Pay Any Price (24 page)

KBR went on to become far and away the largest single Pentagon contractor of the entire war, receiving a combined total of
$39.5 billion
in contracts, according to calculations by the
Financial Times
in 2013.

Charles Smith (who died in 2014) didn't stop KBR. Neither did Cheryl Harris. Steve Coughlin struggled to get the VA to deal more openly with the aftereffects of KBR's burn pits. But all of them stood and fought.

 

 

 

 

PART III

7

Damien Corsetti can't really talk unless he smokes dope. Marijuana is his medicine now. A bong or a pipe has to be at hand in order for Corsetti to revisit his past. He smokes in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. He doesn't really get high. He has smoked so much that it doesn't have much of an effect anymore. It helps him relax and lowers the guardrails in his head. Only then can he begin to talk about his life.

He has told his doctors at the Veterans Administration that dope helps him, and he has pleaded with them to give him a medical marijuana prescription. But the VA doctors have fended off his requests and repeatedly told him that they are forbidden from prescribing marijuana, even though it is now approved for medical use in many states. So Corsetti is forced to medicate himself, and that means he has to scrounge for his medicine out on the streets of Savannah, Georgia, his latest sanctuary from his past.

He grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and his family still lives there. But since coming back from war, Corsetti has bounced between Washington and the South. He finally landed in Savannah in 2011—seven years after he returned from Iraq—because he was fearfully convinced that there were too many Arabs on the streets of Washington and northern Virginia. He was seeing Arabs everywhere, he believed, and felt constantly under siege. His past as an infamous screener and interrogator at American prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq made him fear that retribution might come from any street corner.

His time as an interrogator, first at Bagram Prison in Afghanistan and later and even more painfully at Abu Ghraib—the closest place to hell on earth that Damien Corsetti has ever been—killed something inside him. “Abu Ghraib, if an evil place ever existed that was it. It was all just death, and fucking death. That single place changed everyone who was there.

“A cancerous growth went on there.”

 

His nineteen months deployed, mostly at the two war-zone prisons, left him an emotional cripple. The VA has granted him 100 percent disability status based on the post-traumatic stress he suffered as an army interrogator in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As an interrogator, he was meting out the abuse, not suffering from it, but today Corsetti is still a victim of the American torture regime. He has hurricane-force post-traumatic stress disorder not because of combat but because he followed orders and abused prisoners. He is one of the first veterans known to have been given full disability based on PTSD suffered while conducting harsh interrogations in the war on terror.

When he smokes and talks, Corsetti is surprisingly candid in admitting that what he did was wrong. Yet he also expresses anger and frustration at the army and government that first ordered him to abuse prisoners, then turned on him, charged him, and put him on trial for doing it.

“Yes, I think I did some very bad things,” Corsetti says. “And I think I was a bad person at that time. But fuck anybody else who tells me that. Self-righteous motherfuckers.”

He is just one of many American interrogators who now find that they are suffering, long after leaving the interrogation booth. Corsetti says that virtually every interrogator he served with in Iraq and Afghanistan now suffers from some form of PTSD, mostly in silence. One of Corsetti's friends, a former interrogator from Texas who served with Corsetti at Abu Ghraib, tried to kill himself in 2011 by picking a fight with a Texas Ranger. (He asked that his friend not be named because he remains deeply troubled.) Others, like Corsetti, are burdened by chronic drug and alcohol problems, sleeplessness, failed marriages, joblessness, and poverty.

The United States is now relearning an ancient lesson, dating back to the Roman Empire. Brutalizing an enemy only serves to brutalize the army ordered to do it. Torture corrodes the mind of the torturer.

Damien Corsetti provides an unflinching glimpse into the nightmare world that now consumes those ordered to take America to the dark side.

“I didn't like it,” Corsetti recalls, of his initial attitude toward the interrogation methods the Americans used on prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. “But I remember when it went from me having to mentally prepare myself to go do this, to go in and throw chairs against the walls, and break tables, and sit there and leave a guy on his knees for two hours, to having to mentally prep myself to do that—to the point where I enjoyed doing it. Fuck yeah, I got to the point where I enjoyed doing it.”

The people now suffering from PTSD are not the politicians who sat above it all, back in Washington, and secretly approved the faraway use of torture. They are not the well-credentialed lawyers who provided abstract legal justifications. They are certainly not the psychologists awarded millions of dollars in contracts in exchange for dreaming up scientific-sounding rationales.

Instead they are the people who actually held the collar and the leash. The United States has been running a decade-long experiment on the lives of Damien Corsetti and the other men and women who physically lowered themselves into cramped, secret dungeons, looked into the eyes of other human beings, and then, with their own hands, tortured them. It happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, Thailand and Lithuania, and at other secret locations. They followed orders. They were given interrogation protocols with Orwellian names like “fear-up harsh.” They used “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

 

The results of this experiment are in, and we now know how average Americans—mostly low-ranking military personnel and outside contractors—respond to the experience of inflicting torture. They have come home shell-shocked, dehumanized. They are covered in shame and guilt, not the glory of the returning war hero. They are suffering moral injury.

“Every day I lost a little bit of who I was,” says Corsetti. “I was becoming this other person, and it was like Mr. Hyde was taking over. Fucking more sleeping pills, more anti-depressants, more sleeping pills, more anti-depressants.”

President Barack Obama famously said that America needs to “look forward,” not back. There would be no Truth Commission, no aggressive investigations by Congress or the Department of Justice of those who authorized or enabled torture, or got rich off torture. A decade after 9/11, those who launched the torture regime have made millions from book deals, the lecture circuit, and contracts and research grants with the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and Homeland Security. Spared prosecution, spared even investigation, they now live in splendor.

