DUGSPUR - Carroll County resident Tom Harman knows how the world will remember Spc. Sabrina Harman. His daughter is the woman crouching behind a pyramid of naked and hooded prisoners in one of the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

She is the woman bending over a dead Iraqi in another photograph, giving a rubber-gloved thumbs-up and grinning an oddly jubilant smile.

A sadistic solider with an angel's face; that is the public image of Sabrina Harman.

But to Tom Harman, her father, these pictures do not tell the whole story of his daughter's life at the prison in Iraq.

"She's not a bad person," Harman said last week in the first interview he has given about his daughter. "She's not a person who enjoys torturing people."

Last week, Sabrina Harman was sentenced to six months in prison for abusing Iraqi prisoners in 2003. In addition to taking pictures, the 27-year-old was convicted of charges that she attached wires to a detainee's hands as he perched on a box, believing he would be electrocuted if he fell, jumped on other prisoners and wrote "rapeist" on the leg of another detainee.

Harman pleaded not guilty to the charges, which could have led to a maximum 5 1/2 -year prison term.

Tom Harman said he believes that his daughter should not have been held responsible for the detainee abuse. He thinks she is a scapegoat for her Army superiors, whom he said ordered her to break down the prisoners using any means.

"Somebody had to take the fall. Why not make it the pizzamaker?" he asked, alluding to Sabrina Harman's job at a Papa John's in Northern Virginia before she was called up for duty.

Spc. Sabrina Harman with dead Iraqi prisoner and as she arrived at the Fort Hood courthouse May 17 for trial on prisoner abuse charges.

Associated Press

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Tom Harman of Dugspur says  says he thinks the Army served up his daughter as a scapegoat.

Sabrina Harman is a sacrifice, he said, offered up by the Army after the abuse photos became public in 2004.

"It's like shining a light on a bunch of cockroaches," he said of his daughter's superiors. "They all ran."

Sabrina Harman's case may seem like an extreme example of a father making excuses for his daughter's mistakes. But he said he thinks others would come to the same conclusion if they knew more about her life at Abu Ghraib.

Tom Harman and his wife, Patricia, live on 6 1/2 acres in Dugspur. He's a retired U.S. Park Police officer who moved from Northern Virginia in 1995, three years after he and Sabrina's mother divorced. Sabrina was 11 at the time.

Sabrina Harman grew up at her mother's home in Lorton and visited Dugspur a few times a year.

Standing near a picture of his daughter in her Army dress uniform last week, Tom Harman talked about picking blackberries and riding four-wheelers during Sabrina's visits. Growing up, she was a kind and gentle girl who took bugs outside to let them go instead of killing them, he said.

Sabrina Harman joined the Army Reserve in 2001, after failing a test to join the U.S. Park Police, Tom Harman said. She thought that serving as a military policewoman would help her become a police officer when she got out, he said.

Tom Harman keeps the letters and e-mail messages Sabrina sent from boot camp and from Iraq. In the letters, Tom Harman sees a personal example of how life in a war zone can make a soldier do horrible acts.

It's a transformation that civilians who learned about his daughter through the photos can never understand, he said.

From Army boot camp at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., Sabrina Harman wrote with pride about rappelling from heights, training with guns and learning to wolf down a meal in less than five minutes.

In a dashed-off writing style with little punctuation, she also questioned her choice of joining the Army.

"Im almost sure the army is not for me being trained to kill I just cant grasp," she wrote in a March 2002 letter.

Sabrina Harman's unit, the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cresaptown, Md., was called up for service in Iraq in February 2003, and assigned to train Iraqi police in the southern town of Hilla.

Tom Harman said that his daughter liked the Iraqi people she met there. But at some point, she seemed to become desensitized to the violence in the town.

In a July 2003 letter, Sabrina Harman offered this description of death and combat: "On June 23 i saw my first dead body I took pictures! The other day I heard my first grenade go off. Fun!"

Harman's unit was moved from Hilla to the Abu Ghraib prison in October 2003. In her letters from the prison, Harman said she was homesick. She rarely mentioned the prisoners or her work.

On Christmas Eve 2003, Harman wrote about Saddam Hussein's capture: "Im still in shock they caught Saddam. Funny thing is we had prisoners here that told us a location and description of him. When he was caught it proved they weren't lying. They really did know where he was. Weird."

In Harman's letters, there is no mention of prisoner abuse until after a military policeman gave Army investigators a computer disc with abuse photos from the prison in early 2004.

As the prison scandal broke, Harman e-mailed that she was afraid of getting in trouble, but denied doing anything wrong.

On April 13, 15 days before the pictures of her with Iraqi prisoners were shown on "60 Minutes II", she e-mailed her father: "The government is trying to cover their a-- and put the blame on us ... I am staying strong and hoping this will end soon, hate to say it but this will be in the news and it's going to be huge."

On May 1, Harman wrote that she was facing 17 years in prison: "im in trouble for taking the pictures mainly and i have an assault charge which NEVER happened and can prove. i've never hit anyone ever. theres a lot more to the story that is not being told, so dont believe all of whayt you hear on the news. I love you and i hope this ends soon without jail time."

In other messages to her father, Sabrina Harman wrote that her commanders, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, knew about and condoned detainee abuse in the prison.

Sanchez, who was then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, was later cleared of culpability in the abuse by an Army inspector general's report.

Many of Sabrina Harman's messages to her father ask for his support. "I just hope you believe that this stuff here is not me and never was," she wrote. "I should have never signed up but everything happens for a reason, right?"

Tom Harman said he knows that the photos of his daughter taken at Abu Ghraib don't match his description of her as a loving, kind, young woman. And he knows that his daughter participated in terrible things.

Asked about his reaction the first time he saw the pictures of his daughter with the prisoners, Harman struggled to answer.

"I didn't know what to think," he said, shaking his head. "It's uncharacteristic of her. That's all I can say."

Sabrina Harman's mother, Robin Harman, has said in media reports that her daughter took pictures of the abuse to expose poor treatment of detainees at the prison. Robin Harman declined to comment about her daughter to The Roanoke Times, saying she wanted to talk to Sabrina first.

Sabrina Harman's attorney Frank Spinner did not respond to calls from The Roanoke Times.

Tom Harman said he wants to believe his daughter was documenting the abuse in the photographs, but he knows that does not explain her posing in the photos herself.

He said he can only guess that she posed with the bodies because of peer pressure, to show that she was one of the group.

Harman said he was sick and could not make the trip to Texas for his daughter's military trial at Fort Hood.

When he last talked to Sabrina in early May, he said she was worried about going to prison, but was happy for the case to be over.

Sabrina Harman is being held in detention at Fort Hood pending an Army decision on where she will be transferred, a Fort Hood spokesman Cecil Green said Tuesday.

When she is released, Tom Harman said that Sabrina plans to stay with him in Dugspur. The public might always remember her from the Abu Ghraib photos. But her father and stepmother said they are trying to forget.

"We accept her for this situation," Tom Harman said. "It's not something we understand. But it's hard not to accept her. That's how I see it."

Staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.