Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

  Damien Corsetti provides an unflinching glimpse into the nightmare world that now consumes those ordered to take America to the dark side.

  “I didn’t like it,” Corsetti recalls, of his initial attitude toward the interrogation methods the Americans used on prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. “But I remember when it went from me having to mentally prepare myself to go do this, to go in and throw chairs against the walls, and break tables, and sit there and leave a guy on his knees for two hours, to having to mentally prep myself to do that—to the point where I enjoyed doing it. Fuck yeah, I got to the point where I enjoyed doing it.”

  The people now suffering from PTSD are not the politicians who sat above it all, back in Washington, and secretly approved the faraway use of torture. They are not the well-credentialed lawyers who provided abstract legal justifications. They are certainly not the psychologists awarded millions of dollars in contracts in exchange for dreaming up scientific-sounding rationales.

  Instead they are the people who actually held the collar and the leash. The United States has been running a decade-long experiment on the lives of Damien Corsetti and the other men and women who physically lowered themselves into cramped, secret dungeons, looked into the eyes of other human beings, and then, with their own hands, tortured them. It happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, Thailand and Lithuania, and at other secret locations. They followed orders. They were given interrogation protocols with Orwellian names like “fear-up harsh.” They used “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

  The results of this experiment are in, and we now know how average Americans—mostly low-ranking military personnel and outside contractors—respond to the experience of inflicting torture. They have come home shell-shocked, dehumanized. They are covered in shame and guilt, not the glory of the returning war hero. They are suffering moral injury.

  “Every day I lost a little bit of who I was,” says Corsetti. “I was becoming this other person, and it was like Mr. Hyde was taking over. Fucking more sleeping pills, more anti-depressants, more sleeping pills, more anti-depressants.”

  President Barack Obama famously said that America needs to “look forward,” not back. There would be no Truth Commission, no aggressive investigations by Congress or the Department of Justice of those who authorized or enabled torture, or got rich off torture. A decade after 9/11, those who launched the torture regime have made millions from book deals, the lecture circuit, and contracts and research grants with the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and Homeland Security. Spared prosecution, spared even investigation, they now live in splendor.

  The only people who have been held to account are those who were at the very bottom of the chain of command, the enlisted personnel and low-level contractors who conducted interrogations for a government that told them that the old rules didn’t apply and that the gloves had to come off. A handful, like Damien Corsetti, faced prosecution for their actions. The rest are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and will most likely be suffering for the rest of their lives.

  Corsetti was a private in the U.S. Army’s 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, a military counterintelligence specialist with no training in interrogations when the war on terror began. He says that in 2002, when he first arrived at the “Bagram Collection Point,” the official name for the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan in the early days of the war, he was not given any clear rules on how to handle prisoners. His commanders simply told him to watch how interrogations were being conducted by the first group of interrogators assigned to the prison, a mixed batch of National Guard troops and other military personnel who had been thrown into Bagram with virtually no preparation, after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. They were preparing to leave as Corsetti’s unit was arriving, so Corsetti and other members of his unit sat and watched their final interrogations before taking over. They were openly abusing prisoners, and Corsetti’s commander did not tell his unit to refrain from the harsh tactics already in use; instead, he ordered them not to question or criticize the previous interrogators. The message was clear—Corsetti and his unit were to apply the same tactics.

  Corsetti now knows that he should have refused to go along and should have followed the example of the only man from his unit who did resist. “You ultimately have a choice. You have to do what you know is right. There was one guy, a really solid dude, who saw what was going on the first day, and said I can’t do it. I can’t do this. So they put him in charge of computers, doing the database. He was the only guy over there who stood up, and said, I can’t fucking do this. People made fun of him, called him a pussy. But he stood by it.”

  The other early guidance Corsetti says he received from his commanders was that the detainees were not to be considered prisoners of war but rather enemy combatants, and so did not have the same rights under the Geneva Conventions or the laws of war. That policy decision, handed down by President George W. Bush in February 2002, was, the White House insisted at the time, carefully crafted and narrowly constructed to deal with the capture and interrogation of the terrorists responsible for 9/11.

  Out in the field, however, it meant that the rule book had been thrown out the window. No distinctions were made by interrogators between suspected al Qaeda terrorists and poor, illiterate Afghans captured on the battlefield after fighting for the Taliban-controlled government. The Afghan and Pakistani farmers rounded up by mistake, or turned over to the Americans by rivals eager to settle scores or for the cash bonuses the United States began to pay, were treated as if they were al Qaeda masterminds. They were all “Bobs”—the nickname the American interrogators gave them because of the uniforms the prisoners had to wear, which were made by the Bob Barker Company, a North Carolina prison supply company.

  Before the war on terror, the U.S. military had a well-earned reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. In the closing days of World War II, German soldiers flocked west in order to be captured by the Americans rather than the feared Russians closing in from the east. During the postwar years, the United States was a driving force behind the 1949 Geneva Conventions, codifying the rights of prisoners in armed conflict. During the first Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered en masse knowing that they would be well treated by the advancing U.S. Army.

  Bush’s decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions changed everything. And it changed Damien Corsetti’s life forever. “When you compromise your morals, and do things you know are wrong, maybe not legally, but you know are morally wrong, then yeah, you’ve done something wrong. And I did a few of those things.”

  After he returned to the United States, after Bagram and then Abu Ghraib, and finally after he was tried in a military court and then acquitted of charges of prisoner abuse, Corsetti’s mind and body shut down. Paranoia gained hold. He decided he had to find a city with as few Arab Americans as possible, at least someplace where his fevered imagination wouldn’t conjure them in his head. Savannah’s beauty and orderliness settled him. Its lush historic squares, lined with the elegant town homes that were the real stars in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and which still draw thousands of tourists to the city, provided a calming, organizing effect on his mind.

  Savannah is also closer to Florida, where Corsetti’s wife had fled with their son after he started beating and abusing her, after she took out a restraining order against him. As time has passed, she has finally agreed to let him occasionally see his son, and he eagerly makes the drive from Savannah to Florida. And so he now lives quietly and reclusively in Savannah, along with his girlfriend and their young daughter.

  Still, Savannah wouldn’t be calming enough for Damien Corsetti without the marijuana. Nothing else has worked. Certainly not the Seroquel, which, along with other antipsychotics and antidepressants he was prescribed by army doctors for his PTSD, gave him
nightmares and prompted him to gain more than 100 pounds.

  The officially prescribed drugs, which he took in his first years back from Iraq, turned him into a bloated caricature. The images from those days haunt Corsetti, particularly since that is what he looked like when he appeared in the film Taxi to the Dark Side, the 2007 documentary about torture. He is most famous as an obese and villainous figure. Now that he is off the antipsychotics, Corsetti has shed the weight and looks trim, tall, and muscular, much as he did when he first went to Afghanistan in 2002. Apart from his shaved head, he would be unrecognizable to anyone who saw him in the film during those grim days. He looks deceptively healthy.

  He wasn’t obese when he was deployed. The pounds came after he returned from Iraq to the United States in 2004, while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, waiting to face charges in connection with a wide-ranging investigation of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. When he came back to the United States and was jarred with a welcome home consisting of arrest and prosecution for his actions overseas, Corsetti was already burdened with fully formed PTSD. He spiraled into depression. He became addicted to heroin, which he found easy to buy around Fort Bragg.

  By that time, he was no stranger to doing drugs on duty. He had smoked hash in Afghanistan, which he readily bought from Afghan locals, and he says that he and other American soldiers were able to find remote places around Bagram, including the roofs of buildings, where they could smoke in peace. He says that he conducted interrogations at Bagram while high on hash, and that he even smoked hash with prisoners he was supposed to interrogate.

  He says he got high when he was ordered to repeatedly question Afghans who obviously knew nothing more than they had already said in countless previous sessions. “You’d have to talk and talk, and you would take the job as a joke after a while,” says Corsetti. “You’d think, my job is fucking meaningless today. I’m going to go in there and fucking get stoned. And that’s how your day goes. Hey, I even smoked hash with a few fucking prisoners.”

  But once he was back at Fort Bragg, he switched to heroin and quickly became hooked. Since he was still in the military—the army wouldn’t let him out while they prosecuted him—he became adept at shooting heroin into parts of his body where the needle marks wouldn’t show. He tried other hard drugs, too, including PCP, but they didn’t help to control the demons building inside him.

  The heroin could dull the pain, but it could not control his rage. Once, when he was stuck in traffic in Fayetteville, the hometown of Fort Bragg, Corsetti became so angry that he got out of his car, ran up to the car in front of him, and pulled the driver out and started beating him. Corsetti said he sped away before any police arrived on the scene. With PTSD, “you feel like God’s administrator of fucking karma in the universe,” says Corsetti. “You feel the need to personally exact fucking vengeance on people for karma. And you have no problems doing it.”

  There were other episodes in which he lost control and angrily took out his rage in public. “It’s not that I say and do these horrible things, it’s that I take so much pleasure in it, now that is what fucks with me.” Invariably when he was confronted by the local police, they showed extraordinary patience, realizing that he was a soldier just back from Iraq. They would give him time to calm down and then quietly drive him home. It was the Fayetteville police department’s informal method of dealing with PTSD.

  The police could not save Corsetti’s marriage, however. He met and married his wife while he was in the army. But after returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, he beat and abused her so badly that she took his son and left him. He and his wife, as his parents wrote in a 2009 letter to the Veterans Administration, “could not be in the same room. This has led to a total separation and the wife has a restraining order against him.”

  By the end of his time in the army, Corsetti weighed over 300 pounds and truly looked like a monster, which was horribly ironic because his nickname was “the Monster.” Oddly, he didn’t earn it in the military; it was jokingly applied by a teenage friend long before he joined up and long before he became obese. Before he enlisted, Corsetti liked the nickname so much that he got a tattoo that read “il Mostro,” Italian for “the Monster,” inked across his stomach.

  The nickname fit him perfectly in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the drifting boy from Fairfax, Virginia, was transformed into a fearsome figure along the dim corridors of Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Corsetti was often the first person detainees would meet once they were brought into Bagram. Corsetti’s job as the “screener” was to provide an initial traumatic experience for the prisoner, a shock to their system to ensure compliance. He was also supposed to help decide which detainees were likely to require extra measures later.

  Corsetti was willing and able to quickly become an angry pit bull in the faces of the newly arrived prisoners. He was also often asked by other interrogators to act as the bad cop during their sessions with detainees, and so Corsetti became infamous at Bagram as the crazy one, willing to explode into interrogation sessions, throwing chairs and screaming and threatening detainees. He earned another nickname, given him by a sergeant who served with him at Bagram: “the King of Torture.”

  He became so enthusiastic about finding ways to break and abuse prisoners that Corsetti began experimenting with new types of stress positions:

  I used a combination of shit that I had seen during the handoff from the group of interrogators that had been there before, and some that I came up with. Like putting a guy at a 45 degree angle with your body straight and your head against the wall, I came up with that. I sat down and was like, the knees [another stress position] aren’t doing it enough for me anymore. It’s not quick enough. What can make them feel that fucking 20 minute knee pain in about two minutes? And I figured that out, I sat there in the interrogation booth, and put myself in different positions, and I did this and it was like, oh, this one fucking sucks. So then you go and share it with other people, and you go, hey guys, I just discovered this, it’s great. It’s like prison experiments, what’s tolerable to you over time becomes more tolerable, and limits get pushed further. You don’t even think about it.

  But Corsetti also saw firsthand evidence that his unit was not employing the most extreme methods then in use by other American personnel. He said that he witnessed U.S. Special Operations personnel waterboard an Afghan prisoner at Bagram. For years, the U.S. government has insisted that only three detainees—all high-level al Qaeda prisoners at CIA secret prisons—were ever subjected to waterboarding during the war on terror. But Corsetti, who at the time was eager to join either the CIA or U.S. Special Operations, said that he watched as Special Operations personnel brought an Afghan prisoner in to Bagram and waterboarded him. There is no evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces have ever been investigated for the use of waterboarding, a torture tactic that was never approved for use by the U.S. military, only by the CIA. But the fact that the Special Operations personnel allowed Corsetti to watch as they waterboarded their prisoner suggests that their use of the tactic was not unusual or something they felt they needed to hide.

  Corsetti’s account of witnessing the waterboarding of a detainee at Bagram is not the only evidence that the use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel was more widespread than the government has ever acknowledged. In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported that two Libyans who had been held by the CIA were also waterboarded; the two are not among the three detainees that the CIA has officially acknowledged as having been subjected to waterboarding.

  After the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib exploded in 2004 and the military finally began to investigate cases of torture, Damien Corsetti’s nickname brought him plenty of unwanted attention. He became one of the poster boys for the scandal. After his stint at Bagram, Corsetti and his unit were assigned to Iraq in 2003, and were the first interrogators to help open Abu Ghraib for use by the U.S. military. He returned to the United States in February 2004, just two months before the public disclosure of horrific, gra
phic photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

  The global release of the photographs did what nothing else could—bring sudden and intense pressure on the White House, Pentagon, and CIA for an accounting of how the United States had been treating prisoners captured in the global war on terror. Congress and the press began to investigate, forcing the U.S. military and the Justice Department to pursue the evidence of prisoner abuse and torture more aggressively than ever before. Of course, the Bush administration knew how the abuse had started: the president had declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the war on terror; the Justice Department had given legal opinions to the CIA authorizing the use of “enhanced” interrogation tactics; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved the use of harsh tactics at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and no guidelines had been put into place to prevent the spread of those abusive practices at other U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it was no secret within the government that the abusive interrogation techniques had spread far beyond the CIA black sites and Guantánamo Bay. In fact, a January 2003 memorandum by the chief military lawyer at Bagram spelled out how interrogators there were using the same kind of tactics that Rumsfeld had authorized for use at Guantánamo, the New York Times later reported.