The Fourth Star (35 page)

“I understand you are looking for a kidnapped boy,” an Iraqi colonel whispered to Brigadier General Karl Horst as they walked out of a routine meeting inside the Interior Ministry. “You need to go to this location.” He
quietly pressed a piece of torn paper into the American officer’s hand. Horst, one of two assistant commanders in Baghdad, had been looking for the fifteen-year-old for several days, ever since the boy’s distraught parents told him that their son had been abducted by a Shiite militia with ties to the Interior Ministry. The scribbled note was his first lead.

The location listed on the colonel’s note was a three-story concrete building near the Green Zone, known as the Jadiriyah bunker. When Horst arrived there, a dozen police officers in camouflage uniforms blocked the entrance. He told them to let him pass. They refused. After an extended argument and a call to the interior minister, an Iraqi general showed up and agreed to take him on a quick tour of the facility.

For the next fifteen minutes they wandered up and down the same empty halls and stairwells. Horst was furious. “I want to see the prisoners,” he demanded.

“We’re getting there,” the general replied.

Down a dark hallway, he smelled a pungent odor coming from behind two locked double doors and ordered the jailers to open them. “The man who has the keys is gone for the day,” the general replied. Horst threatened to break open the lock with a sledgehammer, and the guards quickly produced the missing key. Inside the six-foot-by-twelve-foot room were a dozen blindfolded inmates. One of the prisoners began nodding toward a second set of locked doors at the back of the small, windowless room.

As the door opened, Horst was hit by an overpowering smell of dirty bodies, urine, rotten food, and human feces that made him retch. One hundred fifty-six prisoners—all but three of them Sunnis—were sitting in lines with their legs crossed. The guards stepped outside, and the prisoners began lifting up their shirts to show bloody whip marks where they had been beaten. Many of them had been held in the building for months. At least sixteen inmates had died there.

The guards identified themselves as part of an off-the-books unit within the Interior Ministry that patrolled largely Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad. “They’d run missions at night, gather up Sunnis, torture and kill them,” Horst recalled. Aside from a small cartoon-covered notebook with names written inside it, there were no records in the building.
None of the Sunnis in the torture facility had been charged with a crime. There was also no sign of the fifteen-year-old boy. The United States evacuated two dozen emaciated prisoners to a military hospital. Horst snapped some pictures and stuffed the worst-looking torture implements—whips, handcuffs, a bloody metal pole, and a mace—into a box as evidence. During his nine months in Baghdad, Horst had come to believe that the Shiite-dominated police were waging a coordinated campaign to clear Sunnis out of the capital’s mixed neighborhoods. Now he had proof.

Petraeus had left Iraq about two months prior to the discovery of the prison bunker to take command of the Army’s Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth. Before he was assigned there he’d been told that the Pentagon brass were considering him for three slots: the Leavenworth position, a top slot on the Joint Chiefs staff, and an assignment as the superintendent at the U.S. Military Academy. The superintendent job was a terminal three-star position, meaning that if Petraeus was put there, he could never get promoted again. In early 2005, Army secretary Fran Harvey had casually mentioned to Colonel Mike Meese, the Sosh department head, that Petraeus might be headed to West Point. Meese, whose position in Sosh gave him more influence than the average colonel, flipped. “Sir, that is the stupidest thing I have ever heard,” he said, arguing that it would take the talented general permanently out of the war.

Petraeus was given the Leavenworth slot. He’d been replaced in Iraq by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, a smart and affable officer who had led the U.S. division in Baghdad in 2003. Before Petraeus departed, he’d heard rumors that Shiite militias were infiltrating the Special Police Commando force that he had spotted training on the edge of the Green Zone in late 2004 and had enthusiastically backed. The first hints of a problem came when General Thavit, the hard-nosed Sunni who had founded the group, was shunted aside by the Shiite-dominated government in the spring of 2005. Over the course of the summer the commando force grew rapidly and complaints about them multiplied. In Tal Afar, McMaster’s regiment snapped pictures of the police commandos’ abuses and sought their permanent removal from the sector. Hix and Sepp’s report to Casey in August 2005 noted that several U.S. officers had expressed concern about the Shiite force.

