Soldier wrestled with decision to report Iraq jail abuse

It was Darby who, near midnight on Jan. 14, slipped an anonymous note and a computer disc containing digital photographs under the door of the Army criminal investigative office at the prison near Baghdad. The photographs depicted military police officers cheerfully abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners.

The Army launched an investigation, and in April the photos were leaked to news outlets, triggering an international uproar and setting back the US cause in Iraq.

Darby, an Army specialist at the time, has since been promoted and assigned to an undisclosed location.

He testified at a preliminary hearing for Private First Class Lynndie England, one of six military police officers who face possible court-martial in the case. A seventh already has pleaded guilty. A military judge will recommend whether England, 21, who is seven months pregnant, should face court-martial.

Darby said he knew England before "she even went to basic training." Speaking of Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., England's boyfriend and the man who has emerged as an alleged leader of the abuse on Abu Ghraib's Tier 1A, Darby told how they had served in other missions abroad before the war sent them to Iraq.

But, he said, his voice firm and confident, what he accused them of doing "violates everything I believe in, and it violates the very rules of war."

Darby recalled that he had intended to remain anonymous but acknowledged to investigators he was the one who had turned over the photos and said the pictures had made him ill.

"I was kind of shocked," he said, describing his first reactions to the photos in December. "And kind of bewildered."

Photography was one of his passions, he said. He took his 35mm camera to Iraq, he said, but it had been ruined in the sand. Still trying to build his own photo book, he relied on his friends for copies of their souvenir photos taken at palaces that once belonged to Saddam Hussein, at the site in Babylon where Daniel was thrown into the lions' den, and along the fertile banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

He said that made the photos that Graner loaned him so jarring. They were nothing like the photos "I had been collecting to send home to show my family," he said.