Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (19 page)

“I cannot understand what Westinson is blathering about. Can't find the papers he
must
have ready for the medic after the screening? ... Then he swears in a statement he went home for a second time to put his rifle back in his room! I mean, what is it with Brian? The rifle is supposed to be with him, at that desk at all times. Me and the guys just risked our friggin' lives to capture this mass murderer, and he's wandering around the base in some kind of a daze.

“By the way, Brian's room is situated at the way far end from the holding cell, in the back line, against the high outer wall, which I guess took him about seven minutes round trip, each time he left, depending on how much time he spent looking, first for his papers and then for the rifle. What kind of a guard is that?”

There is no dispute that Sam, Jon, and Matt's visit to the holding cell was very brief. Matt says between twenty and thirty seconds, no more. When Westinson re-entered the area Sam checked that he was okay, because this senior noncommissioned SEAL officer understood that the nineteen-year-old Brian had never been in sole charge of a prisoner before this—any prisoner, that is, never mind one of this obvious importance. Brian's boss had recently departed.

“Jon and I were there because of Sam's rigid sense of duty, with a bit of curiosity thrown in,” said Matt. “We would not have bothered if Sam had not been hitching a ride. And right after that brief stop the three of us left together and drove back to the galley for breakfast. I mean, we'd been up all night. It was just getting light.”

It's a SEAL tradition that unless some form of war breaks out, men who have returned from a night mission are given the chance to have a long sleep, perhaps from 0600 to 1600. Kidnapping armed terrorist commanders is tiring work.

And by 0600 on this Wednesday morning, the men of Echo Platoon had crashed thankfully into their bunks before the sun rose above the Iraqi desert. No one had any difficulties sleeping the deep, untroubled slumber of the brave and the just.

Two hours later, however, an unscripted part of the program came blundering into their lives.

Every SEAL who'd taken part in Objective Amber was awakened shortly after 0800 and ordered to report immediately to Danny's recreation room for a full muster, over which Lieutenant Jimmy would preside.

Matt knew immediately this was important. No one awakens an entire platoon of Navy SEALs who'd been up all night unless there had been some kind of a drama.

The SEAL assault leader from Perrysburg knew it could be bad. What he did not know was that the roof was about to fall in on his entire world.

5

A PRESUMPTION OF GUILT

Matt had run a textbook-perfect attack, brought the prisoner in alive and unharmed for interrogation, and was now about to be pilloried by the US Navy for cruelty! “Holy shit,” said Matt.

T
he seven principal US Navy SEALs who had stormed the desert hideaway of Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi came striding through the Camp Schwedler compound on the double that morning. They walked alone, each man confident that his own conduct throughout Objective Amber had been exemplary. Not one of the seven had the slightest idea what was going on.

One by one they reached Danny's recreation room and sat down opposite a surprisingly grim-looking Lieutenant Jimmy. Danny's, normally a place to hang out and relax, watch television, or play video games, was no place for games right now. Lieutenant Jimmy's angry face said it all. He had always been a balanced, calm man, and right now, according to Matt McCabe, “I'd never seen him that furious. Jimmy was seriously ticked off.”

While the Echo assault force had been dead to the world, there had been an unfolding set of truly grotesque circumstances. Shortly before 0800 the Iraqi police had come for Al-Isawi to transport him to their
detention center in the nearby city of Al-Karmah, eleven miles northeast of Fallujah.

When Lieutenant Jimmy went to remove the prisoner from the holding cell there was blood on his robe and his lower lip. It instantly became clear to the SEAL lieutenant that the al-Qaeda man was claiming prisoner abuse, that someone had knocked him about.

His bloody appearance should not have been a shock, as the tactic of self-inflicted injuries appears to be a standard ploy in the infamous al-Qaeda instruction book, the
Manchester Manual
, discovered in the year 2000 and so named because it was found in an al-Qaeda “safe house” in England's great northwestern city and Muslim stronghold.

Not only did bin Laden's senior operators write it; it also still stands as the definitive handbook on how a jihadist is expected to wage his holy war, including religious justifications and many quotations from the Koran.

The eighteen-chapter manual had instructed almost every captive in Guantanamo Bay, giving instructions on how to overthrow all “godless regimes” and replace them with the regimes guided by the teachings of Islam. It teaches terrorists about spying and gathering intel; kidnapping enemy personnel, documents, secrets, and arms; assassinating enemy personnel; freeing “brothers” who have been captured by the enemy; and blasting and destroying places of amusement, immorality, and sin—plus embassies and bridges.

Its most significant section, however, deals with the required actions of the brothers after capture. The
Manual
orders them to insist on proving that state security inflicted torture on them. They must “always complain of mistreatment or torture while in prison.”

The pure deviousness of this always frustrated former US Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. “These detainees are trained to lie,” he stated. “They are trained to say they were tortured...their training manual says so.”

And that's not all their training manual decreed. In its opening pages were the words: “The confrontation we are calling for knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction. And the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun.”

Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi was a disciple of al-Qaeda, and like the rest of his kind, he lived by the
Manchester Manual
. And right now he was trying to prove he was mistreated while in US captivity. That much was obvious to anyone. All he needed was a lawyer.

