“Some of us are pretty ugly too,” Sugar pointed out. “You, for example.”
“Well, that’s a point,” Turtle conceded. “Though Alison says I have an air of distinction.”
It is sometimes claimed that Iraq is an “artificial” state, whose borders, set by European powers in 1920–21, did not respect ethnic or tribal boundaries. It’s true enough as far as it goes, but the same could be said of many nations (the United States and Canada, for example). The people of Iraq may not be as diverse as Americans, but any given Iraqi’s DNA might sport the genes of the original Ubadians who settled along the fertile, muddy banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers mixed in with the genes of immigrating or conquering Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Akkadians, Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Kurds, and maybe even a more recent sprinkling of Brits dating from the heyday of British Colonial rule.
So while dark hair, dark eyes, and a semi-permanent golden tan were common to most of the detainees (while their captors presented the usual glorious American confusion of traits and features), green eyes and even blond hair were not unknown.
There was an unusually pale Iraqi detainee, a redhead known as “New Hampshire” because, to the Mainers, he looked less Iraqi than Irish.
“How did you get here?” Sergeant Doug Horton asked New Hampshire one day.
“Oh, mister-mister! The army took me from my bed and sent me to Abu Ghraib!”
“No kidding?” the sergeant exclaimed. “The exact same thing happened to me!”
As it turned out, the United States was snatching Iraqis up faster than they were deploying troops to guard them. The ratio of prisoners to guards in January 2004 when the 152nd arrived was seventy-five to one. By the following September, the ratio was a far more reasonable ten to one.
Much of the overcrowding was unnecessary, as many of the occupants of the prison were there for no other reason than their age and geographical location when allied forces passed through on one mission or another. The overpopulation made it difficult to identify the real insurgents who would have actionable intelligence.
As the Abu Ghraib scandal played out in the United States during the spring and summer of 2004, military officers who had maintained a loyal discretion regarding the administration’s most egregious errors were now moved to name this Charlie Foxtrot (clusterfuck) for what it was.
Army planners knew what problems the lack of a good wartime detention facility would cause and tried to warn of the potential pitfalls. However, they and their advice had been shut out of the postwar planning effort. They had been told instead to focus on defeating the Iraqi Army and toppling the Saddam Hussein regime.
“In many cases, the tension between military brass and Rumsfeld centers around efforts by the secretary’s inner circle to shake up longstanding military practices and assume greater risks,” reported the Christian Science Monitor. “This has included using smaller numbers of troops, streamlining what he sees as a slow, cumbersome military planning process, and also placing a high emphasis on gathering ‘actionable intelligence.’”
It was the pressure to gain actionable intelligence that inspired Bush administration and senior military officers to authorize “enhanced interrogation techniques” (i.e., torture). But more to the point, it was this pressure that led soldiers and Marines in the field to pluck up any potential source of HUMINT they encountered and stuff them into the deplorable conditions of an already overcrowded prison. Presumably some of these sources proved helpful, but the remainder—the majority—were simply, miserably, and unjustly stuck.
At his direction, soldiers under Colonel Quantock’s leadership stepped up the effort to distinguish and separate the innocent from the guilty, and those suspected of insurgency from those charged with ordinary crimes. The latter were transferred to the tender care of their countrymen when the Hard Site was turned over to Iraqi control in September. Female prisoners were put under the care and protection of female MPs in the Hard Site and were eventually freed. And, most heartening, detainees who had spent months behind the wire at Ganci began at last to get their day in court. Many began to go home.
“If you don’t release people, you only end up creating more insurgents,” now major general Quantock said. “Prisoners getting let go can be leveraged to calm the insurgency. Release became an integral part of our operation as opposed to an afterthought.”
During this period, Quantock also let it be known that anyone brought into Abu Ghraib had to arrive together with documentary evidence of his crime to justify the detention and later to be used in a hearing or trial. The colonel would permit no more roundups of men of military age to swell the population of Ganci beyond its capacity.
