“They were disconcertingly polite,” remembers Matthew McAllester, a rugged young Scotsman who reports for Newsday.
He was not tortured himself. Nor was Newsday photographer Moises Saman, nor Danish photographer Johan Rydeng, nor award-winning freelance photojournalist Molly Bingham. She was even served tea after one interrogation session. They were all treated “humanely,” they agreed. But they had all thought, through their eight days in captivity, that at any moment they might be killed. And they had reason. The archives of human-rights groups are full of stories about people forever “disappeared” by the Iraqi regime–or returned to their family long after their arrest, in little pieces.
After the journalists were hustled out of their hotel rooms in the hours before dawn on March 24 and driven to the prison outside Baghdad all their possessions were taken, including cameras and laptops, and even clothes. They were made to wear prison pajamas. They slept on the cement floors of their individual cells, and sometimes they were blindfolded when taken to be questioned. But there was no physical duress, no sensory deprivation. “I sensed,” says McAllester, “that they knew we were scared enough.”
But the Iraqis in the prison were treated differently. Each night the journalists could hear one or more of them beaten, then left to moan in their cells. Outside the prison, too, the terror encroached. The journalists woke often to the sound of antiaircraft fire and the fear that American bombs might obliterate them all in an instant. Everyone inside knew that risk. Yet Bingham remembers her inquisitor humming a song, willfully nonchalant about the impending American onslaught. “See, we’re not afraid,” he said. “We’re singing. We’re very strong.”
When the four journalists appeared at a crowded press conference in the ballroom of the Amman Intercontinental in Jordan yesterday, the question asked repeatedly and in countless ways was basically just: “Why?” Some of the reporters there came on like interrogators themselves, trying to eke out an explanation that could ward off the same fate for those of our number who are still in Baghdad, and those who might still think of going. What had these four done “wrong”? They just didn’t know. They were never told of any charges against them. They were not even asked, in so many words, if they were spies. They were left to guess what line they’d crossed, and when, and why.
All of them had dodgy visas. Bingham and Rydeng entered Iraq as tourists (yes, tourists). But they presented themselves at the Information Ministry in short order and were assimilated into the regular press corps. McAllester and Saman had special journalist visas to cover peace activists and “human shields,” which they briefly did before going on to look at more interesting stories. McAllester also had one of the Thuraya satellite phones which the Iraqis have forbidden because, among other things, they include the Global Positioning System that gives precise geographic coordinates. But such rules have been broken by many journalists, and no others have been taken away in the small hours of the morning to don the pajamas and sleep on the floors of Abu Ghraib.
Was it something they wrote or photographed? Was it something they said? Someone they met? They could only imagine. And why were they released? They credit the efforts of many different people and organizations pressuring the Iraqi government. Even Yasir Arafat was prevailed upon to help. He obligingly placed a call to the head of Iraqi military intelligence. (It didn’t hurt that Saman, born in Lima and raised in Barcelona, is of Palestinian descent and still has relatives in the West Bank town of Beit Jalla.) A former Palestinian ambassador to Baghdad was enlisted, too. Was that what did the trick?
The more the four journalists reflected on these questions, the more apparent it was, at least to me, that they were never really suspected of anything. The interrogations–two major sessions for each one, and then a final meeting to sign a statement that represented with fair accuracy what they’d said–seem to have been not only polite, but pointless. When they had their belongings returned to them, minus the Thuraya and thousands of dollars in cash, their computers showed no signs that the hard disks were accessed. Bingham said she firmly believed her laptop was never even opened.
So if information was not the object of these arrests, what was? Intimidation, pure and simple, would be part of it. When the journalists disappeared into the hands of the secret police, consternation spread through the press corps both inside and outside Iraq. Baghdad would not say at first where the prisoners were, or even if they were held. Uncertainty is one of Saddam Hussein’s most well-tested tools of terror. It eats away at hope and destroys morale (as it has with the families of hundreds of Kuwaitis detained more than 12 years ago during the Iraqi invasion of their country who are still waiting to hear what happened to their loved ones). Today, any journalist would think more than twice about using a Thuraya or a dubious visa in Iraq. Journalists might also worry more about what they write and who they interview. Such is the paranoid self-censorship imposed by a terrorizing regime.
But there’s another message: the one imparted by the muffled drumbeat of clubs and the moans of the victims in the cellblock where the journalists were held. Iraq is a country where both jailer and prisoner are expected to be tough, ruthless and remorseless. This is a country where people are hard, and proud of it. “We’re very strong,” said the humming inquisitor. “We’re not afraid.” That was what they wanted Bingham and the others to remember from their eight days in prison: that Americans and Westerners are scared; Iraqis are not. Yet as the Third Infantry Division rolls toward Baghdad, the polite torturers of Abu Ghraib, along with the rest of Saddam’s hardened supporters, may find they are whistling in the dark.