Petraeus successfully pushed to have one police commando commander removed and cut off U.S. support to the Interior Ministry’s major crimes unit when its troops were caught abusing prisoners. But it was tough to get hard evidence of widely rumored atrocities because there weren’t enough advisory teams. The ten-man teams, each of which was assigned to a 500-man Iraqi unit, simply couldn’t keep eyes on the Iraqis twenty-four hours a day. “You had such limited means to put hands on [the commandos] and the need was so urgent to get them out there,” Petraeus recalled.

Horst had been worried about the Shiite police forces since early summer, when he had first mentioned his concerns to Casey. He thought that sectarian violence and militia infiltration of the police were a bigger problem than Al Qaeda extremists coming into the country from Syria. “That’s not the read that I am getting from my guys, Karl,” Casey had told him. Like Petraeus, Casey had heard the rumors of Shiite militias taking over the police but could never nail them down. “We were always trying to figure out what the heck was really going on there,” he recalled.

Horst believed the prison bunker proved that his earlier instincts had been right. A few hours after the last Sunnis had been taken from the facility he met with Casey and gave him the photographs from the prison bunker along with the box of torture implements. “Sir, this is a manifestation of the sectarian problem that we have been trying to describe,” he said.

Casey took off his glasses and rested them on the top of his head as he stared at Horst’s pictures. He rubbed his eyes with both hands, something he did only when he was thinking hard or worried. He’d seen this problem coming. In an e-mail to a senior U.S. embassy official nine months earlier, he’d outlined the potential pitfalls of his strategy to shift the fight to the security forces. One of the biggest was that the government would “politicize the security ministries, the military and the police forces, heightening Sunni anxieties.” Now Casey was staring at a brown cardboard box of torture implements that suggested his greatest fear was being realized.

The discovery couldn’t have come at a worse time. The second round of elections was set for December 30, just five weeks away. The Sunnis had boycotted the first vote in January 2005, and Casey was working to convince Sunni leaders to go to the polls in December. He reasoned that if the
Sunnis took part in the balloting and won a place in the new government, the fighting might die down some.

He promised Horst that he’d press Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to investigate what had happened at the bunker. He also wanted to assign an American team to probe whether the interior minister knew about the abuse. Horst’s body was coursing with adrenaline as he walked out of Casey’s small Green Zone office. He found Casey hard to read and wondered if he understood the severity of the problem. The secret prison proved that the U.S. strategy wasn’t working, Horst thought. The military was essentially handing power to a sectarian government and suspect militias. It was time, he believed, to try something different.

J
ust before nine in the morning a convoy of Chevy Suburbans pulled up at the Adnan Palace, an ugly pyramid-shaped building on the western edge of the Green Zone. Casey clambered out of one vehicle along with several aides and diplomats, pushed through the towering wooden doors, and headed up the marble staircase to the second floor where Bayan Jabr, the interior minister, was waiting. A small man with a closely cropped salt-and-pepper beard who had spent years in exile during Saddam Hussein’s rule, Jabr now presided over a force that included some 135,000 local police and 30,000 national police commandos. He and Casey settled into a pair of cushioned armchairs. Like other government officials, Jabr normally didn’t start working until much later in the day, but Casey had wanted to see him first thing.

“This is what we found,” Casey said, pointing at a cardboard box that his aide had brought to the meeting and placed on the low coffee table in front of them. It was the same container Karl Horst had shown Casey the day before, with the whips, shackles, and other torture devices that his men
had removed from the Jadiriyah bunker. Sticking out of the top was a fearsome-looking barbed club. Jabr recoiled and then let out a resigned sigh. “Iraqis,” he muttered, as if such behavior was a national trait. Casey handed him photographs of the emaciated, broken men who had emerged from the dank prison. He wanted no misunderstanding. The secret prison was in an Interior Ministry building less than a mile from his office and guarded by men on Jabr’s payroll. The only possible conclusion, Casey said in a level but firm voice, was that Jabr himself or the people around him had known about the facility and had condoned it.

With his French-cuff shirts and passable English, Jabr was one of the smoother members of the cabinet. He knew nothing about this, he sputtered. He was far removed from such sordid matters. Many of the guards had trained under Saddam Hussein, when all prisoners were treated this way. What did Casey expect? “We will have an investigation,” he said. The meeting lasted no more than fifteen tense minutes. By the time Jabr appeared before the press later to announce the joint Iraqi-U.S. investigation of the prison, the minister had recovered his composure. Most of the prisoners had been foreign terrorists, he told disbelieving Western reporters, holding up several passports. “Nobody was beheaded or killed.” It had been worse under Saddam.

