Pay Any Price (25 page)

He says he got high when he was ordered to repeatedly question Afghans who obviously knew nothing more than they had already said in countless previous sessions. “You'd have to talk and talk, and you would take the job as a joke after a while,” says Corsetti. “You'd think, my job is fucking meaningless today. I'm going to go in there and fucking get stoned. And that's how your day goes. Hey, I even smoked hash with a few fucking prisoners.”

But once he was back at Fort Bragg, he switched to heroin and quickly became hooked. Since he was still in the military—the army wouldn't let him out while they prosecuted him—he became adept at shooting heroin into parts of his body where the needle marks wouldn't show. He tried other hard drugs, too, including PCP, but they didn't help to control the demons building inside him.

The heroin could dull the pain, but it could not control his rage. Once, when he was stuck in traffic in Fayetteville, the hometown of Fort Bragg, Corsetti became so angry that he got out of his car, ran up to the car in front of him, and pulled the driver out and started beating him. Corsetti said he sped away before any police arrived on the scene. With PTSD, “you feel like God's administrator of fucking karma in the universe,” says Corsetti. “You feel the need to personally exact fucking vengeance on people for karma. And you have no problems doing it.”

There were other episodes in which he lost control and angrily took out his rage in public. “It's not that I say and do these horrible things, it's that I take so much pleasure in it, now that is what fucks with me.” Invariably when he was confronted by the local police, they showed extraordinary patience, realizing that he was a soldier just back from Iraq. They would give him time to calm down and then quietly drive him home. It was the Fayetteville police department's informal method of dealing with PTSD.

The police could not save Corsetti's marriage, however. He met and married his wife while he was in the army. But after returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, he beat and abused her so badly that she took his son and left him. He and his wife, as his parents wrote in a 2009 letter to the Veterans Administration, “could not be in the same room. This has led to a total separation and the wife has a restraining order against him.”

By the end of his time in the army, Corsetti weighed over 300 pounds and truly looked like a monster, which was horribly ironic because his nickname was “the Monster.” Oddly, he didn't earn it in the military; it was jokingly applied by a teenage friend long before he joined up and long before he became obese. Before he enlisted, Corsetti liked the nickname so much that he got a tattoo that read “il Mostro,” Italian for “the Monster,” inked across his stomach.

The nickname fit him perfectly in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the drifting boy from Fairfax, Virginia, was transformed into a fearsome figure along the dim corridors of Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Corsetti was often the first person detainees would meet once they were brought into Bagram. Corsetti's job as the “screener” was to provide an initial traumatic experience for the prisoner, a shock to their system to ensure compliance. He was also supposed to help decide which detainees were likely to require extra measures later.

Corsetti was willing and able to quickly become an angry pit bull in the faces of the newly arrived prisoners. He was also often asked by other interrogators to act as the bad cop during their sessions with detainees, and so Corsetti became infamous at Bagram as the crazy one, willing to explode into interrogation sessions, throwing chairs and screaming and threatening detainees. He earned another nickname, given him by a sergeant who served with him at Bagram: “the King of Torture.”

He became so enthusiastic about finding ways to break and abuse prisoners that Corsetti began experimenting with new types of stress positions:

 

I used a combination of shit that I had seen during the handoff from the group of interrogators that had been there before, and some that I came up with. Like putting a guy at a 45 degree angle with your body straight and your head against the wall, I came up with that. I sat down and was like, the knees [another stress position] aren't doing it enough for me anymore. It's not quick enough. What can make them feel that fucking 20 minute knee pain in about two minutes? And I figured that out, I sat there in the interrogation booth, and put myself in different positions, and I did this and it was like, oh, this one fucking sucks. So then you go and share it with other people, and you go, hey guys, I just discovered this, it's great. It's like prison experiments, what's tolerable to you over time becomes more tolerable, and limits get pushed further. You don't even think about it.

 

But Corsetti also saw firsthand evidence that his unit was not employing the most extreme methods then in use by other American personnel. He said that he witnessed U.S. Special Operations personnel waterboard an Afghan prisoner at Bagram. For years, the U.S. government has insisted that only three detainees—all high-level al Qaeda prisoners at CIA secret prisons—were ever subjected to waterboarding during the war on terror. But Corsetti, who at the time was eager to join either the CIA or U.S. Special Operations, said that he watched as Special Operations personnel brought an Afghan prisoner in to Bagram and waterboarded him. There is no evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces have ever been investigated for the use of waterboarding, a torture tactic that was never approved for use by the U.S. military, only by the CIA. But the fact that the Special Operations personnel allowed Corsetti to watch as they waterboarded their prisoner suggests that their use of the tactic was not unusual or something they felt they needed to hide.

Corsetti's account of witnessing the waterboarding of a detainee at Bagram is not the only evidence that the use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel was more widespread than the government has ever acknowledged. In 2012, Human Rights Watch reported that two Libyans who had been held by the CIA were also waterboarded; the two are not among the three detainees that the CIA has officially acknowledged as having been subjected to waterboarding.

