Two top officers reportedly witnessed prison death

By Richard Serrano
Los Angeles Times

Sabrina Harman is among those charged in prison-abuse case.

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Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 327th Military Police Company, also testified that an autopsy on the Iraqi captive showed he had died of a "blood clot from trauma" but that U.S. military authorities tried to mislead other detainees about the cause of death.

The testimony, providing vivid new details about one of the worst abuses alleged to have occurred at the prison outside Baghdad, suggests military-intelligence officers were aware of the widespread mistreatment and carried out some of the abuses.

Reese took the stand at a military preliminary hearing for Spc. Sabrina Harman, 26, an Army Reservist who is one of six guards facing courts-martial in the Abu Ghraib scandal on charges of abusing prisoners.

All six are contending they acted at the behest of military-intelligence officers. Yesterday, their company commander became the first high-level officer in the unit to publicly support their claims.

Reese, who earlier this year was admonished for failing to properly supervise his subordinates, testified that Col. Thomas Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, personally directed stepped-up tactics to be used against detainees to soften them up for interviews, including long bouts of sleep deprivation.

"They came from a full-bird colonel," Reese said of Pappas' orders. "As an MI (military-intelligence) person," Reese said of Pappas:, "I believed he knew what he was doing."

Reese said that while Pappas "wasn't around a lot" at the prison, his second-in-charge, Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, "was always there." Describing how the prison was run, Reese said, "I controlled the MPs inside, but it was run by the MI folks. They had the ultimate say-so as to what went on there."

Pappas and Jordan have been reprimanded by Army superiors. Pappas has not publicly commented on the scandal. Jordan has reportedly told his superiors that he felt pressured to extract more information from detainees, especially after a White House national-security aide toured the prison.

Reese also testified that in late December a group of Navy SEALs brought in a captive suspected of helping to launch an attack on the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad.

But Reese said that by the time he saw the inmate, the man had died after being taken to a shower room being used temporarily for interrogations.
 
Reese named Pappas and Jordan, along with a female major and "some OGA guys," as the ones who were conducting the interrogation when the man died. OGA, for "other government agency," is a common acronym for the CIA.

Reese said he next heard Jordan and Pappas "talking about the situation," and he noticed "the OGA guys were visibly upset this had happened."

He said, "I heard Col. Pappas say, 'I'm not going to go down alone for this.' "

Also testifying was Army Spec. Israel Rivera, a military-intelligence officer, who described Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., the alleged abuse ringleader, of often insulting naked detainees, calling them homosexuals and directing guards to drag them on the floor and make sure their genitalia scraped across the surface.

"He was the loudest and the one actually giving orders," Rivera said.

But he said Harman also was "instigating it, giving the orders, telling them to keep going, pushing them with her hand, her finger."

Army building a case in death of Iraqi general

WASHINGTON — The Army is building a case against two officers and two enlisted personnel in the fatal interrogation of an Iraqi general who was suffocated last November while in custody in Iraq, an Army official said yesterday.

Killed was Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abid Hamed Mowhosh, a commander of Saddam Hussein's air forces. He was captured Nov. 10 and underwent daily interrogations at the Qaim facility with special-operations forces and CIA personnel.

He allegedly was beaten while in a sleeping bag as U.S. personnel sat on his chest and covered his mouth Nov. 26. His death was announced Nov. 27, first attributed to natural causes. Later it was ruled a homicide.

The Army official said that among those under investigation in the Mowhosh case are Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, a member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group, and Chief Warrant Office Officer Jeff Williams.

Two enlisted soldiers who were in the facility at the time of the death also are being investigated, the official said. They were not identified. The four soldiers are at Fort Carson, Colo.