Haunted by The Iceman

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The prisoner was then taken to a shower room, where his arms were pulled behind his back and shackled to window bars, forcing him to stand erect. Wearing an empty sandbag over his head, he was interrogated by a CIA officer identified in last week's issue of the New Yorker as Mark Swanner, who is not a covert operative. Roughly 90 minutes later, al-Jamadi was dead. One of the MPs who unshackled al-Jamadi's body from the window testified that blood gushed from his mouth and nose like "a faucet had turned on," flowing onto the floor where his hood now lay. The autopsy ruled that al-Jamadi's death was brought on by "blunt-force injuries" and "asphyxiation." Cyril Wecht, coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., and past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, examined the autopsy report and other records of the investigations and says, "The most likely cause of death was suffocation, which would have occurred when the sandbag was placed over Jamadi's head, as his arms were secured up and behind his back, constricting breathing." Swanner told investigators he did not harm the prisoner.

Investigators for the military and CIA were meticulous in probing al-Jamadi's death, conducting lengthy interviews with CIA operatives, prison guards and medical staff. One of the obstacles they ran into, however, was the absence of a key piece of evidence, the green, bloodstained nylon sandbag that hung over al-Jamadi's head. It was removed from the scene of his death and later disposed of by a CIA unit chief who supervised interrogators. CIA investigators wrote that in interviews months later, the unit chief maintained that "he did not think there was anything of importance on the hood," despite a "pancake-size" patch of blood that stained it. The investigators wrote that the officer said that "normally at the end of a mission he would throw used hood[s] out ... he thinks he just threw the hood in the trash" and that he might have said, "We don't want people picking it up and making jokes about it." The unit chief said in a military legal proceeding that he had undergone training in forensic science.

There were possible improprieties in the way the death scene was handled at Abu Ghraib. After al-Jamadi died, according to the documents, the blood that gushed from his mouth was mopped up and the floor cleaned with a chlorine-based solution by an MP on orders from a superior before the scene could be examined by any investigator. "You've got a real problem if anything on or near the body at death cannot be identified, photographed and examined for what it explains about the cause and who, if anyone, might be responsible," says Wecht, referring to the blood and the missing hood. The spokesman of a federal law-enforcement agency involved in the inquiries says, "If evidence is missing, there's no question that you would have to consider obstruction, tampering or charging someone as an accessory after the fact."

Two sources, including a U.S. government official, told TIME that when the CIA first interviewed Swanner, he withheld the fact that he had taken pictures of the corpse. It was only after another witness disclosed that fact that the pictures were obtained as evidence.