Lieutenant Jimmy, Echo Platoon's officer-in-charge (OIC), found himself right in the middle of a dangerous controversy. He had observed the prisoner's lip injury and the blood on his robes, and he had provided a new dishdasha (a long usually white robe traditionally worn by men in the Middle East) before handing him over to the Iraqi police along with the $6,000 Matt had confiscated.

Lieutenant Jimmy had checked that the chief medic, Paddy, had given the detainee a clean bill of health after screening him inside the holding cell, and he'd awakened everyone who could possibly shed any light on the matter.

By 0830 every Team 10 SEAL who had laid eyes on Al-Isawi since he was escorted to the holding cell was called into Danny's, including the rookie master-at-arms.

What Lieutenant Jimmy wanted now was answers. If any one of his SEALs had whacked the Butcher, he wanted to know, because he, Jimmy, was obliged to write and then file a military report on precisely how Al-Isawi came to have blood on his dishdasha—blood and an injury that the Iraqi police had plainly seen.

And he knew his SEALs well. They are inherently unable to lie. They are too well versed in the one rule of the US Navy that is hammered into slabs of polished marble, the one rule that will cause any midshipman to be thrown out of the Naval Academy that day: lying cannot be tolerated.

From the youngest age the issue of truth is paramount. Serving combat officers in a warship that has been hit and burning cannot do anything for anyone except report the truth. There can be no versions, withholdings, or varnishing of the truth. It has to be the plain, simple, shining truth. Otherwise no one knows what the hell to do.

Navy SEALs, equally with battle commanders, have this stamped onto their hearts during BUD/S. No SEAL would dream of lying. All of them innately believe, regardless of whether they admit it, that the
wrath of God would somehow strike them down for lying to an officer or, indeed, to anyone who wears the Dark Blue.

Simply stated, they would be too darned scared. But in the US Navy fear is not the sole guardian of honesty. The creed of truth at all times is a part of naval law. It's the bedrock of the silent service. No matter the misdemeanor, every serving officer knows that when he asks, he will be told the truth. It's in the DNA of every one of his men.

SEALs, as they must, believe themselves superior to all enemies. For any one of them to stoop to commit the naval sin of lying would be to break some kind of a sacred trust. Lieutenant Jimmy knew one thing above all else: when he asked his men whether anyone had punched Al-Isawi in the mouth or anywhere else, he would receive an honest answer.

This knowledge did not, however, lighten his mood. Because, as the officer in command of Objective Amber, he was empowered to investigate but obliged to report. Senior command would come straight to him for an explanation of the possible abuse of the prisoner while under the care of SEAL Team 10's Echo Platoon.

Lieutenant Jimmy called the informal meeting to order and briefly outlined the situation: Al-Isawi had come out of his cell with blood around his mouth and on his robe, with a minor cut inside his lower lip.

“Who knows anything about this?” he said. “Because the CO is going to want answers. Prisoner abuse, as you all know, is taken very, very seriously around here.”

The officer gazed around the room. Gazed at his brave and dedicated SEALs, and it was immediately apparent that no one had the slightest idea what he was talking about. Certainly not the principal outsider, MA3 Brian Westinson, the duty guard and a non-SEAL who Matt said was making it clear that he saw nothing, heard nothing, and knew nothing.

“Brian also admitted he had been absent from his post,” said Matt. “Which, despite the plain implication of wrongdoing, opened up a window of opportunity—that someone else had sneaked in there while Brian was absent and attacked Al-Isawi.”

But the rest of the SEALs seemed merely bewildered. As indeed was Lieutenant Jimmy, who would very soon confirm that his men had never shown any behavioral issues while under his command and that they were all disciplined professionals.

In that room there was an unmistakable feeling of disbelief that any one of these trusted, supremely responsible servicemen would have done such a thing—and then stood right here and told a barefaced lie to their officer in command, right in front of everyone.

“There was something weird about the whole thing,” recalls Jon Keefe. “I just could not imagine any of the guys I worked real close with—you know, Matt, Sam, Eric, Rob, or Jason, and certainly not Carlton Milo Higbie the Twelfth—could have possibly behaved in that way. For what?”

(Jon provided himself with endless amusement by constantly increasing and varying the birth numbers after Carl's name. This was, however, probably the final time he would ever find anything remotely funny about anything even distantly connected with the case of “Who Punched the Handcuffed Butcher of Fallujah?”)

No one could help. And for Lieutenant Jimmy this was a matter of extreme concern. Even after the meeting was ended and some of the SEALs stood around talking informally, the officer was given no clues. No one could remember anything that might have shed light.

Lieutenant Jimmy and Leading Petty Officer Sam Gonzales could not even help themselves. In the past hour they had escorted Al-Isawi to the handover and had both noticed that Ahmad Hashim's behavior had changed dramatically when he came in sight of the Iraqi police. He suddenly started moaning and acting as though he were in pain, spitting blood from his mouth.

But this only deepened the mystery. Had someone really punched him? Or had he just braced himself and then bitten his own lip, more or less in accordance with the teachings of the
Manchester Manual?

At this point it was obvious that Lieutenant Jimmy was most seriously on the hook. Because it was he to whom the high command would look for some kind of an explanation. Any kind. But something. And right now he had nothing.

And the principal military powers in Iraq were still neurotic over the worst military scandal to involve the United States for years: the outrages at nearby Abu Ghraib Jail (2004-2006), involving a whole string of incidents—human rights violations in the form of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, with reports of torture, rape, sodomy, and homicide of prisoners.