Blank Spots on the Map

by Trevor Paglen

  Accounts from other prisoners, like Jamil el-Banna and Hassan bin Attash, provided consistent descriptions of the Dark Prison: They spoke of a darkness so thick they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces; Eminem’s Slim Shady album and other kinds of abrasive music and sounds blasted twenty-four hours a day; interrogations were held under strobe lights; prisoners were hung for extended periods of time from bars across their cell’s ceiling. Bisher Al Rawi, held in the Dark Prison beginning in December of 2002, described “some sort of satanic worship music” on constant rotation, impenetrable darkness, and the unsettling sight of masked guards periodically moving through the corridors with dim flashlights. “Plenty lost their minds,” recounted Binyam Mohammed. “I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off.... ”

  “We can’t comment on the subject of unacknowledged detentions,” said Reto Stocker, the Swiss head of the Afghan Delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross at their compound in the Shar-i-Naw section of Kabul. Our visit was unannounced, but after a few phone calls, the guards outside the Red Cross compound ushered us to an office in the back. Stocker said that he’d been expecting us. Strange . . . I imagined that in a small town like Kabul, word gets around pretty quickly when someone shows up asking about secret prisons.

  Stocker wouldn’t budge on the question of black sites. Asked about the work NGOs like Human Rights Watch had done on the subject, Stocker replied, “They’re much more outspoken on the subject.” I knew that the Red Cross isn’t supposed to talk about the work they do. The reports they issue aren’t meant for public consumption—the Red Cross is supposed to discreetly visit prisoners and submit reports only to host governments. In the case of prisoners held by the United States in the war on terror, that would be the executive branch. The point of the Red Cross’s discreet approach is to ensure that the organization remains neutral in a given conflict and doesn’t jeopardize its access to prisoners by publicly embarrassing governments. The Red Cross’s system rarely breaks down, but a notable exception was Abu Ghraib. A Red Cross report on the prison leaked to The Wall Street Journal showed that the abuses at the prison had been documented by the aid agency (and promptly ignored by the Pentagon) long before the internal Army investigations into the prison began. Nonetheless, the Red Cross relies on secrecy as much as the CIA does. It might be called a Faustian bargain, but it’s easy to understand the logic.

  As our conversation spindled around the subject of black sites, Stocker talked about the work the Red Cross was doing in Afghanistan, visiting prisoners at Bagram’s “other Gitmo” and at makeshift prisons on American FOBs (forward operating bases) in places like Gardez. Stocker had just come back from a visit with Jack Idema at the Pul-e-Charki prison outside Kabul. Asked about Idema, Stocker said that talking to Idema was like “talking to someone from Mars.” Our conversation continued dancing around the subject of black sites. I finally got frustrated and threw my hands up: “I feel like you’re implying the Red Cross knows a lot about this, and at the same time you won’t talk about it! You’re really confusing me!” Stocker’s response was calm yet firm: “It’s not my intention to make any of this clear to you.”

  As we got up to leave, Stocker’s tone changed ever so slightly. “You know,” he said, “we are interested in the same things. If you find out anything about this, we would like to know about it.” I pointed down the street. Two blocks away, some kind of American outfit had walled off a city block with concrete blast walls, sandbags, and Nepalese Gurkha guards perched in a makeshift plywood tower pointing M-16s down the alley. Several journalists Thompson and I talked to had mentioned the site, recounting rumors that it might be one of the places where rendition victims wound up. Nobody seemed to know who ran the place. When Thompson and I approached the compound’s blast walls, four layers of security—Afghans, Gurkhas, Bosnians, and finally an American—all declined to say who they were or what the installation was. “I heard that foreign prisoners had been held at that place,” I said. Stocker nodded, acknowledging only what I’d said. He still wasn’t giving anything up.

  Back at the Mustafa Hotel, the Bobs and I had gotten off to an awkward start, but I started making friends with them after consciously steering conversations clear of anything remotely sensitive, like their names. I joined the Bobs each morning for a breakfast of flat bread, butter, and jam. We took to chatting.

