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http://informationclearinghouse.info/article7447.htm
Whitewashing torture?
David DeBatto, Salon.com

A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed his 
colleagues torturing Iraqi
detainees was strapped to a gurney and flown out of Iraq -- even though there 
was nothing wrong with
him.


Dec. 8, 2004 "Salon.com" -- On June 15, 2003, Sgt. Frank "Greg" Ford, a 
counterintelligence agent in
the California National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion 
stationed in Samarra,
Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga, that he had witnessed 
five incidents of
torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal 
investigation. Thirty-six
hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of military service in the 
Coast Guard, Army and
Navy, was ordered by U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was 
then strapped down,
loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military medical center outside 
the country.

Although no "medevac" order appears to have been written, in violation of Army 
policy, Ford was
clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis that he was suffering from combat 
stress. After Ford
raised the torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was "delusional" 
and ordered a
psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that examination, carried out 
by an Army
psychiatrist, diagnosed him as "completely normal."

A witness, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Marciello, claims that Artiga became enraged 
when he read the
initial medical report finding nothing wrong with Ford and intimidated the 
psychiatrist into
changing it. According to Marciello, Artiga angrily told the psychiatrist that 
it was a "C.I.
[counterintelligence] or M.I. matter" and insisted that she had to change her 
report and get Ford
out of Iraq.

Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army mental-health 
professionals, over
many months, confirmed his initial diagnosis as normal.

An officer at the California Office of the Adjutant General in Sacramento, 
Calif., Sgt. Maj. Patrick
Hammond, has known Ford for over 15 years during their service in the 
California National Guard.
Hammond said, "I have never had any reason to question his honesty and I don't 
do so now." This
reporter served in the military with Ford in Iraq for seven months and can also 
attest that he is
sane and level-headed.

Ford, who has since left the military, claims that his superiors shipped him 
out of the country to
prevent him from exposing the abusive behavior. "They were determined to 
protect their own asses no
matter who they had to take down," he says.

Col. C. Tsai, a military doctor who examined Ford in Germany and found nothing 
wrong with him, told
a film crew for Spiegel Television that he was "not surprised" at Ford's 
diagnosis. Tsai told
Spiegel that he had treated "three or four" other U.S. soldiers from Iraq that 
were also sent to
Landstuhl for psychological evaluations or "combat stress counseling" after 
they reported incidents
of detainee abuse or other wrongdoing by American soldiers.

Artiga and other higher-ups in the 223rd M.I. Battalion deny Ford's charges. 
But in the aftermath of
the Abu Ghraib scandal, federal agencies including the Department of Defense, 
the Army's Criminal
Investigation Command (CID), and the FBI are finally looking into them. The 
Department of the Army's
Office of the Inspector General has launched an investigation, according to 
Ford and his attorney,
Kevin Healy, who have been contacted by investigators. If Ford's allegations 
are proven, the Army
would be faced with evidence that its prisoner abuse problem is even more 
widespread than previously
acknowledged -- and that some of its own officers not only turned a blind eye 
to abuses but actively
participated in covering them up.

The 223rd M.I. Battalion was one of the first divisions to enter Iraq after the 
U.S. "Shock and Awe"
aerial bombardment ended, in mid-April 2003. (I also served in that unit 
in-country from April
through October 2003. I met Ford in February 2003, at Fort Bragg, N.C., and 
continued to stay in
contact with him until he was shipped out of the country. I have also since 
left the military.) The
battalion's mission was to collect counterintelligence. Its agents, highly 
trained soldiers
responsible for force protection and for investigating national security crimes 
committed against
the Army, were divided into small units called Tactical Human Intelligence 
Teams, or THTs. Every
day, these teams went out from their forward operating bases in Iraq and 
interacted with the local
people in an effort to gather critical intelligence on such matters as the 
location of conventional
and unconventional weapons and the whereabouts of the fugitives depicted on the 
Pentagon's
55-most-wanted playi
ng cards. It was arguably one of the most sensitive and important jobs in the 
entire Iraqi theater
of operations. As the team sergeant of his THT, Ford was second in command of 
his four-person team
and responsible for training, discipline, logistics and supervision of 
day-to-day operations. He was
also the team's designated combat life saver, or medic.

