The chain of command was obvious to Liang, who came home in January after fulfilling her 22-month active-duty contract with the Reserves. MPs were directed by OGAs and military intelligence officers, she said. But orders were couched as repeated suggestions on how to ‘break down’ prisoners: ‘[Play] loud music, yell at them, scare them, give them cold showers and don’t let them have towels or clothes,’ Liang told NEWSWEEK. The OGAs would disappear only to return hours later for a new round of interrogation. ‘He’s still not talking,’ Liang recalls an OGA saying to her. ‘Do something more.’ This was the drill, day and night.
The bad stuff happened after dusk, she said. While daylight brought a string of visitors — medics, Red Cross officials, high-ranking officers — the dogs came out at night. The second-shifters brought in DVD movies to watch on their computers. Liang said she saw an image on the laptop of Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. —one of those awaiting trial after investigators described him as one of the ringleaders in the alleged prisoner abuses. The photograph was of a snarling military dog held inches from a prone Iraqi prisoner’s face. At the 4 a.m. shift change, she asked, ‘Why dogs?’The prisoner had been handcuffed and scared with the dogs so he’d break, someone told her. It was common to arrive at work and see a prisoner standing on a box, naked, shivering and wearing a hood, she told NEWSWEEK. One morning she came in and saw blood on the walls, although nobody could explain exactly how it got there.
Pummeling and humiliating and photographing Iraqi prisoners, Liang said, was the product of vague guidance, poor discipline, frustration that came with open-ended deployment, and boredom run amok. “I think it was just out of curiosity and boredom and anger,” she said. “You’re there 12 hours a day, every day, and you’re pissed off at everything going on around you. We were told we were going home in September. You want to take out your anger against other people in the unit, but you can’t do that. So some people took it out on the prisoners. What they [the MPs] did was wrong, but not everyone realizes that everyone in there attacked the Coalition forces and tried to kill us.”
Some abuse photographs lacked context, Liang told NEWSWEEK. Take the widely-published image of a prisoner with his arms pulled behind his back and handcuffed to a bed, women’s underwear pulled over his head. He was called “S–tboy,” for his habit of smearing excrement on himself and the walls. “People don’t know what kind of people were put inside that cellblock,” Liang said. “They were crazy people. ‘S–tboy’ would smear it all over himself. That was the reason he was handcuffed.” Liang said he spit on her as she tried to feed him. The underwear? “Just to make a joke,” she said, adding that she can’t recall who was responsible for it.
Another “crazy” man, in his late 20s, was brought in for allegedly looting. His refusal to eat meant the MPs fed him intravenously. He would babble over and over again: “I refuse to eat! Saddam’s going to come back and kill us!” The guards invented nicknames for prisoners based on movie and television characters, Liang said. There was “Gilligan,” a tiny, dim guy. There was “The Claw,” whose birth defect made one hand resemble a bird claw. There was “Froggy,” a man with bulging Marty Feldman eyes. And there was “Mr. Clean,” who bathed obsessively. (After Mr. Clean tried to kill a guard with a pistol someone had slipped into his cell, his nickname became “Trigger.”)
[…]
“I’m not embarrassed,” she said, “but I don’t tell people that I’m with the 372nd [MP Company] because people are going to ask questions.”
Well, as long as she’s not embarrassed. That’s all that matters. Because “people don’t understand” that those guys like “shitboy” and the mentally ill looter who refused to eat because Saddam was coming to kill him were dangerous terrorists who deserved what they got.
I’m glad she’s home now, nice and snug, going to college on the GI bill, looking forward to a long and happy life. Since she’s both brainless and soulless, I’m sure she’ll make a fine little Republican.