Friday, May 7, 2004 | 11:03 a.m.
The instant Nevada Army Guard Spc. Michael Roe saw the first pictures of the torture and mistreatment of prisoners by American soldiers in Iraq he knew exactly where the photos were taken.
He had been there.
"I was appalled and completely disgusted by what I was seeing," said Roe, who served six months last year with the Henderson-based 72nd Military Police at Abu Grahib prison outside of Baghdad. "We came home to a great welcome from the state and our friends and family, and now we find ourselves explaining something we weren't involved with.
"Worse that that is that there are still American soldiers being held prisoner in Iraq, and we don't want to see these kinds of things done to them."
No allegations of mistreatment of prisoners have been leveled against the 72nd, which ran the prison from May 2003 to October, guarding about 1,000 prisoners at a time.
A storm of controversy has built around the prison and its operation since photos surfaced showing prisoners stripped naked as American soldiers taunt them and force them into humiliating poses.
The Wall Street Journal reported today that the International Red Cross has been warning U.S. officials of abuse at the prison for the last year, a time frame that overlaps with the 72nd's operation of the prison.
The 72nd's first sergeant, Daryl Keithley, said he didn't see any of the abuse that has been shown in the pictures obtained by the Washington Post, CBS and other news outlets.
"It was shocking to see these things," said Keithley, a Las Vegas resident and Metro Police detective. "We had policies and procedures in place for the prisoners, but by no stretch of the imagination did they include the things we've seen.
"I don't know the circumstances behind the pictures, whether soldiers were ordered to do this or not. It's just a black mark that touches everything we're trying to do there."
About 110 Nevada soldiers with the 72nd were deployed to Iraq in May 2003 and returned to Las Vegas in November. For the first 3 1/2 months the unit was at the prison they were alone, guarding Iraqis who had committed crimes that were not war-related, such as robbery or murder.
But when the prison started to get captives that were prisoners of war, military intelligence set up at the prison and began conducting interrogations, Keithley said.
"We never participated in any interrogations," Keithley said, adding that the 72nd's deployment overlapped with the unit replacing it at the prison, the 372nd Military Police, for about a week in October.
The 372nd is the Maryland-based unit at the center of the controversy.
Capt. Troy Armstrong, commander of the 72nd, said that a Washington Post photo of a member of the 372nd with a naked prisoner at the end of a leash was taken in a section of the prison that was used by military intelligence.
Armstrong was interviewed by the general in charge of the Nevada Army Guard about the 72nd's experiences in Iraq after the photos first surfaced, but the Nevada National Guard has not been contacted in connection with the investigation of abuse at the prison, a Nevada Guard spokeswoman said.
During their time at the prison, about 20 miles west of Baghdad, the complex was constantly shelled by mortars.
"About 15-20 Iraqi prisoners were killed in mortar attacks while we were there," Keithley said. "We had others that had heart attacks and had to be medivaced to a hospital where some later died."
The prison sits on a 280-acre site behind 15-foot-high, mile-long stone walls that surround the four sides of the complex.
The 72nd arrived in the Middle East in early May 2003, and after two weeks in Kuwait the company made a two-day drive through the desert to Baghdad.
Once the unit reached the prison they found children, sheep, wild dogs and fields of feces-ridden rubble and trash. Over two days they cleaned out one of the prison compounds inside the 280-acre prison complex.
The first two weeks in the prison left the soldiers looking like they had chicken pox as sand fleas and mosquitos ate at them.
The 72nd commandeered a warehouse in the prison to serve as troop quarters. The building had been used as a factory where prisoners made shoes in much the same way prisoners make license plates in some U.S. prisons.
A huge mural of Saddam Hussein dominated one wall of the building, below which the troops set up their cots.
The soldiers erected razor-wire pens in the prison yard and named them after hotels on the Strip. The largest pen was known as the Bellagio.
In each pen a translator and a leader were chosen from among the prisoners to make communication easier, Keithley said.
"If we had prisoners fighting or some other issue that required discipline we would segregate those involved," Keithley said. "There was no taking off of their clothes and making them stand off in an area, or anything like what has been shown in the photos."
Roe, a community college student and security guard at a Strip casino, said that the abuse at the prison puts the soldiers still in Iraq back at square one when it comes to everyday interaction with Iraqi people.
"We have soldiers over there fighting hard and this doesn't help them," Roe said. "It just plants bad seeds. If I'm an Iraqi and the U.S. military is trying to get me to surrender peaceably, I'm not going to after seeing the pictures of what happened at the prison.
"I wouldn't blame them for not surrendering after seeing that."
The 72nd earned 10 Purple Hearts during its deployment, and none of the unit's soldiers were killed, although two soldiers from different units were killed during the 72nd's time at the prison, when a military intelligence tent at the prison was hit by a mortar round.
The prison was infamous for the atrocities committed there by Saddam Hussein's regime, and the soldiers in the 72nd often heard stories from Iraqis about thousands being tortured and put to death there.
One story Iraqis told the soldiers was how one of Hussein's sons visited the prison.
Finding it overcrowded ordered the execution of 2,000 prisoners.
"The Iraqis that committed the atrocities at the prison in the past are still floating around on the streets of Baghdad," Roe said. "I think the difference between those acts and what is happening now is that the Americans that did these things are going to be held responsible."
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