Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Kleinman agreed that the intel was a mess, but he did not believe it was because the interrogations were not harsh enough. He described a chaotic situation lacking any effective screening of new detainees, with some prisoners appearing to have no intelligence value. But the task force wanted Kleinman and his colleagues to participate in interrogations, and eventually, they were ordered to do so. Kleinman soon found himself in the Black Room at NAMA. “I walked into the interrogation room, all painted in black with [a] spotlight on the detainee. Behind the detainee was a military guard...with a[n] iron bar...slapping it in his hand,” Kleinman recalled. “The interrogator was sitting in a chair. The interpreter was to his left...and the detainee was on his knees.... A question was asked by the interrogator, interpreted, the response came back and, upon interpretation, the detainee would be slapped across the face.... And that continued with every question and every response. I asked my colleagues how long this had been going on, specifically the slapping, they said approximately 30 minutes.”

  Kleinman said he considered the tactics used on the prisoner to be “direct violations of the Geneva Conventions and [actions that] could constitute a war crime.” Kleinman says he told the commander of the Special Mission Unit at NAMA that his force was engaged in “unlawful” conduct and systematic violations of the Geneva Convention. It had no impact on the commander or Kleinman’s other JPRA/SERE colleagues. Kleinman said his superior told him that they had been “cleared hot to use SERE methods” in interrogations. Kleinman said he believed that was an “unlawful order,” adding that he “wasn’t going to have any involvement with it, and I didn’t think that they should either.” He was told that the prisoners were not entitled to Geneva Convention protection because they were “unlawful combatants.” The torture continued.

  Kleinman also recalled a detainee whom the task force was trying to break. His colleagues decided to make the man believe he was being released and actually drove him to a bus stop. Moments later, they snatched him again and returned him to NAMA. The man “was literally carried by two of the guards into the bunker struggling against them. He was taken down there,” Kleinman said. His two SERE colleagues “took over from that point.... They ripped his [clothing] off—not cut—they ripped it off... ripped off his underwear, took his shoes, they’d hooded him already, then they—they had shackled him by the wrist and ankles—being screamed at the entire time in his ear in English about essentially...what a poor specimen of human that he was.... And then the orders were given that he was to stand in that position for 12 hours no matter how much he asked for help, no matter how much he pleaded, unless he passed out, the guards were not to respond to any requests for help.”

  Despite Kleinman’s objection to SERE tactics being expanded at NAMA, the task force and Kleinman’s bosses forged ahead. In September 2003, they began developing a CONOP, or “Concept of Operations,” for HVT “exploitation” for the camp. Similar to the “Exploitation Draft Plan” that SERE’s chief psychologist, Dr. Bruce Jessen, had developed a year earlier for use in Afghanistan, it called for taking enemy torture tactics used to train US forces and reverse-engineering them. The CONOP called for “tailoring detainee punishment consequences to maximize cultural undesirability.” Less than a month after he arrived, Kleinman was pulled out of NAMA, in the words of the Pentagon inspector general, because it “became apparent that friction was developing” between the task force and Kleinman. Kleinman later told the US Senate that “friction” was an understatement and that he believed his life was being threatened by members of the task force in retaliation for his dissent. One task force member, he said, sharpened a knife while telling Kleinman to “sleep lightly” because the task force does not “coddl[e] terrorists.”

  Another source of torture at NAMA was that members of the HVT Task Force responsible for hunting people would continue to have access to the prisoners they seized. According to Major General Miller, at times the task force at NAMA would use special operators as interrogators. That created scenarios where the rage from the battlefield would spill over into interrogations, even after the prisoner was disarmed and in custody. Malcolm Nance, the former SERE instructor, told me, “Captives captured on the battlefield, first thing you’re going to learn is the guy that is capturing you is going to be very upset that you just lost the fire fight to him, and you killed some of his buddies so be prepared for having an ass whipping. It’s just that simple.” It becomes even worse when the soldiers who did the assault then have access to those prisoners for days on end. “It’s army doctrine that when you take a prisoner, one of the things you do is secure that prisoner and then you speed him to the rear. You get him out of the hands of the unit that took him,” recalled an army officer of his experience at a different filtration site. “Well, we didn’t do that. We’d keep them at our holding facility for I think it was up to seventy-two hours. Then we would place him under the guard of soldiers he had just been trying to kill.” The officer described one such incident where a detainee who was suspected of having killed a US soldier had his leg whacked by one of the soldier’s comrades with a baseball bat.