There were those who complained bitterly about this policy, commanders in the field who resented being asked to gather evidence or articulate probable cause. In short, warriors were told to behave like policemen. They also feared, perhaps with some justification, that the detention system had developed a revolving door, and terrorists were being released to cause more harm to American troops and Iraqi civilians.
Counterinsurgency warfare, according to Quantock, however, places a higher premium on the opinions of the populace than on the safety of the troops. Every prisoner taken to Abu Ghraib had left an estimated minimum of twenty friends and relatives behind. If he was imprisoned unjustly, or treated badly, those who loved him would be infuriated, and everyone they expressed their feelings to would have further cause to resent, distrust, and even wish harm upon the Americans. Such resentment and distrust undermined what tentative interest Iraqi citizens might have had in cooperating with the American effort.
“Treat [detainees] with a little bit of dignity and you can work wonders,” Quantock said.
To that extent, the commander pestered General Miller for more resources. Better food and gravel to get the prisoners out of the mud were but a few improvements. The detainees also began getting access to reading and math classes from local civilians contracted and vetted by the army. Moderate Imams would visit to talk jihadists down from their radical pedestals.
“I wanted them to join the team,” Quantock said.
And join the team they did. Quantock said that the amount of information coming out of the camps increased many times over.
“It’s hard to prove,” he said. “But I know the changes saved countless lives.”
So spirits were high when eight of the Ganci 4 compound chief Hussein’s family had been cleared of their charges and were going to be sent home. They were moved to the area used to hold detainees pre-release. Yogi had bought a box of Cuban cigars on his most recent expedition to the Green Zone, and he asked Skeletor if he’d like to go down to the pre-release compound and have a cigar with Hussein’s boys.
They brought the Husseins out of the compound and sat down with them on the makeshift cement-block-and-board benches. There were no handcuffs or shotguns; just some cold Pepsi, a box of Cuban cigars, and Firos, to translate.
“We all sat around and chilled with them, human to human, not soldier to prisoner,” Skeletor later told Tex. “It was a really nice moment.”
It was a way of thanking them for working with the 152nd, and not against them, during the terrible events of April.
“Good luck. Be well,” the Americans and Iraqis told each other. Then the Iraqis boarded the bus home, and the Americans walked back to Ganci.
The release of an Iraqi prisoner from Abu Ghraib did not occur in the manner made classic by countless crime dramas on TV; they were not simply deposited outside the front gates. Rather, commanders determined that the most humane course would be to bring detainees back to the locale where they’d originally been arrested. The prison provided transportation by what became known as the “Happy Bus.”
For some, it wasn’t always quite so happy. The rules said that they had to be brought back and released where they were initially apprehended, and this didn’t always sit well with the released detainees. This could cause p
roblems if a former detainee was returned to a place where he wasn’t especially welcome. Cultural lines and neighborhoods had been shifted and splintered by the war, meaning a Sunni neighborhood might have changed to Shiite over the course of a prisoner’s stay with the Mainers.
After the photo scandal broke, and rumors of further abuses, including the rape of female prisoners, began circulating, women who had been imprisoned at Abu Ghraib returned home to find that they were judged damaged goods, whether or not they had in fact been raped.
And there were some, though not many, who rode the Happy Bus out of Abu Ghraib only to be brought back, having demonstrated their jihadist bona fides in some regrettable act of re-offense. This would be true, for example, of the detainee dubbed New Hampshire.
Though Sergeant Horton had nothing to do with New Hampshire’s departure on the Happy Bus, he had been known to inquire on behalf of detainees whose protestations of innocence sounded particularly plausible.
Middle-sized, squarely built, with fierce eyebrows and a bristling mustache, Horton could easily be typecast as the tough-as-nails Gunny in a World War II movie. His courage under fire, which would be amply demonstrated on more than one occasion, was matched by an unsentimental, clear-eyed empathy for the detainees in his charge.
