A United States soldier at the heart of the prisoner-abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison pleaded guilty on Wednesday to a range of charges, from making hooded inmates masturbate to punching them in the chest.
However, Staff Sergeant Ivan ”Chip” Frederick admitted guilt to only some of the elements of the five charges against him during the first of a two-day court martial on a military base at Baghdad’s international airport.
He offered a rare insight into what took place behind the bars of the detention centre where pictures of grinning US soldiers posing by a heap of naked Iraqi men taken earlier in the year sparked worldwide outrage.
Referring to a photograph of a pyramid of seven prisoners — one of the most notorious images from the Abu Ghraib outrage — the sergeant said they were criminal suspects who had been hooded with their hands tied.
”We threw them in a pile,” Frederick said.
”That’s when Sergeant [Javal] Davis started jumping in the pile,” he said referring to one of two other soldiers due to appear in court this week.
Frederick said Davis had been ”sort of” laughing as he stomped on the prisoners’ hands and feet, and admitted that he could have stopped the abuse. ”But I didn’t.”
Instead, the soldier joined in as the inmates were stripped and abused, punching one of them in the chest because he had been described as a ring leader.
”I stood him up and punched him in the chest. I was angry. They told me he was the ringleader. He hit a female soldier in the face with a rock,” he said.
The man slumped down and signalled for an inhaler so a medic was called, but the ordeal did not stop there. The naked prisoners were lined up against a wall still with bags over their heads.
”I told one of them to masturbate,” Frederick said. ”I grabbed his arm by the elbow, put it on his genitals and moved it back and forth with an arm motion and he did it.”
He said that other soldiers embroiled in the affair, including Private First Class Lynndie England and Corporal Charles Graner, were watching and taking pictures.
Frederick admitted that he thought his actions had been indecent and immoral.
When asked by Colonel James Pohl, the presiding Judge, why he did it, the soldier responded: ”Just to humiliate him … it makes the army look bad.”
Davis and Graner are due to appear before a judge at Camp Victory later this week. — Sapa-AFP