“Listen,” Dizl said, when Kathib, with lordly reluctance, appeared on the other side of the fence. Echoing Tex, Dizl outlined some of his thoughts about the risks that detainees and soldiers alike were facing there at Abu Ghraib, and about how the dangerous choices of some of Kathib’s people in Ganci 7-1 only put everyone in more danger.
“They are not my people!” Kathib protested.
“They are now,” said Dizl. “You must keep things on your side of the fence as peaceful and orderly as possible, given the circumstances.”
“Asweech! You are crazy!”
“Some say.”
“This is impossible!”
“You must do it,” said Dizl.
Back in his tower, Dizl didn’t entertain any illusions about the conversation he had just had with the Iraqi. Doubtless for Kathib, abusive master of all he surveyed within the wire, the sentiments of the American on the outside sounded like the speeches of adults in old Peanuts cartoons. Dizl’s humanitarian efforts were reduced to a few puffs on a wonky trombone. Still, it was a start.
“I’m hoping to make Kathib into what, in corrections terms, is known as a change agent,” Dizl admitted, when Turtle asked.
As it turned out later, Kathib persisted in being the wrong guy for the job.
Soon after letting Kathib know that he would be held personally responsible for what did or didn’t happen in the compound between the hours of noon and midnight, Dizl found himself in conversation with the Imam of the Ganci 7.
“I am not prepared to go through Kathib to get things done anymore,” Dizl told him. “If there are things the detainees need, or if I see something go wrong, and I want a person brought to the wire below my tower, this must happen, with or without Kathib,” he said.
“Yes,” the Imam agreed.
“And I will treat bullies, liars, and thieves appropriately,” Dizl continued. “This must be understood.”
“I understand,” the Imam said.
In the parlance of American prison culture, Kathib was “getting punked,” served notice that he wasn’t going be in control anymore. In fact, the thuggish Kathib was now Number One on Dizl’s watch list.
In elucidating the new regime for the assembled detainees, Dizl made a gesture, a visual analogy of a hawk grabbing a rat, as he navigated the language barrier between himself and the Iraqis.
The interpreter turned to his followers and said, “Ah, Shahein!”
“Shahein,” Dizl repeated. “Ayuh, that’s me, and Kathib is far (the rat)!”
After that, whenever Dizl spotted Kathib or one of his minions punching another detainee, stealing food or clothing, or engaging in any other bullying behavior, Dizl would give forth an osprey’s whistle and the detainees would respond by yelling, “Ahhhhhhhhh! Shahein!”
Being a businessman rather than an ideologue, the Ganci 4 compound chief, Hussein, was more willing than Kathib to make a pragmatic peace with the foreigners. As time went on, the relationship between the Mainers and the family group they called “Hussein’s Mafia” became one of mutual benefit. If other detainees were fighting, stealing, or breaking compound rules, Hussein’s relatives would turn in the perps and be rewarded with cigarettes, candy, and extra rations of food, which Hussein could then translate into even more peace and quiet.
The detainees were products of a far more authoritarian culture than the Mainers were used to, where dominance and force were expected and negotiation the resort of the weak. Compound leaders, like Kathib and Hussein, either commanded complete authority (whether by savvy or by fear), or they had none whatsoever. There seemed to be nothing in between.
The detainees were also, perforce, getting a sense of the Americans’ way of doing things. Most detainees arrived discouraged, fearful, and defeated. In time, they would generally respond to the food, shelter, clothing, protection, medical care, and (eventually) family visits with at least some measure of cooperation and even gratitude. But others—the foreign fighters most notably—seemed to prefer thinking of this dignified and respectful care as a sign that the Americans had somehow been bent to the jihadists’ will.
Removing a problem detainee from a crowded Ganci compound could take several days, because the best time to lay hands on them would be at Count. This took place three times per shift, though before the arrival of the 152nd, detainees were occasionally asked to perform the Count themselves. Unsurprisingly, the correct number would consistently be reported, though both malingering and escapes were common.
