March 18, 2006
Cited as Symbol of Abu Ghraib, Man Admits He Is Not in Photo
By KATE ZERNIKE
In the summer of 2004, a group of former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison filed a lawsuit claiming that they had been the victims of the abuse captured in photographs that incited outrage around the world.
One, Ali Shalal Qaissi, soon emerged as their chief representative, appearing in publications and on television in several countries to detail his suffering. His prominence made sense, because he claimed to be the man in the photograph that had become the international icon of the Abu Ghraib scandal: standing on a cardboard box, hooded, with wires attached to his outstretched arms. He had even emblazoned the silhouette of that image on business cards.
The trouble was, the man in the photograph was not Mr. Qaissi. [Editors' Note, Page A2.]
Military investigators had identified the man on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement immediately after the photographs were discovered in January 2004, but then the man seemed to go silent.
Mr. Qaissi had energetically filled the void, traveling abroad with slide shows to argue that abuse in Iraq continued, as head of a group he called the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons.
The New York Times profiled him last Saturday in a front-page article; in it, Mr. Qaissi insisted he had never sought the fame of his iconic status. Mr. Qaissi had been interviewed on a number of earlier occasions, including by PBS's "Now," Vanity Fair, Der Spiegel and in the Italian news media as the man on the box.
This week, after the online magazine Salon raised questions about the identity of the man in the photograph, Mr. Qaissi and his lawyers insisted he was telling the truth.
Certainly, he was at Abu Ghraib, and appears with a hood over his head in some photographs that Army investigators seized from the computer belonging to Specialist Charles Graner, the soldier later convicted of being the ringleader of the abuse.
However, he now acknowledges he is not the man in the specific photograph he printed and held up in a portrait that accompanied the Times article. But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires and that he is the one on his business card. The Army says it believes only one prisoner was treated in that way.
"I know one thing," Mr. Qaissi said yesterday, breaking down in tears when reached by telephone. "I wore that blanket, I stood on that box, and I was wired up and electrocuted."
Susan Burke, a lawyer in Philadelphia who is representing Mr. Qaissi and other former prisoners in a lawsuit against civilian interrogators and translators at Abu Ghraib, said that Mr. Qaissi had been abused in the same way as the man in the photo. "The sad fact is that there is not only one man on the box," she said.
Using a name that Mr. Qaissi is often called, she said, "Haj Ali is but one of many victims of the torture by Graner and the others."
In the interview for the article, Mr. Qaissi pointed to his deformed hand and said it matched the hand in the photograph. A close look at the photograph, however, is inconclusive.
Whether he was forced to stand on a box and photographed is not clear, but evidence suggests that he adopted the identity of the iconic man on the box, the very symbol of Abu Ghraib, well after he left the prison.
Records confirm that Mr. Qaissi became inmate 151716 sometime after the prison opened in June 2003, but do not give firm dates; Mr. Qaissi, a 43-year-old former Baath Party member and neighborhood mayor in Baghdad, said he arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and was released in March 2004, two months after the Army began an investigation into the abuse.
And he suffered mistreatment and humiliation at the hands of the same people who photographed the man on the box: photographs investigators seized show him forced into a crouch, identifiable by his mangled hand, with the nickname guards gave him — "The Claw" — scrawled in black marker across his orange jumpsuit.
But if he was the hooded man on the box, he did not mention it on several key occasions in the first months after the scandal broke.
In the spring of 2004, Mr. Qaissi approached Muhammad Hamid al-Moussawi, the deputy director of the Human Rights Organization of Iraq, and proposed that the men set up a group for prisoners of the occupation, Mr. Moussawi said this week. Yet Mr. Qaissi never claimed at the time that he had been the man in the photograph, Mr. Moussawi recalled.
A journalist who interviewed Mr. Qaissi three times that May and June about what happened at Abu Ghraib similarly said he never mentioned the pose or the photograph. The journalist, Gert Van Langendonck, said Mr. Qaissi mentioned the other cruelties he described in the Times profile.
A lawsuit Mr. Qaissi joined, filed on July 27, 2004, also made no allegation that he was shocked with wires or forced to stand on a box. That allegation appeared only on an amended version of a complaint he later joined, filed last month, which said he had been forced to stand on the box and fell off from the shocks of the electrocution: "They repeated this at least five times."
Another man had already been publicly identified as the man on the box in May 2004, when documents including logbooks and sworn statements from detainees and soldiers were leaked to The Times.
On May 22, 2004, The Times quoted the testimony of a detainee, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh: "Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head. Then he was saying, 'Which switch is on for electricity?'"
Specialist Sabrina Harman, one of the soldiers later convicted of abuse, identified the man by his nickname, Gilligan, in her statement.
She left some room to believe that others were subjected to the same treatment. "The wires part," she said, was her idea, but she said Specialist Graner and Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II had forced detainees to stand on a box to stay awake, and did so at the request of military intelligence officials. Abu Ghraib photographs show more than one example of a hooded man forced to stand on boxes.
But Chris Grey, a spokesman for the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, said that the military believed that Mr. Faleh had been the only prisoner subjected to the treatment shown in the photo. "To date, and after a very thorough criminal investigation, we have neither credible information, nor reason to believe, that more than one incident of this nature occurred," he said.
Mr. Qaissi's lawyer, Ms. Burke, countered, "We do not trust the torturers."
Mr. Qaissi seems to have first begun identifying himself as the hooded man in the fall of 2004, by which point he had started his prisoners' group out of a politically charged mosque in Baghdad.
In an article in the February 2005 issue of Vanity Fair, Donovan Webster identified Mr. Qaissi as Haj Ali, the likely man on the box, based on an extensive investigation of military records. Soon, Mr. Qaissi was featured in numerous profiles, including in Der Spiegel, reprinted by Salon, as well as on the PBS current affairs program "Now," where he described being shocked: "It felt like my eyeballs were coming out of my sockets."
With his soft voice and occasionally self-deprecating humor, he has impressed interviewers as affable and credible. He told his story with a level of detail that separated it from that of many others.
Most of his assertions and details could be confirmed, Mr. Webster and others stress. In his three-hour interview with The Times, Mr. Qaissi did not veer from reported details and appeared confident in his discussion, punctuating his story with bitter laughter and occasionally, tears. But he never raised the possibility that another man may have also been photographed in the same pose.
Human rights workers were compelled by his story, as well. Reporting the Saturday article, The Times relied in part on their statements that he could well be the hooded man, as well as on prison records and interviews with friends and his lawyers, who say they have Mr. Qaissi's blanket, the same one, they said, draped over the man in the photograph. Army officials at the time refused to confirm or refute Mr. Qaissi's claims, citing privacy protections in the Geneva Convention.
Abdel Jabbar al-Azzawi, who now lives in Baghdad and says he was in the prison with both Mr. Qaissi and the man named Gilligan and has joined the lawsuit, says he saw Mr. Qaissi wearing the blanket fashioned into a poncho depicted in the photograph, though he did not see the photographs being taken.
Mr. Qaissi's lawyers also stress that the iconic photograph is not the basis of his case. In court papers, he also says he was punched, kicked, hit with a stick and chained to his cell while his captors poured cold water over his naked body.
Meanwhile, it is not clear what happened to the real hooded man, Mr. Faleh. An Army spokesman said he was released from American custody in January 2004. Tribal leaders, and the manager of a brick factory next to the address where prison records say he lived, said they had never heard the name. Besides, they said, detainees often make up identities when they are imprisoned. Mr. Qaissi's attorneys said they have not attempted to search for him.
Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Beirut for this article, Eric Schmitt from Washington and employees of The New York Times from Iraq.
