Soldier wrestled with decision to report Iraq jail abuse

FORT BRAGG, N.C. -- The soldier who unmasked the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq described yesterday how his decision to go public came after a month of soul-searching over whether to violate the Army's taboo against breaking ranks.

"These people were my friends," Sergeant Joseph Darby said of seven former comrades in the 372d Military Police Company from rural Maryland who have been charged with criminal behavior in the prison abuse case. "These were people I had been through experiences with in the past. It's a hard decision to do something that puts your friends in prison."

It was Darby who, near midnight on Jan. 14, slipped an anonymous note and a computer disc containing digital photographs under the door of the Army criminal investigative office at the prison near Baghdad. The photographs depicted military police officers cheerfully abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.

The Army launched an investigation, and in April the photos were leaked to news outlets, triggering an international uproar and setting back the US cause in Iraq.

Darby, an Army specialist at the time, has since been promoted and assigned to an undisclosed location.

He testified at a preliminary hearing for Private First Class Lynndie England, one of six military police officers who face possible court-martial in the case. A seventh already has pleaded guilty. A military judge will recommend whether England, 21, who is seven months pregnant, should face court-martial.

Darby said he knew England before "she even went to basic training." Speaking of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., England's boyfriend and the man who has emerged as an alleged leader of the abuse on Abu Ghraib's Tier 1A, Darby told how they had served in other missions abroad before the war sent them to Iraq.

But, he said, his voice firm and confident, what he accused them of doing "violates everything I believe in, and it violates the very rules of war."

Darby recalled that he had intended to remain anonymous but acknowledged to investigators he was the one who had turned over the photos and said the pictures had made him ill.

"I was kind of shocked," he said, describing his first reactions to the photos in December. "And kind of bewildered."

Photography was one of his passions, he said. He took his 35mm camera to Iraq, he said, but it had been ruined in the sand. Still trying to build his own photo book, he relied on his friends for copies of their souvenir photos taken at palaces that once belonged to Saddam Hussein, at the site in Babylon where Daniel was thrown into the lions' den, and along the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

He said that made the photos that Graner loaned him so jarring. They were nothing like the photos "I had been collecting to send home to show my family," he said.

England faces up to 38 years in prison for her role in the abuse scandal. She is shown in numerous photos posing with nude prisoners, one of them at the end of a leash. Graner, 35, also is charged and remains in Iraq, along with four other prison guards, awaiting courts-martial. Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who pleaded guilty, is serving a year in military prison. Others have received letters of reprimand, including the MP unit's company commander and the general overseeing prison operations in Iraq.

Darby testified by telephone, his location and assignment kept secret because authorities are concerned about potential repercussions from soldiers who might view him as a snitch.

Indeed, Special Agent Tyler Pieron, the Army criminal investigator who received the photos from Darby, and other agents testified that those fears were not to be dismissed. They said Graner, a prison guard in civilian life, is a large man with a "volatile temper."

Darby, who worked as a shift coordinator at Abu Ghraib, was away most of November. When he returned on Thanksgiving, he said, he was regaled with stories about a prison shoot-out in which an inmate, armed with a smuggled 9mm pistol and two bayonet knives, wounded an Army prison guard.

"I heard there were bullet holes in the walls and bloodstains on the floor and that there were pictures of that. I wanted to see them," Darby said.

He said he knew Graner was a fellow camera buff, so he turned to him for photos from the shooting incident.

Sure enough, he said, Graner loaned him two computer discs.

Over the next several days, Darby said, he downloaded the discs onto his computer and examined the pictures. First he viewed travelogue photos of scenes from Kuwait and Iraq.

Then he clicked on several other folders and came across images of detainees -- beaten and humiliated, stacked naked into a pyramid. Graner and England were in the photos, too, grinning and giving thumbs-up signals.