  Perry recalled an incident soon after he arrived at NAMA involving an alleged financier of Zarqawi who was taken to the camp. The man was allegedly refusing to give any information to his interrogators. “I had no part in this interrogation, I was just observing....There was kind of a garden-like area with dirt and mud and a hose out there,” Perry recalled, adding:

  He was stripped naked, put in the mud and sprayed with the hose, with very cold hoses, in February. At night it was very cold. They sprayed the cold hose and he was completely naked in the mud, you know, and everything. [Then] he was taken out of the mud and put next to an air conditioner. It was extremely cold, freezing, and he was put back in the mud and sprayed. This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on, and I was just one of them, kind of walking back and forth seeing [that] this is how they do things.

  Perry also recalled watching a British SAS officer—not authorized to conduct any kind of interrogation—mercilessly beat a detainee until he and another soldier intervened. As early as the summer of 2003, the CIA’s Baghdad Station was complaining to Langley that Special Operations troops were being too aggressive with detainees. The CIA’s general counsel, Scott Muller, said that the techniques being used at NAMA were “more aggressive” than those the CIA was using.

  The task force would fly new detainees to NAMA using unmarked helicopters. The prisoners were clad in blue jumpsuits, and during their journey, they would have blacked-out goggles placed over their eyes. Interrogators at NAMA used an “authorization template” on their computers to check off which harsh interrogation techniques they intended to use on detainees. The request to use harsh interrogation would, in theory, need approval from higher-ups. “I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed. It would be signed off by the commander, whoever that was,” recalled Perry. “He would sign off on that every time it was done.” Another interrogator added that “every harsh interrogation [was] approved by the J2 [the unit’s chief intelligence officer] of the TF and the Medical prior to its execution.” Perry continued: “Some interrogators would go and use these techniques without typing up one of those things just because it was a hassle, or he didn’t want to do it and knew it was going to be approved anyway, and you’re not gonna get in that much trouble if you get caught doing one of these things without a signature.”

  When Perry and a handful of colleagues began expressing their discomfort with the events at NAMA to their commanders, those commanders would call in military Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) lawyers, who lectured the dissenters on the distinction between unlawful enemy combatants and POWs, and the legal loopholes therein. “Within a couple hours a team of two JAG officers, JAG lawyers, came and gave us a couple hours slide show on why this is necessary, why this is legal, they’re enemy combatants, they’re not POWs, and so we can do al
l this stuff to them and so forth,” Perry recalled. “I mean they had this two hour slide show all prepared, and they came in and gave it to us and they stopped interrogations for it. It was a PowerPoint.” The lawyers, Perry alleged, said that “we didn’t have to abide by the Geneva Conventions, because these people weren’t POWs.” Perry said he thought the lawyers “just came in and said whatever they had to say to patch it up and continue with the war.”

  All task force personnel were required to sign nondisclosure agreements. Interrogators were often told that the White House and Rumsfeld were watching their operations closely. Perry stated that he saw McChrystal at NAMA on more than one occasion. The personnel at NAMA, he alleged, were given the impression that the techniques had been approved from on high because they “were only like a few steps away in the chain of command from the Pentagon.” The task force commanders, he said, would tell the interrogators that the White House or Pentagon had been directly briefed on their progress, particularly when it came to intel on Zarqawi. The commanders would tell them: “Rumsfeld was informed, such and such a report is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning, read by Secdef.” He added, “It’s a big morale booster for people working 14 hour days. Hey, we got to the White House!” Malcolm Nance told me, “When you have the President of the United States setting the pace, well you’re gonna get Abu Ghraib, you are going to get abuse. You’ve got the intelligence community throwing the book out to the point where, in their world, no one was ever subjected to ‘abuse’ by the US Armed Forces.”

  Major General Keith Dayton, the commander of the Iraq Survey Group, which was established in June 2003 to coordinate the hunt for WMDs, described the situation at NAMA as “a disaster waiting to happen,” warning the Pentagon’s inspector general that he needed to “slam some rules on this place right away to basically keep ourselves from getting in trouble and make sure these people are treated properly.” Dayton described cases of prisoners transferred to conventional military custody from the task force with signs of being “badly burned,” having two black eyes, “back almost broken,” “multiple contusions on his face.” Soldiers and personnel from Camp Cropper (near Camp NAMA) stated under oath that detainees arrested and interrogated by the task force and SEAL Team 5 had been delivered to Camp Cropper showing obvious signs of abuse.

