Chapter+9

Interrogator Tony Cimoli came back home from Iraq after serving at the Abu Ghraib Prison. But, not only was Tony interrogating prisoners, he also became involved in one of the biggest scandals to hit the Army while in Iraq. Tony was linked to the torturing of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. He is now a 37 year old bouncer at a bar in Chicago, but he thinks that the events that happened at the prison will probably be his companion for the rest of his life.

Beginning in 2004, stories of abuse, torture, and rape held inside the Abu Ghraib prison became public news on T.V for many weeks. People learned that Abu Ghraib was once a torture center used by Saddam Hussein and his government when he was in power. The prison was huge, fifteen feet walls made of concrete, hundreds of cells, many officers, and torture rooms used for abuse and interrogation once used by Saddam's men. American citizens back at home were shown the true harsh reality of what not only American soldiers were doing, but also how Iraqi citizens were being treated inside of the prison. In 2003, four soldiers were under investigation and formally charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) with detainee abuse. In April 2004, news of the investigation leaked and graphic images of the abuse were shown on television here in America during the show //60 Minutes.// Tony Cimoli watched his fellow soldiers abuse and torture the inmates before the news was ever discovered, and he never said a word. Instead, Tony was influenced by what he saw and began to do the same things. Detainees were urinated on, punched, jumped on a limb which had been shot (severely wounding it so that it could not thereafter be healed), pouring phosphoric acid on their bodies, or sodomization with a baton. Tony decided to do this so that he could get information from the detainees about terrorists and planned attacks on the U.S. military. Randomly, depending on how many men were on his list to interrogate during the day, he would walk to their cells and have it opened so that the prisoner could step out. The floor was cold, and the prisoners were always barefoot, so this sent chills up their bodies from the cold tile floors. The officers before Tony would always start by having the prisoners strip naked first. The prisoners would be cold, timid, and deathly afraid of what was about to happen to them. They would step out, and immediately look around. Up, down, side to side, observing the hell they were all in. Cells lined the bottom of the buildings which were shaped like rectangles, doors on each side leading to the yards. Iron stairs, which were white, would lead to a second floor, with iron walkways, all with cells on them. Everything was painted white, and everything you said would echo throughout the building. Because it was painted white, it was much easier to see almost anything unless it blended in. So usually, every kind of abuse performed in the cell block buildings would be visible to all prisoners who had a good angle to see it. The prisoners would look down at their fellow Iraqi citizens, feeling pity for them, and hoping it would all come to a close very soon. The prisoner would feel ashamed and embarrassed. Tony studied these methods and soon created his own way to torture and abuse the prisoners in order to interrogate them and have more answers from them.

At first, Tony would start by hitting the prisoners by punching them or kicking them. Later, he became more comfortable with what he was doing and began to burn prisoners with acid or lighters, even matches if he couldn't get the other supplies. He had only one thing that bothered him, and that was the screaming and the sound of pain being exerted from the prisoners. He only felt success when he could extract information from the prisoners. But, what Tony didn't know was that the prisoners were being tortured so severely that they began to give fake information just so that the soldiers would stop abusing them. In reality, the prisoners didn't know anything at all, in fact, many of them were innocent of any accusation thrown at them. This method backfired on the prisoners because Tony began to think that he was getting good information for his American soldiers and kept abusing them even more. He continued to torture the Iraqi citizens, husbands to wives they loved, and father to children they had been stripped from. The prisoners soon started to show their pain, and one was quoted "'Do you pray to Allah?' one asked. I said yes. They said, '[Expletive] you. And [Expletive] him.' One of them said, 'You are not getting out of here healthy, you are getting out of here handicapped. And he said to me, 'Are you married?' I said, 'Yes.' They said, ' If your wife saw you like this, she will be disappointed.' One of them said, 'but if I saw her now she would not be disappointed now because I would rape her.'"[...]" They ordered me to thank Jesus that I'm alive."[...]" I said to him, 'I believe in Allah.' So he said, ' but i believe in torture, and I will torture you'" Tony lived through this madness every day, and soon he started to leave his climax of power, his feeling that he was in control.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Tony did not know that the prisoners were actually innocent of the actions they were accused of. Many were arrested and never charged, but instead beaten and abused. Some men were married and had families to take care of. This started to get to the head of Tony, and he realized they were torturing the men for no reason. They were innocent men and Tony had just taken away a part of their life. He even tried to imagine himself being stripped of his family to be beaten and tortured. He didn't know how these men had been able to endure such a thing. By the tame he came to his senses, Tony had already been broken down and the scandal was out in the open. Abu Ghraib was shut down and Tony was sent home and suffered panic attacks upon returning to the U.S. He was later placed in the Army Psychiatric Care unit. He never fully realized what he was doing during the torture, and afterward it hit him so hard he didn't know what to do with himselfHe feels he didn't know he would find and indulge in his own evil, but in Iraq, a place he never chose to be in, his evil surfaced and took him over. Now, three years later, he still feels this will be with him until the day he dies.

Joporto