  One of the Bobs was different than the others. A fortyish African-American man who wore smart casual clothes, he stayed away from the nightly drinking that the other men in his crew took part in. He looked less jaded than the others, more resigned, less boisterous. One morning as we sat eating breakfast together, he confessed that he hated being in Afghanistan. He missed his wife and daughter back in the States but was now on his third rotation because it was the only way he saw to get ahead financially. With the earnings from his first and second stints in-country, he’d been able to save enough for a down payment on a house for his wife and himself. Another eight months and he’d be able to help put his daughter through college.

  After a few days, some of the spookier Bobs started inviting me to drink with them in the hotel’s back rooms when they had some downtime. At some point, I realized that my being a writer didn’t upset them for the reasons I’d suspected. The Bobs weren’t worried about me spilling whatever inconsequential secrets they might let slip. Journalist Peter Bergen had been through the Mustafa the previous year, working on a story for Rolling Stone. Setting the scene for his piece, Bergen casually mentioned that the Mustafa had an in-house massage parlor stocked with giggling young Thai women. There’d been hell to pay when the Bobs’ wives back home had learned about it. As far as I could tell, the massage parlor was no more.

  Over beers with one of the Bobs at the Mustafa one night, I mentioned what Stocker had said about Jack Idema. The Bob paused. “He wasn’t such a bad guy,” he finally said, in the kind of tone you might have if your brother had been sent to prison for armed robbery, but you thought he was a decent guy who got a bum deal. Before he was locked up in the Pul-e-Charki prison outside Kabul, Idema had been the king of the Mustafa scene. He even had a cocktail named after him in the hotel bar: the Tora Bora. The Bobs all knew him: They’d been part of the same gang.

  Idema might have been a Bob once, but he went beyond that role. His story is filled with conflicting loyalties, secrecy, and violence. If Afghanistan and the United States affect one another through relational geographies of informality, secrecy, and violence, then Idema’s story is an account of its logical outcome.

  Jack Idema’s military career began when he was a Special Forces operative in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The rest of the story gets obscure. Idema claims that, after being discharged from the Army in 1984, he signed on as a military adviser in El Salvador and Honduras as part of a black Special Mission unit. This claim is hard to verify: as Idema told Peter Bergen, the only record of this service is in files that the Army “[doesn’t] want to give anyone.” Idema also spent time in Haiti and Thailand training local forces. Back in his home of New York State, Idema was a partner in a counterterrorism training school called the Counter Group.

  During this same time, Idema’s police record started growing: There was a 1982 charge of possessing stolen property, a 1986 charge for resisting arrest and assault, a 1988 arrest for disorderly conduct, and a 1990 arrest for assault involving a firearm. Idema spent 1994 through 1997 in federal prison on more than fifty counts of wire fraud. According to Idema’s version of the story, the charges stemmed from a Clinton administration conspiracy against him. Idema claims that in the early 1990s, he traveled to Lithuania to follow the trail of the illegal arms trade coming out of the former Soviet Union. According to Idema, he discovered in Lithuania a black market in tactical nuclear weapons, so-called “suitcase nukes.” Idema says that he brought this information to the FBI, who asked for his sources. Believing the FBI to be penetrated by Russian moles, Idema refused,
setting off a “shit storm of biblical proportions” that eventually led to the FBI investigation. But the record contradicts Idema: The FBI began their investigation a full year before Idema went to Lithuania.

  Idema made up his mind to go to Afghanistan after 9/11, encouraged by the multimillion-dollar bounties on al-Qaeda and Taliban heads. With a documentary team from National Geographic in tow, Idema slipped into Afghanistan via Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in October 2001 and quickly joined up with Northern Alliance forces on the invasion’s front lines.

