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Abu Ghraib Torture Victim Speaks Out
04/27/05 "Herald-Tribune" - - NEW YORK -- A former prisoner who says he was the man under the black hood in the gruesome photo from Abu Ghraib speaks out on this week's edition of the PBS newsmagazine "Now."

"I remember the box, the pipes, even the two wires," Haj Ali says in reference to the photo which, with others like it, showed the world how U.S. soldiers were abusing Iraqi inmates.

"They made me stand on a box with my hands hooked to wires and shocked me with electricity," Ali recalls through an interpreter in his first in-depth American TV interview. "It felt like my eyeballs were coming out of their sockets. I fell, and they put me back up again for more."...

...But attorney Tom Wilner, who has filed suit on behalf of several detainees, argues they "are being held in conditions that are worse than the worst convicted murderer or rapist in the United States. Charles Manson lives in much better conditions than these people, and they haven't even been charged with a crime."

Haj Ali was released from Abu Ghraib as abruptly as he was arrested, "Now" reports - he was tossed off the back of a truck. He now runs a program to document accounts of continuing torture at the prison.