Captivity (10 page)

Another detainee was Idrees Younis Nuri, a 20-year-old accounting student who also was detained in October 2003. His 30-year-old brother Wakas told me Idrees and five friends were on their way to the market during Ramadan when a sequence of explosions occurred, one of them near a passing U.S. convoy. U.S. soldiers swept up thirty-five people who happened to be in the vicinity of the attack, Idrees
and his five friends among them. Wakas told me, “Our neighbour was one of the ones who was detained. He told me they were severely tortured by the soldiers. He heard screams through the night until morning. One of the thirty-five was sent to the hospital. Our neighbour was released after two days.” Like Kahdhan, Wakas explained that his brother had been exempted from military service. “He is sick. He has a disease in his colon. And he is still a student, so he has no experience in how to use weapons.” Unlike most detainees, Idrees faced an actual charge: “Attack on Coalition.”

I remember discussing with Sheila Provencher something she’d written for the Adopt a Detainee program. I had a concern about a phrase she was using, which went something like, “…  soldiers returning home, having to face in the night the unspeakable things they had done …” I thought this should be changed to “unspeakable things they had seen.” Yes, things were bad, I argued, but American forces had not yet crossed the line into atrocity. They had not been there long enough to experience the profound dehumanization process that occurred during the Vietnam War. They seemed to have very little interaction with the civilian population, being confined to military bases when not on patrol. It appeared, based on our intermittent interactions with soldiers, that military discipline was intact.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The evidence, in fact, was right in front of me. I just didn’t see it—or didn’t want to.

There was, for example, the case of Mahadi Al Jamal, a frail 70-year-old man recovering from a hip replacement who was killed while in American custody on December 21, 2003. His son Abdulkahar told me how their home had been raided at nine-thirty in the evening. Soldiers broke down doors, smashed furniture, scattered their belongings everywhere. They handcuffed and hooded Abdulkahar, his father and his uncle. Mahadi complained of not being able to breathe. The men were brought one by one into the back of an armoured personnel carrier, Abdulkahar first and then his father. “My father was in very bad condition at that time. He couldn’t talk because of the hood. I could hear him gasping. I pleaded with the soldiers to help my father, but they only
said bad words to me. They beat me on the chest with the end of their weapons to make me silent. After that my father stopped moving. One of the soldiers called on the radio, ‘The fucking old man, I think he’s dead, I think he’s dead!’ ”

Abdulkahar and his uncle were released that night. An officer came to their house and informed them that Mahadi had died of a heart attack. Two days later the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Nate Sassaman, told them the decision to raid their house had been based on false information, and that the U.S. forces would find and punish the informant.

Abdulkahar showed me a formal apology written on CIA letterhead. “We will not rest until this investigation is complete,” the letter promised. It was signed, “Mr. Ken, Project Forces Manager.” “Mr. Ken” was never heard from again.

Abdulkahar concluded the interview by saying, “In Samarra, everyone expects to be arrested in the night, so now they wear suitable clothes and their ID to bed.” At the time, he was working on his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Baghdad. He was thirty years old.

Then there was Abu Hishma, a town of seven thousand people surrounded by five miles of concertina wire on the orders of Colonel Sassaman. It was an act of collective punishment for the death of Sergeant Dale Panchot, who was killed on November 17, 2003, when a rocket-propelled grenade fired from the town hit his Bradley armoured personnel carrier. Eight sheiks, the mayor, the police chief and most of the town council were arrested. All the men aged eighteen to sixty-five were assigned English-language identity cards. A sign posted at the checkpoint entrance read, “This fence is here for your protection. Do not approach or try to cross or you will be shot.” Sassaman said the wire enclosure would remain in place until the villagers turned over the men who were responsible for killing Panchot.

A month before Sergeant Panchot was killed, villagers told us Sassaman’s men shot Aziz Taha, a 25-year-old English student at the University of Baghdad. When his brother’s wife, Majida, ran to help
Aziz, she was shot and died instantly. Two hours later Aziz bled to death when the soldiers wouldn’t let anyone help him. A week later U.S. forces were attacked in the area. Aziz’s brother Yasseen was detained on the notion that he would have the motive of avenging the deaths of his wife and brother. Yasseen and Majida had three children, the youngest of whom was fifteen days old on the day Majida was killed.