When it was Dizl’s turn to supervise Count, he would have a team leader remove the difficult person from the line. Then he would summon the Imam.
The Imam, with evident disgust, would ask Dizl what should be done with this man.
“Ask him what his mother would say about his actions?”
The Imam would do so, and the detainee would hang his head.
“Now ask him what he needs? Is he hungry? Does he need a new prayer rug?”
An Imam had his own power among the detainees. The disgust on his face and the virtuous, Gandalf-like power in his eyes would sear the soul of any believing Muslim. This approach was far more effective than removing and isolating the troublesome detainee, and the public spectacle extended the reach of the lesson throughout Ganci.
So the detainee, who was generally squatting on the ground, would be required to stand up and admit to his misbehavior. He would have to apologize to the Imam for the aggravation he had caused, while Dizl added corroborative details of time and place from his notes and occasionally sketches he had made of the action.
Dizl would appeal to their humanity instead of their animalistic fear. Why back an animal into a corner with violence to get it to change behavior when food and respect work better?
How did Dizl have the fortitude to take care of men who might have just killed his brothers-in-arms? According to him, his duty had nothing to do with their crimes. Dizl had worked in the Maine state prison guarding guys who had “raped kids to death.” It’s a job, it’s a discipline: create an environment of balance. It doesn’t take a lot of people to do so, just the right ones.
The Mainers began figuring out the system that they’d inherited: their infrastructure. An infrastructure where, in the past, detainees would be mere feet away from a water storage tank and the plumbing wouldn’t work. Before the Mainers, it seemed few units cared too much about following the basic humanistic procedures for taking care of prisoners of war.
So the soldiers found sustainable methods for detainees to have access to water, power, shelter, etc. The prisoners didn’t have to get treated special; they just needed to see that the Americans would try to give them livable conditions, that the Americans were willing to move away from the bad habits of their predecessors.
“We transcended miles of fence with a little humanity,” Dizl said.
He didn’t put them there; his duties were limited to taking care of the detainees.
Slowly, over time, a balance could be detected, a fragile but definite sense of order based on more than the power of the guards’ guns or the fear of the detainees.
As Skeletor intuited, the seeds might even have been sown during the terrible mass casualty attacks in April. After all those weeks of anxious anticipation, the blow had fallen, hard. It was a test.
By summer, there would be redemption. The April attacks got the attention of the generals and politicians and accelerated their plans for the new camp. It would have all the things that Ganci didn’t have: bandages, hammers, radios, and the other necessary tools for running a prison.
There would also be surgeons, shrinks, dentists, even a pediatrician the local families could bring their children to see. There would be preventive care, like vaccines and bomb shelters.
There would be a combat library and movies for the detainees, even air conditioning for their tents, which was nice, since the average daytime temperature hovered around 130 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the desert heat, anyone with any sense spent the hottes
t part of the day seeking shade. To this end, for example, the hand-sized desert palm spider had developed the unnerving habit of dashing toward anything that might cast a shadow, including an American soldier.
Stripping off one’s clothing presented itself as an obvious response to the intense heat. It was only with difficulty that the leadership could convince the men, especially the younger guys, to keep at least their underpants on when off-duty. There was a kid from Warren, Maine, whose dad had driven the school bus Dizl used to take to high school. He earned the moniker Roy-Roy-the-Naked-Boy because of his enthusiasm for nudity. The problem wasn’t solely aesthetic; it was a matter of keeping vulnerable parts out of harm’s way as much as possible.
Early in their deployment, a sniper bullet had buzzed past Huladog’s head as he passed the fuel point one night, whanging off the structure of a diesel tanker before tumbling off into the darkness, an excellent case in point for anyone still unconvinced that it was prudent to remain “armored up” at all times. Boots, body armor, and a helmet became mandatory for travel between the Mortar Café and the porta-potties. The inevitable result was that exhausted men, or men with small bladders, would pee in empty water bottles to be disposed of later. Tolerances of this practice varied from person to person, and quarrels about the number and age of these bottles and what was considered acceptable provided Abu Ghraib’s tenants with another diversion.
