The 9/11 Wars (25 page)

ABU GHRAIB

The need to gather intelligence on the networks responsible for the increasingly lethal and increasingly numerous IED attacks was stressed by a number of high-level US army reviews during 2004.
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But the American intelligence operation in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, was hobbled by a lack of local knowledge and cultural understanding and an over-reliance on ‘SIGINT’ or technical communications intercepts.
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. The response of ground commanders – with one or two notable exceptions – was to fall back on the same tactics as were being employed in Afghanistan: ‘cordon and sweep’ operations designed to hoover up potential insurgents. Through early 2004, the tempo of such raids had accelerated. They were indiscriminate and resulted in huge numbers of suspects being sent into the American military-run prison system. On one raid the author joined in Tikrit shortly after the fighting had ended in Falluja, troops first knocked down the door of the wrong home and then detained a suspected financier on the basis that, as a professed taxi driver, he could not afford the china on display in his dining room. The suspect affected a studied insouciance, sniffing a flower from his garden, which prompted Captain Eric Coombs, thirty and in charge of the operation, to comment disgustedly, ‘It’s like he’s French or something,’ and take him into custody.
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Back at Coombs’ base, a solitary tank fired shells at irregular intervals into a patch of open ground a mile or so away from which mortar attacks were occasionally launched. There was no evidence of any insurgent movement at the site, which was taken as proof that the ‘terrain-denial’ operation was working. ‘No one is going to shoot anything at us from that bit of Iraq,’ said the tank’s gunner. A day later, news of what had been happening at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad broke.

In the short term the scandal at Abu Ghraib resulted from the huge flow of detainees from units on the ground like that of Coombs or Hector Mirabile in Ramadi conducting their vast dragnets. These sent tens of thousands of detainees into the creaking system set up by the coalition. As there was never meant to be an occupation let alone an insurgency, no one had thought about what might need to be done with captured Iraqis and hastily created facilities, chronically undermanned and under-resourced, were quickly swamped.

Abu Ghraib itself, one of the most notorious jails under Saddam Hussein and a symbol of the violence of the past regime, had been reopened by the Americans in August 2003 as a holding centre for captured former regime figures and common criminals, the two mixed together in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. Looting after the invasion had not just gutted the ministries but had rendered most of Iraq’s extensive prison system unusable too. Some 75,000 secure prison places were needed, experts estimated. A few thousand were available.
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By the end of the year, however, Abu Ghraib alone had a population of 7,000. Poorly defended, situated between the hardline Sunni suburbs of western Baghdad and the rough towns of Falluja and Ramadi, the complex was an obvious target and was soon being regularly mortared. The servicemen posted there had little training for running a detention facility and lived among decomposing rubbish, ate monotonous and unhealthy combat rations and showered under drums of cold water. The prisoners and ‘security detainees’, the new term usefully blurring their exact legal status, lived in abject squalor, many exposed to the elements, to insects, rabid dogs and the fire of the insurgents. Others, in the rehabilitated Saddam-era concrete cell blocks, had marginally better physical conditions but were exposed to the worst of the mistreatment perpetrated by the gaolers. There were frequent power and water cuts. Unsurprisingly, there were also riots, some of which were put down with live ammunition. The commanding officer, a reservist brigadier general, tried to raise these issues with her higher command but without success.
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However, if the abuse occurred for a variety of specifically local reasons the forms it took were those that had evolved so early in the conflict in Afghanistan. Many American interrogators and prison guards in Iraq had served in facilities like Kandahar or Bagram, where interrogators had faced the same circumstances and similar pressures for results. Indeed some of those now in Iraq had already been implicated in serious abuse. One, Captain Carolyn Wood of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, considered herself ‘very knowledgeable of interrogation techniques’. At Bagram, Wood had issued a list of recommended techniques – from sensory deprivation to the use of dogs – without precedent in American army history and it was under her command that the three deaths detailed in
chapter 3
had occurred. Decorated for her service in Afghanistan, she was appointed head of interrogations at Abu Ghraib in August 2003 and immediately issued a new list of techniques more appropriate for ‘the Arab mind-set’.
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When American military interrogators across Iraq were told by superiors that ‘the gloves were coming off regarding … detainees … we want these individuals broken’, the suggestions as to how this might be done revealed how extensive the influence of the first major campaign after 9/11 had been.
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One soldier answered the memo outlining the new, tougher approach, saying he had ‘spent several months … interrogating the Taliban and al-Qaeda’ and as a result recommended ‘open-handed facial slaps from a distance of … about two feet and back handed blows to the mid-section from … about 18 inches’ as well as exploiting ‘fear of dogs and snakes’. Another respondent to the memo recommended using closed fists and ‘low voltage electrocution’, also practised in Kandahar.
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Indeed, almost all the abuses in Abu Ghraib – stripping prisoners naked, low-voltage shocks, humiliating sexual practices, stress positions, cold and heat, chaining to bars or walls, beatings and the compulsive photographing or filming of such acts – had already been seen in Afghanistan.

