Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  “No Blood, No Foul”

  IRAQ, 2003–2004 —In the first year of the Iraq War, a lot of JSOC’s dirty business went down in a small cluster of buildings nestled in the corner of a Saddam-era military base near the Baghdad International Airport. US Special Operations Forces had taken over the base soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and erected a fence around the cluster of buildings that made up Camp NAMA. At the center of the small compound, surrounded by barbed wire, was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF).

  Members of the JSOC Task Force resided at NAMA, but it was hardly just a dormitory. This task force went by various code names, and the names were frequently changed for operational security and to make investigating it difficult. At various times, it was known as Task Force 20, Task Force 121, Task Force 6-26, Task Force 714 and Task Force 145. Suspected insurgents snatched in house raids or taken off the streets of Iraq cities were brought to NAMA and placed in one of two structures: “Motel 6” was a plywood barracks; “Hotel California” was an actual cellblock that a few months earlier had been used by Saddam’s regime as a prison. The acronym NAMA stood for “Nasty-Ass Military Area.” Its motto, as advertised in posters throughout the camp, was “No Blood, No Foul.” A Defense Department official said it was a play on a task force adage: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”

  To develop their approach to interrogating prisoners they would snatch in Iraq, the Special Mission Units that made up the HVT Task Force worked from a copy of the interrogation standard operating procedure (SOP) that was developed while McChrystal was running the detention and interrogation operations in Afghanistan as part of CJTF 180. According to a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation conducted years later, the Iraq Task Force simply “changed the letterhead, and adopted the SOP verbatim.” The SOP “included stress positions, sleep deprivation, and the use of dogs.” The regime of torture techniques, built up on the demands from Rumsfeld, Cheney and their posses for more results in interrogations, was spreading.

  The people taken to NAMA were not given rights as prisoners of war (POWs). They were classified as unlawful combatants. They would not see lawyers, be visited by the Red Cross or be charged with any crimes. Rumsfeld had issued guidelines to JSOC for its own “black” detainee program, which was off-limits to the conventional military. The task force could hold prisoners for ninety days without giving them anything resembling rights or transferring them to above-board military prisons. In effect, this meant that the task force had free rein over the prisoners for three months to squeeze out any information they might have held. Prisoners were often subjected to “beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation, and various forms of psychological abuse or torture,” according to Human Rights Watch. Access to NAMA was denied to the Red Cross, lawyers and family members. According to a former interrogator at NAMA, a colonel told him that “he had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.” Similarly, army investigators would not be allowed to set foot in Camp NAMA. The task force members were told that such moves were “very necessary for the efficacy of the operation, and we don’t want people to know even our name, of the unit.”

  When Colonel Stuart Herrington was deployed by Major General Barbara Fast to investigate conditions at detention facilities and intelligence operations in Iraq in December 2003, he was rebuffed by the task force at NAMA.

  So secretive was NAMA that when General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the Guantánamo Bay prison, tried to visit, he was not permitted to enter the camp until he took his request all the way up the chain of command. There was a special ID to get into Camp NAMA, and the only people permitted to enter without it were prisoners, shackled and hooded. Ironically, even though NAMA personnel didn’t want General Miller in their camp, the general seemed to be on their side. During that trip to Iraq, while touring other facilities including Abu Ghraib, Miller reportedly chastised US military prison administrators for “running a country club,” charging they were being too lenient on detainees. Miller suggested they “GTMO-ize” their detention facilities and, according to military officials who met with the “GTMO team,” they discussed how using dogs was “effective in doing interrogations with Arabs” because of “Arabs being fearful of dogs.”

  The task force at NAMA was run by JSOC, but it was built by pulling personnel from a variety of agencies and units. There were CIA and DIA interrogators, air force interrogators, and a variety of analysts and guards. “They told us we can’t tell our chain of command about who works here or what [the task force] does. You’re completely shut off. You can only discuss it amongst yourselves. That’s what they told us from the very first day,” recalled an interrogator who worked at Camp NAMA in 2003–2004. “It was pretty loose as far as chain of command goes. There was no rank within the task force....We called the colonel by his first name, called the sergeant major by his first name....I couldn’t tell you the sergeant major’s last name if I tried. Same with the colonel. When you asked somebody their name they don’t offer up the last name....The consensus was, more often than not, when they gave you their name it probably wasn’t their real name anyway.”

