HOLLISTER
– Although he didn’t witness abuse of Iraqi prisoners while
stationed at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison for five months, a
Hollister soldier described an environment lacking clear discipline
policies and one where over-worked soldiers grew increasingly
disgruntled.
HOLLISTER – Although he didn’t witness abuse of Iraqi prisoners while stationed at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison for five months, a Hollister soldier described an environment lacking clear discipline policies and one where over-worked soldiers grew increasingly disgruntled.
Spc. Dionicio Arevalo Jr., a member of the California National Guard, worked at the prison from October to March and returned home in April. He worked in a prison compound separated from the one that has drawn worldwide attention for alleged prisoner abuse.
“They never did explain to us the Geneva Convention that much,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that our chain of command never told us what we can or cannot do.
“From what I remember in basic training, I don’t remember them even explaining to us about the rules of war, which should be explained to us.”
Even though he was not in the compound where the alleged abuses occurred, Arevalo heard rumors of maltreatment and that military investigations were under way.
Now, with the worldwide media coverage of the abuse allegations, Arevalo worries U.S. soldiers will lose the hard-earned trust of many Iraqi people. When he left Iraq, he estimated that about half the country’s citizens supported U.S. troops.
Photos of alleged abuse show U.S. military guards torturing and sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees. Seven military guards have been charged on suspicion of abusing prisoners, and one is now facing court marshal proceedings.
“That right there,” he said of the attention, “is going to destroy a lot of what we’ve worked for.”
Arevalo said many of the prisoners from that building were the same Iraqi insurgents continually attacking and killing American soldiers.
Asked whether he feels sadness for the prisoners in the photos, he said, “Not really.
“Those people that were actually shown, I believe, are the people that were doing bad things against the coalition forces,” said Arevalo, while his baby boy cried from a carrier on the family’s living room floor.
Arevalo, 31, was a correctional officer assigned to the 870th Military Police Company in one of the prison’s eight compounds. He served in Iraq for a total of 10 months and returned home April 11.
That’s when he met his then 7-month-old baby boy, Dionicio III, for the first time. A photo of his homecoming – him hugging his boy after stepping off the plane – captured Bay Area media attention.
Arevalo, a civilian security guard before joining the National Guard in 1998, said direction from superiors at the prison was seriously lacking. And there were no specific guidelines on how to discipline unruly detainees, he said.
There were three primary rules at the Abu Ghraib prison: Don’t talk to prisoners; don’t photograph prisoners; and don’t allow prisoners anything to write with.
“That’s pretty much it,” he said.
A growing frustration among many over-worked prison guards, he said, “probably” contributed to the depicted abuse.
“There’s a lot of people working long hours,” he said. “Anything good they do for the prison, they’re not really recognized or appraised for anything good they do.”
Arevalo described the compound at the Abu Ghraib prison where he worked as the “tent area,” which is surrounded by barbed wire fence and packed by prisoners who committed lesser offenses. There, he said, prisoners rarely caused problems.
In that compound, he called the relationship between soldiers and prisoners as one “where people pretty much had respect for each other.”
He didn’t witness any abuse of Iraqi detainees, Arevalo said. But there were instances when U.S. prison guards came under attack. Iraqis launched mortars into the prison about “once every two weeks or so,” he said.
And in December, he recalled, a major riot broke out involving prisoners throwing large rocks at guards. The U.S. soldiers responded by firing their entire stock of rubber bullets, he said.
“Once they finished the rubber bullets, people were asking permission to use live rounds,” he said.
Commanders ordered the soldiers to hold fire. But it was too late. Two prisoners were shot, and one died.
He described the entire prison complex as being about the size of a community college campus. “The worst of the worst” of the Iraqi rebels were detained at a nearby compound, where the alleged prisoner abuse occurred, he said.
Arevalo acknowledged there was “a little wrong” with soldiers’ actions depicted in the photos. But he also doesn’t believe the privates and specialists shown in newspaper and television reports should take the blame, he said.
Their immediate supervisors – team leaders and squadron leaders – are primarily at fault, he said. Moreover, he doesn’t think the Bush administration should take the heat, even though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently accepted responsibility.
“They should have brought it up and punished them right then and there,” he said of the prison commanders.
Foremost, though, he expressed personal frustration toward the media for the snowballing coverage of the scandal.
Arevalo wishes pictures taken at the prison would not have been made public – not while the U.S. continues rebuilding efforts in Iraq.
“I’m kind of mad right now,” Arevalo said. “The (media) are just focused on this thing that a few soldiers did.”