A second influence was the example of practices in the broader network of US prison facilities that had been constructed over the previous two years. The idea of exploiting the psychological fears of those under interrogation had been suggested with Abu Zubaydah, the supposed al-Qaeda senior leader detained the previous year in Pakistan and subsequently waterboarded. In August 2003, General Geoffrey Miller, who as commander of detainee operations at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had introduced a much harsher regime there, visited Iraq as part of a review of intelligence-gathering operations and recommended charging prison guards with preparing, i.e. softening up, detainees for questioning.
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This new definition of the role of the guards in American prisons in Iraq undoubtedly exacerbated the deterioration in conditions at Abu Ghraib. Staff Sergeant Ivan L. Frederick II, a member of the 372nd Military Police Company and a central figure in the Abu Ghraib scandal, wrote home describing how he had ‘questioned some of the things’ that he had seen such as leaving inmates in their cell naked or dressed in female underwear, handcuffing them to the cell door, isolating them with no clothes, toilet facilities, ventilation or running water for up to three days but had been told that ‘this is how military intelligence (MI) wants it done’.
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As in Afghanistan an interesting question is whether the abuse was driven from the bottom or from the top. Did it evolve endogeneously or as a result of directives from the most senior levels of political and military leadership?
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Certainly in Abu Ghraib – as well as in the prison at Camp Bucca in the south and countless smaller facilities – detainees were often seen as terrorists responsible for 9/11 and treated as such. An example of how language percolated through all those involved in a mission was the memo referred to above which used words – ‘the gloves coming off’ – borrowed directly from the Bush administration’s ‘point man’ on counter-terrorism, Cofer Black.
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Also, the connections between theatres, units, individuals and policies make it hard to argue either that the handful of low-ranking soldiers disciplined for the Abu Ghraib abuse were simply the proverbial bad apples or, as Pentagon under-secretary Douglas Feith claimed, that their actions were ‘a matter of personal sadism by a small number of individuals’.
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Abuse was of course far from universal – the American soldiers the author was with when the scandal broke were horrified – but it had become an integral part of the American military and counter-terrorist effort. For example, interrogators at Camp Nama at Baghdad International Airport had also systematically stripped prisoners, employed stress positions and sleep deprivation, had punched and kicked them and, according to one report, added a new technique of shooting them with paintballs.
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Nor was such behaviour restricted merely to the Americans. Abuse by the British in Basra and other parts of the province was astonishingly similar to that practised elsewhere. Though smaller in scale, abuse by British troops too featured ritualized sexual humiliation, beatings, exposure to heat, thirst, stress positions and it too saw soldiers, some eventually implicated in the deaths of a series of detainees between 2003 and 2004, film or photograph their actions with careful attention to the
mise en scène
.
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The conclusion must be that such behaviour was at the very least a phenomenon that had both a ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ element. The Bush administration encouraged and aggravated problems that had, from the very earliest days of the war, been evident. In Abu Ghraib itself, the role that interrogators from Military Intelligence played in driving the abuse was paradoxically underplayed by the photographs that eventually emerged which showed only low-ranking military police personnel.
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Whether directed from above or the result of the independent actions of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals, the result was the same. The abuse of prisoners by all sides rapidly became one of the defining characteristics of the 9/11 Wars, somehow integral to the very nature of the conflict. Certainly the images that depicted the abuse at Abu Ghraib – the hooded man, the leashed man, the slavering dog inches from the face of a terrified detainee – became some of the Wars’ most recognizable and enduring icons.
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One of the most worrying elements of the Abu Ghraib scandal was the lack of reaction it provoked in Iraq. Among those waiting outside the prison the day after the scandal broke was Zacaria Falah, from the northern city of Mosul, who had spent seventy days in Abu Ghraib. His older brother was still imprisoned. Both had been accused of helping ‘the resistance’ – a charge they denied. Falah said he had been taken from his home, which was ransacked during the raid, in the middle of the night and transported to a base in the northern city of Mosul known as ‘Camp Disco’ to Iraqis because of the habit of the guards of putting on loud music and making the detainees ‘dance’ for hours on end. From there he was taken to Abu Ghraib, where he was housed in a tent, sleeping on the floor with thirty-four other men. ‘Of course, everything that you are now talking about was happening,’ he said. ‘That is what the Americans are like. We have known for years. We have always been angry. Why be more angry now?’
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THE GREEN ZONE

