JAG CENTRAL

The Los Angeles Times today ran this story about a witness to the abuse of prisoners by Military Intelligence soldiers. Until now, the only hard, eyewitness testimony about abuses has been by and towards military police:

In a telephone interview with The Times, Rivera described his involvement in the case for the first time, saying that he visited the cellblock largely out of curiosity and that he was stunned by what he saw: detainees being stripped naked, made to crawl on their stomachs and chained into a ball of limbs and flesh on the prison floor.

Rivera, 20, is the first military intelligence soldier to come forward publicly and say that he witnessed a fellow intelligence soldier, Cruz, taking part in the abuse of prisoners in the isolation cellblock at Abu Ghraib. Cruz has also been cited in testimony by Sgt. Samuel J. Provance III, another intelligence officer, who said Cruz "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth."

Cruz could not be reached for comment this week.

Because they are among only a handful of intelligence soldiers directly tied to the abuse in photographs, Rivera and Cruz are potentially important witnesses for military investigators seeking to determine the scope of the scandal — specifically whether the torture of detainees had any connection to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib.

Rivera disputed such claims, saying the abuse he witnessed had nothing to do with "softening up" prisoners to get information from them.

He insisted that his superiors did not know about the abuse, let alone sanction it.

Rivera said that as he got ready to leave the cellblock amid anguished pleas for help from the prisoners, Cruz stopped him to make sure he didn't plan to talk.

"Before I walked out of that bay, he looked at me and asked me, 'Izzy, you're not going to tell anybody, are you?' " Rivera said, speaking by telephone from Baghdad this week.

"And I looked at him and I said: 'No, absolutely not, Cruz. You have nothing to worry about.' "

Rivera said he never informed his superiors and still hasn't shared his account with military investigators.

When he met with an Army Criminal Investigation Division agent in January, he refused to talk unless he was provided with an attorney.

"The big reason I'm doing this [speaking publicly] is there's a big sense of guilt that I have," Rivera said. "I didn't know there was a huge conspiracy [of abuse at Abu Ghraib], but I did know about that one night…. I should have said to my sergeant, 'Hey Sergeant, I saw this,' and a lot of it would have been dealt with if I had."