There were of a couple of men whose honesty seemed so evident to him, for example, that Horton was moved to make inquiries among the Secret Squirrels on their behalf. Pressed, the Secret Squirrels admitted they really didn’t have much evidence that these guys had done anything wrong other than be present in the wrong place at the wrong time. With that assurance, Horton made an energetic case to the command staff that the hearing process be expedited, and the two were heard and released.
It turned out that the two men were not only ordinary, law-abiding citizens of Abu Ghraib, they had served on the local town council. “Shukhran, mister-mister, thank you. You are kind, hanoon,” they would say to Horton before boarding the Happy Bus.
Nothing about New Hampshire suggested he possessed much in the way of civic virtue. Still, he was set loose.
“Haven’t I seen you here before?” Horton asked, upon spotting a mop of carroty hair on the other side of the wire.
“No, mister-mister! Not me,” said New Hampshire.
If Horton was inclined to doubt his own memory, the newly installed eye-scanning technology at the Secret Squirrel shop confirmed it: New Hampshire was a repeat offender. His crime-against the coalition? Placing an IED along a roadway.
One day, during one of his frequent across-the-wire conversations, Horton conducted a very informal poll of a group of a dozen or so of New Hampshire’s fellows who had been detained on the same charge.
“Money?” he asked each in turn, and each in turn said yes, they had been paid for improvising or placing an explosive device. As Horton points out, this was no small matter in a country whose economy had been as thoroughly wrecked as badly as its infrastructure by the combined effects of decades of mismanagement, war, sanctions, more war, looting, corruption, and the abrupt dismissal of thirty thousand employees of one of Iraq’s largest employers, the Iraqi Army.
If the money needed to feed one’s family wasn’t sufficient incentive, al-Zarqawi’s jihadists offered an additional one: Work with us, or we’ll take a Black and Decker and drill a hole in your head. They meant it, too. Horton’s information was that the unusually unpleasant prison bully the Mainers had nicknamed Lucifer had been one of the head-drillers.
Lucifer was also one of the more troublesome detainees and fought guards most chances he got. This grew tiresome. It meant, for example, that every time he needed a shower, medical attention, or rescue from the lethal clutches of a fellow prisoner, someone had to physically overpower him.
One day, Yogi called the command post requesting assistance at the isolation cage, and Dizl went to see what he needed. The isolated detainee had expressed a need to go to the bathroom, Yogi explained, and would need an escort, but Yogi couldn’t leave his post. Would Dizl take him?
“Sure,” said Dizl. “Who is it?” He craned his neck for a look. “Oh, come on! Lucifer is in isolation again?”
“Yup,” said Yogi.
“And has to go pee again?”
“That’s what he says.”
“Jeeeezus. For a terrorist, that guy has a tiny bladder!”
“I know. And he’s going to fight you.”
“I know,” said Dizl ruefully. He sighed. “I’m tired of fighting Lucifer, Yogi,” he said. “I’m an old man.”
“You’d think, if he really needed to go to the bathroom, he wouldn’t fight the guy who’s helping him out.”
Dizl brightened. “Maybe if we give him five or ten minutes, he’ll have to go so badly, he’ll be too focused on that to bother fighting me? And then, when he’s done, he’ll be so happy and relieved …”
“How badly do you think Lucifer would have to go before he’s too distracted to fight?”
“I say it’s worth a try,” said Dizl.
As it turned out, Lucifer didn’t cause too much trouble that day, but the next time Dizl had to deal with him, Lucifer’s bodily needs must have been met more recently. He tried to karate kick Dizl in the throat. Lucifer lost the argument, but Dizl retained an injury to the ball of his right foot that would require repeated surgeries during ensuing years.
One of the numerous problems Dizl and the other Mainers faced was a lack of instruction; they had no real SOP. Dizl had never even laid eyes on an operations manual for Abu Ghraib Prison. This seemed very strange; every branch seems to have a never-ending supply of thick manuals covering everything from invading a country to the proper adornment of medals on a dress uniform and when you’re allowed to wear what kind of hat. Asking around, however, he discovered that no one seemed to have come across anything so basic and useful as directions in prison operations.
