The 9/11 Wars (108 page)

    
7
.
Nir Rosen, ‘Losing it’, Asia Times Online, July 15, 2004.

    
8
.
Nir Rosen, ‘Home rule: letter from Falluja’,
New Yorker
, July 4, 2004.

    
9
.
Author interview, Falluja, July 2003.

  
10
.
The al-Dulaimi had been loyal to Saddam and rewarded handsomely for their support. However, their loyalty was not unconditional. In 1998 Saddam had hanged an army general from Ramadi, and relations had been tense ever since. The al-Dulaimi nonetheless had been strongly present in Saddam’s intelligence and security apparatus.

  
11
.
Author interview, Ramadi, July 2003.

  
12
.
‘U.S. Commander in Iraq says year-long tours are option to combat “guerrilla” war’,
New York Times
, July 17, 2003.

  
13
.
Hoffman also perceptively argued that in Iraq one saw ‘the closest manifestation yet of netwar, the concept of warfare involving flatter, more linear networks rather than the pyramidal hierarchies and command and control systems (no matter how primitive) that have governed traditional insurgent organizations … [It] involves small groups who communicate, coordinate, and conduct their campaigns in an internetted manner, without a precise central command.’ RAND Corporation (Bruce Hoffman),
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq
, June 2004. For more on Netwar see John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt and Michele Zanini, ‘Networks, Netwar and the Information-Age Terrorism’, in RAND Corporation (Ian Lesser et al.)
Countering the New Terrorism
, 1999, p. 47.

  
14
.
See the very useful discussion in Scott Atran,
Talking to the Enemy
, HarperCollins, 2010, pp. 267–8.

  
15
.
Jessica Stern,
Terror in the Name of God
, Harper Perennial, 2004, p. 271: resilience is the ‘ability of a network to withstand the loss of a node or nodes. To maximise resilience, the network has to maximise redundancy. Functions are not centralised. Capacity – the ability to optimise the scale of the attack – requires coordination, which makes the group less resilient because communication is required. Effectiveness is a function of both capacity and resilience.’

  
16
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Author interviews with American army intelligence officers, Tikrit, May 2004, Baghdad, September 2004. Author interviews with British army intelligence officers, Basra, August 2004. Also with insurgents, Baghdad and Ramadi, April and September 2004. Greg Grant, ‘The IED Marketplace’,
Defense News
, March 2005. Amatzia Baram, ‘Who Are the Insurgents? Sunni Arab Rebels in Iraq, April 2005’, special report for the United States Institute of Peace. See also Rory McCarthy, ‘For faith and country, insurgents fight on’,
Guardian
, December 16, 2004. Other classic operational elements of Abu Mujahed’s group would include the way in which they accessed military expertise – partly as a result of the hasty demobilization of the army. The post-invasion period saw a rapid dissemination of such knowledge among the civilian population. Also, though Abu Mujahed did not mention it, the internet aided some groups to learn both about ambush tactics and, crucially, about the media potential of the acts. Abu Mujahed was entirely typical not only of the modern Sunni Iraqi militant but of the reality of such militancy globally.

  
17
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The overall commander of Marine Expeditionary Force One was General James T. Conway.

  
18
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The lynching, as journalist Nir Rosen pointed out, was an Iraqi tradition called
sahel
, a word unique to Iraqi Arabic, which once meant dragging a body down the street with an animal or vehicle, but eventually grew to mean any sort of public killing or lynching. Rosen, ‘Losing it’.

  
19
.
Author interview with Andrew Rathmell, CPA policy planning office, 2004.

  
20
.
Author interview with senior Ministry of Defence official, London, August 2004.

  
21
.
Author interviews with Andrew Rathmell, senior CPA officials, London, 2004. Jonathan F. Keiler, ‘Who Won the Battle of Fallujah?’,
Proceedings, U.S. Naval Institute
, January 2005, p. 59. Sean D. Naylor, ‘ “Paying the price” for pulling out: commanders see a tough fight to retake Fallujah’,
Army Times
, October 4, 2004.

  
22
.
Abu Anas al-Shami, the diary of Falluja, Arabic al-Fajer media, 2004, author collection. An English translation is reprinted in Loretta Napoleoni,
Insurgent Iraq: Al Zarqawi and the New Generation
, Seven Stories, 2005: see p. 219.

  
23
.
The exact number of dead civilians was heavily contested. American military spokesmen insisted that the bulk of the 800 or 900 civilian dead were insurgents. Doctors in Falluja said that many of those they had treated were neither male nor of combat age. Iraq Body Count, ‘No Longer Unknowable: Falluja’s April Civilian Toll is 600’, October 26, 2004.

  
24
.
Ricks,
Fiasco
, p. 342.

  
25
.
A ‘stunning victory’ in the words of a memo written by Nathaniel Jensen, a State Department diplomat attached to the CPA. Ibid., p. 345.

  
26
.
Bing West,
The Strongest Tribe
, Random House, 2009, p. 31.

  
27
.
Propaganda produced years later by militants in Europe, Afghanistan and Pakistan still mentioned Falluja. In 2009, for example, videos entitled ‘Lions of Falluja’ were still being posted on the internet by European extremists. To have participated in the fighting at Falluja was seen as particularly praiseworthy. See al-Muderii, Abdul’Aala transcript: ‘The Martyr Abu Usama Walid walad al-Hibatt al-Tunisi’, As-Sahab Media foundation via the NEFA Foundation, November 30, 2009, p. 1.
http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscellaneous/nefaWalidTunisi1109.pdf
.

  
28
.
Ricks,
Fiasco
, pp. 258–9.

  
29
.
SIGINT stands for Signals Intelligence. Ibid., p. 194. The latter, for example, gave analysts a false impression of the number of non-Iraqis among the insurgents as the ‘internationals’, who did not have the personal relationships that locals had, made heavier use of the telephones that the eavesdropping technology picked up.

  
30
.
Author interview, Tikrit, May 2004.

  
31
.
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris,
Standard Operating Procedure
, Picador, 2009, pp. 21–2.

  
32
.
Mark Danner, ‘US torture: voices from the black sites’,
New York Review of Books
, April 9, 2009.

  
33
.
Gourevitch and Morris,
Standard Operating Procedure
, pp. 38–9.

  
34
.
Mark Danner, ‘Abu Ghraib: the hidden story’,
New York Review of Books
, October 7, 2004, p. 33. The military intelligence unit that oversaw interrogations at the Bagram detention centre, where at least two prisoners’ deaths were ruled homicides, was later placed in charge of questioning at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Captain Carolyn A. Wood, who served at Bagram from July 2002 to December 2003, brought to Iraq interrogation procedures developed during service in Afghanistan, according to Congressional testimony. It was apparently Captain Wood who wrote the interrogation rules posted on the wall at Abu Ghraib. Human Rights Watch,
The Road to Abu Ghraib
, pp. 23–4.

  
35
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Thomas E. Ricks, ‘In Iraq, military forgot the lessons of Vietnam: Early missteps by U.S. left troops unprepared for guerrilla warfare’,
Washington Post
, July 26, 2003.

  
36
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Prisoners there later remembered how much more brutal their custodians had become as a result. Author interviews with former prisoners, Kabul, August 2008.

  
37
.
Associated Press, 30 April 2004, excerpts from writings of an accused soldier who helped run Baghdad prison.

  
38
.
Interrogators in Bagram told investigators that the knowledge that those at the most senior levels of political power in the country had ‘denied the Geneva convention’ to detainees had influenced their behaviour.

  
39
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Black had unapologetically insisted before Congress that ‘after 9/11 … the gloves had come off’ regarding the rules governing the operations conducted by the CIA.

  
40
.
Feith, Douglas,
War and Decision
, p. 485.

  
41
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A total of thirty-four members of Taskforce 145, involved in the hunt for al-Qaeda fugitives, were eventually disciplined for mistreating detainees. Five US army rangers were convicted of assault. Mark Bowden, ‘The ploy’,
The Atlantic
, May 2007. Gourevitch and Morris,
Standard Operating Procedure
, p. 210.

  
42
.
Hundreds of complaints by Iraqis eventually made their way into British courts. In addition to the abuses mentioned above, many complained of sexual humiliation by women soldiers, or being held for days in brightly lit cells as small as one metre square. Ian Cobain, ‘Servicemen at “UK’s Abu Ghraib” may be guilty of war crimes, court hears’,
Guardian
, November 8, 2010. ‘No public probe into Iraq “abuse” ’, BBC News Online, November 14, 2009. ‘Torture by British soldiers in Iraq was not carried out by “few bad apples … there was something rotten in the whole barrel” ’,
Daily Mail
, September 21, 2009. Ian Cobain, ‘Iraq deaths in British custody could see military face legal challenges’,
Guardian
, July 1, 2010. Very serious allegations of execution and subsequent mutilation of corpses in Maysan province in 2004 have never been fully investigated. British military courts dismissed charges against all defendants except one, who was convicted for inhumane treatment. See
The Aitken Report, An Investigation into Cases of Deliberate Abuse and Unlawful Killing in Iraq in 2003 and 2004
, Crown Publishers, January 25, 2008, for the British army’s official response.

  
43
.
Low-ranking personnel were, often enthusiastically it is true, frequently only carrying out the instructions of the interrogators, who wanted their subjects ‘softened up’. Gourevitch and Morris,
Standard Operating Procedure
, p. 94.

  
44
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Though various individuals have claimed to be the man in the iconic photograph, none have been positively identified. He is believed to be Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh (detainee 18170). An American army spokesman said Faleh was released from American custody in January 2004. Kate Zernike, ‘Cited as symbol of Abu Ghraib, man admits he is not in photo’,
New York Times
, March 18, 2006.

  
45
.
Author interview, Abu Ghraib, May 2004.