See Abu Ghraib Abuse Victim Now Advocates Prisoners' Rights for background. I feel like less of a shrew for having suspected that the Der Spiegel journalist who profiled Qaissi months before the New York Times did had been taken in by a fraud.
"Cited as Symbol of Abu Ghraib, Man Admits He Is Not in Photo," by Kate Zernike - the New York Times, 18 March 2006 (registration required)
In the summer of 2004, a group of former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison filed a lawsuit claiming that they had been the victims of the abuse captured in photographs that incited outrage around the world.
One, Ali Shalal Qaissi, soon emerged as their chief representative, appearing in publications and on television in several countries to detail his suffering. His prominence made sense, because he claimed to be the man in the photograph that had become the international icon of the Abu Ghraib scandal: standing on a cardboard box, hooded, with wires attached to his outstretched arms. He had even emblazoned the silhouette of that image on business cards.
The trouble was, the man in the photograph was not Mr. Qaissi. [Editors' Note, Page A2.]
Military investigators had identified the man on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement immediately after the photographs were discovered in January 2004, but then the man seemed to go silent.
Mr. Qaissi had energetically filled the void, traveling abroad with slide shows to argue that abuse in Iraq continued, as head of a group he called the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons.
The New York Times profiled him last Saturday in a front-page article; in it, Mr. Qaissi insisted he had never sought the fame of his iconic status. Mr. Qaissi had been interviewed on a number of earlier occasions, including by PBS's "Now," Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel and in the Italian news media as the man on the box.
This week, after the online magazine Salon raised questions about the identity of the man in the photograph, Mr. Qaissi and his lawyers insisted he was telling the truth.
Certainly, he was at Abu Ghraib, and appears with a hood over his head in some photographs that Army investigators seized from the computer belonging to Specialist Charles Graner, the soldier later convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse.
However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph he printed and held up in a portrait that accompanied the Times article. But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires and that he is the one on his business card. The Army says it believes only one prisoner was treated in that way....
Records confirm that Mr. Qaissi became inmate 151716 sometime after the prison opened in June 2003, but do not give firm dates; Mr. Qaissi, a 43-year-old former Baath Party member and neighborhood mayor in Baghdad, said he arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and was released in March 2004, two months after the Army began an investigation into the abuse.
And he suffered mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of the same people who photographed the man on the box: photographs investigators seized show him forced into a crouch, identifiable by his mangled hand, with the nickname guards gave him — "The Claw" — scrawled in black marker across his orange jumpsuit.
But if he was the hooded man on the box, he did not mention it on several key occasions in the first months after the scandal broke....
Mr. Qaissi's lawyers also stress that the iconic photograph is not the basis of his case. In court papers, he also says he was punched, kicked, hit with a stick and chained to his cell while his captors poured cold water over his naked body.
Meanwhile, it is not clear what happened to the real hooded man, Mr. [Abdou Hussain Saad] Faleh [whose identity as 'the man on the box' is confirmed by logbooks and sworn statements from soldiers and detainees]. An Army spokesman said he was released from American custody in January 2004. Tribal leaders, and the manager of a brick factory next to the address where prison records say he lived, said they had never heard the name. Besides, they said, detainees often make up identities when they are imprisoned. Mr. Qaissi's attorneys said they have not attempted to search for him.
Also see:
"Corrections" - the New York Times, 18 March 2006 (registration required)
A front-page article last Saturday profiled Ali Shalal Qaissi, identifying him as the hooded man forced to stand on a box, attached to wires, in a photograph from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal of 2003 and 2004. He was shown holding such a photograph. As an article on Page A1 today makes clear, Mr. Qaissi was not that man.
The Times did not adequately research Mr. Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr. Qaissi's account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge. Lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib vouched for him. Human rights workers seemed to support his account. The Pentagon, asked for verification, declined to confirm or deny it.
Despite the previous reports, The Times should have been more persistent in seeking comment from the military. A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box, raising suspicions about Mr. Qaissi's claim.
The Times also overstated the conviction with which representatives of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International expressed their view of whether Mr. Qaissi was the man in the photograph. While they said he could well be that man, they did not say they believed he was.
I imagine this news is going to lead to more comment on what a poor job reporters and editors do of checking their sources and facts. And it should -- not just the NYT but Der Spiegel and PBS should have caught some of the same things that struck me as funny about Qaissi's self-presentation. (Things that bothered me in the Der Spiegel account were that Qaissi was staying in an expensive, western-style hotel, and that he had supposedly drawn the room curtains to block out the sight of bathing-suit clad women around a swimming pool but had no qualms about inviting the German woman reporter up to his room.)
In the greater scheme of things, however, this development doesn't amount to much. Qaissi's misrepresentation might damage the law case he and other former detainees have filed in US court (I'm not a lawyer -- I don't know what effect it will have.) But in the court of public opinion it will barely cause a ripple. Iraqis' and others' perceptions of what happened at Abu Ghraib, and their assessment of the American institutions and authorities connected with that abuse, are rooted in experience that has nothing to do with Qaissi. That body of public opinion is a much bigger problem for the US than the court case is.
Ironically, today's NYT also ran this story:
"Before and After Abu Ghraib, a US Unit Abused Detainees," by Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall - the New York Times, 19 March 2006 (available at nytimes.com on 18 March)
As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a shadowy military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
The story of detainee abuse in Iraq is a familiar one. But the following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.
It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret Central Intelligence Agency detention centers around the world.
The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib....
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