In the side pocket of his fatigue pants, Dizl carried a fat little book entitled Soldier’s Manual of Common Tasks (Skill Level One), Soldier Training Publication 21-1-SMCT. Its cover was thickly reinforced with olive-green duct tape and annotated with ballpoint pen. Dizl had written “NEVER SNIVEL” in bold lettering across the front. In this volume, there weren’t any instructions for guarding a prison, let alone for guarding a prison that combined such a diversity of offender-types. There was no guidance on how to manage the care and control of, for example, children who also happened to be murderers, bomb-makers, and enemy combatants.
So, adapt and overcome. Dizl emailed his wife: “Could you send me my old Maine State Prison Policies and Procedures Manual?”
She did, and the Mainers reviewed this document carefully, adapting its provisions to the Iraqi reality. It worked surprisingly well. Later on, after they had survived the heaviest of the insurgent attacks and had begun to build Camp Redemption, a question arose as to what should be done with stubbornly violent detainees who refused to behave themselves.
They opened Dizl’s Maine State Prison Policies and Procedures Manual and found a human solution, a painless means of attaching meaningful consequences to bad behavior: the restraint chair. The restraint chair was pretty much exactly what it sounded like. It had a similar appearance to an electric chair, though it came without the bits and pieces required to make it an execution tool. It was designed to keep an unruly prisoner secured via restraints on the arms, legs, and forehead in a manner that didn’t cause any pain as long as the occupant didn’t struggle too much.
Following the specifications given in the manual, Dizl and the Lost Boys commissioned the chair for Camp Redemption, installing it on a smooth concrete platform in a sheltered area. A Red Cross delegation that was touring Abu Ghraib at the time specifically signaled its approval of and even admiration for this response to inmate violence.
Colonel Quantock marveled publicly about the 152nd’s remarkable versatility. “They can make just about anything happen,” he said.
10 Ricks, Fiasco, 192.
11 Ricks, Fiasco, 197.
/> TWELVE
LENNY THE LOBSTER, HAJJI-PUSSY, AND FRANK
“[D]etaining the family members of anti-Coalition forces, destroying the homes of captured suspects … and shooting at Iraqi vehicles that attempt to pass Coalition vehicles … may bestow short-term tactical advantages. However, these advantages should be weighed against Iraqi sentiments and the long-term disadvantages associated with the image it creates.”
—Study by the Center for Army Lessons Learned, Fiasco, p. 253
AS MAY DREW to a close, there was a note on the camp message board. It said, “Make mental note that ICOs [Iraqi Correction Officers] will be taking over the Hard Site today (040521). This means that you will see Iraqis in the area and in the towers around the Hard Site carrying AK-47s. Their uniform is not known at this time. Do not shoot them!”
“What’s going on?”
“FUBAR.”
Camp Bucca, a new compound built to help with detainee overflow, safely situated near Umm Qasr and the Kuwaiti border, needed more troops to reinforce the Sixteenth MP Brigade. So commanders took a platoon of Mainers away from the already understaffed mission at FOBAG.
There was also good news, Big Army announced cheerily. The Lost Boys who’d been living in the Mortar Café were being moved into trailers being constructed in an area known to soldiers and Marines as Mortar Field.
In other words, the higher-ups had decided to take an empty area rumored to be a mass grave, an area no detainee would go near, and turn it into a trailer park for all the personnel at Abu Ghraib. Doubtless the trailers themselves would have been downright luxurious compared with the minimal amenities offered by the Mortar Café. And if you’re already dwelling within the dubious feng shui of a torture chamber, living atop a mass grave couldn’t be a whole lot worse.
The problem with Mortar Field was, in a word, mortars. The area had been thus dubbed for a reason, and if anything could make a cement-block building twenty-five yards from a fuel point seem a haven of safety, it was the idea of living in a tin box on Mortar Field.
Packed for the Wrong Trip Page 13