by Mark Fallon
Zierhoffer wrote back that it was plausible. Sensory deprivation “can cause hallucinations, usually visual rather than auditory, but you never know,” she wrote. Zierhoffer took no remedial action; instead, she advised him to double down on breaking Jawad. “He appears to be rather frightened,” Zierhoffer wrote, “and looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on his interrogator. . . . Make him as uncomfortable as possible. Work him as hard as possible.”
The team agreed to further isolate the boy, leaving him naked and sleep-deprived. Over a two-week period, Jawad was grabbed out of bed and moved to another cell every three hours. Miller would often tout this “frequent flyer” technique to visitors of the camp.
On December 22, 2003, Jawad—who had been moved out of isolation but was not allowed to have contact with the neighboring detainees—was accused of “cross block talk,” a catch-all infraction that covered any attempt to make contact with anyone other than his keepers. His interrogators retaliated by taking the few remaining comfort items from Jawad’s cell, including his prayer mat and Koran. For Jawad, like many detainees, prayer was the only solace he had. On Christmas Day 2003, Jawad attempted suicide by repeatedly banging his head against the metal walls of his cell.
• • •
By November 2003, more than three months after Rumsfeld had authorized new SERE-based interrogation plans—though now without the word “SERE” attached to them—the record of accomplishment was becoming starkly clear. For all their aggressiveness, the new plans produced little intel. But even so, Miller submitted requests to have the new programs used on additional detainees. General Hill had given his usual rubber stamp approval, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Billingslea consistently recommended Rumsfeld approve the plan. Detainee abuse at Gitmo was not the work of a few bad apples. It was expanding toward being the standard operating procedure for interrogation and being endorsed by policymakers at the highest levels. Torture was, in fact, becoming institutionalized.
Not that there wasn’t pushback. At the CITF, we were aggressively questioning the XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXX XX XXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXXX. Over at the Office of Legal Counsel, concerns were brewing too, about potential flaws in the August 2002 White House memo that had green-lighted so much of the horror show at Gitmo. This internal debate eventually came to a head when an OLC lawyer named Jack Goldsmith called top Pentagon lawyer Jim Haynes to advise him that the memo could no longer be relied upon as legal cover for enhanced interrogation.
Haynes and others had consistently relied upon that memo for their tenuous legal justification of what was going on at Gitmo, including overriding the concerns of top military lawyers such as Alberto Mora, but Goldsmith’s objection presented a higher hurdle. Once Haynes relayed the OLC’s opinion to Rumsfeld, the defense secretary could not legally sign off on Geoffrey Miller’s newest request. The solution? An end run. Instead of sending Miller’s request up to Rumsfeld for his signature, it was routed to his assistant, Deputy DOD General Counsel Daniel Dell’Orto, without telling him about the now-missing OLC legal cover. Dell’Orto signed off on the last day of 2003, and General Meyers approved the plan on January 2, 2004, assuring detainee abuse would continue in the New Year.
Far from being a new prison for a new kind of prisoner, Guantanamo Bay would become America’s Devil’s Island, or as Slahi would later describe it, Azkaban, the mythical fortress prison from the Harry Potter series. Within Gitmo’s forty-five square miles, arbitrary imprisonment without legal recourse had become an instrument of national policy. All that was left now was to franchise the abuse throughout the war theater, and that was already in the works.
CHAPTER 11
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ABU GHRAIB COUNTRY CLUB
The Iraq War that officially began with the “shock and awe” aerial assault of March 20, 2003, would grow quickly into a massive affair. More than half a million coalition forces, 309,000 of them American, led the invasion during the first year alone. Saddam Hussein was overthrown and eventually executed. His Baath Party had the government and military ripped from its hands. Baghdad’s center city was transformed into a Green Zone—an American outpost in the midst of an occupied nation bristling with insurgents—while US and coalition forces spread far and wide across the country. A new government had to be formed, the people had to be pacified, a ruined economy and infrastructure needed to be brought back on line. Yet of all the people and places and stories that dominated the news in those days, one name stands out above all the others in memory: Abu Ghraib.
The Iraqi city of Abu Ghraib was a star-crossed place well before American interrogators turned it into a poster child for cruel and unusual punishment. Built in 1944 on the western edge of Baghdad—“Ghraib” may be a corruption of “gharb,” Arabic for “west”—the city was best known for many years for its baby formula factory and for the suspicion, common among Western intelligence agencies, that the factory was also producing biological weapons. Severely damaged by Allied bombing during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, the factory was partially rebuilt only to be bombed again and destroyed a decade later. On neither occasion, though, did the ruins contain any evidence of biological weapons or their manufacture. Indeed, the only compelling evidence ever discovered among the rubble were crates of baby formula.
The Abu Ghraib prison that US interrogators would make so famous was originally built by Saddam Hussein to warehouse his many political enemies. If its walls could talk, they would undoubtedly tell tales of prisoner abuse during those early years that would make even hardened torturers wince with pain, but that abuse was inflicted by a ruthless and sadistic dictator with no regard for international law, not by agents of a nation that had been one of the primary architects of the international conventions meant to prevent torturous acts.
