My Share of the Task (34 page)

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O
n December 15, 2005, Iraq held a third round of elections—to vote in the first permanent parliament—but they neither stabilized nor unified Iraq. Against the rising din of Sunni-Shia violence, the votes perpetuated the sectarian slide of the country. But amid so many deaths, we soon got word of a curious resurrection.

On January 6, 2006, one of our liaison officers reported that Iraqi forces had captured a man they believed was Abu Zar. If true, he was not dead after all, and given his importance, we were anxious to interrogate him ourselves. Working through Department of Defense procedures, we arranged for him to be transferred from Iraqi custody to our control. Soon, Abu Zar was flown to Balad and escorted the short distance from the flight line to the task force screening facility, which was now a truly professional operation. It had taken eighteen months of relentless focus, leadership, and attention at all levels of our task force to make it so.

Sixteen years earlier, while I was studying at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, one of my instructors had related a conversation he'd had with an Israeli officer. When asked what to do first when faced with an insurgent or terrorist threat, the Israeli officer said firmly, “Build a big jail. You're going to need it.” The Israeli's wry answer came from experience.

As the Israeli had implied and Abu Zar would soon reconfirm, detainee intelligence was vital. HUMINT, or human intelligence, along with several other collection disciplines like SIGINT (signals intelligence) and IMINT (imagery intelligence), formed the spectrum of ways we could gather information and understanding of a situation, a population, or most often the enemy. HUMINT involves on-the-ground human sources, from patrols that speak to local villagers to spies. One of the most important of these has always been prisoners, or detainees. Detainees can explain the meaning of what we see from other intelligence sources and can let us step into the mechanics, mindset, and weaknesses of the enemy organization. Detainees, whether they talk out of fear, because they think it's pointless not to, or because their egos can be manipulated and played, can reveal not just what the enemy thinks but
how
he thinks and
why
he fights.

Detainee operations were as difficult and sensitive as they were vital. The resources required and the complexities and risks associated with them caused most organizations to avoid such duty. Some who called loudest for better intelligence on Al Qaeda were happy to have someone else to “bell the cat.”

So it was a thankless but necessary task that selected agencies and military units took on in the aftermath of 9/11. And they were unprepared for it. Beyond the legal and diplomatic complexities, the United States had not institutionalized the policies or devoted the resources required to professionalize detention operations. Trained interrogators were woefully few. Essential language skills in Arabic, Dari, and Pashto were almost nonexistent, and other relevant expertise and experience were largely unavailable to the forces that needed them. Well-intentioned but unqualified people struggled to perform a dauntingly complex task, with predictable results. When I took TF 714 in the fall of 2003, more than two years into the fight, little had changed.

I was one of the leaders who lacked experience in detainee custody and exploitation. I had studied history and understood the theory but had never done anything remotely like running a prison. My peers and subordinates were similarly positioned. I was clear on the legal and moral imperatives, but they were just a foundation on which to build enough expertise to command TF 714's detainee operations. We dealt with the limited but complex population of Al Qaeda–related detainees that had the highest likelihood of providing critical intelligence. From the beginning, the importance and sensitivity of the mission was clear.

It began the day I assumed command of TF 714. Lyle Koenig, the air force brigadier general then commanding our task force in Iraq, called me from Baghdad to welcome me to the command. After pleasantries, he stated flatly, “Sir, we need to close the screening facility we're operating at our base at BIAP. We don't have the expertise or experience to do this correctly.”

I asked him for options, but we agreed that in the near term, none were evident. We concluded that I would visit the facility on my forthcoming trip to the theater and determine a way ahead.

When I visited the building we used at the Baghdad Airport to screen new captures about a week later, I was unimpressed with both the facility and our ability to staff it. It was housed in a one-story building that the task force had modified internally to contain holding cells, several interrogation booths, and a common work area for analysts and interrogators. The holding cells were constructed of wood and were clean and functional. But the overall facility was cramped and had old linoleum floors and white ceramic tiles crumbling off the walls. On the positive side, it was a short distance from the Joint Operations Center, making it easy for key staff and the commander to provide frequent personal oversight, which I knew was crucial.

Most dangerous, the facility was not manned with the right expertise. That day I met two or three interrogators and a couple of interpreters. They seemed dedicated to getting it right but lacked the requisite experience or manpower. As important as detainee handling and interrogation were to any effort like ours, we were not yet up to the task. We were not obtaining the necessary intelligence, and we had not yet implemented the right facilities and controls to handle detainees properly.

“
This is our Achilles' heel,” I told the task force staff. “If we don't do this right, we'll be taken off the battlefield.” I knew that mistreating detainees would discredit us.

Changes began almost immediately, competing for attention and resources with daily operations and a range of other initiatives vital to our effort. In December we held Saddam Hussein in our small screening facility at BIAP in the first weeks after his capture, but at that time we were still only partway through the necessary process of developing a truly professional capability.

The importance was reinforced when, on April 28, 2004, three weeks after we'd focused our commanders' conference in Bagram on the complexities and sensitivity of counterinsurgency operations, particularly detainees,
CBS News
broadcast images taken by Americans working at Abu Ghraib prison, in the city of the same name west of Baghdad. Pictures from the guards' digital cameras clearly showed American soldiers abusing Iraqis. On a personal level I was sickened by the images of arrogant superiority. In a nation we sought to liberate from an oppressive dictator, we seemed to mirror all we opposed.

The pictures sent shock waves through units deployed in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My force was disgusted by the soldiers' stunning and immature depravity, and we immediately felt effects of the misconduct, even though we had no connection with Abu Ghraib. The more important effect was Abu Ghraib's impact on America's perception in the world.