Then there was Abu Siffa, a farming village about a twenty-minute drive from Abu Hishma. According to villagers we interviewed, on December 16, 2003, at 2:00 a.m., Sassman’s men surrounded Abu Siffa and detained eighty men and three teenaged boys (aged fourteen, fifteen and sixteen) in the course of a fourteen-hour operation. Mohammed Jasim Hassan Altaai, one of only two men in the village who were not detained, told us, “The Coalition Forces were searching for one person, but they searched all our houses. It was a rainy night and they surrounded our whole village—about twenty-five houses—with tanks and Humvees. They surrounded the farmers’ fields with tanks and destroyed the fences. They destroyed the doors of our houses and kicked down our bedroom doors, or used their weapons to open them, while we were sleeping. They gathered the men together and beat them severely. A 70-year-old man suffocated and died when they put a black plastic hood on him.”
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The object of the raid was Kais Hattam, a prominent Baath Party official. According to Sassaman, Saddam was captured with documents linking him directly to Hattam. After detaining Hattam, U.S. forces fire-bombed his home and left his large extended family homeless. On December 31, U.S. forces destroyed the home of Abas Muhamed Abd Wahid, a 41-year-old primary school teacher with a family of sixteen. A third home was destroyed on January 2. “They have detained all the men,” Mohammed said. “Jamal and I are the only two men still living in the area. They took about fifteen teachers from the secondary school, so now there aren’t enough teachers to give lessons.”

–

I listened to and documented dozens of such stories. We were so busy, there was hardly time to think. Each story deserved further investigation and determined follow-through, but there were so many, and they just kept on coming. We didn’t have the resources to do any of them justice. I’d write them up, file them, send them on to the Chicago office, move on to the next thing. They became bits of language that I assembled and processed.

The stories were astonishing, overwhelming, sometimes impossible to believe. Some I dismissed altogether as rumour and occupation tall tales—stories about Iraqis being pushed out of helicopters, for example, or thousands of detainees being held in ghost prison camps in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. An Iraqi cleric, his voice quivering with rage, told us in the Abu Ghraib parking lot that Iraqi women in Abu Ghraib were being paraded around nude, forced into lesbian sex, raped, impregnated. He said a female prisoner smuggled out a note begging for the prison to be bombed. “It is better for us to die,” she was said to have written. I heard the same story from a different man in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, where we held public vigils for detainees.

I sifted and evaluated the things I was hearing. I listened cautiously, suspended judgment, reminded myself I was hearing only one side of the story, that I needed to get all the facts, avoid mental commitment. I detached, became a technician of careful listening who collected and analyzed human rights abuses. I wanted to believe in the good intentions of the beleaguered officials and soldiers we talked to, most of whom said they never wanted to be in Iraq in the first place. They were well-intentioned people who seemed to be doing the best they could to follow the rules, run a decent occupation and improve the lives of the Iraqi people. I wanted to believe that the world I belonged to and understood, the world of Western Judeo-Christian civilization and values, was beyond this kind of moral atrocity. It was, I can see now, a process of denial.

Judith Herman, in her book
Trauma and Recovery
, writes: “Those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator.
It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing … The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.” When Mahadi Al Jamal’s son told me about the murder of his father at the hands of U.S. soldiers, I told myself I didn’t have time to follow up and left his grief on a piece of paper when I returned to the safety of Canada. The truth is, I was protecting myself from the brutality of what I was hearing, distancing myself from the staggering human implications of a son sitting next to his father as he suffocated under a hood.