In the heat of the day, if you wanted to pick up or work with equipment that had been lying in the sun, it was advisable to wear gloves. Serious burns could result from something as simple as grabbing a hammer.
Incidentally, there would not be air conditioning for the troops’ living quarters. This engendered resentment in the ranks, naturally enough, as even a Texan would find the climate a challenge, and for Mainers accustomed to fresh, cool summers, the hot nights were a misery from which one woke feeling halfway mummified.
“But it’s a dry heat, isn’t it?” folks back home would invariably ask, and Dizl would sigh patiently and say, “Yes, Iraq is a desert. It’s a very dry heat.”
One day around the middle of May, Dizl had been tasked with gathering a work detail of young detainees. They’d been shipped new tents, ones adapted for the promised air conditioning, and the detainees would serve as labor along with Dizl and other soldiers. The Iraqi sun burned down on them as Dizl traveled across the now-familiar gritty ground, moving from guard tower to guard tower, seeking shade just like a spider.
Pausing to catch his breath, Dizl found himself sharing the shade of a tower with a dozen or so small brown sparrows. They were perched on a bit of wire at about eye-level. Dizl had watched a lot of birds during his forty years, but he had never seen birds actually pant before. Nor did they move when Dizl appeared, let alone fly away. Instead, they just looked at him, stunned into apathy by the relentless heat, beaks open, heaving breasts working the air in and out of their tiny avian lungs. Dizl could have picked them like apples.
A couple of hours later, Dizl and his work detail were panting, too, with the effort of hoisting a new tent upright. Dizl knocked the last tent peg into the sand and wiped his hands on his pant legs, leaving streaks that would rapidly dry back into dust and salt. Glancing idly to the right, along the lane that ran between adjacent enclosures, he was startled to see a man with a machine gun. The man was clad incongruously in a dark suit, mirror shades, and a necktie.
Secret squirrel, thought Dizl—a term for the various CIA, DoD, or other intelligence contractors—whereupon, by way of confirmation, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld stepped into view beside his bodyguard. The fierce sun glinted off the Secretary’s spectacles as he turned his head and looked down the lane toward Dizl and the Iraqi boys.
“Shit!” Dizl breathed.
The Iraqi boys looked at him enquiringly.
“Shahein?”
“Yalla shabob,” Dizl hissed. He pointed urgently at the tent they had just erected. “Yalla SHABOB! Get into the tent!”
The boys dove for cover, with Dizl right behind.
“What is it, Shahein?”
“Shhh! Lateesh! No talking!” Their brown eyes wide, they leaned toward him as he put his finger to his lips and widened his own pale eyes to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.
“Rumsfeld!” he hissed.
“Rumsfeld!” the boys looked at each other, eyebrows arced, mouthing the word, grinning their astonishment. “Rumsfeld?”
“Mushkalat! Trouble!” Dizl nodded portentously. With exaggerated stealth, he reached into the cargo pocket of his dusty fatigues and drew out a stash of Tootsie Pops kept handy for just such an emergency. So they sat there together, lollipops jammed between chapped lips, a forty-year-old private and ten young Iraqi detainees, huddled together beneath the canvas, hiding from Donald Rumsfeld.
9 Ken Ballen, Terrorists in Love(New York: Free Press, 2012).
ELEVEN
HUMINT
“At a tent camp used for detainees with medical conditions, prisoners ran out shouting. Some hobbled on crutches; one man waved his prosthetic leg overhead. ‘Why? Why?’ he shouted in Arabic. ‘Nobody has told me why I am here.’”