  Many of the members of the task force would grow long beards and seemed eager to make themselves look as frightening or intimidating as possible. “This is the dark side of the forces. This is the realm where you have essentially a cadre of folks who have a great deal of freedom. The folks that get to this level are treated with a certain amount of deference,” Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer told me. “The culture is that where everybody essentially goes by their first name, no matter what rank you are, and the basic bottom line is, when you get to that level you just know what you need to do, and there’s no second guessing, there is no room for being babied.”

  Back at the State Department, Wilkerson watched as this parallel detention system was being built up by Rumsfeld and Cheney and believed they used the task force specifically to avoid any scrutiny. “There is no oversight and when there’s no oversight you’re all-powerful. And when you know there’s no oversight, then you know that you can pretty much do whatever you want to do,” he told me. “We forget that when we create these special operating units, we create at least within a percentage of them—and this percentage is heightened incredibly in the special operations forces—you’ve got people who are killing instruments. That’s what they are. That’s what they’re honed and trained to be, is killing instruments. When you allow no oversight of them, and you allow them to repeat operations, over and over and over again, with no oversight, then you allow them to instinctually gain the knowledge that almost anything goes. Then, almost anything is going to go.”

  “Rather than going through the local command, the Baghdad command, up to CENTCOM and then back to the Pentagon, there seemed to have been some sort of an express elevator, from JSOC operations on the ground, straight back to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence [Cambone], and then to the Secretary of Defense. So it was going straight back to Washington—very, very high levels,” charged Scott Horton, a human rights attorney who, as president of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights, investigated the US torture program and JSOC’s role in it. “We know that a number of the normal rules that had applied, concerning the way that detention operations went forward, and the way interrogation operations went forward, were not being applied to JSOC. They had their own rules. So there were Special Access Programs and we know that these operations were associated with a lot of brutality, people being beaten up, being severely mistreated. So often as not, the torture cases and the serious abuse cases were far more frequently linked to JSOC operations than anything else.”

  When JSOC first deployed to Iraq to lead the hunt for WMDs and Saddam’s top leadership, the prisoners they took early on were prioritized in terms of what, if any, intelligence or information they may have possessed that would pro
duce results to support either of those missions. The harsh interrogation methods that were being refined in black sites and in Afghanistan were to be unleashed in Iraq. “There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

  The Bush administration also wanted to find WMDs and to retroactively prove that its claims of Iraq possessing them were true. Rowan Scarborough, a conservative military journalist who wrote two books for which he received extensive access to Rumsfeld and his team, recounted how furious Rumsfeld would become each day when he was briefed on the lack of WMDs in Iraq. “Each morning, the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust. Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier. One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’ At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers,” according to Scarborough. Horton added: “A lot of this intelligence gathering operation, at the outset...was driven by a need to produce information that would justify [the war]. And I think that the use of torture was authorized largely because of an expectation that that would produce results. I don’t think there was ever any expectation that it was going produce the truth, but it would produce people saying what they wanted them to say, that would somehow back this up.”

  But as the months went on in Iraq and the WMD and al Qaeda claims fell apart, the focus of the interrogations began shifting to crushing the insurgency. The list of targets and suspects quickly grew from the original deck of cards representing the Saddam regime to a potentially infinite catalog of names. “You saw the French do this in Algeria and you saw the Americans do this in 2003 in Iraq,” recalled Exum, who was deployed to Iraq at the time. “You start out with a target list, and maybe you’ve got 50 guys on it, maybe you’ve got 200 guys on it, but you can work your way through those 50 or 200 guys, and then suddenly at the end of that target list you’ve got a new target list of 3,000 people on it.”

  McChrystal expanded JSOC’s role in detainee operations, but NAMA was up and running before he set foot in Iraq. The CIA, which inflicted more than its share of dirty deeds on prisoners, had become so shocked at the torture at NAMA that it withdrew its interrogators from the base in August 2003, though it continued to provide intelligence to the task force. In fact, the month before McChrystal assumed command at JSOC, an army investigator, as well as intelligence and law enforcement officials, were already voicing their warnings about detainee abuse, suggesting that the harsh techniques were being employed by JSOC. In September 2003, after a request from the “commander of the Special Mission Unit Task Force,” US military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) instructors, whose official job was to prepare US service members to endure torture and captivity, arrived at Camp NAMA.

