US Guards Did Give Me Electric Shocks

London Mirror | January 5 2005

THIS hooded Iraqi prisoner shown wired up in Abu Ghraib jail claimed yesterday he was tortured with electric shocks.

Haj Ali, who also said he was hung naked from his handcuffs while soldiers hurled ice cold water over him, said: "I could feel the pulses going even into my eyeballs."

The picture of Ali, 46, standing on a box with wires attached to his fingers is one of the most haunting images of the humiliation heaped on prisoners in Baghdad by US troops.

At the time it was believed that Ali was being tormented with sleep deprivation, fearing he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.

But now for the first time he has told US magazine Vanity Fair: "They'd give me electric shocks." Whenever he collapsed or fainted, guards would kick him or beat him with sticks yelling: "Get up! Get up!"

Ali also said he was subjected to deafening music torture with guards repeatedly playing at full volume a loop of the refrain from David Gray's song Babylon.

He said: "Babylon...Babylon...Babylon...over and over again. It was so loud I thought my head would burst. It went on for a day and a night."

Ali said his main tormentor was Specialist Charles Graner - the alleged ringleader of torture at Abu Ghraib who is now facing trial.

Recalling his abuse at Graner's hands, he said that on one occasion he was handcuffed on his cell floor despite being in agony from a severely injured arm.

Ali said: "Graner told me to stick out my arms through the bars as far as I could. Then he put his foot on my hand and went back and forth, pressing and grinding it. I was in so much pain I passed out."

In the picture of electric shock torture Ali is seen wearing a poncho-style woollen blanket which he sewed together to keep warm in the freezing Iraqi winter.

He revealed that the use of hoods for detainees was introduced by US forces and was not even resorted to by Saddam Hussein's regime.

Ali said: "This is something the Americans brought. The idea of bagging someone on the head is completely associated with the US occupation."

Prisoners, he added, were known by nicknames such as Dracula and Wolfman. Extraordinarily, the worst treatment was reserved for one inmate nicknamed Colin Powell, the name of the US Secretary of State.

Ali said: "I think they really hated this guy because they treated him really bad."

Other detainees alleged terrible abuse was still taking place at the hellhole jail three months after pictures of gloating US troops abusing prisoners first shocked the world in April.

Despite US claims to have stamped out abuse, one 15-year-old prisoner claimed that he was forced into a bathroom and sexually assaulted by a soldier.

The US army did not deny the latest accounts of ill treatment.

But spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson was suspicious of other claims of captives held in wooden boxes, illegal detentions, round the clock handcuffing and sexual abuse.

He said: "I call it flaky. I just don't see what purpose there is in keeping people blindfolded in boxes.

"I'd like to think that these claims aren't true...but I don't know. If someone is doing this to detainees, they deserve to be taken down."

A lawsuit on behalf of more than 1,000 Iraqi detainees is pending against Titan Corporation, the supplier of Arabic-English translators to coalition forces in Iraq.

British troops are being investigated over 76 cases of alleged abuse.