Authors: Eric Fair
5.11
In late January, everyone working at Abu Ghraib is ordered to schedule a meeting with an agent from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command (CID). The investigators are part of a team that has been sent to Abu Ghraib to investigate claims of detainee abuse. We've heard there are pictures. Bagdasarov, Henson, and I are assigned similar time slots to visit CID. We walk across the prison complex together and speculate about what they're looking for. Bagdasarov asks about the hard site. Henson says, “Don't ask.”
The CID office includes a waiting room with chairs. When we walk in, two soldiers from the FRE team are waiting their turns. A CID agent no older than John Blee calls my name, leads me to a small room, and closes the door. I ask him whether I am free to leave. He says, “Not yet.” I tell him this means I am under arrest. I tell him to read me my rights. He says it doesn't work that way in the Army. I tell him I'm not in the Army. I ask him to open the door. He refuses, so I stand up and open it myself. We argue about whether or not I am subject to military law. He is frustrated. He tells me to relax. He says, “If you know something, now's the time.” He asks about Steven Stefanowicz. He asks about dogs. He hands me a paper and tells me to check the appropriate boxes.
I head back out to the waiting room, where I find Bagdasarov. Henson and the two soldiers from the FRE team are still being interviewed. Eventually, Henson and one of the soldiers join us in the waiting room. We all agree to wait for the other soldier. The young CID agent tells us to move along. We tell him we want to wait for our friend. He says, “What friend? No one else is here.”
The other soldier is cooperating with investigators. Only later will CID recognize they cannot allow potential sources to sit in a waiting room together. The waiting room is eventually eliminated, but not before everyone at the prison is able to figure out who spent extra time talking to CID. A few months later, in April, the U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, will publicly thank Sergeant Joe Darby for providing photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib to Criminal Investigation Command. Prior to this, no one knew who provided the photographs. The Army will then place Darby in protective custody.
“What are you going to tell Karin about this?” This is what Ferdinand asks me in the dining facility. We were talking about our interviews with the agents. Neither of us checked the appropriate boxes on that piece of paper to indicate something was wrong at Abu Ghraib. Ferdinand had the young agent, too. He went through the same door-closing routine, but eventually he just got up and left. Now he's wondering if he shouldn't go back and check some of the boxes. He wonders what he'll tell his wife and son.
Three years from now, I'll see that piece of paper with the appropriate boxes again. A Department of Justice prosecutor and two CID agents will question me about an article I publish in the
Washington Post
. The article will address some of the things I did at Abu Ghraib, but it won't reveal everything. One of the agents will pull out this piece of paper and say, “Remember this?” He'll ask me why I didn't check the appropriate boxes. I will say, “I'm not proud of that.”
5.12
In late January, I transition onto a new interrogation team. The Army is working to reorganize the structure in order to address growing concerns about the men planting IEDs in the roads. Convoys are beginning to take heavy casualties. Henson and Blee have been assigned to small teams of CACI personnel who will join frontline troops in order to provide more direct interrogation services for units stationed outside of Abu Ghraib.
In February, the five of us drive back to Baghdad one last time to purchase liquor for Henson and Blee before they leave Abu Ghraib. We eat at the new Burger King trailer that has been flown in and set up at Camp Victory. We eat at the Bob Hope Dining Facility, where there is a hamburger bar. They grill you a hamburger and let you add your own choice of toppings. They have hot peppers and bacon, cold soda and ice cream. We visit CACIville and take hot showers. We shit in the clean portable toilets. We visit the PX and buy Gatorade and Doritos. We drive back to Abu Ghraib, where we stand on the roof of a prison building and toast the departure of Blee and Henson. Blee is scared. He says, “Maybe it's time to just go home.” We say, “It can't be worse than Abu Ghraib.” Mortar rounds chase us back inside.
That night someone shines a light in my eyes. A man is standing over me and asking me questions. He asks me my name. I shove his flashlight out of the way. He apologizes. He says he's heard of me. I speak Arabic. I produce in the booth. I keep to myself. He introduces himself as Brent Jennings, the lead interrogator for the team headed to Fallujah. He says the other interrogator they had assigned isn't willing to make the trip. He's a pussy, not cut out for this sort of thing. There needs to be an immediate answer. We leave tomorrow. Yes or no, in or out?
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In the morning, I regret the decision to leave for Fallujah. I think about what Blee said about going home. I plot out my departure and estimate the number of days it will take to leave Iraq and be back in bed with Karin. It will take six days; one full day to get back to Baghdad, one day in Baghdad to schedule a flight to Kuwait, one day in Kuwait to reserve a flight back to Texas, two days in Texas to turn in gear, and one day of travel back to Bethlehem. Six days. I tell myself that I should make an effort to last another six days. At the end of six days, I can reevaluate and make the decision to go home. I will survive the rest of Iraq by surviving the next six days, then the next six days, then the next.
Ferdinand is going to Fallujah with us. Like me, he received a late-night visit from Brent after another screener dropped out. The departure to Fallujah is delayed when Brent is told to arrive ahead of the team in order to secure living arrangements. One of the analysts on the team, Jim Fisk, convinces Brent that he should take another person to act as his second in command. Jim volunteers himself for the position.
Jim is young. He is tall with broad shoulders. Like Ferdinand, he is overweight. Unlike Ferdinand, he carries the weight awkwardly. But he is also well spoken, masking the incompetence that will eventually come to define him and our interaction in Fallujah and beyond. This is the first time Jim inserts himself into a position he isn't qualified to fill. It won't be the last.
While Brent and Jim move west, the four of us who remain behind tell each other that Fallujah cannot be worse than Abu Ghraib. We occupy an empty cell and wait for follow-on orders from Brent and Jim. We expect to leave the next morning, but two full days go by. The days are empty and dull. Our departure is imminent, so CACI doesn't assign us any work. It is the longest stretch of inactivity I've experienced in over a month. On the second night, I have my first nightmare.
In this nightmare, which recurs often, someone I know begins to shrink. At first I can hold them in my hand or put them on a table, but as they grow smaller I begin to lose track of them. They slip through my fingers and disappear onto the floor. I know they're still there but I cannot find them. I hear their screams in my panic as I scramble to avoid stepping on them.
Eventually, Brent and Jim finish the preparation in Fallujah and send for the rest of the team. CACI decides that it is best we do not drive our own vehicles into Fallujah. CACI is concerned about damaging the vehicles they leased in Kuwait. CACI buys used cars to replace the more expensive Toyota Land Cruisers. CACI doesn't issue radios or communication equipment. CACI tells us to travel with the Army.
When we talk about CACI, we never really know whom we are talking about. None of us had a face-to-face job interview or visited the corporate offices in Virginia. None of us met the employees who recruited us. None of us even know what “CACI” stands for. In Iraq, there are CACI employees who hold job titles such as “country manager” or “site supervisor,” but they never have answers to our questions. At meetings, they say things like “You'll know as soon as I know” or “We're working on it” or “Just let things work themselves out.” After the meetings, we share rumors about the changes CACI is making. We hear about vehicles, or weapons, or body armor, or bonuses. We go back to the site supervisor or country manager and tell him about the rumors. Then there is another meeting, at which the site supervisor or country manager addresses the rumors. Sometimes the rumors turn out to be true, sometimes they don't. Then the country manager or site supervisor tells everyone to calm down. He'll tell us he's trying to get in touch with corporate offices about the other rumors.
The insurgency has been growing steadily since our arrival in Iraq in early January. We hear about the attacks at morning briefs, and the stories get more and more violent. The groups conducting the attacks grow larger, and the attacks grow more frequent. By February 2004, there is little doubt about the lethality of the organized resistance sweeping across Iraq. Abu Ghraib is a dangerous place, to be sure, but the road out west to Fallujah is an all-out meat grinder. Armored vehicles are still uncommon in Iraq, and though soldiers have welded metal plating to the cab of our truck, the back is protected only by the canvas covering designed to keep out the rain.