Abu Ghraib represented a devastating setback for America's effort in Iraq. Simultaneously undermining U.S. domestic confidence in the way in which America was operating, and creating or reinforcing negative perceptions worldwide of American values, it fueled violence that would soon worsen dramatically.

I knew that our task force was vulnerable to misperceptions. Some reported that our screening operations constituted “black” prisons in which commanders ordered the mistreatment of detainees. That wasn't the case before I assumed command and wasn't true under my command nor under my successors. But creating the right facilities and building our expertise took time and meant addressing buildings, standards, leadership, and most important, the mindset of the force. Abu Ghraib demonstrated what can happen when even a well-intentioned army attempts to conduct sensitive operations, like the handling of detainees, without the preparation and resources required to do it correctly.

By the summer of 2004, the new screening facility was clearly the most important building constructed during our critical move to Balad. It was clean and sterile, with cells, offices, and interrogation booths inside a building with aluminum paneling, glossed cement floors, and high ceilings. Only a few months after its initial construction, we doubled it in size while maintaining the same capacity. At its highest levels, the facility contained only a small number of captures.

We made the facility as internally transparent as possible. Interrogations were monitored, and inspections conducted regularly. We hosted partner representatives from the FBI, conventional military units, and other agencies, and distributed interrogation reports to their headquarters. We established ways for partners from the United States or other countries to watch selected interrogations. This allowed experts on particular topics, or even on certain personalities, to judge detainee responses. This transparency meant that screening a capture, like Abu Zar, in our facility leveraged expertise and intelligence from across the spectrum of groups doing counterterrorism.

Recognizing that people typically assume the worst of whatever they can't see, we would take most visitors to our task force, especially those from the States, on a full tour of the facility. I wanted to dispel incorrect perceptions these congressmen, national security officials, or partner agency representatives might have. It was also a subtle, frequent reminder to my force that we were accountable for how we handled detainees. Most visitors said they were impressed, but continuous refinement and improvement were needed.

On one such occasion not long after we had begun using the Balad screening facility, Senator Carl Levin visited and toured it. He saw the facility in its first weeks of use, when the cells had been built smaller than some others in Iraq and were painted black. They weren't dirty, and the paint choice had been made with no particular intent. But it sent a negative message. Senator Levin said nothing during the visit, and I judged him satisfied with what he saw. But soon afterward I received a letter he'd sent to the secretary of defense, expressing concern with the black cells. His letter was a surprise, and I wished I'd known his concerns on the spot, but it served as a good outside check on us. We immediately painted the cells a brighter color and simultaneously began a construction program to expand the screening facility, including cells that matched exactly with the standards that had begun to be carried out across all of the MNF-I force. We continued to learn as we fought.

I emphasized through written guidelines and face-to-face conversations throughout the task force that not only were screening operations critical but the conduct of those operations was elemental to success. Mine was a direct message:
If you screw up, you will be punished. Simple as that. I won't wait for someone else to act; we won't “protect our own.” I will personally make sure you are kicked out of the task force and court-martialed if necessary.
I was clear and unequivocal. Anything less than emphatic prohibitions on mistreatment might be taken as implicit consent.

I learned quickly as we went along. But I also made mistakes. As late as the spring of 2004, six months into my command, I believed our force needed the option of employing select, carefully controlled “enhanced” interrogation techniques, including sleep management. I was wrong. Although these techniques were rarely requested or used, by the summer of that year we got rid of them completely, and all handling inside our centers followed the field manual used by the Army.

Intuitively I knew leadership was key, but in the first months after I assumed command, we tended to place outside “augmentees,” not organic members of TF 714, in leadership roles in the screening facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the spring of 2004 I realized that was a serious mistake. The thought had been that we lacked the in-house expertise, so we'd leverage outside experience. But we quickly found out that augmentees lacked it as well. Our screening operations demanded mature, seasoned leaders whom I could trust completely, so from that point on we assigned only leaders from inside TF 714, professionals I knew and trusted, to the responsibility. To reinforce oversight I sent a cadre of TF 714 leaders on routine circulations to every one of our locations that conducted screenings. On these unannounced trips, they reviewed facilities and procedures and came back with best practices that could be applied across the force. Higher commands like CENTCOM also routinely inspected us.

There were lapses of discipline, but they were never tolerated. Never a wink and a nod. During the difficult summer of 2004, when we tracked and interdicted the truck leaving Fallujah carrying the two men and the thirteen-year-old, whose actions indicated to us that they likely knew Zarqawi's location in real time, we knew that information like this was extraordinarily time sensitive: Zarqawi would quickly learn of the capture and move, rendering the intelligence valueless. Within minutes the detainees were taken to a forward operating base in Baghdad for questioning, while other parts of the force were alerted in preparation of acting on any useful intelligence.

Although trained interrogators appropriately conducted initial questioning of one of the men, two members of the capture force monitoring the interrogation, anxious to get Zarqawi's location, mistreated the detainee by electrically shocking him several times with a Taser. The incident was clearly serious, and our reaction to it reflected the mindset I sought in the force. Human Rights Watch recovered and reported on a June 25 e-mail from an FBI official to FBI headquarters stating that several days earlier a detainee with burn marks had been brought in from one of Task Force 6-26's outstations (TF 6-26 was then the numerical designation for TF 16) and noting that “immediately this
information was reported to the TF 6-26 Chain of Command, and there is currently a military 15-6 investigation initiated. This information was shared with all members working at the [screening facility] (military, FBI, . . . DHS) and all were reminded to report any indication of detainee abuse.”