One of four journalists expelled from Iraq after more than a week in
prison, Matthew McAllester describes the horror, frustration and finally
relief when they were finally released into Jordan.
At first it sounded like the guards who played pool throughout the night in
a room at the end of the cell block were having a play fight or at worst an
argument over what the local rules might be at Abu Ghraib.
The clicking of the pool balls had stopped. Shoes that usually padded or
snapped down the concrete hallway between the two rows of cells were
rushing. Several pairs of shoes, or boots. There was shouting, too.
A body fell to the ground, and now, amid the shouting, emerged a single
voice coming from the level where I lay, on the cold floor of my cell. That
voice was different from the others. It came from a throat contracted by
fear. It seemed about two or three metres from me.
I recognised one of the other voices. It belonged to a guard who had broad
shoulders and wore wire-rim glasses. He had been there when we checked into
the prison a couple of days earlier, and he had searched the pockets of my
black fleece. He had stood beside me as I stripped to my boxer shorts and
put on my blue-and-white striped prison pyjamas. Somehow in our new
universe full of dark stars, I picked him out as perhaps one of the
blackest. Ever since, I had avoided eye contact with him whenever he walked
past my cell door.
He had a loud voice, normally, barking commands angrily to the Iraqi
prisoners who occupied the cells opposite ours. His was a nonchalant
aggression. Now his voice was unrestrained, furious. And it came in a new
rhythm, alternating with another sound.
In the early 1990s, I once saw two men rush out of a warehouse building in
Manhattan with baseball bats to beat up a man who looked like a drug
addict. The man had been clumsily, hazily trying to break into a car. The
sound of the bats against his gangly body has stayed with me. That was the
sort of sound I was hearing now, alternating with the shouts of the
heavy-set guard.
The prisoner was on the ground, and he was being beaten with something that
was not a fist or a boot. A shout and then that slightly resonant sound of
flesh and bone giving way to something very hard that was moving fast. And
then another shout from the guard, another blow.
The fluorescent strip above my head filled my cell with light, as it did 24
hours a day. I was plainly visible to the men in the corridor, and I did
not want to be seen watching. As soon as I had sensed the violence
beginning I turned to my left side and lay motionless.
Journalists are meant to bear witness. But I turned away and chose not to
see a thing.
Eventually the beating stopped, and the man was dumped into his cell. The
big guard seemed to have exhausted his fury.
With each breath he made a sort of crying sound. Sometimes he broke that
rhythm to exhale his pain with more force, and the otherwise silent block
filled up with what I wondered might be the man's last gasps.
A guard ambled back and spoke to him, asking him a question. The man just
continued to whine with his agony, and the guard walked away.
After another while, two guards came back. There were more questions, and
this time the prisoner responded.
I don't know how long the man's noises filled the cells. Since they had
taken away my watch when we arrived at Abu Ghraib, with everything else I
owned, apart from some bottled water, time had lost its structure. But
eventually silence came back to the block.
In the morning, the prisoner was alive. Moises Saman, two cells over from
me, said on Wednesday that he saw blood on the floor.
Sometime over the next two days I came to see the big guard as a source of
some comfort.
He smoked, and one day I heard my next-door prisoner Molly Bingham plead a
cigarette from him.
When he walked past, I asked for a cigarette also, and the man held out a
pack of extra-long, super thin Pine cigarettes.
I thanked him with all the warmth I could generate.
"No problem," the man said in a gentle voice, smiling kindly.
Abu Ghraib did things like that: making me turn away from a beating and
then form a tiny alliance, or reliance, on the beater.
And so all I can do now is to bear witness to the sounds we all heard that
night, and on other nights, and to say that the largest and most feared
prison in Iraq is still home to hundreds of men who do not have the
countless numbers of people working every waking minute to try to get them
out, as we had.
Those men are still in there. And so are the guards.
McAllester and Moises Saman, 29, a Newsday photographer, were set free on
Tuesday with Molly Bingham, 34, an American freelance photographer, and
Johan Rydeng Spanner, a Danish freelance photographer.
pic.
Newsday
http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/03/1048962878311.html
