One such case was Hayder Sabbar Abd, prisoner #13077, the man in the hood in the photograph above. He is being taunted and humiliated by former pfc. Lynndie England. The New York Times' Ian Fisher tracked down Abd after his release in May 2004. "The shame is so deep," Fisher wrote, that "Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures... pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera."
"The truth is we were not terrorists," Abd said. "We were not insurgents. We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this."
According to Abd, the father of five children and a Shiite Muslim from Nasiriya, he had served 18 years in the Iraqi military, at times in the Republican Guard, but was demoted to the regular army after several desertions. He was arrested in June 2003 at a military checkpoint when he tried to walk away from the taxi he was riding in. He was held for three months and four days in a prison in southern Iraq before being transferred to Abu Ghraib. He was never charged and never interrogated.
In a sworn statement to military investigators, Abd said:
"After they took off my clothes the American soldier removed who was wearing glasses, night guard, and I saw an American female soldier which they call her Ms. Maya, in front of me they told me to stroke my penis in front of her. [...] They were laughing, taking pictures, and they were stepping on our hands with their feet. And they started taking one after another and they wrote on our bodies in English. I don’t know what they wrote, but they were taking pictures after that. Then, after that they forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees we had to bark like a dog and if we didn’t do that, they start hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything."