Goal #5: Improve the effectiveness of the operation by teaching these young men and women how to interview—rather than interrogate and torture—prisoners.
For the first ten hours of the long flight, I focused on these goals, watching the video again and again to look for clues about how to achieve them. After I had firmly established the goals in my mind, I began to ask myself, How are you going to accomplish these goals? I then turned my efforts to crafting my eleven-step action plan. My napkin was getting filled up:
1. Have one boss and only one boss for myself: the commanding general. I needed to be a separate observer/ consultant and not have to report to the commander at Abu Ghraib nor to the intel unit commander. Why was this so important? If I reported to the intel unit commander, I knew that I would lack effectiveness. Reporting to one or two other officers prior to discussing anything with the general would significantly dilute my concerns. Instead, I needed to be a special staff officer who was part of the general’s staff, and who reported only to him. I would request that Major General Miller have me report to him and only him.
2. Be an active, positive influential force at all times. I learned from my tour at Gitmo that I needed to be visible, involved, active, solution-focused, and not blame any of the young soldiers for the previous failures. Bad leadership was to blame, first and foremost, not the poor efforts of the young Americans that I had the privilege of serving with.
3. Actively engage leadership in the work. My briefings on Abu Ghraib suggested that one problem that led to abuses was that junior enlisted men and women operated under the cloak of darkness, without supervision by senior officers or senior noncommissioned officers. I resolved, as the new leader, to become actively involved in all aspects of the mission.
4. Provide 100 percent supervision at all times to the soldiers overseeing the prisoner interviews. I would advise the intel leadership that if a psychologist was not present, we could not do interrogations—plain and simple. By having a psychologist present, the prisoner would be provided a level of protection. In the beginning it might be hard to accommodate this step due to massive understaffing of psychologists, but I intended for it, in time, to become standard practice.
5. Add cameras in all interview booths so that all interviews could be monitored simultaneously from one office.
6. Add multiple layers of supervision. Have a supervisor observing at all times either from behind a one-way observation mirror or on a video monitor.
7. Institute a medical monitoring process to identify abuses. If all detainees were given a brief physical prior to being interviewed, and then another one directly afterwards, it would be easy to identify if any overt physical abuse had occurred during the interview.
8. Perhaps most important of all the steps: Bring on board a military lawyer with expertise in the Geneva Conventions. Interrogations and plans must be reviewed to determine if the procedures and techniques were harmful, illegal, or violated the Geneva Conventions in any way.
9. Institute specific training for all interrogators. Similar to what I had found at Gitmo, my briefings indicated that most of the interrogators in Abu Ghraib were nineteen to twenty-five years old and had attended a three-month training school. The skill levels varied greatly, and as a result I would want to start holding training seminars to improve interviewing techniques.
10. Put clear policies on acceptable and unacceptable behaviors into place in writing. What constituted “abuse” needed to be defined precisely—and not tolerated.
11. Add roaming military police patrols. These MPs would make rounds at the intel facility for the entire time interrogations were being conducted.
My two days at Fort Bragg with Colonel Banks seemed to fly by. I read all the necessary classified reports, reviewed the classified and unclassified versions of the Taguba inspector general report and had several long conversations with Colonel Banks, who was disgusted with what we were seeing from our soldiers in Abu Ghraib but, like the rest of us, was not yet sure how to explain it. He did tell me that, from what he saw, one thing was clear: there was no effective leadership at the prison. He was sending me to determine the details of what had gone wrong and how to fix it, but he was already sure that the photos of abuse were evidence that no one had the reins in Abu Ghraib, that no one was exerting any control.
“Larry, remember, people will do what their leaders allow them to do,” he said.
I thought about that comment quite a bit as I continued my journey. I boarded a plane from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, International Airport that took me all the way to Germany. There I transferred planes and boarded a chartered DC-10 with four hundred other soldiers headed for Iraq via Kuwait City. As we flew, there was nothing but silence in the cabin. It seemed odd that we were flying into the heart of a dangerous combat zone, where death could await some of us, and most of these twenty-year-old boys and girls slept while listening to their iPods.
