Dirty Wars (30 page)

The Battlefield Interrogation Facility at NAMA had
four interrogation rooms
and a medical screening room, where Saddam was first processed after his capture. Furnished with rugs, prayer mats, couches, tables and chairs, the “Soft Room” was where cooperative and high-ranking detainees were brought for questioning—and tea. The Blue and Red (or Wood) rooms were larger (about six by ten feet), rectangular and plain; the Blue Room had a coat of blue paint over the plywood walls. These rooms were used for medium-intensity interrogations, reportedly employing techniques approved by the US Army Field Manual. The Black Room was preserved from its days as a torture chamber under Saddam and, for good measure, the task
force kept the meat hooks that hung from the ceiling during the Iraqi dictator's reign of terror in place for their use. The Black Room was the largest room—approximately twelve by twelve feet. It was here that JSOC would perform its harshest interrogations.

Detainees were moved between rooms, depending on their cooperation with the interrogators. “We would do that to show him if you tell us what we want to hear, then
this is the treatment
that you'll get,” recalled “Jeff Perry,” the pseudonym of a former interrogator at NAMA who provided eyewitness testimony on his experiences at NAMA to Human Rights Watch. “If you don't, then this is the treatment that you'll get. So there was a lot of that, going back and forth between the rooms.” If a prisoner was believed to have info on Zarqawi, he would be sent to the Black Room. It would also be used if “the interrogator thinks he's being lied to or he's not going to get anywhere with just talking to him,” Perry recalled. “We would march with him into the black room.” It would also be used if interrogators were “angry at [a detainee] and want[ed] to punish him for some reason.”

Inside the Black Room, the full-spectrum of SERE tactics were unleashed on detainees, along with a slew of medieval freestyle techniques. “It was painted black floor to ceiling. The door was black, everything was black,” recalled Perry. “It had speakers in the corners, all four corners, up at the ceiling. It had a small table in one of the corners, and maybe some chairs. But usually in the black room nobody was sitting down. It was standing, stress positions.” The
interrogations there often incorporated
extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual, humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the “No Blood, No Foul” motto. But, eventually, even blood was okay.

One former prisoner
—the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards—said he was made to strip, was punched repeatedly in the spine until he fainted, was doused with cold water and forced to stand in front of the air-conditioner and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Prisoners held at other facilities also
described heinous acts
committed against them by interrogators and guards, including sodomizing detainees with foreign objects, beating them, forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation—nothing but bread and water for more than two weeks in one case.

Members of the task force would
beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their faces
. One member of the task force reported that he had heard interrogators “
beating the shit out of
the detainee.” According to a former
interrogator with the task force, one of his colleagues was “reprimanded and assigned to desk duty because he
pissed in a bottle
and gave it to a detainee to drink.” Members of the task force would also
interrupt non-harsh interrogations
and begin slapping or beating detainees. On at least one occasion, they abducted the wife of a suspected insurgent being hunted by the task force “
to leverage
the primary target's surrender.” The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was still nursing her six-month-old baby. After interviewing numerous members of the task force at NAMA, Human Rights Watch concluded, “the abuses appear to have been part of a regularized process of detainee abuse—'standard operating procedure.'”

Steven Kleinman, at the time a lieutenant colonel in the air force,
arrived at Camp NAMA
in early September 2003, just as McChrystal was taking over as commander of JSOC. Kleinman was a veteran interrogator and an air force SERE instructor. When he was first dispatched to Iraq, he believed his job was to observe the interrogations at the camp and analyze how they could be done more effectively. A year earlier, Kleinman had investigated the program at Guantánamo and found “
fundamental systemic problems
” that he believed had undermined the stated goals of the interrogations. But the task force at NAMA had different plans.
They told Kleinman
they were having trouble getting actionable or reliable intelligence from their prisoners, and they wanted Kleinman and his SERE colleagues to help them apply SERE tactics to the interrogations. In essence, they wanted Kleinman and his colleagues to use the very torture tactics against detainees that they had taught US military personnel to resist.

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 all 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.”