Casey found Jabr hard to believe, too. After returning to his office, he ordered a secret investigation to assess whether the minister had known about the prison. Though it was never acknowledged publicly, U.S. and British intelligence eavesdropped on the top levels of the government, intercepting their cell phones and text messages. When the secret report came back a few weeks later, there was no definitive proof linking Jabr to the torture operation. But Casey was convinced that he at least had known about it. The bunker was run, the United States believed, by a relative of Jabr’s, known as Engineer Ahmed, who was often seen around Adnan Palace. The United States wanted to use the Jadiriyah incident to force personnel changes at the Interior Ministry, starting with Jabr. When Casey and U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad presented Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari with the classified report a few weeks later, the subject only seemed to make him weary. “He just said, ‘Okay. I’ll look at this,’” Casey recalled. He and Khalilzad talked about whether they should try to force
the prime minister to do something by giving him a deadline to take action or calling a press conference to further expose the abuses in the ministry. Casey decided it was the ambassador’s call. “As a military guy, I didn’t feel like I ought to dictate to the prime minister,” he explained. Eventually the subject of Jadiriyah was dropped. No one important was fired, and Jabr remained in senior government posts.

There were more episodes like this one the longer Casey remained in command, moments that raised fundamental questions about the course the United States was embarked upon in Iraq. If the Interior Ministry had been infiltrated by Shiite militias that abused Sunnis and was headed by a minister who denied the evidence, how could the United States proceed with its plans to place it in charge of security? Wasn’t that a path to failure? Casey wasn’t blind to these and other contradictions. He had been in command for nearly eighteen months, longer than any other senior American, military or civilian, and knew better than most the flaws at the core of the U.S. effort. Not that Casey doubted the course he was on. He was in many ways the prototypical officer, curious and thoughtful, open to new information and ready to adjust—but usually at the margins, enough to assure himself that whatever problems existed were being addressed, if not entirely resolved. The meetings at Adnan Palace and with the prime minister were good examples. He wasn’t going to let the incident pass, but he wasn’t going to provoke a showdown, either. It wasn’t his job. This was a sovereign country, and it was up to the ambassador to handle the prime minister and major political issues, not him. Besides, he told himself, the last round of national elections was only a few weeks away. The next government would be better.

Casey had arrived in Iraq determined to keep his goals limited, not to take on tasks beyond the military’s purview and ability. It was the same mind-set that the Army had adopted during the 1990s peacekeeping missions in an attempt to avoid another Vietnam-like quagmire, which had destroyed the force. The longer he remained in Baghdad the more he became convinced of this logic. Military power could drive down the violence and buy time to build a government. But the military couldn’t force the Iraqis to get along with each other; it couldn’t win the war. There were big downsides to expanding the military’s role. Asking the Army to do more, he believed,
risked breaking the institution to which he had dedicated his life and cared for deeply.

By early 2006, however, people who mattered were beginning to doubt him and the strategy. In November, Senator John McCain went public with his criticism in a major speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank a few blocks from the White House. The lunchtime audience overflowed into the hallways, straining to catch every word from the former prisoner of war who would shortly announce his candidacy for the presidency. “There is an undeniable sense that things are slipping,” he said, reciting the worrisome trends in Iraq. He was careful not to blame the White House or even Rumsfeld, whom he privately considered a disaster. Instead the former Navy pilot aimed his remarks at the military men in Baghdad. U.S. commanders had been slow to adopt “a true counterinsurgency strategy” that emphasized protecting the population and holding on to areas cleared of insurgents, he said. Wrongheaded plans were afoot to reduce troop levels and hand off the mission as quickly as possible to the Iraqi army and police. “Instead of drawing down, we should be ramping up,” he declared, and instead of rotating its generals after one-year tours, the Pentagon should keep the best of them in Iraq, mentioning Petraeus, Chiarelli, and others. “We need these commanders and their hard-won experience to stay in place.” He didn’t praise or even mention Casey. That was the way a mugging was done in Washington.