>From the barred window of a second-floor cell, one woman with
outstretched arms shouted down to visitors: "I have girls at my house.
They have no one to take care of them. I'm their mother and father."
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An amputee removed his prosthetic leg and waved it in protest. "How can I be a security detainee?" he asked. "What can I do without a leg?" A second man raised a metal cane above his head; five others brandished wooden crutches.
The chaotic scene unfolded in front of two busloads of journalists whom the U.S. military brought to the world's largest Army-run prison for a tour Wednesday morning, hours before President Bush went on two Arab television channels to discuss the physical and sexual abuses of detainees here last fall.
The tour -- conducted by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who oversees the military's prisons in Iraq -- was intended to highlight plans to improve living conditions, health care and interrogation procedures affecting 3,900 inmates, most of them detained on suspicion of aiding resistance to the U.S.-led occupation.
But it also illuminated the rage within Abu Ghraib, which was Iraq's most feared prison before the U.S. military toppled President Saddam Hussein last spring.
"The coalition forces have humiliated Iraqi people, their freedom, their dignity and their human rights," an inmate said in English through a megaphone that had been supplied by the military to improve communication between prisoners and officials. Reading from a manifesto written on yellow paper, the man alleged that many of the thousands of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib were innocent people who were detained on "false information offered to the coalition forces" on the basis of "nothing more than personal revenge."
The virulence of the inmates who swarmed toward the visiting journalists on the first part of the tour visibly surprised military officers, who hustled the journalists back on their way. "Come on, in the bus," ordered Col. David E. Quantock, who commands the 450 military police officers at the prison. "We've got other things to do."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5674-2004May5.html