26 April 2005


BAGHDAD - Ali al-Shalal, nicknamed "clawman" by his US guards, said they attached electrodes to his body and tortured him at the height of the abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. And he describes going through the same agony as a man in an infamous photo of a black-hooded prisoner, dressed like the grim reaper, humiliated and standing on a crate, with wires running from his body that captured the spirit of sadism in the US-run detention centre.

A year after the revelations of rampant sexual and physical abuse leaked to the media, the 42-year-old Shalal has rebuilt his life, fighting for those abused in Iraq’s US-run prisons.

But he is haunted by his own memories from the autumn of 2003 in the notorious prison on Baghdad’s western outskirts.

"I consider speaking out part of a peaceful jihad (holy war)," says Shalal, a big man, with a touch of grey to his hair.

After CBS News aired photos of US prison guards forcing detainees into degrading sexual positions on April 28, 2004, a torrent of pictures, snapped by the guards, were shown around the world.

They included naked men in a pyramid, forced to simulate oral sex, another detainee pulled on a leash, another snarled at by ferocious guard dogs.

Shalal responded to his ordeal by forming a prisoners’ rights group and joining a class action law suit in the United States against translation firms CACI International and Titan Corp, whose representatives were allegedly involved in the notorious actions at the prison facility, once dreaded as the main execution ground of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Five of seven Abu Ghraib prison guards have so far received punishments ranging from six months’ to 10 years’ imprisonment.

The senior commander of the US military in Iraq at the time of the scandal, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, was cleared Friday of any wrongdoing by a US military probe.

"Since I was freed in January 2004, not one day have I been happy. I am haunted by the nightmare that I lived. But it’s even harder to see the trials of the torturers without the victims being able to claim justice," Shalal says.

So far, he has taken 10 prisoners to Amman where they have met US lawyers who are pressing a class-action suit in a US federal court against Titan and CACI, with the US military named as a co-conspirator.

One Philadelphia-based attorney, Susan Burke, said the class-action suit, so far counts 120 former detainees, and spans incidents in some 30 prisons across Iraq.

"The reality is how could this have happened. The world needs to know," Burke told AFP.

Reflecting on the scandal, Shalal says: "I was very happy when the photos were published because they convinced the sceptics of the reality of the US occupation. Before many people did not believe us, especially Iraqi officials who accuse us of lying."

Shalal was arrested on October 13, 2003 by a car park close to a mosque in Amariyah in western Baghdad and accused of being an insurgent.

The next day, he was taken to Abu Ghraib and kept in a tent with other prisoners. His hands and feet chained, a sack on his head, they moved him to the indoor cells where he found himself in "hell".

"They accused me of attacking coalition forces. I told them they should look at my hand, then they would understand that I couldn’t attack anyone," he said.

His hand was deformed in 2003 when a rifle he was holding accidentally discharged.

They accused him of taking advantage of his position of a local leader in the Amariyah district to incite people to fight the Americans.

"They put a pistol to my head and my penis, and shouted "Edam’ (execution). They had an Egyptian translator-interrogator — Adel Nahla Abu Hamdad — who walked on my back and said "Give us names otherwise we will make your hand rot from gangrene’."

They chained his hands to the bars of his cell, with a loudspeaker above his head blaring out the song "By the Rivers of Babylon" by 70s Euro-disco group Boney M.

"They took photos of me while I was naked and I had to pee by my feet. I recited the Koran and I wished they would kill me ... Arabs are very modest so death was preferable to this humiliation," he said, choking back tears.

The soldiers gave detainees nicknames like "Colin Powell", "Big Bird", "Dracula", "Gilligan". He was named "Clawman" because of his burnt and deformed hand.

Shalal was in Cell 49. Opposite him was a man the guards named "Wolfman", who was ordered to bark all the time and forced to wear a woman’s red nightie.

Once, they took Shalal out of his cell at night, threw a sack over him and tied a wire to a finger on each hand and made him stand on a box.

"They electrocuted me. I had the impression my eyes were falling out of their sockets and I fell down. At that moment, they took my picture and laughed. They did it again. I fell without even knowing."

After a third time, he could not stand up.

"My teeth were chattering and I tasted blood in my mouth from where I bit my tongue."

__He is still bothered by the memory of a father and son on his cell block.

"They put sacks on their heads. They asked the son if he wanted to go the bathroom and he answered yes. They told the father to stretch out on the ground and everyone to shut up.

"The son peed and when they took the sack off his head, he saw he had urinated on his father. And all this time, the guards took pictures and could not stop laughing."__