The Army calls its passengers “packs.” There are four of us. An Army sergeant assigns us to the back of a truck. He tells the driver there will be four packs in the cargo area. There are no seats. We ride in the back and sit on cardboard boxes filled with bottled water. When the CACI site supervisor at Abu Ghraib arrives to see us off, we remind him about the armored vehicles and weapons all of us were promised by CACI recruiters. The site supervisor says, “We're working on it.”
The Army sergeant says we have to leave our foreign weapons behind. In 2004, thirty-eight civilian contractors are abducted in Iraq. Fourteen of them are subsequently killed. Four others are never heard from again. But the vast majority of contractors are forbidden from carrying government-issued weapons. When we travel on our own, the Army looks the other way and we can keep our illegal weapons, but when we convoy with the military, the Army enforces the rules. CACI has failed to secure the authorization necessary to allow its employees to legally carry weapons in Iraq. We ask the site manager at Abu Ghraib about the weapons policy. We tell him we're pretty sure we're being targeted, even though we are considered noncombatants and Iraqi insurgents are officially not permitted to target us. He tells us CACI is still working on the weapons policy.
As we drive out of Abu Ghraib, the hard site and the interrogation booths are the last things we see. They disappear behind the prison walls as we wind our way through concrete barriers out onto the main road. Abu Ghraib shrinks on the horizon as we travel west to Fallujah.
6.1
In early February 2004, Jim greets us at Camp St. Mere Eglise in Fallujah. The camp is occupied by the Army's 82nd Airborne Division and named after a French town liberated by the 82nd in World War II. Later, in March, the Marines will take over from the Army and rename it Camp Fallujah. In April, the Marines will lay siege to Fallujah in response to the killings of Blackwater employees. In November, during Operation Phantom Fury, they'll all but reduce Fallujah to rubble.
Jim leads us into the building where we will conduct interrogations. It is small. The facility itself is designed to hold approximately one hundred prisoners. There are two offices, one for the military police and one for military intelligence. Two rooms are set aside for interrogation, another for screening, and a third for what Jim calls “other activities.” Brent meets me inside the office and pulls me aside. He says, “You're going to love it here, nothing like Abu Ghraib, you can do pretty much anything.”
The office is decorated with maps of Fallujah and other nearby citiesâRamadi, Haditha. There are plush black leather chairs and four Dell desktop computers, which rest on makeshift plywood desks. Captain Dent, the officer in charge of the interrogation element at the base, is sitting at one of the computers. She's playing Minesweeper.
Dent clicks on the wrong square and detonates a mine. She says, “No fucking way, bullshit. Fuck.” She turns in her chair and sort of waves us in with her fingers. She doesn't stand up. Dent is small and skinny. Ferdinand calls her an ugly cunt under his breath. I laugh.
Dent starts in on the officer's speech. Ferdinand and I have heard it before, as enlisted soldiers. Officers give this speech when they take command of new troops. The officer tells the enlisted personnel not to think of them as an officer. The officer says the enlisted personnel just need to do their jobs. The officer says they won't get in the way. The officer is not a micromanager. Then the officer says something like “There's another side to this coin.” This is what Dent says. She says, “There's another side to the coin.” That's the officer's warning: Don't force me to step in. Dent says, “Don't make me be the dick.”
At Abu Ghraib, it was never clear who was in charge. There were officers, but none of them acted like one. When Dent gives her officer speech, it is clear she is in charge. It is the first time I've encountered someone willing to take responsibility for a group of interrogators in Iraq. We do the work. She takes the professional credit. If we screw up, she takes the professional blame. This is actually the way the Army is supposed to work. I don't like Dent. But Dent acts like an officer, and I respect her for it.
However, the relationship between contractors and soldiers remains unclear. Not only does Captain Dent treat us like soldiers, she treats us like enlisted soldiers. As an officer, she outranks all enlisted personnel, no matter their rank, including those with far more time in service. There are criminal consequences for enlisted soldiers who do not follow her orders. But it's not clear what consequences civilians would face for disobeying Dent.