Dirty Wars (31 page)

All task force personnel were required to sign
nondisclosure agreements
. Interrogators were often told that the White House and Rumsfeld were watching their operations closely. Perry stated that he saw McChrystal at NAMA on more than one occasion. The personnel at NAMA, he alleged, were given the impression that the techniques had been approved from on high because they “were only like a few steps away in the chain of command from the Pentagon.” The task force commanders, he said, would tell the interrogators that the White House or Pentagon had been directly briefed on their progress, particularly when it came to intel on Zarqawi. The commanders would tell them: “Rumsfeld was informed, such and such a report is on Rumsfeld's desk this morning, read by Secdef.” He
added, “It's a big morale booster for people working 14 hour days. Hey, we got to the White House!” Malcolm Nance told me, “When you have the President of the United States setting the pace, well you're gonna get Abu Ghraib, you are going to get abuse. You've got the intelligence community throwing the book out to the point where, in their world, no one was ever subjected to ‘abuse' by the US Armed Forces.”

Major General Keith Dayton, the commander of the Iraq Survey Group, which was established in June 2003 to coordinate the hunt for WMDs, described the situation at NAMA as “a
disaster waiting to happen
,” warning the Pentagon's inspector general that he needed to “slam some rules on this place right away to basically keep ourselves from getting in trouble and make sure these people are treated properly.” Dayton described cases of prisoners transferred to conventional military custody from the task force with signs of being “badly burned,” having two black eyes, “back almost broken,” “multiple contusions on his face.” Soldiers and personnel from Camp Cropper (near Camp NAMA) stated under oath that detainees arrested and interrogated by the task force and SEAL Team 5 had been delivered to Camp Cropper showing obvious signs of abuse.

There are at least two known cases of Iraqis dying immediately after being transferred from the custody of task force Navy SEAL commandos. After what a SEAL team described as a “struggle,” on April 5, 2004, the SEALs delivered prisoner
Fashad Mohammad
to a conventional base, where he was interrogated and then allowed to sleep, at which point he became unresponsive and later died. The medical examiner's report on his death, which was released under the Freedom of Information Act, said that Mohammad “died in U.S. custody approximately 72 hours after being apprehended. By report, physical force was required during his initial apprehension during a raid. During his confinement, he was hooded, sleep deprived, and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood.” Although the report described “multiple minor injuries, abrasions and contusions” and “blunt force trauma and positional asphyxia,” it concluded that the cause of death was “undetermined.” On November 4, 2003,
Manadel al Jamadi
died at Abu Ghraib prison, amid allegations that he had been beaten to death by members of SEAL Team 7. One team member was court-martialed but was ultimately acquitted—and nobody was charged with homicide.

By December 2003, a confidential Pentagon memo warned, “It seems clear that” the task force “
needs to be reined in
with respect to its treatment of detainees.” But the torture and abuse at NAMA continued, particularly if a detainee was believed to have any information about Zarqawi or his network. All of the interrogations were aimed at extracting intel that
would lead to the next raid, the next strike and the next capture or kill. In an “operations center” near NAMA, “task force analysts
pored over intelligence
collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids,” the
New York Times
reported. “Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.”

In early 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a scathing report on the mass arrests of Iraqis. It asserted that “
over a hundred ‘high value detainees
' have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight” at a “High Value Detainees” section at the Baghdad Airport. Without specifically singling out the task force, the report described the raids that led to arrests of scores of Iraqis. Soldiers would burst into homes

usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped and sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest—sometimes in pyjamas or underwear—and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyeglasses.

The report cited “military intelligence officers” who told the Red Cross “that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross findings echoed those of the classified military report in late 2003, which warned that the task force's abuse of detainees combined with the mass arrests of Iraqis gave the impression that the United States and its allies were acting like “gratuitous enemies” of the Iraqi people.

When the military finally was permitted to investigate NAMA, its agents received threats from personnel at the camp, while DIA interrogators had their vehicle keys confiscated and were “ordered” not to discuss what they had seen with anyone. On June 25, 2004, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, then director of the DIA, sent a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone with a
list of complaints
from DIA personnel at Camp NAMA. One interrogator had
his photos confiscated after taking pictures of injured detainees, and others complained that task force commandos forbade them from leaving the camp without permission, even for a haircut, and from talking to outsiders; they threatened them and screened their e-mails. Despite these efforts at suppression, news of detainee abuse at NAMA made its way up the ranks, and eventually to lawmakers.

