Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“They sent us to Guantánamo for a trial run at the al-Qaeda guys,” he said. “We had no experience at all in the Middle East. No knowledge of the history or language or customs. We had no experience as interrogators, either, except in role-playing scenarios at SERE. Hell, we taught survival in the wilds. Evasion from capture. Resistance in captivity. And escape.”

Tritt drained most of his beer in one long gulp. “But Briggs and I made up for it with attitude and showmanship. We had both written ‘scholarly’ papers for the SERE instructors under us. One of mine was called ‘The Psychological Aspects of Captivity.’ Twenty pages of psychobabble. But I updated the title to ‘The Psychological Foundations of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,’ and made it required reading for the Guantánamo staff. We were arrogant and aloof. We acted like experts. We wanted that job.”

“How’d you do?”

“At Gitmo? Fair. Nobody there was impressed by us at first. Everybody thought they were experts on interrogations. You tell a seasoned military interrogator that you’re a psychologist, they don’t exactly salute you. But we were energized by the idea of how far we might be able to take things. And how much money we could turn it into.

“We were selling our souls, but we didn’t know it yet. I can’t speak for Briggs, but as of our last day at Guantánamo I could still stand the sight of my own face in the mirror. After? Now? Well.”

Tritt finished the beer, dropped the bottle into the cooler, and brought out another. A wrinkled, short-haired mongrel heard the clink and lifted his sleep-flattened face to the sound.

“Luckily, some of the rogue Bagram interrogators were at Gitmo, so Briggs and I learned fast. They showed us how the everyday tools worked.”

“Everyday tools?”

“Oh, the basics, I mean. The restraint chairs and iso boxes, which aren’t much bigger than a coffin. The hoods. And the basic physical techniques, too, like walling and peroneal compliance blows. Those are when you knee a detainee on the outside of his thigh. You know, right here, where it’s all gristle and tendon against the femur.” He tapped the outside of his thigh. “You knee the guy really hard, and as often as you need to. It hurts like hell, especially if they’re suspended by chains. This one detainee at Bagram, a taxi driver named Dilawar, he died in the chains. When we took him down, we found out his legs had turned to mush from the compliance blows. Surprised us.”

Tritt took a deep breath and let it out slowly, looking down at the label on his beer bottle. “And we learned all the other basic techniques that seemed to be working — the chains and stress positions, hooding, light saturation, sleep deprivation. Loud music for hours on end. We renamed some of the basics, took credit for them with the new guys. Over the years, Briggs and I got credit and blame for all sorts of things we didn’t do. But there were two big things we did that made enhanced interrogation techniques better. One was we learned to combine. Throw the book at ’em. You keep a guy awake for thirty-six hours, chained to the ceiling in a cold cell, throw on some ice water every few hours, make him listen to death metal the whole time, and he’ll pretty much tell you anything you want him to. Of course, he’s got to have that thing to tell.”

The pitch of Tritt’s voice rose and his words came faster. “The other revolutionary thing we did had actually begun at Navy SERE training, where we’d taught resistance to waterboarding. Briggs and I remembered how much our men hated waterboarding, hated it more than anything else. They said the only thing that kept them from cracking was being able to thrash around, you know, just fighting for breath. The fight kept them sane. So Briggs and I invented this two-man procedure, ‘Constrictor.’ One of us would get the subject in a headlock, and the other would put the wet towel over his face, then get the stream going. Hold the bucket up high for maximum pressure, of course. And we’d just fill the guy up with cold water. Cold water worked best, retarded the gag reflex. And not being able to thrash around to try to get breath because of the headlock, well, that just drove the detainees crazy. They’d break their wrists in the restraints. It’s been called simulated drowning, but there was nothing simulated about the way we did it. It was a good way to get a subject to what we called ‘the point of distortion.’ That was an amalgam of physical and psychological force that, when applied at the right time, distorted the detainee’s reasoning to the point where he could see no options. No options. End of hope, end of resistance. All he could do is tell us what we wanted to know. If he knew it. But... waterboarding was just the beginning. It was nothing compared to other things we did.”

“Spencer mentioned the menu.”

“Oh yeah. The menu. We had nineteen EITs approved by Rumsfeld and the lawyers. We even used insects. ‘Plague of Insects,’ we called it, where you put a detainee’s head in a pillowcase filled with the ugliest, meanest bugs you can find. Which are plentiful in tropical and desert countries. The key to Plague of Insects was forcing the detainee to look into the bag first. Later, in places like Romania and Poland, we had trouble finding good biting and stinging insects, especially in cold weather, so Plague of Insects wasn’t used as much. Mice worked on some detainees. You’d be surprised how often the biggest, strongest guys are scared of mice. The lawyers didn’t approve the mice, but if they worked, well... One detainee broke down completely when we moused him. God, we laughed. Sometimes, laughing was all you could do to keep your sanity. Don’t forget, we were working and living in a torture chamber.”

“No, I won’t forget that.”

“Another thing that kept Briggs and me sane was reminding ourselves that we were running a business. This was our career. So we not only strategized on how to get actionable results with enhanced techniques, we also figured out how to report the results in order to get bonuses. We killed a Yemeni man in Poland on the waterboard. It happened on the one hundred and forty-fifth time we did him. He had denied knowing anything about al-Qaeda. He prayed to Allah but never gave us one shred of actionable intelligence. So we kept filling him up with cold water and one day his heart just stopped. So, the question was: How could we turn that dead guy into a useful intelligence bonus? Well, I’ll tell you how — just call his death proof that the detainee had no meaningful information to surrender. Which justified the torture, of course. So we reported that case as ‘resulting in useful intelligence,’ which earned Spencer-Tritt the bonus pay. We did that a lot. After all, we were our own overseers, our own watchdogs and analysts. I remember the man we drowned. Jamal. Proud guy. Hated us.”

Tritt finished his beer in one long gulp and had another open before I was half done with mine. The alpha dog, a nice-looking yellow Labrador named Chief, came over, sat with ears cocked, and looked at his master. Tritt’s tone of voice had changed once again and Chief had heard it, and I’d heard it, too.

“Even Chief hates these stories by now,” said Tritt. “I tell them to the dogs all the time. That keeps all the old wounds open and fresh, which keeps me sorry and miserable. The main reason I haven’t killed myself is because I believe I deserve the pain of remembering all the pain I caused. But you didn’t come here to hear about my gloomy little psyche.”

I noted that Tritt still hadn’t looked at me since I’d arrived, not directly, not even when handing me a beer. I wasn’t sure why his voice had changed — excitement? Passion? Revulsion? Shame? The thrill of confession? I watched him in profile. His eyes were trained slightly up, and apparently far away, maybe on the sharp tips of the Sierras, or the sky beyond.