Things in Iraq were bad—far worse than I ever imagined. We have only to consider the systematic torture and degradation of detainees at Abu Ghraib. The use of white phosphorus, banned by a 1980 UN treaty, during the siege of Fallujah in November 2004. The murders of twenty-four Iraqi civilians (eleven of them women and children) by U.S. Marines on November 19, 2005, in the town of Haditha. The gang rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl named Aber Qasim Hamza in Al-Mahmudiyah on March 12, 2006. The subsequent murders of her mother, father and seven-year-old sister by U.S. soldiers to cover up the crime. The executions of five children, four women and two men on March 15, 2006, shot in the head by U.S. soldiers while handcuffed in a house owned by Faiz Harat Khalaf near Abu Sifa. The July 2007 report by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian published in
The Nation
based on interviews with fifty Iraq combat veterans. Their conclusion: “Dozens of those interviewed witnessed Iraqi civilians, including children, dying from American firepower. Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit … they … described such acts as common and said they often go unreported—and almost always go unpunished.” The testimony of soldiers such as Cliff Hicks, quoted in the June 12, 2006, edition of
Newsweek:
“People were taking steroids, Valium, hooked on painkillers, drinking. They’d
go on raids and patrols totally stoned. We’re killing the wrong people all the time, and mostly by accident. One guy in my squadron ran over a family with his tank. Guys would crap into MRE bags and throw them to old men begging for food.”

I wonder now who was more naive—me or Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Sassaman, the Warrior King who told
New York Times
correspondent Dexter Filkins, “With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”
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I met Colonel Sassaman on January 12, 2004, at Forward Operations Base Paliwoda, a commandeered school located on the outskirts of Balad, about sixty kilometres north of Baghdad.
^†
The base had been named after Captain Eric Paliwoda, a 28-year-old officer who had been killed nine days earlier when the base was attacked by mortar fire. Colonel Sassaman himself had lifted the dying man into the medevac helicopter.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Colonel Sassaman was one of the most celebrated of the U.S. Army’s stable of warriors. He was the commander of eight hundred men (Fourth Infantry Division, Eighth Battalion), the son of a Methodist minister, a West Point graduate, the quarterback who piloted the army football team to victory in the 1984 Cherry Bowl (an army first). He ran a total of 1,002 yards that year while nursing three cracked ribs.

He greeted us just as the day’s mail was being unloaded from an armoured personnel carrier. “You’re the first Americans I’ve met since I’ve come here—besides CBC and CNN reporters,” he said, grinning at his suggestion that journalists weren’t full-fledged Americans. He shook
hands with each member of the delegation. “Call me Nate,” he said. “Come in, come in, we’ll get you something to drink.” Sassaman was forty years old, his face tanned and open, with a lean, decisive jaw and quick, penetrating eyes, a man who exuded confidence, command, authority. He was vigorously fit and moved with a quarterback’s ease.

We were led down a hallway and into a classroom. I stopped at a bulletin board. There was a poster of the Twin Towers with the words “God Bless America and Our Troops,” a sign that read “In the absence of orders, attack,” and a trophy photo of an Iraqi man lying face down in the dirt, a soldier kneeling on his head, others bending down and smiling into the camera with their thumbs up, his white pickup truck in the background. When I mentioned the picture, the soldier escorting us said, his chest inflating with pride, “Yeah, it took a while, but we got ’em. One of the bad guys.”

We sat around a collection of plastic garden tables (the kind with a hole in the middle for an umbrella) on the plastic lawn chairs that are ubiquitous in Iraq: the eight members of the delegation I was leading; Sami, Mohanned and a third Iraqi lawyer from the Balad chapter of the Organization of Human Rights, which had suggested the meeting; and Colonel Sassaman, Captain Blake, Captain Williams and their official translator, Thanya. (Our own translator elected not to come, fearing he might be detained.) Breezes flowed into the room through broken windows. Cold soft drinks were brought on trays.

After formal introductions, Colonel Sassaman began to talk. “I don’t think anybody knew what we were getting into when we came in here. When I think of the Iraqi people, I feel incredible sadness and incredible rage at the same time. We can only do so much, and there’s far more for us to do here than we’re able to do. We’ve had no support from the State Department. I thought that would be their job, rebuilding the country. We’re not equipped or trained for this. We’ve had to go back to our high school textbooks—it’s Civics 101 here. You wouldn’t believe the mind-numbing civics lessons we’ve had to give.”