JOE DARBY REDUX. I first wrote about Army Spc. Joseph Darby on May 5th of 2004, calling him "an American hero" for having the courage to come forward and report outside his chain of command on what was going on at Abu Ghraib.

I then wrote about Army Spc. Joseph Darby here, on May 19th of 2004, quoting from the LA Times:

Army Spc. Joseph Darby, who was disgusted by the abuse photos and first alerted authorities, was called as a defense witness, but the military judge presiding over the April hearing in Baghdad said the whistle-blower was "unavailable."

I said I suspected he was unavailable because of this. You should read this piece, if you didn't the first time; it's about how Joe Darby was treated in his western Maryland hometown when he came home, and people learned that he was the man who first blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib.

"If I were [Darby], I'd be sneaking in through the back door at midnight," says Janette Jones, who lives just across the border in Pennsylvania and stopped here at midday with her daughter for a Pepsi and a smoke.

[...]

"They can call him what they want," says Mike Simico, a veteran visiting relatives in Cresaptown. "I call him a rat."

Those were typical responses.

Then I wrote about Joe Darby on May 31st of 2004, quoting from another article:

But ask Lehman about Joe Darby, the fellow army specialist, hailed as a hero by U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for exposing the abuse.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes," Lehman said. "We don't believe in ratting people out like that."

[...]

There won't be any parades for Darby when he comes home to Corriganville, Md.

His home is shuttered, plastered with "No Trespassing" signs.

Neighbours won't talk about him and most in a community so tiny it is not even on most maps, claim not to know him.

"He should have kept his mouth shut," said Billy Joe Davis, a 65-year-old Corriganville resident with blunt views expressed in equally blunt language.

"Ask him if he thinks it's cruel to have them dragging the bodies of our people up and down the street. Ask him if he thinks it's cruel hanging our people off the bridges.

"We should just blow the place up and get the hell out of there."

Tim Flesher, a 40 year old who runs the town's auto dealership also believes Darby should have kept to himself.

He believes the abuse of prisoners was wrong, but added: "The mistake we made was taking prisoners in the first place. We should shoot the sons of bitches or let them go."

And so on.

Later, in August of 2004, we learned much more about Joseph Darby, from what I called a "searing, must-read, story" in GQ; it was titled "The Conscience of Joe Darby." It's no longer online, but you can read my excerpts and those of a handful of other bloggers.

Now GQ has a fresh account from Joe Darby. It's, again, full of vivid detail.

[...] I’ll say this, too: The abuse started earlier than anybody realizes. Nobody has ever said that publicly, but there were things going on before our unit even got there. The day we arrived, back in October of 2003, we were getting a tour of the compound and we saw like fifteen prisoners sitting in their cells in women's underwear. This was day one; nobody from our unit had ever set foot in the prison. We asked the MPs in charge—the Seventy-second, out of Las Vegas—why the prisoners were wearing panties. They told us that it was a corrective action, that these guys had been mortaring the compound. So probably the MPs decided to mess with these guys. This stuff was going on before we arrived. After we took over, it basically just escalated.

The other thing was, there were other government agencies who would come into the prison and handle prisoners. I can’t say which agencies, but you can probably guess. Sometimes we didn’t know exactly who they were. We’d get a call at like three in the morning from the battalion commander, saying, “You have a bird coming in. You need to take prisoner such and such from cell whatever to the landing zone in fifteen minutes.” So I’d put my gear on, cuff the prisoner, bag him, go to the LZ, wait for the helicopter to land, and then hand the prisoner off to the guys inside. I didn’t know who they were. Didn’t ask. When they tell you not to ask any questions, you don’t ask questions. They might bring the prisoner back in a few hours, or the next morning, or two days later. You didn’t ask. Other times, they would bring a new prisoner into the compound. You didn’t know who they were, or who the prisoner was, or what he had done, or what they were going to do to him. You just handed over the cellblock. One night, this Black Hawk landed at about 4 a.m., and a couple guys came in with a prisoner and took him to tier 1, put sheets up so that nobody could see, and spent the rest of the night in there. They told us to stay away, so we did. Then a couple hours later, they came back out. They were like, “The prisoner is dead.” They asked for ice to pack him, and then they said, “You guys clean this up. We weren’t here. Have a good day.” Got back on the bird and took off, left the dead body right there. Those guys can come in and kill a guy, and there’s nothing you can do. There’s no record of them. They were never there. They don’t exist.

[...]

