You know, this guy blew up, like, 10 of my buddies. He needs to get his behind kicked. I know what I can do and I know what I... And I think I know what I can't do. I think I know what I can't do, but I see these guys doing this and I see, you know, the CIA guys coming and doing this. You know, after a while it's like, "You know what? "It's free reign, just don't kill them." I was not the same person there that I am sitting in this chair or that I was before I got there. I don't know what I could've done different. I could've said, "Screw you, I'm not working here" and just gone to jail for disobeying an order, I guess. But, I don't know. I'm sure everybody can do something different put in... I just don't know what I would've done different, put in the same situation. If I could back all the way up, I wouldn't have joined the military. That's what I would have done different. It's just not worth it. You go through all that trouble to start back where you were when you first went in. Trying to get in school, trying to get... It just wasn't worth it. I just want to go on with life. You know, get a job, raise my son. I don't think I have a lot of choices. Can't change anything, so... And if I did, then I wouldn't have Carter. I mean, I wouldn't trade him for the world, so... I wouldn't want to go back and change anything. It's how the world turns, ain't it? People backstabbing other people. Unfairness. It's drama. It's life. You live it. Now I just got to move on.