Letters From Hell

[Spazito]

I AM A PRISONER at Abu Ghraib." With those words, Mohammed Jassim al-Jabouri and I began our short-lived correspondence. It was a haunting first sentence, in a letter smuggled out of Iraq's most notorious prison by a local worker not long after disturbing images of torture and abuse surfaced in the media. Despite the words' simplicity, they were chilling -- as is the rest of this story. After three short letters, my go-between has disappeared, there has been no more correspondence from Mohammed, and his family lives in fear after American troops searched their home.

first met my contact, Hassan (not his real name), outside Abu Ghraib prison. The photographs of torture and abuse had become public a day earlier; desperate families were swarming the prison gates, wanting news of loved ones but kept at bay by razor wire, concrete barriers and U.S. Marines. Some carried newspaper clippings of the horrifying images as they demanded information from Abdul Rahman Wahham Arar al-Rawy, the prison's Iraqi liaison officer. Many had not heard of their family members in months.

Hassan was not at Abu Ghraib to visit relatives -- he was an employee who gathered up litter from the prison grounds and ran errands for his American taskmasters. His family lives in abject poverty in a ragged village not far from the prison; to top up his meagre stipend, he also, on occasion, smuggled out letters from prisoners to family members who paid him a few dollars in compensation. "I've only done it a few times," he told me during our first meeting. "It's dangerous. The Americans search me, but I have a good hiding spot." He reached down and showed me, pulling back the sole of his tattered sandal.

The next morning he brought me the initial letter, scrawled on the back of foil from a cigarette package. It reminded me of my first visit to the prison, in April 2003 after Saddam Hussein's regime had fallen. Abu Ghraib was then a symbol of the horrors of Saddam's rule: thousands had died there. Looters and vengeful former inmates were tearing the place apart. On the wall of one of the cells on death row, I saw the last desperate plea from a condemned prisoner: "I am a prisoner at Abu Ghraib. May God have mercy on me."

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