One of seven US soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi prisoners said she was acting under direct orders from military intelligence to "make it hell" for inmates before interrogation, The Washington Post reported Saturday.
"They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time, already hooded and cuffed," Specialist Sabrina Harman, 26, a military police officer from Alexandria, Virginia, told the Post.
"The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."
Speaking with the Post via e-mail this week from Baghdad, the US Army reservist said her unit took direction from the military intelligence officers in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison and from civilian contractors there who conducted interrogations.
She told the Post they were given no rules and little training.
But Harman did not discuss the abusive treatment of prisoners, nor who ordered that treatment, and she would not answer any questions about the charges against her, the paper said.
Harman was one of two soldiers seen smiling in a widely published photograph, in which she crouched behind a cluster of naked Iraqi detainees stacked in a pyramid.
According to a charge sheet cited by the Post, she is accused of taking photographs of the pyramid, as well as filming inmates who were ordered to strip and masturbate in front of others, photographing a corpse and attaching wires to an inmate's hands while he stood on a box with his head covered. It said she told him he would be electrocuted if he got down from the box.
She said the people who brought the detainees to her military police unit - either army intelligence officers, CIA operatives or civilian contractors - "would set the standards on whether or not to 'be nice.'
"If the prisoner was co-operating, then the prisoner was able to keep his jumpsuit, mattress and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until (military intelligence) decided," Harman said.
"Sleep, food, clothes, mattresses, cigarettes were all privileges and were granted with information received."
She said she had never been taught about the Geneva Conventions' mandates on prisoner treatment.
"The Geneva Convention was never posted, and none of us remember taking a class to review it," she told the Post. "The first time reading it was two months after being charged. I read the entire thing, highlighting everything the prison is in violation of. There's a lot."
Harman's mother, Robin Harman, told the Post her daughter was taking and collecting photographs in a bid to expose the abuses at the prison, but she had her not to get involved.
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