  The JSOC Task Force did not categorize Camp NAMA as a prison but rather as a “filtration site” where intelligence was being obtained. This gave cover for all the dirty activity and the secrecy that shrouded it. The Special Access Program that the task force operated under “would be given a mission and might be authorized to use all sorts of special practices, that not only deviate from normal military practices, but might actually violate military law, and military policy, and this would be done by means of a Special Access Program, that would usually come from the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence [Stephen Cambone]. There’s very clearly some criminal conduct,” said Horton, the human rights lawyer. “And yet, here in this special JSOC regime, this was being authorized—being incited—by officers who were running the camp, who were supposed to be prohibiting this kind of conduct.”

  The Battlefield Interrogation Facility at NAMA had four interrogation rooms and a medical screening room, where Saddam was first processed after his capture. Furnished with rugs, prayer mats, couches, tables and chairs, the “Soft Room” was where cooperative and high-ranking detainees were brought for questioning—and tea. The Blue and Red (or Wood) rooms were larger (about six by ten feet), rectangular and plain; the Blue Room had a coat of blue paint over the plywood walls. These rooms were used for medium-intensity interrogations, reportedly employing techniques approved by the US Army Field Manual. The Black Room was preserved from its days as a torture chamber under Saddam and, for good measure, the task force kept the meat hooks that hung from the ceiling during the Iraqi dictator’s reign of terror in place for their use. The Black Room was the largest room—approximately twelve by twelve feet. It was here that JSOC would perform its harshest interrogations.

  Detainees were moved between rooms, depending on their cooperation with the interrogators. “We would do that to show him if you tell us what we want to hear, then this is the treatment that you’ll get,” recalled “Jeff Perry,” the pseudonym of a former interrogator at NAMA who provided eyewitness testimony on his experiences at NAMA to Human Rights Watch. “If you don’t, then this is the treatment that you’ll get. So there was a lot of that, going back and forth between the rooms.” If a prisoner was believed to have info on Zarqawi, he would be sent to the Black Room. It would also be used if “the interrogator thinks he’s being lied to or he’s not going to get anywhere with just talking to him,” Perry recalled. “We would march with him into the black room.” It would also be used if interrogators were “angry at [a detainee] and want[ed] to punish him for some reason.”

  Inside the Black Room, the full-spectrum of SERE tactics were unleashed on detainees, along with a slew of medieval freestyle techniques. “It was painted black floor to ceiling. The door was black, everything was black,” recalled Perry. “It had speakers in the corners, all four corners, up at the ceiling. It had a small table in one of the corners, and maybe some chairs. But usually in the black room nobody was sitting down. It was standing, stress positions.” The interrogations there often incorporated extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual, humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the “No Blood, No Foul” motto. But, eventually, even blood was okay.

  One former prisoner—the son of one of Saddam’s bodyguards—said he was made to strip, was punched repeatedly in the spine until he fainted, was doused with cold water and forced to stand in front of the air-conditioner and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Prisoners held at other facilities also described heinous acts committed against them by interrogators and guards, including sodomizing detainees with foreign objects, beating them, forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation—nothing but bread and water for more than two weeks in one case.

  Members of the task force would beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their faces. One member of the task force reported that he had heard interrogators “beating the shit out of the detainee.” According to a former interrogator with the task force, one of his colleagues was “reprimanded and assigned to desk duty because he pissed in a bottle and gave it to a detainee to drink.” Members of the task force would also interrupt non-harsh interrogations and begin slapping or beating detainees. On at least one occasion, they abducted the wife of a suspected insurgent being hunted by the task force “to leverage the primary target’s surrender.” The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was still nursing her six-month-old baby. After interviewing numerous members of the task force at NAMA, Human Rights Watch concluded, “the abuses appear to have been part of a regularized process of detainee abuse—‘standard operating procedure.’”

  Steven Kleinman, at the time a lieutenant colonel in the air force, arrived at Camp NAMA in earl
y September 2003, just as McChrystal was taking over as commander of JSOC. Kleinman was a veteran interrogator and an air force SERE instructor. When he was first dispatched to Iraq, he believed his job was to observe the interrogations at the camp and analyze how they could be done more effectively. A year earlier, Kleinman had investigated the program at Guantánamo and found “fundamental systemic problems” that he believed had undermined the stated goals of the interrogations. But the task force at NAMA had different plans. They told Kleinman they were having trouble getting actionable or reliable intelligence from their prisoners, and they wanted Kleinman and his SERE colleagues to help them apply SERE tactics to the interrogations. In essence, they wanted Kleinman and his colleagues to use the very torture tactics against detainees that they had taught US military personnel to resist.