Family, friends proud of soldier's decision to go to authorities

The soldier who blew the whistle on the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq is a 24-year-old military reservist from the hardscrabble hill country of southwestern Pennsylvania. Specialist Joseph M. Darby is described as deeply patriotic and occasionally hotheaded, but usually with a good heart.

Back home, friends and relatives say they are proud that Darby found the courage to take a stand against the humiliation and physical abuse of prisoners, actions allegedly carried out by fellow soldiers from the 372d Military Police Company, based in Maryland. But Darby's friends and relatives also are stunned and shaken by the enormity of the scandal that Darby helped unloose by tipping officers to mistreatment that has enraged the Islamic world and rattled the Bush administration.

''It must have been hard to put out his neck like he did," said Maxine Carroll, Darby's sister-in-law, from Windber, Pa.

''People respect him for choosing the high road . . . But people are kind of nervous about what could happen . . . There's some worry" about his safety.

News reports have identified Darby as the soldier who slipped an anonymous note under the door of a superior describing mistreatment of prisoners by Americans at Abu Ghraib, a US military prison near Baghdad that has gained new notoriety because of photographs published and broadcast worldwide that showed detainees posed in demeaning positions while swaggering soldiers -- Darby's comrades -- mugged for the camera. Later, according to published reports, Darby provided a sworn statement to military investigators that has served as the launchpad for a massive investigation stretching from the several enlisted men and women alleged to have physically and psychologically mistreated the prisoners to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Until Saddam Hussein was toppled last year by invading US troops, Abu Ghraib was infamous as a place of torture and incarceration for opponents of his dictatorial regime. Now the sprawling prison has become a symbol to the Arab world of the American occupation of Iraq.

Family members said Darby acted out of idealism.

''He said he could not stand the atrocities . . . he had stumbled upon," Margaret Blank, Darby's mother, told ABC News. ''He said he kept thinking, 'What if that was my mom, my grandmother, my brother, or wife?' "

Seymour M. Hersh, in an article in the New Yorker magazine this week that helped break the story of the abuse, writes that Special Agent Scott Bobeck of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command testified recently before a closed military hearing that Darby blew the whistle after seeing photographs of naked detainees posed beside male and female soldiers of the 372d. ''He felt very bad about it and thought it was very wrong," Bobeck said at the hearing, according to The New Yorker.

Six members of the 372d have been accused of ''sadistic" treatment of Iraqi prisoners, according to a military report.

Some of his friends in Maryland and Pennsylvania are somewhat bemused by the news about Darby. ''Mostly, Joe was known as a good guy who sometimes had a pretty hot head," said a former school friend, who requested anonymity. ''I'd guess it just ticked him off that these people were getting away with bad behavior."

Darby grew up in a family that moved a lot and that was harder pressed than most in a region of abandoned strip mines and shuttered factories. Acquaintances recalled he worked night shifts at a hamburger joint during high school to help his family. He was raised by his mother and stepfather, a disabled truck driver.

After high school, Darby moved to Falls Church, Va., where he worked as a mechanic, according to acquaintances and media reports. He joined the Army Reserve's 372d Military Police Company about three years ago and had completed a tour of duty in Bosnia before deploying to Iraq in February 2003.

Darby's wife of six years, Bernadette, has stopped talking to news media but relayed through a family spokeswoman that she is extremely proud of her husband.