—Associated Press, May 6, 2004
ACOUPLE OF years after they’d returned home, Dizl received a phone call from Chiclets. He had had enough; he couldn’t take the images of the dead Marines’ faces in his head any more. Unlike Dizl, who chose not to look at the faces of his dead and wounded comrades so he wouldn’t have to for the rest of his life, Chiclets had had no choice. His mission at FOBAG mandated that he get very personal with them, the dying Marines, like holding their shattered skulls in his hands as he desperately tried to keep their brains from falling out.
Dizl was on the next ferry to Rockland. Chiclets, his young wife, father-in-law, and Dizl all took a ride down to the Togas VA to find Chiclets the help he so desperately needed.
A few years after that, in July 2011, Dizl was leaving the hospital after a surgery on his foot when he heard someone shouting his name, “Kelly! Hey, Kelly!”
It was Chiclets, who was now working as a VA nurse in the primary-care wing alongside Dizl’s own doctor.
“I asked my primary-care doctor if she knew what they had in a guy like him,” Dizl said. “She said, ‘Yes, we do!’”
In the summer of 2003, the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) sent a team to Iraq to review intelligence-gathering efforts in Iraq. The team found a series of wide-ranging problems in using technology and in training and managing intelligence specialists. Younger officers and enlisted soldiers were unprepared for their assignments, “did not understand the targeting process,” and possessed “very little to no analytical skills,” the CALL team found. It said that there were sixty-nine “tactical human intelligence” (HUMINT) teams working in Iraq, and that they should have been producing at least 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering a total average of 30. Overall, it said, the teams lacked “guidance and focus.” They were also overwhelmed, and at least fifteen more teams were needed.10 In August 2003, Captain William Ponce, an officer in the Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell, sent out a memo to subordinate commands. “The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees,” he told them. (Quantock told his guys to put the gloves back on.)
Captain Ponce stated that Colonel Steve Boltz, the second highest ranking military intelligence officer in Iraq, “has made it clear that we want these individuals broken”—intelligence jargon for getting someone to abandon his cover and relate the truth as he knows it.
“Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks,” he wrote. Ponce ordered them to “Provide interrogations ‘wish list’ by 17 Aug 03.”
“I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al-Qaeda,” a soldier attached to the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, operating in Western Iraq, responded just fourteen hours later, according to the time stamp on his email. “I firmly agree that the gl
oves need to come off.” With clinical precision, he recommended permitting “open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches … I also believe this should be a minimum baseline.” He also reported that “fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely.”11
Some of the guys from Maine—Humpty for one—had never been on an airplane before being told they were heading overseas. Humpty had never set foot outside the United States; he could count on one hand the number of times he had left the state of Maine. In fact, he seldom departed even Hancock County, in which he had been born and raised.
As much as television and films could prepare him for the appearance and customs of people outside of Downeast Maine, and as easy as it had been for Humpty to form friendships with the African American and Hispanic soldiers he would work with, nothing had really prepared him for the culture shock that was Iraq, especially in Abu Ghraib. Maine had only recently fallen from its spot as the whitest state in the United States to number four, so anyone with a little melanin in their skin appears quite foreign to kids growing up in rural Maine.
However, Humpty—as well as some of the men from the more cosmopolitan regions of Maine—was completely unprepared for the appearances, habits, and customs of Iraqis, and soldiers of the 152nd found them distinctly, sometimes unfathomably, exotic. Humpty never got used to the calls to prayer echoing from the spire of the local mosque, whose onion-domed tower was visible from almost everywhere in Abu Ghraib.
Dizl, on the other hand, liked the haunting, song-like calls, and the tidy rows of synchronized worshippers that would form within the wire walls in response to the song of prayer. He found the Iraqis themselves, with their liquid dark eyes and flashing smiles, aesthetically pleasing as a rule.
“Some of them are pretty unattractive, though,” said Turtle, when this subject was broached one day in the Hawk’s Nest. “Thumby, for example.”
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