In 2004, under pressure from a handful of lawmakers, Stephen Cambone, whose SSB was actually enabling the harsh interrogation ops at NAMA,
scribbled a handwritten letter
to his deputy, Lieutenant General Boykin. Dated June 26, 2004, it read, “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable. In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26.” An aide to Boykin said, “At the time [Boykin] told Mr. Cambone he had found
no pattern of misconduct
with the task force.”

Despite all the whistleblowers' reports, an official US military report on alleged abuses at NAMA and other facilities concluded that the prisoners' descriptions of torture were lies. Accusations of wrongdoing and misconduct by members of the task force were handled in-house rather than through traditional military disciplinary procedures. In one case, when an Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) agent attempted to investigate a member of the task force for abusing a detainee, it was quashed because, in the words of the CID, “the
subject of this investigation
is a member of TF 6-26” and the task force's own security officer “has accepted investigative jurisdiction in this matter.”

In all, some
thirty-four task force members
would be “disciplined” for misconduct, and at least eleven members were removed from the unit. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that “a small number of task force members have been administratively disciplined, but not court-martialed. Five Army Rangers associated with the task force were reportedly court-martialed for abuses they carried out against detainees,” but “the sentences were all six months or less. There are no indications that officers up the chain of command [were] held accountable, despite serious questions about officers' criminal culpability.”

An air force interrogator who worked with the JSOC task force hunting Zarqawi told me that he “
did not see any form of oversight
for the kill or capture campaign.” He said he witnessed and stopped several cases of abuse, which he communicated up the chain of command. “With the cases in which I reported abuses, there was no accountability. In one case, an interrogator was merely recalled from a remote location and then put right back to work at the main prison. The atmosphere was such that secrecy was the priority.” He added, “My general impression is that occasional
law-breaking would be tolerated as long as it never got out to the press.”

The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantánamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan. When Abu Ghraib prison was taken over by US forces and converted from a Saddam-era prison and torture chamber into a US-run gulag, the Americans who set it up simply took the task force's standard operating procedures and, once again,
changed the letterhead
and implemented them.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke wide open in April 2004, when major news organizations released photos showing systematic abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners being held at the prison by the US military. As more photos became public, they showed naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, angry dogs growling over shuddering prisoners, mock executions. When Major General Antonio Taguba
eventually investigated
, he found documentary evidence of acts even worse than those depicted in the published photos, but the White House chalked up the torture and abuse to a few “bad apples,” and the public would never see the full extent of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib.

The horrors of the US-run prisons of Iraq may never come fully into light, but one thing was abundantly clear: Tactics that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, had been considered the sovereign realm of America's most unsavory “dark side” forces, and that had required approval from the highest levels of power in the United States for each escalation, now had become the widely accepted standard operating procedure for handling detainees in a huge battlefield with massive numbers of prisoners being held by the US military.

CAPTAIN IAN FISHBACK
graduated from West Point in 2001 and deployed with the 82nd Airborne to Afghanistan for a combat tour from August 2002 to February 2003. In late 2003, he deployed to Iraq, where he was based at Forward Operating Base Mercury. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Fishback witnessed the migration of the tactics from the black sites to the military's own prisons and filtration sites. On May 7, 2004, Fishback heard
Rumsfeld's congressional testimony
. The defense secretary had said that the United States was following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the “spirit” of the conventions in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld's statement did not jibe with what Fishback had seen, so he began seeking answers through his chain of command. “
For 17 months
, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command
through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General's office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantánamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men,” Fishback recalled, adding that he was “unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”

When Fishback began asking questions about the torture and abuse he had witnessed, he was blackballed by the military. He was confined to Fort Bragg and was
denied permission
to leave the base to attend a scheduled briefing on Capitol Hill. In a letter to Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Fishback wrote: “Some do not see the need for [investigations]. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States?” Fishback's protest barely registered a blip on the radar.

In the summer of 2004, McChrystal officially
moved the task force
forty miles north of Baghdad to the Balad Air Base and brought the HVT interrogation and “filtration” site that had been housed at NAMA with him. But a change of venue would not end the abuses.

McChrystal flatly denied that commanders at NAMA “ordered the mistreatment of detainees,” asserting that any abuse was the result of “
lapses of discipline
” among individual members of the task force. Allegations of systematized torture at NAMA, he said, were false. “That wasn't the case before I assumed command and wasn't true under my command nor under my successors,” McChrystal wrote in his memoir.