Journalists Get Better Acquainted With Iraqi Methods Than Had Been Planned

In The London Times yesterday:

“We kill, we kill,” muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq.

During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea of their whereabouts, the terrified quintet sat in adjacent, bare-concrete cells forbidden to talk to each other, their solitude punctuated by the screams of Iraqi prisoners being led away to torture from the cells around them, the thud of anti-aircraft fire and the pounding of US bombs that were exploding uncomfortably close....

In The Sydney Morning Herald today:

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....

I can't wait to see how long it takes Howell to put this on the front page.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 04/04/03 08:41:10 AM
Categorized as Media.