Ford spent his first weeks in Iraq at Balad Air Base, also known as Camp 
Anaconda, about 50
kilometers north of Baghdad along the Tigris. In early May, he was assigned to 
a THT that was headed
for Samarra, another 20 kilometers to the northeast. An ancient trading center 
that dates to the
Mesopotamian era, Samarra was known as a hotbed of Sunni Arab loyalists, 
ex-Baath Party officials,
and Islamist extremists. The two-story police station the Army occupied was 
located in the center of
town, closely surrounded by taller buildings, giving anyone who cared to fire 
on the Americans an
excellent field in which to do so. And fire they did. Almost every night, Ford 
and his teammates
would be forced to dive from their bunks for cover as mortar rounds rocked the 
compound. The
concussions shook the foundation and broke whatever glass windows remained. 
Fortunately, the Iraqi
mortar crews proved wildly inaccurate, and no Americans were killed, but 
several were wounded and
the attacks nev
er let up. There was immense pressure on the THT to find out who was behind the 
attacks and to
supply the information to the "gunslingers" of the 4th Infantry Division. It 
was in that environment
that Ford says he saw the incidents that led to the end of his long military 
career.

Late last summer I met Ford for lunch on a sunny afternoon at the Delta King 
Riverboat, which is
tied to the docks in downtown Sacramento. Ford has returned to his longtime job 
as a corrections
officer at Folsom Prison, and his wavy brown hair is longer than it was when I 
knew him in Iraq. He
has spent the past year trying to clear his name, but apart from a few 
newspaper interviews he gave
after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, he has not told his story to 
anyone until now.

Ford seemed calm and resolute as he talked about how the events that took place 
in Samarra
contradicted everything he thought he knew about the military. For more than 
three decades, he said,
he had always served with "people that I knew I could depend on when it really 
mattered. They were
people that I would have sacrificed my life to save if need be, and I knew they 
would do the same
for me, no questions asked."

He went on, "There were also rules and regulations to follow. Some of the rules 
applied only in
peacetime, some only in time of war. Some always applied. You knew which was 
which. These simple,
basic rules were pounded into your head from the day you got off the bus at 
basic training. You
broke the rules, you paid the price. Period. Everyone knew that simple fact, 
and everyone accepted
it."

But Ford said those rules were savagely broken in Samarra in June 2003. He 
described multiple
incidents of what he called "war crimes" and "torture" of Iraqi detainees 
ranging in age from about
15 to 35. According to Ford, his teammates, three counterintelligence agents 
like himself -- one of
them a woman -- systematically and repeatedly abused several Iraqi male 
detainees over a two-to
three-week time period. Ford describes incidents of asphyxiation, mock 
executions, arms being pulled
out of sockets, and lit cigarettes forced into detainee's ears while they were 
blindfolded and
bound. These atrocities took place in an Iraqi police station, Ford said. His 
attempts to stop the
abuse were met with either indifference or threats by his team leader, who was 
himself one of the
abusers, according to Ford.

Ford clenched his fists tightly and shook his head slowly from side to side. "I 
guess one of the
things that pisses me off most is the arrogance," he said. "The condescending 
attitude that my team
had. Some of the medics, too. Saying things like 'So what, he's just another 
haji,' like they were
scum or some kind of animal, really just pisses me off."

Ford said he was fighting a raging battle with himself over whether to report 
what he'd seen to his
superiors at Anaconda or to confront the team leader one last time. He felt 
"sick inside" about the
mistreatment of detainees, but he did not want to be a "rat," either. Having 
worked as a corrections
officer for almost 20 years, Ford knew how he would be perceived among the 
troops if he snitched. "I
didn't want to have to watch my back at the same time I was dodging mortar 
rounds from the Iraqis. I
decided that I had to confront [the team leader] and tell him, in no uncertain 
terms, that I would
not stand for any more of that kind of shit toward the detainees."

Ford said he found the team leader and had it out with him. "I told him that if 
there was ever a
court-martial over these incidents, I would absolutely testify against him. I 
said that this kind of
crap has to stop or else I would report it to Artiga." According to Ford, the 
team leader replied,
"Fine, Greg, you do what you have to do." By then, Ford said, he'd "had 
enough." He told the team
leader that he would be filing a complaint against him and the other agent as 
soon as possible. He
said the team leader told him he was "crazy" and "seeing things" and no one 
would believe him
anyway, so "knock yourself out."