Con men know that the secret of a great scam is to tell desperate people exactly what they want to hear, and by the late spring of 2003, more than a few people in high places in Washington were despairing about the situation in Iraq. The problem wasn’t so much the war front, although the insurgency was gaining strength by the day, as it was the justification for the war already being fought. George Bush, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld—they had all sold the invasion of Iraq to their own countrymen, to America’s allies, and to the world at large via the United Nations as being necessitated, in part, by the presence of yet undiscovered WMDs and biological warfare weapons. The fact that none had been found—at the Abu Ghraib baby formula factory or anywhere else in Iraq—a full year into the war was beginning to suggest one of two things: either there were no such weapons and the evidence that there were, which had been obtained mostly by torturing detainees, was wrong; or indeed there were, and the only way to find them was to double down on and refine the torture already taking place at multiple military black sites across the country.
For pitching enhanced interrogation techniques, the timing couldn’t have been better, or the conditions. Back in Washington, DC, Colonel Randy Moulton, the commanding officer of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), was busy marketing SERE interrogation techniques and learned helplessness to the desk jockeys who were being pressed from above to find the thus-far-elusive evidence, both of WMDs and biological warfare weapons, and of an Al Qaeda–Iraq connection. The Defense Intelligence Agency and its purported interrogation experts were doing the same, within a command climate all too willing to ignore the fact that the JPRA, trained to recover military personnel, and SERE psychologists—experts in teaching American soldiers how to resist torture—had no real-world interrogation experience.
The Iraq Survey Group (ISG), which was formed in June 2003, at least spent time in the war theater, but ISG’s charge was to find weapons of mass destruction, and that likely deafened members’ ears to some extent to what they learned as they debriefed Iraqi prisoners, searching for evidence that would further their specific mission. Time and again those prisoners told the I
SG they had been subjected to extensive cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment by their military police officers and soldiers at multiple military camps in Iraq. At Gitmo, as we’ve seen, a thin legal fog hung over whether the Geneva Conventions against such practices actually applied. In Iraq, where the US was conducting an announced war, no such cover could be claimed. Nonetheless, the ISG failed to adequately flag what it must have witnessed—a program of intentional abuse intended to “set the conditions” for interrogation, exactly like the SERE EIT techniques at Guantanamo—and from there the practices involved began to metastasize through the entire war theater and, sadly, the insurgency as well.
ISG, though, had plenty of help, and it ran deep into the army command structure both in-country and out. At the time the ISG was established, army colonel Thomas Pappas was commanding the US Army’s 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which included the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. Initially those interrogators had been trained under the Army Field Manual at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Unsatisfied with the results and seeking additional techniques beyond what his interrogators had learned under the AFM, Pappas assigned the task to Captain Carolyn Wood, his battalion assistant operations officer, as the officer in charge of the interrogation operations at Abu Ghraib. And this, in turn, completed the circle that connected Abu Ghraib and Iraq with Gitmo, black sites XX XXXXXXXXXXX, and too much more. Wood, it turned out, had previously served as the interrogation operations officer at Bagram in Afghanistan, which had been the primary overseas testing ground for the unverified interrogation practices honed at Gitmo. It was also where Morgan Banks had been assigned, bringing with him his SERE methodology.
Will the circle be unbroken? I kept wondering, harkening back to the old spiritual and hoping it would. The answer, of course, was no. Not even close.
• • •
Captain Wood’s assignment from Colonel Pappas had been to develop standard operating procedures for the military interrogators at Abu Ghraib. In July 2003 Wood simply adopted wholesale the SOPs being used by the Special Mission Units already operating in Iraq, which were based on the SOPs being used by Special Mission Units in Afghanistan, which had been developed after their visit to—where else?—Gitmo. As Wood put it when she was questioned by the Senate Armed Services Committee, she had “cleaned up some of the grammar, changed the heading and signature block, and sent [the SOP] up” to be approved policy for the brigade. It didn’t take long for the SOP to sink in. After the battalion Human Intelligence and Counterintelligence officer sought additional input on the SOP, he sent word around to this staff as follows: “The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees. Colonel Bolz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken.”
The response, thank goodness, was not universal approval. When Major Nathan Hoepner, the battalion’s operations officer, received a draft of the orders, he looked at what the “gloves coming off” meant in practical terms: close-quarter confinement, sleep deprivation, white noise, and the use of dogs and snakes. Every officer in the command was allowed comments on the draft. Hoepner’s were emphatic: “That in no way justifies letting go of our standards. We NEVER considered our enemies justified in doing such things to us. . . . BOTTOM LINE: We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.”
In August 2003 Wood resubmitted her interrogation policy, including all the same techniques as her original proposal while omitting any negative responses such as Hoepner had provided. Wood even included an additional measure: sensory deprivation. That same month, following a phone call between JPRA Commanding Officer Moulton and the commander of the SMU Task Force in Iraq, a written request was sent to the JPRA for an “interrogation team.” Now that the SMU had adopted the SERE EIT program as their interrogation standard, they needed training in how to apply it.