The only people who have been held to account are those who were at the very bottom of the chain of command, the enlisted personnel and low-level contractors who conducted interrogations for a government that told them that the old rules didn't apply and that the gloves had to come off. A handful, like Damien Corsetti, faced prosecution for their actions. The rest are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and will most likely be suffering for the rest of their lives.

 

Corsetti was a private in the U.S. Army's 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, a military counterintelligence specialist with no training in interrogations when the war on terror began. He says that in 2002, when he first arrived at the “Bagram Collection Point,” the official name for the main U.S. prison in Afghanistan in the early days of the war, he was not given any clear rules on how to handle prisoners. His commanders simply told him to watch how interrogations were being conducted by the first group of interrogators assigned to the prison, a mixed batch of National Guard troops and other military personnel who had been thrown into Bagram with virtually no preparation, after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. They were preparing to leave as Corsetti's unit was arriving, so Corsetti and other members of his unit sat and watched their final interrogations before taking over. They were openly abusing prisoners, and Corsetti's commander did not tell his unit to refrain from the harsh tactics already in use; instead, he ordered them not to question or criticize the previous interrogators. The message was clear—Corsetti and his unit were to apply the same tactics.

Corsetti now knows that he should have refused to go along and should have followed the example of the only man from his unit who did resist. “You ultimately have a choice. You have to do what you know is right. There was one guy, a really solid dude, who saw what was going on the first day, and said I can't do it. I can't do this. So they put him in charge of computers, doing the database. He was the only guy over there who stood up, and said, I can't fucking do this. People made fun of him, called him a pussy. But he stood by it.”

The other early guidance Corsetti says he received from his commanders was that the detainees were not to be considered prisoners of war but rather enemy combatants, and so did not have the same rights under the Geneva Conventions or the laws of war. That policy decision, handed down by President George W. Bush in February 2002, was, the White House insisted at the time, carefully crafted and narrowly constructed to deal with the capture and interrogation of the terrorists responsible for 9/11.

Out in the field, however, it meant that the rule book had been thrown out the window. No distinctions were made by interrogators between suspected al Qaeda terrorists and poor, illiterate Afghans captured on the battlefield after fighting for the Taliban-controlled government. The Afghan and Pakistani farmers rounded up by mistake, or turned over to the Americans by rivals eager to settle scores or for the cash bonuses the United States began to pay, were treated as if they were al Qaeda masterminds. They were all “Bobs”—the nickname the American interrogators gave them because of the uniforms the prisoners had to wear, which were made by the Bob Barker Company, a North Carolina prison supply company.

 

Before the war on terror, the U.S. military had a well-earned reputation for the humane treatment of prisoners of war. In the closing days of World War II, German soldiers flocked west in order to be captured by the Americans rather than the feared Russians closing in from the east. During the postwar years, the United States was a driving force behind the 1949 Geneva Conventions, codifying the rights of prisoners in armed conflict. During the first Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered en masse knowing that they would be well treated by the advancing U.S. Army.

Bush's decision to abandon the Geneva Conventions changed everything. And it changed Damien Corsetti's life forever. “When you compromise your morals, and do things you know are wrong, maybe not legally, but you know are morally wrong, then yeah, you've done something wrong. And I did a few of those things.”

 

After he returned to the United States, after Bagram and then Abu Ghraib, and finally after he was tried in a military court and then acquitted of charges of prisoner abuse, Corsetti's mind and body shut down. Paranoia gained hold. He decided he had to find a city with as few Arab Americans as possible, at least someplace where his fevered imagination wouldn't conjure them in his head. Savannah's beauty and orderliness settled him. Its lush historic squares, lined with the elegant town homes that were the real stars in
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
and which still draw thousands of tourists to the city, provided a calming, organizing effect on his mind.

Savannah is also closer to Florida, where Corsetti's wife had fled with their son after he started beating and abusing her, after she took out a restraining order against him. As time has passed, she has finally agreed to let him occasionally see his son, and he eagerly makes the drive from Savannah to Florida. And so he now lives quietly and reclusively in Savannah, along with his girlfriend and their young daughter.

Still, Savannah wouldn't be calming enough for Damien Corsetti without the marijuana. Nothing else has worked. Certainly not the Seroquel, which, along with other antipsychotics and antidepressants he was prescribed by army doctors for his PTSD, gave him nightmares and prompted him to gain more than 100 pounds.

The officially prescribed drugs, which he took in his first years back from Iraq, turned him into a bloated caricature. The images from those days haunt Corsetti, particularly since that is what he looked like when he appeared in the film
Taxi to the Dark Side,
the 2007 documentary about torture. He is most famous as an obese and villainous figure. Now that he is off the antipsychotics, Corsetti has shed the weight and looks trim, tall, and muscular, much as he did when he first went to Afghanistan in 2002. Apart from his shaved head, he would be unrecognizable to anyone who saw him in the film during those grim days. He looks deceptively healthy.

He wasn't obese when he was deployed. The pounds came after he returned from Iraq to the United States in 2004, while he was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, waiting to face charges in connection with a wide-ranging investigation of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan. When he came back to the United States and was jarred with a welcome home consisting of arrest and prosecution for his actions overseas, Corsetti was already burdened with fully formed PTSD. He spiraled into depression. He became addicted to heroin, which he found easy to buy around Fort Bragg.

By that time, he was no stranger to doing drugs on duty. He had smoked hash in Afghanistan, which he readily bought from Afghan locals, and he says that he and other American soldiers were able to find remote places around Bagram, including the roofs of buildings, where they could smoke in peace. He says that he conducted interrogations at Bagram while high on hash, and that he even smoked hash with prisoners he was supposed to interrogate.