We arrived to a pitch-black abyss in Kuwait City at the Air Force Military Air Terminal. It was Zero Dark Thirty—impossible to know the day and time. I glanced at my young comrades and realized that even this darkness was strange to most of them. Most Americans have never experienced the level of darkness found in these countries.
We exited from the plane and a tall Army first sergeant yelled, “Fall in!” All four hundred sleep-deprived soldiers fashioned themselves into a crisp military formation. We remained in formation for about forty-five minutes until the semi truck with our bags arrived. Arranging ourselves in a long line, we passed the duffel bags down the line, stacking them side by side. Despite the orderliness of the process, it was indeed a shit mess. Finding my five Army green duffel bags among the identical five Army green duffel bags all four hundred soldiers brought took three hours. Finally, bags safely in my possession, I headed to the nearby huge tin warehouse that housed about one thousand Army green cots. I threw myself onto a cot, desperate for sleep.
It was hot as hell, despite being 3 a.m. As I dozed off to sleep, I didn’t feel right. It was hard to determine if it was the 130- degree heat or if I was getting sick. Finally, I sank into unconsciousness. The next day, I didn’t feel any better, and for the following forty-eight hours I did nothing but eat and sleep—and neither very efficiently. I was losing my voice but I couldn’t tell if I actually had a fever because it was 125 degrees outside and rising, and everything felt overheated. I had a hard time figuring out if I was sick or just plain miserable from the heat like everyone around me.
From Kuwait I boarded an Air Force C-130 cargo plane into Baghdad. As I boarded the plane I noticed there were three female MPs loading their gear onto it. The tallest of them could only have been five feet. The senior sergeant of the three picked up a .50 caliber machine gun—that’s a big, badass weapon—and slung it over her right shoulder while she carried an M16 and a can of ammo in her left hand. The other two female MPs had a double-barreled shotgun, an M16, and a 9mm pistol on each hip. The crew chief asked me, “Colonel, where would you like to sit?”
“Son, I want to sit right between those three rough-and-tough gals over there.”
“Sir . . . but you can sit up in the comfortable seat, up by the pilots,” he said helpfully.
“Partner, if this bird goes down and we get in a gunfight, the pilots won’t be able to save my old ass like those three girls right there,” I told him. “I want to sit right between those female MPs, and I’ll sit real close to the one with the .50 cal machine gun.”
I nestled in nice and cozy with the heavily armed soldiers and waited out the long ride into Baghdad. A few miles out from Baghdad, at 10,000 feet, the crew chief stood up and yelled, “Don your helmets and vest!” We did, and within minutes I felt the plane pick up speed. I knew what that meant: this big bird was doing a combat approach.
Here we go. This is gonna be some wild shit here, I thought.
A combat approach is used when landing at an airport in a combat zone, and it is truly something to experience at least once
in your life. Instead of a gentle, slow descent to the runway that would make your big fat plane an easy target for anyone on the ground, the pilot brings it in fast and furious, juking and jiving up and down, left and right. In an instant, this mammoth aircraft picked up speed and banked sharply at a 45-degree angle in a downward motion to my right, like we had suddenly gone over that first big hill on a roller coaster. It was wicked! The huge lumbering plane was dancing like it had delusions of being a nimble fighter jet. The sailor across from me barfed on the floor of the plane and then started shouting prayers loudly with puke all over his chin. The twenty-eight-year-old pilot leveled the aircraft for what seemed to be three seconds. Then the plane suddenly angled straight down and it seemed as though we were plunging nose first to the ground. Then we leveled out at the very last second and came to a sudden stop. I never knew a C-130 could land so fast and come to a complete halt in so little time. When the plane finally stopped moving, it felt like my nuts were in my throat.
“Welcome to Iraq,” somebody on the plane mumbled amid the groans as we all tried to get our shit together again. I was finally here and now it was time for me to get to work. The hell of Abu Ghraib still awaited me, but now it was just around the corner.
