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The CPT Report
“During that day the guards shouted at me. ‘You want to kill the U.S. Army!!! I will take you to Guantanamo.’ I told them I did not shoot at the U.S. army. Then a soldier came and said to us, ‘Everyone is going to die.’ “While we were still blindfolded, a soldier came and took my brother away and shot a bullet into the air. That soldier then went to my brother and told him that they had killed me and said that he is next. He told him that he is going to die. The soldier made sounds like he was reloading the gun. And then said, ‘Say goodbye because you are going to join your brother and you are going to die.’ Several times he put the gun to my brother’s head after making sounds like he was loading the gun. During this whole time we were blindfolded. Each brother was sure the other was dead. Then someone came and hit me on the shoulder. “Then they took us to another building where they put us in a small prison-like cell. There were three other people there too. The keepers were told to give us water every hour. “Finally another soldier came and removed our blindfolds and handcuffs. Until we reached the cell we had been given nothing to drink and handcuffs and blindfolds had been in place since arrest. “The next day they took us back to the place where we had been terrorized earlier. Two of the Akif boys were now released. Then they put us in the truck for transport to the airport where a woman detective questioned us. We were asked, ‘Why are you here? What do you do? Are you a Baath party member? What was the occupation of your father?’ I told the detective exactly what happened and the detective was a little surprised. The detective said to me, ‘Your record says you resisted U.S. forces.’ “Then we were processed into the camp at the airport and assigned a capture tag and numbers for Camp Cropper in the Airport. We were there for 14 to 15 days. The water was terrible. Food was military rations, two meals per day. It tasted terrible but we were forced to eat it. Some people vomited it right back up. The number in our 4- by 7-meter tent varied between 30 and 40, so it was crowded and hot. “Two days later I was transferred to Bucca (Um Qasr). At the airport before departing a doctor checked me, including my blood pressure. The doctor asked me what kind of water I was drinking and I told him that, ‘I drank what you gave me to drink.’ The doctor said to me, ‘You need a lot of water.’ “On the way to Bucca we stopped for one night at Nasiriyah. I was so happy to get away from the airport because we all know that no one ever gets released from the airport. Other detainees had told me that the road to release goes through Um Qasr and I was on the way there. The food was better and the water was better. My total time in detention was 66 days. During that time I lost 20 kilos or about 45 pounds. There was a man in our group who was suffering from a diabetes-induced coma, but the guards refused to get help for him. We prisoners managed to revive him. “At Um Qasr a detective with the same questions interviewed me again. The woman detective told me that I was not a criminal, a terrorist or a supporter of Saddam so I should be patient and I would be released. Persons in Bucca with charges of being connected to Al Qaeda described how they were beaten but otherwise many of us were treated well. I was happy to see my parents when they came.” * * * On January 26, 2004, Dr. Ali Al Za’ag, an Iraqi science professor at Baghdad University, was released. I had met and interviewed Dr. Ali back in the summer after he had been interrogated 15 times. This time he was detained when he went to a General Information Center (GIC) in the Karrada District of Baghdad. He had been urged by U.S. forces to go there and get a gun permit in order to protect himself from the threats to the scientific community. He was arrested by a U.S. soldier who refused to listen to his argument that he had been interrogated 15 times last summer and then had been declared “clean” by weapons inspector Scott Alcott. A neighbor who went with him reported that Dr. Ali never came out of the office. After visiting the GIC (a former palace of Saddam Hussein’s daughter) several times and receiving no information, the family approached CPT and International Occupation Watch (IOW) for assistance. For several weeks CPTers and Eman of IOW went with family members to various CPA offices trying to find out where Dr. Ali was, what the charges were, and to protest the arrest. Major Peterson, head of the GIC told them, “This is not a case of Big Brother. He will not disappear down some black hole. In one week we will be able to tell you whether he will be held or released.” Weeks went by and the family still received no further information. Several of us joined in a vigil at the university sponsored by faculty and students on his behalf. The family believed Dr. Ali was arrested because another American weapons inspection team had returned to Iraq for another search for WMD. U.S. forces had arrested at least six other scientists in this latest search, despite the fact that the head of the previous inspections team recently returned to the U.S. declaring that there had never been any such weapons, that they were destroyed in the early to middle 90’s. On March 4 we got a call saying that after 38 days, Dr. Ali was free. A week later he told us his story. From the GIC he was taken to the Green Zone where soldiers put him in a three-meter by three-meter wire cage that he likened to an animal cage. It was out of doors, unprotected from the weather, and was next to 15-20 other cages that held prisoners. “I was treated like a dangerous person,” he said. He was only there until dark when U.S. military police in two Humvees transported him to Cropper Camp at the Baghdad Airport.
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