Saddam had walled off a city within a city along the Tigris in the centre of Baghdad, where he had built a vast palace, rows of villas for members of his extended clan and senior officials, guardhouses, even hospitals and schools. It was here that the Coalition Provisional Authority was based. This was the Green Zone, named after the shading on Coalition security maps, where red marked danger and green its opposite. At night, with much of the city plunged into steaming darkness due to power cuts, the Baghdadis sleeping on their roofs to avoid the heat could see the ten hectares of the Green Zone ‘lit up like a wedding in an Indian musical’, as Bashem Jaffar, a hairdresser in the upmarket Karada area, put it. Joining the CPA in its heavily defended enclave was most of the diplomatic community. As had happened in Kabul eighteen months earlier, the British had reopened their colonial-era embassy, realized it was indefensible and then, as the security situation deteriorated, been forced to leave the garden and the colonnade and retreat to a new complex behind the blastwalls.
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Elsewhere in the capital, long lines of concrete T-blocks were beginning to block off streets, bridges, a view of the sky.

Like the huge military bases going up around the country (and in Afghanistan) the Green Zone was profoundly isolated. The food in the vast mess hall was all imported and included an extraordinarily high proportion of pork products.
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A variety of bars, licit or otherwise, provided often hard-working and stressed CPA officials the chance to blow off steam. Women went jogging in singlets and shorts. The scene in the ballroom nightclub of the al-Rashid hotel in the centre of the Green Zone was surreal – a frenetic decadence fuelled by cheap whiskey and recent broken marriages. Identical SUVs, Humvees and shuttle buses ferried people around. Most staff were on short-term contracts, and very few spoke any Arabic.
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Visiting the Green Zone involved crossing at least three checkpoints manned variously by American troops, a range of coalition allies and private security guards. Reporters had to do this often – it regularly took an hour or more – if they wanted to attend the press briefings held at the convention centre opposite the al-Rashid hotel. At the briefings they would be told about the latest initiatives taken by the CPA, and occasionally there would be some details of military operations. There was a café and a board on which press releases detailing events such as ‘ribbon-cutting ceremony al-Nathana bridge, 9am saturday’ were posted alongside the latest casualties, increasingly from IED attacks. ‘Every single one haunts us but we are not wavering,’ said the American military spokesman. Another notice announced that ‘several planned reconstruction projects have been suspended due to the non-permissive environment posed by terrorists’. In one briefing an Iraqi reporter asked what he should tell his frightened children woken by the sound of low-flying military helicopters. ‘Tell them that is the sound of freedom,’ came the response. General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, told assembled reporters that he was ‘very optimistic’ and was sure that he had the ‘combat forces’ to prevail. A banner hung above the new Iraqi Business Development Center: ‘Peace and best wishes from the children of America to the children of Iraq’.
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