5
House of Strange Fathers
June 2004
When I arrived in Baghdad, I was greeted by General Miller’s staff and the Abu Ghraib intel center’s acting commander. We loaded into an armored Humvee and drove to the tent reserved for high-level military personnel for the night. It was just another tent with cots on the floor, not a big step up from the tin shed with cots in Kuwait, but with one big difference. With the outside temperature still around 100 degrees, this VIP tent was a frigid 49 degrees. I slept in my clothes because it was so damn cold.
The following morning, I met with General Miller, my former commander at Gitmo, to get my marching orders. Just the sight of him reassured me that we had a good soldier in charge here. If the late great Marine Corps general Chesty Puller had ever had a twin brother, it would have been General Geoffrey D. Miller. I welcomed the opportunity to work for him again. You never left General Miller’s office unclear about your purpose in life or what your exact mission was to be. He was about five feet five inches tall with a notable underbite. He would have been a better choice as an actor for the colonel than even John Wayne in the 1960s film about Vietnam, The Green Berets. Despite his small size, General Miller could organize soldiers with passion and a clear sense of purpose. We respected him and wanted to work for him. He measured every word with an uncanny efficiency. This gift, coupled with his telling movements and expression, provided the observer with volumes of information.
Inside the general’s office at Task Force 134 headquarters, Miller immediately focused on the mission—he was not one for much small talk. He launched into business, with his customary drawl.
“Larry, we could sure use your help,” he said, growling out the last word so it sounded more like hep. “The JIDC [Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center] doesn’t have a lot of good leaders like you. I want you to teach them how to do this the right way, teach ’em how to get prisoners to talk without all the harsh stuff. You know how to do it. You will report to me and only me.”
With his instructions on the table, he looked me in the eye. “Now, what are your questions?”
I had none. It was exactly clear what he wanted me to do: save this rapidly sinking ship.
At 2 p.m. the following day, General Miller, the acting director, and the five-man security team for the general and me boarded a Black Hawk helicopter. Because of the dangers in Iraq, all generals traveled with a well-armed security force. Twenty minutes later, we landed at Abu Ghraib. I tried to brace myself for whatever I would find here, knowing it wouldn’t be good.
As I stepped off the helicopter, I recalled Truman Capote’s description of the small, remote Kansas town in his book In Cold Blood. Americans didn’t “happen across” Abu Ghraib. Before the news of the abuses, most Americans had never even heard of this place, and the few who had rarely gave it a passing thought. This was a place you forgot as soon as possible.
Abu Ghraib was a wasteland, nothing but sand and rocks and run-down buildings, with garbage and raw sewage everywhere you looked. This was a terrible place to be, for anyone.
As I stood there surveying the scene, it struck me that I didn’t even know what this place was named for. Was it named after somebody or did the name mean something? I asked Sam, an Arabic interpreter from the intel center, and found that the meaning of Abu Ghraib held a very ominous and dark metaphorical message, even prior to the beginning of the global war on terrorism. The actions of U.S. soldiers here were not the first abuses to be attached to this name.
The word Abu refers to “father” in Arabic, and Ghraib has been interpreted to mean “strange.” Loosely translated, Abu Ghraib was interpreted by the locals to mean “the house of strange fathers.” It was built by the British in the 1950s and ’60s. Since its beginnings, it took on three or four ominous and sinister purposes in the Saddam Hussein regime. Initially, it was an insane asylum much like those found around the world before 1956. Before then, psychiatrists lacked the ability to control schizophrenics with medication, leading to many of the horrible scenes we think of from the worst mental hospitals of that time. Then Thorazine, a very effective antipsychotic medication, hit the market in the United States. It became the most effective clinical tool of its time in managing hallucinations, paranoia, and other symptoms of schizophrenia. But not in Iraq. Even in the modern era, psychiatrically ill patients were sentenced to Abu Ghraib without these modern advances, locked away, and the keys discarded. These patients were strapped to beds and beaten or tortured into submission by Iraqi guards.