The next day, Ford said he rode with the rest of his team down to Camp 
Anaconda, where the 223rd had
its headquarters, as did the 205th M.I. Brigade, which was made infamous by the 
Abu Ghraib scandal.
Both divisions were commanded by Col. Thomas Pappas. Upon his arrival, Ford 
said that he immediately
went to the company headquarters and met with Artiga and 1st Sgt. John Vegilla. 
Ford said that it
was clear that Artiga knew he was coming. "I told them that I wanted to request 
a formal
investigation into allegations of war crimes committed by my team against Iraqi 
detainees. I said I
wanted to request a removal of this whole team and their replacement by a 
senior team, because
they're bringing the house down. He looked right at me and said, 'Nope, that 
never happened. You're
delusional, you imagined the whole thing. And you've got 30 seconds to withdraw 
your complaint. If
you do, it will be as if this conversation never took place.'" Ford refused, 
and Artiga told him to
"get ou
t of here" and that he would call him when the complaint was ready.

In an interview, Artiga denied making those statements. Vegilla did not respond 
to interview
requests.

A few hours later, Marciello, a senior counterintelligence agent, arrived to 
accompany Ford from the
transient tent where he was staying to company headquarters to see Artiga and 
Vegilla. The slight
and bespectacled Marciello, who looks like a cross between Woody Allen and 
Wally Cox, recently
retired from the National Guard after almost 35 years of service. According to 
Marciello, "Artiga
then instructed Vegilla to take Ford's M-16 and ammunition away from him for 
safekeeping and said
that he was revoking Ford's security clearance. He [Artiga] also said that I 
was being assigned to
escort Ford 24 hours a day until further notice." Artiga then ordered Ford to 
report immediately to
Capt. Angela Madera, an Army psychiatrist, at the base mental-health facility 
for a "combat stress
evaluation." Marciello says he escorted Ford to his meeting with Madera.

According to Marciello, he waited outside Madera's office for approximately one 
hour while Madera
interviewed Ford. After the interview, "I escorted Ford back to his tent and 
then stayed with him
for the remainder of the day." To Marciello, Ford seemed frustrated at the 
situation but calm and
under control.

Marciello remembers being summoned the next morning, June 16, to company 
headquarters by Artiga, who
according to Marciello was "really pissed" about the report Madera had written 
regarding Ford. "He
was pacing around in the office holding the report up," Marciello said. "Dr. 
Madera had diagnosed
Ford as completely 'normal' and 'not a danger to himself or others.'" Artiga 
was "just livid,"
Marciello recalls. "He took me in tow over to meet with Madera. Just me and 
him. We practically ran
over there. Once we got there, he held up her report and asked her what she 
thought she was doing.
He walked right over to her and got right in her face. Then he told her that 
this report cannot stay
the way it is. He said that she will change it to read that Ford is unstable 
and must be sent out of
[the Iraqi] theater immediately. He then said something to the effect that this 
was a C.I. or M.I.
matter and that he was telling her that she had better see to these changes 
right now."

Artiga denied pressuring Madera to change her diagnosis and said he did not 
recall whether Marciello
or anyone else was in the room during the meeting.

According to Marciello, "Madera was really shook up by the encounter with 
Artiga ... She was
trembling." With that, Marciello said, "Me and Artiga just up and left Madera's 
office and headed
back to the company area. Artiga went back to the office and I went to find 
Ford." Marciello found
Ford in his tent and related what had just occurred. "I told him to stay put 
and that I would return
in a little while." It was the last time Marciello saw Greg Ford.

The Geneva Conventions signed by the United States and 114 other countries in 
1949 give prisoners of
war strict protections. They cannot be assaulted, photographed (except for 
counterintelligence
purposes), threatened with physical harm, denied medical care and medication, 
or deprived of food,
water, clothing or sleep. They are also entitled to have mail access and 
regular visits from the Red
Cross or other humanitarian groups.

The photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad that became public in the 
spring showed
interrogators flagrantly violating those conventions. Seven low-level soldiers 
have since been
charged, with one conviction, but no one up the ladder has been held 
accountable. Meanwhile, it has
become increasingly clear that the mistreatment at Abu Ghraib was symptomatic 
of a wider problem.
The Department of Defense is currently investigating more than a hundred 
allegations of prisoner
abuse. So far, not a single officer or high-ranking enlisted soldier has been 
charged in any of
them.

There are striking parallels between the conditions at Abu Ghraib when the 
abuses took place and
those at Samarra when Greg Ford says he saw his colleagues torturing detainees. 
Both facilities were
suffering heavy casualties as the result of daily mortar attacks from an 
invisible enemy. In both
cases, the command became increasingly frustrated at its inability to identify, 
locate and stop the
attackers and -- bolstered by directives from top military brass to "set the 
conditions" for
information collection -- allowed combat troops and military intelligence 
operatives to use harsh
tactics. Both facilities were populated mostly by young reservists with no 
combat experience. The
majority of detainees, meanwhile, were adolescents or old men of little to no 
intelligence value.

The M.I. units at both centers also shared a commanding officer, Col. Thomas 
Pappas, who arrived in
Iraq sometime in the middle of June 2003 and formally took charge of the 205th 
M.I. Brigade at an
elaborate change-of-command ceremony at Anaconda on July 1. The 205th comprises 
Ford's 223rd M.I.
Battalion and the 519th M.I. Battalion, which played a part in both the Abu 
Ghraib scandal and at
least one detainee death in Afghanistan, resulting in criminal charges being 
filed. After Pappas
ordered all members of the 205th to be present at his change-of-command 
ceremony, three soldiers
from the 519th were killed in a vehicular accident while traveling through 
hostile territory from
northern Iraq in order to attend.

The Army has already dealt with one case of abuse by soldiers stationed at 
Samarra. At a recent
court-martial in Fort Hood, Texas, four enlisted soldiers from the 4th Infantry 
Division in Samarra
were convicted of manslaughter for forcing two handcuffed Iraqi men to jump off 
a bridge over the
Tigris River during an interrogation. One of the Iraqis drowned. The soldiers' 
commanding officer, a
lieutenant colonel that regularly worked with agents of the 223rd, was 
administratively disciplined
for helping to cover up the incident.

Not long after Marciello left him, Ford said, Madera, accompanied by an unknown 
male captain,
entered Ford's tent and told him to get ready because he was going to be 
"medevac'd" to Germany
immediately. "What the hell is going on here?" Ford remembered demanding, but 
Madera told him to "be
quiet," that he "had to leave," and that she would explain once they were 
airborne. She escorted him
to a waiting Humvee that took them to the base airstrip, where a C-130 was 
warming up on the tarmac.

"Madera ordered me to lie down on a gurney that had been in the rear of the 
Humvee so she could
strap me down. I again asked what was going on, only this time a lot more 
pissed off. I said that I
was perfectly able to walk." Ford said Madera insisted, telling him it was the 
order of "[Lt. Col.
Timothy] Ryan and Artiga" that he be "bound and secured" when taken "out of 
country." "I saw that I
had no choice and finally said OK, anything just to get the fuck out of there," 
Ford recalled. With
the help of the male captain, who Ford said identified himself as a medical 
officer, Madera strapped
him to the gurney.

Just then, Ford claimed, Ryan, Artiga's superior officer, pulled up in his 
Humvee and walked over to
where Ford was lying on the gurney. "He looked down at me and said, 'Don't 
worry. We are going to
get you the best treatment available.' I was enraged at that point, and it was 
a good thing I was
strapped down. I just stared back at Ryan with looks that I hoped could kill, 
but I didn't say
nothing. What was the point? He had won that round."

Ryan did not respond to interview requests for this story.

