Cover-up of prison death by army colonel alleged

BAGHDAD, Iraq – The company commander of the U.S. soldiers charged with abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison testified Thursday that the top military intelligence commander at the prison was present the night a detainee died during an interrogation and efforts were made to conceal the details of his death.

Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, said he was summoned one night in November to a shower room in a cellblock at the prison, where he discovered the body of a bloodied detainee on the floor. A group of intelligence personnel was standing around the body, discussing what to do, he said. Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of military intelligence at the prison, was among those present, said Reese.

Reese said an Army colonel named Jordan sent a soldier to the prison mess hall for ice to preserve the body overnight. Lt. Col. Steven Jordan was head of the interrogation center at the prison, but it was unclear whether he was the officer to whom Reese referred.

No medics were called, Reese said, and the detainee’s identification was never recorded.

Reese testified that he heard Pappas say at one point, “I’m not going down for this alone.”

An autopsy the next day determined the man’s death was caused by a blood clot resulting from a blow to the head, Reese said, and the body subsequently was hooked up to an intravenous drip as if it were a live detainee and taken out of the prison, Reese recalled. There is no known record of what happened to the body after that.

Reese’s testimony came during the first day of an investigative hearing for Spc. Sabrina Harman, one of seven Army reservists from the 372nd charged with abusing detainees at the prison late last year.

During investigations of alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib, statements by other witnesses have described the death of the detainee, and the corpse appears in photographs documenting abuse at the prison. But no testimony or evidence had previously indicated Pappas was in the shower room on the night that the detainee died.

During an earlier hearing for another soldier in the 372nd, Spec. Jason Kenner testified that a Navy SEAL team and officers from other government agencies – referred to as OGA, a designation that commonly includes CIA operatives – brought the detainee in alive with a bag over his head. Kenner said he later saw that the man had been severely beaten on his face.

Intelligence officers took the detainee to a shower room used for interrogations, Kenner said, and shackled him to a wall. “About an hour later, he died on them,” Kenner testified. “They decided to put him on ice. There was a battle between (OGA) and MI as to who was going to take care of the body. A couple days later, he was finally disposed of.”

Harman, one of seven soldiers from the 372nd charged with abusing detainees at the prison, appears in two photographs that military prosecutors are using as evidence against her, including one in which she is smiling and giving the thumbs-up with the corpse in the shower room.

The Army has accused her of taking photographs of a pyramid of naked detainees and photographing and videotaping detainees who were ordered to strip and masturbate in front of other prisoners and soldiers, according to her charge sheet. She is also charged with jumping on several prisoners as they lay in a pile; with writing “rapeist” on a prisoner’s leg; and with attaching wires to a prisoner’s hands while he stood on a box with his head covered. She told him he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box, the documents allege.

A former pizza shop assistant manager from Alexandria, Va., Harman, 26, told the Washington Post last month that members of her military police unit took direction from Army military intelligence officers, from Central Intelligence Agency operatives and from civilian contractors who conducted interrogations at the prison.

She was not called to testify on Thursday, but Reese said military intelligence clearly controlled the cellblock where Harman and other members of her military police platoon worked the night shift.

“My MPs, they were directed by the MI people for what they wanted and how they wanted it,” he said.

Earlier this week a U.S. Army judge accepted a request by attorneys of three other soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib case to question the top commanders in Iraq and their subordinates. The judge issued the rulings at pretrial hearings for Sgt. Javal Davis, Cpl. Charles Graner Jr. and Staff Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Frederick II.

Spc. Jeremy Sivits, the first soldier to face a court-martial, pleaded guilty last month and was sentenced to a year in prison.