JPRA selected three people for the mission: Lieutenant Colonel Steven Kleinman; Terry Russell, the JPRA research and development manager; and Lenny Miller, a contract SERE instructor. The SMU specifically requested Lenny Miller be part of the support team. Of the three, only Kleinman was a trained and experienced interrogator, having previously served in that position in Operation Just Cause and Desert Storm. That alone was unique. In the army especially, but also generally across the services, interrogations are mostly done by junior enlisted personnel, many without college degrees. But Kleinman brought other skills to the party as well. As a former air force intelligence officer, he was well schooled in developing cooperative assets, and as the senior Joint Personnel Recovery Agency intelligence officer, he also was aware that his group was not designed or trained to handle interrogations. That, however, is precisely what Moulton had in mind for Kleinman’s team.
Shortly after the team arrived in Iraq the first week of September 2003, Moulton authorized them to participate in SMU interrogations and to use the full range of SERE school physical pressures. Kleinman was taken aback by this. He thought he was being sent to Iraq to observe and offer advice on SMU interrogations, not to be in the middle of them. He was also concerned with the scope of the new rules of engagement. “How in the world did this get authorized?” Kleinman wondered.
On September 5, 2003, the JPRA team took part in its first SMU interrogation of an Iraqi detainee. When Kleinman walked in the room, he saw the detainee on his knees in a stress position and with a spotlight shining in his eyes, being repeatedly slapped in the face. A military police officer was standing in the background, menacingly pounding an iron bar on his hand.
Who is this guy? Kleinman asked himself. He looks like a stereotype from an old gangster movie, slapping that bar in his hand. When Kleinman was told this had been going on for thirty minutes, he felt it was a “direct violation of the Geneva Conventions” and “could constitute a war crime.” Kleinman went to the SMU’s immediate commander and recommended the session be halted immediately. He also called Randy Moulton and the SMU lawyer to remind them that the use of SERE tactics in an interrogation constituted violations of the Geneva Conventions.
Not so, Moulton replied. The JPRA team, he said, had been “cleared hot”—meaning there was full authority to proceed with SERE exploitation tactics in an interrogation.
Well, thought Kleinman, Moulton is issuing an illegal order—service members have an obligation not to follow unlawful orders. But in this opinion, he was on his own. His fellow team members, Russell and Miller, disregarded Kleinman’s warnings and kept right on going, helping to abuse an Iraqi detainee with exploitation techniques from the SERE role-play scenarios.
To maximize the psychological impact on the victim, they told the detainee he was going to be released from custody. They let him clean up and walk out to a bus stop to wait for a ride home to his family. Thinking he was moments from freedom, the victim was roughly “captured” again by the SMU personnel. The two JPRA instructors then stripped him naked—other than the hood placed over his head and shackles on his wrists and ankles—and threw him into a cold, dark cement bunker. After that, they screamed at the victim and dehumanized him repeatedly. The guards were instructed to have the detainee remain standing for twelve hours, no matter how much he pleaded, unless he passed out.
Having witnessed the SERE exploitation tactics at work, Russell and Miller then proceeded, with Moulton’s authorization, to develop a formal plan for using such practices on prisoners of war. Titled “Concept of Operations for HVT Exploitation,” the plan was basically a DOD version of psychologist Bruce Jessen’s April 2002 “Exploitation Draft Plan”—part of the EIT plan Jessen and Mitchell developed for the CIA.
Kleinman’s warnings might have fallen on deaf ears, but his presence on the JPRA team remained a problem. Not only did he refuse to participate, he continued to let both the JPRA and SMU chains of command know they were engaging in what he considered criminal acts. Inevitably, this caused friction within and around the team—so much so that Kleinman remembers being threatened by an SMU member who, while sharpening his knife,
warned Kleinman to “sleep lightly” because the SMU doesn’t coddle terrorists. Not long afterward, a decision was made to extract the JPRA team from Iraq.
• • •
Steven Kleinman, it needs to be noted, was not alone in issuing warnings and vocalizing his opposition. At every step along the way to legitimatizing torture, brave, sometimes horrified people stepped forward—within the military, within the CIA, within adjunct civilian organizations such as my own, within government generally. Emails sent in June 2003 between CIA medical and psychological staff leave little doubt that concern over SERE-EIT practices ran high at Langley. Mitchell and Jessen, one email reads, “have shown blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all their colleagues.”
The SMU task force legal advisor would later say he met with the SMU commander and told him SERE training was not meant for detainees. The lawyer also concluded that JPRA’s presence had the potential to lead to abuse. He also said he told the commander JPRA was not qualified or trained to perform interrogations. The SMU commander disregarded this legal advice, just as he did Kleinman’s.
Further up the chain of command, Army Lieutenant General Robert Wagner, the Joint Forces Command J-1,I read in the September 4, 2003, Weekly Report about the new “gloves off” practices and about how some of his own JPRA people were involved in them and wrote back to the JPRA: “I’m not sure I see the connection between your assigned responsibilities and this task. It is a good observation and recommendation. But, what charter places JPRA in the business of intelligence collection?”