Haider Sabbar Abed al-Abbadi kept his shame to himself until the world saw him stripped naked, his head in a hood, a nude fellow prisoner kneeling before him simulating oral sex. “That is me,” he claims to a TIME reporter, as one of the lurid photographs of detained Iraqis suffering sexual humiliation at the hands of U.S. soldiers scrolls down a computer screen. “I felt a mouth close around my penis. It was only when they took the bag off my head that I saw it was my friend.” In the nine months he spent in detention, al-Abbadi says he was never charged and never interrogated. On that awful November night, four months after his arrest, he thought he and six other prisoners were being punished for a petty scuffle. They were herded into Cellblock 1A. The guards cut off their clothes, and then the degrading demands began. Through it all, al-Abbadi knew the Americans were taking photos, he says, “because I saw the flashbulbs go off through the bag over my head.” He says he is the hooded man in the picture in which a petite, dark-haired woman in camouflage pants and an Army T shirt gives a thumbs-up as she points to a prisoner’s genitals. He says he was in the pileup of naked men ordered to lie on the backs of other detainees as a smiling soldier in glasses looks on. And al-Abbadi says he was told to masturbate, though he was too scared to do more than pretend, as a female soldier flaunted her bare breasts. Those scenes, caught in shocking candor by someone’s digital camera, played over and over last week in the world’s newspapers and magazines and across the airwaves. Jarring new examples emerged: the same female soldier, holding a leash wrapped around the neck of a naked prisoner cringing at her feet. Even when the shots were pixilated or cropped for modesty, nothing could hide the raw cruelty of U.S. soldiers ridiculing the manhood of Iraqi captives. Of all places, these atrocities occurred at Abu Ghraib prison, once the infamous home of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers. The accounts of these misdeeds would be sickening in the best of times. But with each new revelation of abuses inflicted by U.S. troops in Iraq, it seems evident that the damage goes far beyond the appalling acts of a few miscreants. As public doubts about the war grow, the images of sadism symbolized all that is going wrong with the U.S. venture in Iraq. The photos touched off a global outcry, especially in the Arab world, where they provoked fresh fury among millions of Muslims opposed to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and provided grist for every conspiracy theorist who claims the U.S. is bent on debasing Islam and humiliating Arabs. “We’re going to live with the consequences of this for the next 40 years,” says a senior White House official, and few would accuse him of exaggeration. Most immediately, the scandal has imperiled the U.S. effort to pacify Iraq by turning even more ordinary Iraqis against the occupation and reinforcing the sense that control is slipping everywhere, less than two months before the U.S. is due to hand sovereignty back to the nation.
