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  Thursday  October 6  2005    10: 13 AM

torture r us

Atoning for Abu Ghraib
The lives of two men -- an Iraqi prisoner and an American guard involved in his torture -- were destroyed in the prison. Nine U.S. soldiers have been sentenced in the scandal, but both men say that's not nearly enough.


On the day he lost his innocence before the eyes of the world, Sgt. Javal Davis was sitting in the mess hall at Victory Base in Abu Ghraib prison, eating a plate of rice and tuna fish. Davis ate mechanically, ignoring what the other soldiers were saying, occasionally glancing up at a TV screen.

It was April 28, 2004. Insurgents were still launching the occasional rocket-propelled grenade at their base near Baghdad, and CNN was broadcasting images from home: basketball, the White House, Wall Street. It was a normal day at Victory Base. But then the room suddenly went still.

There was a man on the screen, his arms spread out and attached to electrical wires, his head covered with a sandbag. The headline read: "Scandal at Abu Ghraib." Other images followed, images of prisoners on dog leashes, of piles of naked, intertwining bodies.

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