U-turn on Abu Ghraib torture image

[DaSangarTalib]

New York Times forced to apologise after victim is wrongly identified as ex-Baghdad mayor

Tracy McVeigh, foreign editor
Sunday March 19, 2006
The Observer


It was a sensational story. Pictured holding the chilling iconic photograph of an Abu Ghraib prisoner standing on a box, his head covered and wires attached to his outstretched arms was Ali Shalal Qaissi - the New York Times said this was the Iraqi who had suffered so at the hands of US troops.
Qaissi - who has that image emblazoned on his business card - told how his wounds were still raw. But one week later the New York Times has again suffered the embarrassment of getting it spectacularly wrong, and has published an apology after it emerged Qaissi was not the man in the photograph.

Military investigators had identified the prisoner on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement when the photographs were found on the computer of Charles Graner, the soldier convicted in January 2004 of being a ringleader in the prison abuses. But Qaissi's claims were taken at face value when the NYT profiled him in a front-page article.

Qaissi represents a group of former detainees - the Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons - who filed a lawsuit over abuse captured in the photographs. Qaissi has appeared in publications and on television in several countries and he does appear with a hood over his head in some of the photographs seized from the computer.

Qaissi, 43, a former Baath Party member and Baghdad mayor, said he arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and was released in March 2004. Photographs show him forced into a crouch, identifiable by his mangled hand, with the name guards gave him - 'The Claw' - scrawled across his orange jumpsuit.

His claim to be the hooded man did not emerge until after he had started the prisoners' group. After online magazine Salon raised questions about the issue last week, Qaissi insisted: 'I know one thing, I wore that blanket, I stood on that box, and I was wired up and electrocuted.'

This weekend's apology in the NYT read: 'The Times did not adequately research Mr Qaissi's insistence that he was the man in the photograph. Mr Qaissi's account had already been broadcast and printed by other outlets, including PBS and Vanity Fair, without challenge... A more thorough examination of previous articles in The Times and other newspapers would have shown that in 2004 military investigators named another man as the one on the box.'