Later, Abu Ghraib functioned as the torture chamber for those who either disagreed with Saddam Hussein or created a quiet discontent with his wishes. Iraqi citizens were hanged, mauled by animals, tortured, and brutalized in ways most Americans could never fathom. Some of the very worst of Saddam Hussein’s atrocities occurred right here, in these wretched buildings at Abu Ghraib.
Third, Abu Ghraib served as the center of the Hussein-era maximum-security prison system. Even a country abused by a bloodthirsty dictator has its share of hardcore criminals, and this is where Iraq sent them. Abu Ghraib housed the worst of the worst criminals—rogue degenerates, murderers, rapists, and sociopaths.
Fourth, the Abu Ghraib prison was to sequester away husbands and fathers who resisted turning their wives or daughters over to Saddam or his two favorite sons to satisfy the Husseins’ perverted sexual desires. If either Saddam or his sons sought the company of a man’s wife and the husband did not consent, the husband was arrested by a member of Saddam’s thug guard and brought to Abu Ghraib for convincing sessions. The husband or father would be beaten and tortured beyond recognition until he would consent to having his wife raped by either Saddam Hussein or one of his sons. Thousands of women were hidden away in sex harems across Iraq.
My God, this truly is hell on earth. The things that must have happened here, even before we showed up . . .
Sam waited for me to absorb all he had told me, finally adding his own commentary. “Abu Ghraib is indeed a house of strange fathers, a place of many strange fathers. It has had many ghosts,” he said quietly. “The U.S. should not have come to Abu Ghraib.”
I couldn’t disagree with Sam, based on what I had just heard. I knew already that the Iraqi government told us not go to Abu Ghraib, that it was not the right place for any kind of U.S. operation, but I didn’t really understand that warning until I was there at this “house of strange fathers.” I came to think this phrase was a powerful metaphor for not only the prison of Abu Ghraib but also the half-assed, poorly planned postwar occupation. There really wasn’t much of a plan. I remembered how, as the whole world watched, President Bush stood on that aircraft carrier and declared that the war was over. To us on the battlefield it seemed as though the administration
believed that, like in the first Gulf War, the Iraqis would lay down their weapons and go home. But out on the front lines, it was clear there was no well-thought-out plan for what to do with the 20,000 prisoners we soon accumulated.
That’s how we ended up in Abu Ghraib and why I was standing there wondering if I could fix the mess we’d made. Our leaders had expected the occupation of Iraq to be a very, very short-term venture and the prison at Abu Ghraib was already there, so why not use it? We soon found the answer to that question. As many soldiers would say, right from the beginning, the U.S. occupation of Abu Ghraib was a “Charlie Foxtrot,” which could be loosely translated to mean a real shit mess. The big picture was that it was a failed postwar strategic plan. At the same time America watched our “strange fathers” lead us into a war that we now know had little to do with a real threat at that time. Strained logic forced us to swallow the idea that Saddam actually had something to do with 9/11.
All of this was running through my mind as I was finally surveying the scene at Abu Ghraib. As the interpreter said “house of strange fathers” to me for the third or fourth time, I began to think that not only was this place a house of strange fathers but also that it took a bunch of strange fathers to actually believe this ragtag Iraqi army was any real threat to America’s national security. I was not an infantry officer, but even I could see that the best Iraqi infantry unit would get their ass kicked in a fight with any Boy Scout troop in North Carolina.
As we walked from one side of the compound to the other I was increasingly lightheaded and nauseated. With an apology, I asked the general to excuse me because I didn’t feel well. I found my way to my room, an actual old prison cell with bars, about thirty square feet in size. I remembered Sergeant Danny’s warning to me to stay in an old prison cell, not one of the tents, so I at least understood why I had been put in such a shithole. In Abu Ghraib, apparently, this was high living. I collapsed onto the Army cot and passed out. Only later would I learn I was suffering from what was called the “Iraqi crud,” which was soldiers’ slang for the worst flu of your life. I awoke at 11 p.m., feeling no better than when I had gone to sleep. I resolved to see the physicians in the morning and get treated if need be. In the meantime, I had a job to do.
Fixing Hell Page 10