  There are at least two known cases of Iraqis dying immediately after being transferred from the custody of task force Navy SEAL commandos. After what a SEAL team described as a “struggle,” on April 5, 2004, the SEALs delivered prisoner Fashad Mohammad to a conventional base, where he was interrogated and then allowed to sleep, at which point he became unresponsive and later died. The medical examiner’s report on his death, which was released under the Freedom of Information Act, said that Mohammad “died in U.S. custody approximately 72 hours after being apprehended. By report, physical force was required during his initial apprehension during a raid. During his confinement, he was hooded, sleep deprived, and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood.” Although the report described “multiple minor injuries, abrasions and contusions” and “blunt force trauma and positional asphyxia,” it concluded that the cause of death was “undetermined.” On November 4, 2003, Manadel al Jamadi died at Abu Ghraib prison, amid allegations that he had been beaten to death by members of SEAL Team 7. One team member was court-martialed but was ultimately acquitted—and nobody was charged with homicide.

  By December 2003, a confidential Pentagon memo warned, “It seems clear that” the task force “needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” But the torture and abuse at NAMA continued, particularly if a detainee was believed to have any information about Zarqawi or his network. All of the interrogations were aimed at extracting intel that would lead to the next raid, the next strike and the next capture or kill. In an “operations center” near NAMA, “task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids,” the New York Times reported. “Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.”

  In early 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a scathing report on the mass arrests of Iraqis. It asserted that “over a hundred ‘high value detainees’ have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight” at a “High Value Detainees” section at the Baghdad Airport. Without specifically singling out the task force, the report described the raids that led to arrests of scores of Iraqis. Soldiers would burst into homes

  usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped and sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest—sometimes in pyjamas or underwear—and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyeglasses.

  The report cited “military intelligence officers” who told the Red Cross “that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross findings echoed those of the classified military report in late 2003, which warned that the task force’s abuse of detainees combined with the mass arrests of Iraqis gave the impression that the United States and its allies were acting like “gratuitous enemies” of the Iraqi people.

  When the military finally was permitted to investigate NAMA, its agents received threats from personnel at the camp, while DIA interrogators had their vehicle keys confiscated and were “ordered” not to discuss what they had seen with anyone. On June 25, 2004, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, then director of the DIA, sent a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone with a list of complaints from DIA personnel at Camp NAMA. One interrogator had his photos confiscated after taking pictures of injured detainees, and others complained that task force commandos forbade them from leaving the camp without permission, even for a haircut, and from talking to outsiders; they threatened them and screened their e-mails. Despite these efforts at suppression, news of detainee abuse at NAMA made its way up the ranks, and eventually to lawmakers.

  In 2004, under pressure from a handful of lawmakers, Stephen Cambone, whose SSB was actually enabling the harsh interrogation ops at NAMA, scribbled a handwritten letter to his deputy, Lieutenant General Boykin. Dated June 26, 2004, it read, “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable. In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26.” An aide to Boykin said, “At the time [Boykin] told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.”

  Despite all the whistleblowers’ reports, an official US military report on alleged abuses at NAMA and other facilities concluded that the prisoners’ descriptions of torture were lies. Accusations of wrongdoing and misconduct by members of the task force were handled in-house rather than through traditional military disciplinary procedures. In one case, when an Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) agent attempted to investigate a member of the task force for abusing a detainee, it was quashed because, in the words of the CID, “the subject of this investigation is a member of TF 6-26” and the task force’s own security officer “has accepted investigative jurisdiction in this matter.”

  In all, some thirty-four task force members would be “disciplined” for misconduct, and at least eleven members were remov
ed from the unit. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that “a small number of task force members have been administratively disciplined, but not court-martialed. Five Army Rangers associated with the task force were reportedly court-martialed for abuses they carried out against detainees,” but “the sentences were all six months or less. There are no indications that officers up the chain of command [were] held accountable, despite serious questions about officers’ criminal culpability.”

  An air force interrogator who worked with the JSOC task force hunting Zarqawi told me that he “did not see any form of oversight for the kill or capture campaign.” He said he witnessed and stopped several cases of abuse, which he communicated up the chain of command. “With the cases in which I reported abuses, there was no accountability. In one case, an interrogator was merely recalled from a remote location and then put right back to work at the main prison. The atmosphere was such that secrecy was the priority.” He added, “My general impression is that occasional law-breaking would be tolerated as long as it never got out to the press.”

  The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantánamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan. When Abu Ghraib prison was taken over by US forces and converted from a Saddam-era prison and torture chamber into a US-run gulag, the Americans who set it up simply took the task force’s standard operating procedures and, once again, changed the letterhead and implemented them.