  When the initial battles for Afghanistan finished in early 2002, Idema settled into the Wild West life of post-invasion Afghanistan. Spooks were everywhere: undercover CIA officers, black Special Forces units, and hosts of “advisers” and “communications” people, many of whom camped out at the Mustafa Hotel. Idema fit the profile to a T: by day, strapped with pistols and machine guns, he cruised the capital in an SUV wearing wraparound shades and a desert camo uniform that looked almost, but not exactly, like American military garb. By night, Idema held court at the Mustafa, where, unlike the other shady types living in the war on terror’s dark corners, he was more than happy to regale his drinking buddies with outlandish tales of his past and present exploits.

  Idema set up his own one-man war-on-terror operation, an ad hoc group composed of a few American bounty hunters and Afghan fighters. Edward Caraballo, an award-winning documentary cameraman, followed the group, recording their exploits. Echoing the code names of American Special Forces teams operating in Afghanistan, Idema called his crew Task Force Saber 7.

  From time to time, Idema would disappear from the Mustafa with truckloads of machine guns, RPGs, radios, body armor, knee pads, and everything else one would need for scattershot paramilitary operations. “Top-secret mission,” he’d tell the Mustafa crowd if they asked where he’d been. “We’re closing in on the last terrorists,” he’d whisper cryptically. Idema told the crowd that he was reporting directly to Donald Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon for these “top-secret” missions, and in the post-invasion climate of Kabul, it seemed plausible. The only thing that didn’t make sense was Idema’s willingness to talk about himself. Soldiers assigned to black units outside normal chains of command aren’t known to brag about their exploits to outsiders.

  On July 5, 2004, Idema’s world imploded. Days before, Idema had made an egregious political mistake when his Task Force Saber 7 raided the house of Afghan Supreme Court justice Maulawi Siddiqullah, who Idema believed was plotting an assassination attempt on Yunus Qanooni, the Northern Alliance commander serving as Afghanistan’s education minister. In a dawn raid, Idema grabbed the Supreme Court justice and one of his brothers. A group of German soldiers in an overhead helicopter provided backup. A few days later, Afghan police arrested Idema and the other members of his outfit. Afghan authorities found a private prison built into Idema’s home. On the wall were two clocks, one showing local time in Afghanistan, the other showing the time in Fort Bragg, home of the Army’s Special Forces community. A piece of paper tacked to Idema’s wall was labeled “missions to complete.” Number two was “Karzai”; number four, “pick up laundry.”

  Idema’s trial took place only months after the publication of photos from Abu Ghraib. Idema’s former prisoners described being scalded with hot water, dunked in ice water, kicked and beaten, chained upside down by their ankles, and hooded for days at a time. Idema admitted to running a private prison in Kabul but insisted that the men he’d captured were terrorists and that he’d used only standard interrogation techniques on them. Idema faced five charges before the Afghan court: taking hostages, having a private jail, torture, robbery of vehicles, and entering the country without a visa. He was looking at twenty years in an Afghan prison.

  The story of Jack Idema gets as muddled and twisted as the American occupation of Afghanistan itself. When reporters showed up for the trial, Idema confidently claimed that “we were working for the U.S. anti-terrorism group. We were working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies. We were in direct contact with Rumsfeld’s office five times a day, every day.” A spokesperson for the Defense Department said it wasn’t true: “This group of American citizens does not represent the American government and we do not employ or sponsor them.”

  But as the trial proceeded, Idema and his lawyers started producing a stream of documents strongly suggesting that, while he may have not been in the direct employ of the Pentagon, they certainly knew what he was up to. At best, the Pentagon had indirectly authorized his activities. At worst, they let Idema’s task force go about their “missions” with a wink and a nod. First, the Pentagon admitted that it accepted a prisoner at Bagram whom Idema handed over, saying that the man was a high-level Taliban intelligence official. Moreover, Idema’s lawyer played a tape of Idema speaking to the office of Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, a former Delta Force commander serving as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin had made headlines after suggesting, in uniform, that the war on terror was a struggle between the “Christian nation” of the United States and the satanic forces of Islam. In one of the tapes, a Boykin aide says, “We passed all your information to the J2 [intelligence] staff here and to DIA [the Defense Intelligence Agency]. And we were trying to protect our boss [Boykin] from getting associated with it, because he doesn’t need any other scrutiny right now by the press.” In another, an aide says, “I told General Boykin you called. I gave him the information.” Although Idema could prove no written authorization for his activities, it was clear that some of the highest-ranking officials in the Pentagon knew what he was up to.

