Jeremy Scahill - Dirty Wars

By December 2003, a confidential Pentagon memo warned, “It seems clear that” the task force “needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” But the torture and abuse at NAMA continued, particularly if a detainee was believed to have any information about Zarqawi or his network. All of the interrogations were aimed at extracting intel that would lead to the next raid, the next strike and the next capture or kill. In an “operations center” near NAMA, “task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids,” the New York Times reported. “Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.”

In early 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a scathing report on the mass arrests of Iraqis. It asserted that “over a hundred ‘high value detainees’ have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight” at a “High Value Detainees” section at the Baghdad Airport. Without specifically singling out the task force, the report described the raids that led to arrests of scores of Iraqis. Soldiers would burst into homes

usually after dark, breaking down doors, waking up residents roughly, yelling orders, forcing family members into one room under military guard while searching the rest of the house and further breaking doors, cabinets and other property. They arrested suspects, tying their hands in the back with flexi-cuffs, hooding them, and taking them away. Sometimes they arrested all adult males present in a house, including elderly, handicapped and sick people. Treatment often included pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles. Individuals were often led away in whatever they happened to be wearing at the time of arrest—sometimes in pyjamas or underwear—and were denied the opportunity to gather a few essential belongings, such as clothing, hygiene items, medicine or eyeglasses.

The report cited “military intelligence officers” who told the Red Cross “that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross findings echoed those of the classified military report in late 2003, which warned that the task force’s abuse of detainees combined with the mass arrests of Iraqis gave the impression that the United States and its allies were acting like “gratuitous enemies” of the Iraqi people.

When the military finally was permitted to investigate NAMA, its agents received threats from personnel at the camp, while DIA interrogators had their vehicle keys confiscated and were “ordered” not to discuss what they had seen with anyone. On June 25, 2004, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, then director of the DIA, sent a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone with a list of complaints from DIA personnel at Camp NAMA. One interrogator had his photos confiscated after taking pictures of injured detainees, and others complained that task force commandos forbade them from leaving the camp without permission, even for a haircut, and from talking to outsiders; they threatened them and screened their e-mails. Despite these efforts at suppression, news of detainee abuse at NAMA made its way up the ranks, and eventually to lawmakers.

In 2004, under pressure from a handful of lawmakers, Stephen Cambone, whose SSB was actually enabling the harsh interrogation ops at NAMA, scribbled a handwritten letter to his deputy, Lieutenant General Boykin. Dated June 26, 2004, it read, “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable. In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26.” An aide to Boykin said, “At the time [Boykin] told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.”

Despite all the whistleblowers’ reports, an official US military report on alleged abuses at NAMA and other facilities concluded that the prisoners’ descriptions of torture were lies. Accusations of wrongdoing and misconduct by members of the task force were handled in-house rather than through traditional military disciplinary procedures. In one case, when an Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) agent attempted to investigate a member of the task force for abusing a detainee, it was quashed because, in the words of the CID, “the subject of this investigation is a member of TF 6-26” and the task force’s own security officer “has accepted investigative jurisdiction in this matter.”

In all, some thirty-four task force members would be “disciplined” for misconduct, and at least eleven members were removed from the unit. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that “a small number of task force members have been administratively disciplined, but not court-martialed. Five Army Rangers associated with the task force were reportedly court-martialed for abuses they carried out against detainees,” but “the sentences were all six months or less. There are no indications that officers up the chain of command [were] held accountable, despite serious questions about officers’ criminal culpability.”

An air force interrogator who worked with the JSOC task force hunting Zarqawi told me that he “did not see any form of oversight for the kill or capture campaign.” He said he witnessed and stopped several cases of abuse, which he communicated up the chain of command. “With the cases in which I reported abuses, there was no accountability. In one case, an interrogator was merely recalled from a remote location and then put right back to work at the main prison. The atmosphere was such that secrecy was the priority.” He added, “My general impression is that occasional law-breaking would be tolerated as long as it never got out to the press.”

The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantánamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan. When Abu Ghraib prison was taken over by US forces and converted from a Saddam-era prison and torture chamber into a US-run gulag, the Americans who set it up simply took the task force’s standard operating procedures and, once again, changed the letterhead and implemented them.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke wide open in April 2004, when major news organizations released photos showing systematic abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners being held at the prison by the US military. As more photos became public, they showed naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, angry dogs growling over shuddering prisoners, mock executions. When Major General Antonio Taguba eventually investigated, he found documentary evidence of acts even worse than those depicted in the published photos, but the White House chalked up the torture and abuse to a few “bad apples,” and the public would never see the full extent of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib.

The horrors of the US-run prisons of Iraq may never come fully into light, but one thing was abundantly clear: Tactics that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, had been considered the sovereign realm of America’s most unsavory “dark side” forces, and that had required approval from the highest levels of power in the United States for each escalation, now had become the widely accepted standard operating procedure for handling detainees in a huge battlefield with massive numbers of prisoners being held by the US military.