The propellers of the huge turboprop engines on the C-130 sent scorching blasts 
of superheated air
back toward the group, almost hot enough to singe the skin on a face. (When I 
left Iraq from the
same tarmac a few months later, I did get burned from the blasts.) As Ford's 
gurney sank into the
steaming tarmac, Madera and the other medical officer wheeled him up the long 
ramp and into the
aircraft's cavernous interior. Once they were airborne, Madera unstrapped Ford 
and motioned for him
to sit next to her on one of the hard benches that run along the sides of the 
plane. "She told me
that she was forced to get me out of Iraq ASAP by Ryan and Artiga, who she 
claimed were scared to
death by what I might say. She also told me that she wanted me to get out of 
Iraq as soon as
possible because she feared for my safety." Ford said Madera also told him, 
"These people are
serious and very scary." She apologized for having orchestrated such an exit, 
but said there was no
other way. "I tol
d her that I understood, but felt as though I had just been kidnapped." 
According to Ford, Madera
replied, "You were."

Madera did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this story.

The C-130 took Ford to Kuwait, where he cooled his heels inside transient tents 
for two to three
days and waited for the 223rd to issue him an order. The order never came -- in 
violation of Army
regulations -- but eventually he boarded another aircraft, still accompanied by 
Madera and the other
officer but now acting on his own volition, and flew to the Army Regional 
Medical Center in
Landstuhl, Germany. "The first thing they kept asking me at Landstuhl was, 
'Where are your orders?'
How'd you get out of theater?' I mean, I was probably asked that 50 times when 
I was there.
Everybody asked me that. They have a reception group that meets you there and 
even the Air Force
people when I was getting off the plane said, 'We don't know how you got on 
this plane because you
don't have any orders. We don't have a single set of orders for you.'"

According to a senior official at the California National Guard headquarters in 
Sacramento, Ford
should have had what is known as a "medevac" order from his unit in Iraq (205th 
M.I. Brigade) in
order to leave the country. No one is allowed out of a theater of operations 
without either a
medevac order or a standard set of written orders authorizing travel to a 
destination. Ford had
neither, which is a violation of Army policy.

After a brief stay for evaluation at Landstuhl, Ford says, he was flown to the 
United States, where
he went first to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, and then to Fort Lewis, Wash., where 
he was placed in the
Madigan Army Medical Center. At Fort Lewis, Ford filed a complaint with the 
Army's Criminal
Investigation Command, or CID, in which he cited both the uninvestigated "war 
crimes" allegations
and the retaliation that he says followed.

At every stop along the way, from Kuwait to Germany to the United States, Ford 
was evaluated by Army
mental-health professionals and given a clean bill of health. Doctors at each 
location confirmed
Madera's original diagnosis -- that he was mentally stable. Ford supplied me 
with documents from all
of the hospitals he visited, showing diagnoses of "normal," "not delusional," 
"not paranoid," "no
evidence of hallucination," "stable mental condition," and other similar 
remarks. There is nothing
to suggest that any of the Army medical personnel who evaluated Greg Ford after 
he made his
allegations in Iraq felt that there was anything wrong with him. Tsai at the 
Army Regional Medical
Center in Landstuhl, Germany, gave Ford a final diagnosis of "Stable Mental 
Condition." Dr. Thomas
Hardaway of the Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, wrote, 
"there was not any
indication of overt paranoia or delusional quality to what he was saying about 
his circumstances."
He went
on to say, "There is nothing on my initial screening evaluation indicating any 
overt pathology or
personality problems ... Release patient from Behavioral Medicine Clinic."

Finally, in February 2004, eight months after he blew the whistle, Ford was 
released from active
duty and given an honorable discharge, and in October, 10 months after his 
initial application, he
was formally retired from the Army.

Even if Ford's allegations of prisoner abuse turn out to be false, the Army's 
treatment of him
betrays an outrageous attempt to cover up a potential scandal and a blatant 
disregard for its own
rules. According to both Ford and a credible witness, Marciello, Ford was 
strapped to a gurney and
bundled off to a mental ward on the basis of a coerced diagnosis for an 
indefinite period of time,
all before any investigation was even started, much less completed. When a CID 
investigator finally
began pursuing the matter in the fall, Artiga told the investigator that the 
223rd had "looked into
it" and found "nothing wrong." If what Ford and his witnesses say turns out to 
be true, then the
officers involved could face criminal charges ranging from threatening and 
intimidation, perjury,
and assault to false imprisonment, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The 
list of potential
breaches of Army regulations is just as long, including "conduct unbecoming of 
an officer," a
serious offens
e in the military.