 

After the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib exploded in 2004 and the military finally began to investigate cases of torture, Damien Corsetti's nickname brought him plenty of unwanted attention. He became one of the poster boys for the scandal. After his stint at Bagram, Corsetti and his unit were assigned to Iraq in 2003, and were the first interrogators to help open Abu Ghraib for use by the U.S. military. He returned to the United States in February 2004, just two months before the public disclosure of horrific, graphic photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The global release of the photographs did what nothing else could—bring sudden and intense pressure on the White House, Pentagon, and CIA for an accounting of how the United States had been treating prisoners captured in the global war on terror. Congress and the press began to investigate, forcing the U.S. military and the Justice Department to pursue the evidence of prisoner abuse and torture more aggressively than ever before. Of course, the Bush administration knew how the abuse had started: the president had declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the war on terror; the Justice Department had given legal opinions to the CIA authorizing the use of “enhanced” interrogation tactics; Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved the use of harsh tactics at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and no guidelines had been put into place to prevent the spread of those abusive practices at other U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq. And it was no secret within the government that the abusive interrogation techniques had spread far beyond the CIA black sites and Guantánamo Bay. In fact, a January 2003 memorandum by the chief military lawyer at Bagram spelled out how interrogators there were using the same kind of tactics that Rumsfeld had authorized for use at Guantánamo, the
New York Times
later reported.

But stating the obvious—that torture was the direct result of official American policy—was an uncomfortable truth, one that could lead to war crimes trials for top government officials. And so it was not long before the calls for justice led the White House, Pentagon, and CIA to search for scapegoats. After Abu Ghraib, the army suddenly took renewed interest in the deaths of two detainees at Bagram in December 2002, while Corsetti and the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion had been assigned to the prison. The two detainees, Dilawar and Habibullah, were found dead in their cells after being manacled in stress positions and beaten for days on end. The case of Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, ultimately became the basis for
Taxi to the Dark Side,
the documentary in which Corsetti made his first public appearance.

The probes of the two deaths eventually led to a wider investigation of prisoner abuse at Bagram and finally to charges against Corsetti. He had not been directly involved with the two prisoners when they died, and he was not charged in connection with their deaths. But statements from other interrogators about Corsetti's actions, as well as from another detainee who had been interrogated by Corsetti at Bagram, led military prosecutors to target him. In 2005, Corsetti was hit with a long series of charges related to specific acts he allegedly did to prisoners. He was charged with maltreating prisoners by sitting on them, striking them, throwing garbage on them, putting cigarette ashes on them, pulling on their beards, forcing them to be exposed in front of women interrogators, and, most embarrassing of all for Corsetti, pulling out his penis, putting it up to a detainee's face, and then telling him, “This is your God.” To top it off, he was also charged with alcohol and drug use.

While Corsetti and other enlisted personnel from his unit faced courts-martial, no senior army officers or other senior government officials were held to account for what happened at Bagram or later at Abu Ghraib. (Capt. Carolyn Wood, who was in command of Corsetti's interrogation unit at both Bagram and Abu Ghraib, was investigated but not charged, and remained in the army.)

But the fact that the Bagram investigation targeted a group of enlisted personnel, just like the investigation of Abu Ghraib, backfired on the army when Corsetti's case went to trial before a military jury at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 2006. After deliberating for less than half an hour, the jury acquitted Corsetti on all charges, even on those for drinking and drug use. The jury was clearly sending a message to the army that it should stop the scapegoating.

But while the scandal slowly faded from the headlines, Corsetti's life spun out of control, clouded by his raging PTSD and worsening drug problem. An outpatient drug rehab program finally helped him to shake off heroin, but getting help for his PTSD was much more difficult. While he was facing prosecution, he was afraid to open up to army psychologists and psychiatrists because he knew they could be subpoenaed to testify against him in his court-martial. After he left the army, he was admitted to a VA hospital in West Virginia with an in-patient PTSD treatment center. He said that the program was divided between older Vietnam veterans and younger veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that at night, after the clinic staff went home, arguments and battles broke out between the two sides—different generations, different wars. Nothing much helped Corsetti, and after three months he left and began drifting again.

The letter his parents sent to the VA in 2009, pleading for help for their son, describes in sorrowful detail how deeply Corsetti had sunk in the years after he left the army. Corsetti lost his house and car because he was unable to hold a job, his parents wrote.

At the time, Corsetti was living with his parents, and so they saw his behavior on a daily basis. “On numerous occasions, he has called us both at work, in a panicked state and totally out of control. There have been many times he has stated he cannot take it anymore. We immediately leave our offices and come home to take him to the VA hospital. Of course halfway there he asks, why are you taking me to the hospital, what is wrong?”

They added that “he has panic attacks a couple of times a week that prohibit him from taking public transportation and dealing with crowds. . . . In the TV room he insists on keeping all the shutters closed for fear that someone is looking in on him. The room is kept dark, no lights are ever on and when we let some light in he either has a panic attack or gets totally abusive. . . . He has attempted to take his life on multiple occasions. Fortunately he has not succeeded, however we are in constant fear of what we will find when we get home every day.”

Corsetti and his parents had to wage a prolonged battle with the VA to win full disability benefits for his PTSD, but there is no doubt that he was completely disabled by the trauma and ghosts that still haunt him. He has made some progress, in part by trying to come to terms with what he did and finding ways to make amends. One opportunity came in 2010, when he testified for the defense of Omar Khadr, a fifteen-year-old Canadian captured in Afghanistan, interrogated at Bagram, and then sent to Guantánamo Bay.

Corsetti finally had the chance to testify about the constant pressure for new intelligence that was placed on his unit while assigned to Bagram. The pressure came from the top, he said, from the secretary of defense, and worked its way down until it created an environment in Bagram in which the demands for intelligence reports outweighed the need to treat prisoners in a humane way. The pressure led directly to the abuse of prisoners.

But even though Corsetti can now talk about what he did and what he witnessed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and can also discuss in excruciating detail the symptoms and consequences of his PTSD, he does not believe that he will ever be free of his illness. He simply understands his plight better. He thinks that he will never be able to hold a job again. On his worst days, he doesn't try to leave his apartment; he now can tell when he is liable to launch into an angry confrontation with a store clerk or another driver. He has been left handicapped by the war on terror, just as surely as if he had been blasted by an IED.