Reservist Sabrina Harman Charged With Abusing Prisoners
Sabrina Harman is one of the U.S. soldiers who have been charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and who will face court martial proceedings. Harman was interviewed by e-mail from Iraq this week.
[She] said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation. "They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed," Harman said in interviews by e-mail this week from Baghdad. "The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk." She said her military police unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the facility and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations.
Harman's face is now famous as belonging to one of the soldiers who posed in a widely published photograph showing naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid....She also is charged with striking several detainees by jumping on a pile of detainees, 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, according to Army charging documents. She is accused of then telling him if he fell off the box he would be electrocuted.
In the interview, Harman, 26, said detainees were handed over to her Military Police unit by Military Intelligence officers or by the civilian contractors. Prisoners were stripped, searched and then "made to stand or kneel for hours," Harman said. Sometimes they were forced to stand on boxes or hold boxes or to exercise to tire them out, she said. "The person who brought them in would set the standards on whether or not to 'be nice,' " she said.
Update: Here, with this picture.
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