Word: cardona
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Even for a people used to waking up to the sound of explosions, Iraqis were jolted by a Friday morning bombshell: the news, first reported on time.com, that Sgt. Santos Cardona, viewed here as one of the villains of Abu Ghraib, had been ordered back to their country. Although Iraqi and Arab media have been slow to pick up on the story (the news cycle here tends to be a day or two behind the U.S.) many in Baghdad read about it online, and word quickly spread. The reaction was predictable: total outrage...
...Officials said that the Iraqi government was not consulted on Sgt. Cardona's new posting. "He was sent without the knowledge of the Iraqi government," says Said Fadil al-Shara'a, internal affairs advisor to Nuri al-Maliki. "Nobody who has abused Iraqis should be allowed into this country, whether or not he has been convicted...
...Embassy declined TIME's request for a comment, saying questions about Sgt. Cardona were "military matters and issues." On Friday morning, in an apparent response to the publication of TIME's story, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that Cardona's transfer is being "evaluated" and that his movement with his unit into Iraq from a staging area in Kuwait has been "stopped." But the U.S. military in Iraq went further. "He's not coming to Iraq," Lt. Col. Josslyn L. Aberle, chief of media operations for the Multinational Corps in Iraq stated flatly. And indeed, by Friday afternoon...
...Iraqis contacted by TIME said it was especially galling that Sgt. Cardona would have been involved in training police. To political analyst Tahseen al-Sheekli, it suggested "that America wants to build a police force that doesn't believe in human rights...
...Even those who say they would have been willing to give Sgt. Cardona the benefit of the doubt, quickly add that his presence in Iraq was a bad idea. "He was convicted and punished for his acts, and even the Islamic Sharia'a says he should be forgiven," says Hussain al-Musawi, who heads the Shi'ite Political Council, an influential group within the Shi'ite coalition that dominates the Iraqi parliament. "But I don't think that the Iraqi government should allow him to enter the country-I think it will do whatever necessary to prevent that...