In addition to Ford and the other soldiers treated by Tsai, other Army 
whistle-blowers have also
reported this type of mistreatment. According to a May 25 report by United 
Press International,
Julian Goodrum, a decorated lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserves, was allegedly 
locked in a
psychiatric ward as punishment for filing a complaint over the death of a 
soldier in his command. He
had also testified before Congress about the poor medical care Reserve soldiers 
returning from Iraq
and Afghanistan were receiving at Fort Knox, Ky. After he escaped from the 
locked ward, he was
charged with being AWOL and was even given a $6,000 bill for room and board 
during his involuntary
hospital stay. Still another whistle-blower, Sgt. Samuel Provance of the 205th 
M.I. Brigade, was
stripped of his security clearance and assigned to administrative duties in 
Germany after reporting
abuses at Abu Ghraib. Provance told me in recent e-mails that he has been 
harassed by other soldiers
and commande
rs since he made his allegations and has become something of a pariah in his 
unit.

In August 2004, Ford filed a report on his allegations of war crimes and 
abduction with the
Sacramento office of the FBI. That office forwarded the report to the Bureau's 
headquarters in
Washington, which in turn passed it along to the Department of Defense. Ford 
says he met with
investigators from the DoD's Office of the Inspector General in the last week 
of September. "It was
obvious from their line of questioning that their mission was to cover up for 
DoD and the Army,"
Ford said. Special Agent Karen Ernst of the FBI's Sacramento office told me 
that the Bureau "may"
have jurisdiction in the matter and is prepared to step in if the DoD "drops 
the ball on this."
Although she would not offer an opinion of Ford's case, she did say that they 
only file reports if
they believe the allegations have "some merit."

The Department of the Army Office of the Inspector General has also launched an 
investigation into
Ford's allegations. Although by policy they can neither confirm nor deny the 
existence of a current
investigation, Ford said that investigators have flown out to California to 
interview him and have
conducted several follow-up interviews as well as requested documents and 
e-mail records from him.
Requests through the Freedom of Information Act to the Army or the DoD for any 
reports relating to
Ford and his allegations have resulted in a flurry of letters stating 
essentially that the case is
"complex" and that it will take additional time to compile all of the requested 
documents.

Neither the California Office of the Adjutant General in Sacramento nor the 
state's Judge Advocate
General (JAG) office would officially comment, but staff at both places told me 
off the record that
they hoped Ford would be vindicated and the officers in question punished for 
"abuse of authority."

According to an Army CID special agent who is familiar with Ford's case, "This 
is a classic case of
a whitewash. A coverup. The agent in Iraq never even looked at the 15-6 
investigation the 223rd
supposedly did. No one was ever interviewed until Abu Ghraib hit the fan." When 
I asked him whether
the CID was complicit in an Army coverup of the case, he said, "Absolutely ... 
Do you have any idea
how ugly this case could get if they ever really looked into it? It would open 
up a whole can of
worms that they just don't want to touch." The agent, who refused to give his 
name for fear of
retaliation, added, "Based on everything I know about this case, I believe 
Ford. I have seen too
many similar cases not to. It fits the pattern. Everyone involved in this 
blatant coverup should be
criminally prosecuted. For this to have dragged on for over a year without 
being investigated is
ridiculous." In September, the CID conducted two telephone interviews with 
Marciello, but no one
else in the
223rd has yet been interviewed, including myself.

His nightmarish experience with the Army in Iraq has changed him forever, Ford 
told me as we sat on
a bench near the fountain in front of California National Guard headquarters in 
Sacramento. He said
that he intended to devote the next few years, and maybe even the rest of his 
life, to working with
individuals and organizations in the fight for human rights and dignity. He 
specifically mentioned
Amnesty International and the World Organization for Human Rights. The latter 
has formally requested
that Attorney General John Ashcroft file criminal war-crimes charges against 
high-ranking
administration officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 
President George W.
Bush, over the revelations coming out of Abu Ghraib. Ford said he hoped to join 
in pushing for that
action.

About the writer
David DeBatto is an author and former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent who 
served in Operation
Iraqi Freedom.

Copyright 2004 Salon.com





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