  Idema’s relationship with officials in the Afghan government, a patchwork of warlords, tribal interests, Northern Alliance commanders, and outright crooks without any discernible shared interests, did not fit the traditional role of mercenary. With the government so divided by factions, sometimes he seemed to be working against it, sometimes for it. At the trial, Idema’s lawyer showed a tape in which Yunus Qanooni thanks Idema for thwarting the assassination attempt against him and offering the help of the Afghan government in Idema’s private counterterrorism efforts. The trial’s presiding judge, Abdel Basit Bakhtiari, echoed Qanooni’s words when he declared in public, “You have saved the life of Minister Qanooni, and the people you have arrested were terrorists and Al Qaeda.” Still, Idema was an outlaw so far as the governments of the United States and Afghanistan were officially concerned. In another age he might have been called a pirate.

  When Idema entered Afghanistan, he cast his lot in with the Northern Alliance. After the fall of Kabul and the ousting of the Taliban, the old warlords from around the country—including the Northern Alliance commanders—jockeyed for influence. In their various designs for power, the warlords were inconsistently supported by the Americans. This exacerbated the instability. Afghanistan’s central government became little more than a vehicle for the warlords, who’d assumed key positions, to usurp public money and channel foreign aid to their own private power bases. The old commanders raised thousands of private armies throughout post-Taliban Afghanistan, splintering the state into a thousand pieces.

  Jack Idema’s Task Force Saber 7 fit into the emerging post-Taliban feudal system. Idema was fighting state-identified terrorists. On several occasions, Idema called on ISAF (the NATO-led force, entirely separate from the U.S. military) bomb disposal squads to assist at houses he’d raided. The ISAF units, unable to tell the difference between Idema’s squad and the American Special Forces presence more generally, found traces of explosives and suspicious electrical equipment at the locations Idema raided. Idema’s outfit was really not that different from the other informal militias occupying the country: Task Force Saber 7 shared much with the warlords’ private armies, the legions of private military contractors like DynCorp, Blackwater, and Triple Canopy, and the CIA and Special Forces paramilitaries themselves, who, like the others, weren’t about to tell anyone who they were or what they were doing.

  I
dema’s Task Force Saber 7 was just another private army (admittedly smaller) like those of the warlords; all thrived on the infusion of American dollars. The court eventually acquitted four Afghans caught with Idema after it turned out they were members of the Afghan army. And even as Idema sat in prison, the judge who’d sentenced him empathized with the rogue bounty hunter: “I’d like to be like Jack, because he is a very brave man,” Bakhtiari told The Times Online. “I understand he had fought terrorism and I’m sorry he has been arrested. I feel the government of Afghanistan could have done more with him.”

  Jack Idema was reporting to Boykin’s office at Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Just as the CIA was going through dramatic changes in its structure, managing everything from its new “expanded powers” to the legions of green-badgers it had brought on as private contractors, the Pentagon was also going through a huge change in the structure of its forces.

  Humiliated by the Pentagon’s inability to quickly deploy to Afghanistan immediately after 9/11 (leaving the CIA to take the lead role in the initial phases of the war), the defense secretary wanted a “leaner,” more “agile” military. A key part of Rumsfeld’s transformation was vastly expanding the size, scope, and powers of the Special Forces community. He’d requested a 35 percent budget increase for the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) between fiscal year 2003 and 2004, and changed SOCOM from being a “supporting command” to a “supported command”: SOCOM went from being charged with supporting other combat commands’ missions to being able to develop and implement missions on its own initiative. The change also removed a layer of bureaucracy between SOCOM and the secretary of defense: SOCOM would report directly to Rumsfeld rather than regional commanders.