I always wanted to stay anonymous. At first, I didn’t even give my name to the Criminal Investigation Division. I just burned a copy of the pictures onto a CD, typed an anonymous letter, put them in a manila envelope, and handed them to an agent at CID. I said, “This was left in my office,” and walked out. But about an hour later, this little short guy named Special Agent Pieron came to my office and started grilling me about where the pictures came from. It took him about half an hour before I gave it up. I said, “Fine, I had the pictures. I’m the one who put them in there.” I said, “I’ll talk to you after work.”

I still didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it turned out to be. I thought they would be taken off duty and tried, but I didn’t think the world would ever hear about it. I never thought it would explode the way it did.

[...]

A few of the soldiers in the pictures he knew, but I identified the rest and told him where the pictures were taken, that kind of thing. But while I was doing it, another CID agent was actually going out and rounding these people up. They worked too fast. They were picking them up while I was still there!

[...]

There was only one way out of the room, so there was basically no way to sneak by. One of the agents went and grabbed all of these blankets and rugs and covered me up with them, made me look like a really tall woman in some kind of ridiculous outfit. Then he told everyone in the room to turn around and face the wall, and they led me out the door and down the corridor and outside. I couldn’t see anything; they had to guide me. I was scared as hell.

[...]

That was one of the most nervous periods of my life. I was constantly scared. I started getting paranoid. I kept my gun with me at all times. I took it to sleep with me. All the other platoons in my company slept in one of the old prison buildings on the compound, in cells, but I slept in a closet in an old administration building, so I was one of the only soldiers who didn’t have a big metal door that I could close. In fact, there wasn’t any door at all. I was totally exposed. I hung a poncho in the doorway, like an army raincoat, and I would lie there in bed with both arms behind my head and my left hand inside the pillowcase, gripping my nine-millimeter with the safety off. I would just listen. And about four days into it, I’m lying there, and I hear the poncho go swish. I was like, Holy shit—somebody is coming into my goddamn room. And then it was quiet again. I’m thinking, Oh fuck.

[...]

Eventually, after about a month, somebody finally had the sense to take them off the compound. That was a huge relief, but I still wanted to make sure nobody found out what I’d done. One of the things you have to understand is the mentality of where I grew up, in western Maryland. It’s a small town, and there’s not a lot of work. So most people are either in the military, in the Reserves, or they’re related to somebody who is. They’re good people, but I knew they weren’t going to look at the fact that these guys were beating up prisoners. They were going to look at the fact that an American soldier put other American soldiers in prison. For Iraqis. And to those people—who basically are patriotic, socially programmed people who believe whatever they’re told—the Iraqis are the enemy, and screw whatever happens to them. So I knew if I wanted to go back to my civilian life, if I wanted to integrate back home, nobody could know what I’d done. They’d never forgive me. And I was assured by the army that nobody would know. I would remain anonymous.

Well, it didn’t work out that way. About a month after Graner and the rest of them left Abu Ghraib, we were up in Camp Anaconda, and I was sitting with ten other guys from my platoon in the dining facility. It’s a big facility, packed with like 400 other soldiers, and I’m sitting there eating when Donald Rumsfeld comes on during the damned congressional hearings. It was like something out of a movie. I’m sitting there, and right next to me there’s a TV, and Rumsfeld is on it when he drops my damned name. Almost nobody in my unit knew what I’d done until he dropped my damned name. On national TV. I was sitting midbite when he said it, and I was like, Oh, my God. And the guys at the table just stopped eating and looked at me. I was like, Fuuuuuck. And I got up and got the hell out of there.

[...]

Because a lot of people up there view me as a traitor. Even some of my family members think I’m a traitor. One of my uncles does, and he convinced my brother not to talk to me anymore. So my wife had to hide in a relative’s house, and when the media tracked her there, she had to be taken into military custody.

[...]

Then they took us to a house on the post for the night, and after a while, I went outside to talk to Major Chung, the provost marshal for my unit based in Cumberland. He asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “I just want to go home.” And he said, “You can’t go home. You can probably never go home.”

And he couldn't. Joe Darby never went back to his home.

[...] I’m not welcome there. People there don’t look at the fact that I knew right from wrong. They look at the fact that I put an Iraqi before an American. So we’ve relocated, and I’ve been working as a military mechanic for the past two years. My orders were extended through the trials, so I have now served ten years on an eight-year contract. My last day in the military is August 31. I’m done.

And it's all thanks to Donald Rumsfeld.

We all have so much to thank Donald Rumsfeld for -- particularly Iraqis -- but Army Spc. Joseph Darby as much as anyone.

Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5.