Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

14. “No Blood, No Foul”

IRAQ, 2003–2004—In the first year of the Iraq War, a lot of JSOC’s dirty business went down in a small cluster of buildings nestled in the corner of a Saddam-era military base near the Baghdad International Airport. US Special Operations Forces had taken over the base soon after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and erected a fence around the cluster of buildings that made up Camp NAMA. At the center of the small compound, surrounded by barbed wire, was the Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF).

Members of the JSOC Task Force resided at NAMA, but it was hardly just a dormitory. This task force went by various code names, and the names were frequently changed for operational security and to make investigating it difficult. At various times, it was known as Task Force 20, Task Force 121, Task Force 6-26, Task Force 714 and Task Force 145. Suspected insurgents snatched in house raids or taken off the streets of Iraq cities were brought to NAMA and placed in one of two structures: “Motel 6” was a plywood barracks; “Hotel California” was an actual cellblock that a few months earlier had been used by Saddam’s regime as a prison. The acronym NAMA stood for “Nasty-Ass Military Area.” Its motto, as advertised in posters throughout the camp, was “No Blood, No Foul.” A Defense Department official said it was a play on a task force adage: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.”

To develop their approach to interrogating prisoners they would snatch in Iraq, the Special Mission Units that made up the HVT Task Force worked from a copy of the interrogation standard operating procedure (SOP) that was developed while McChrystal was running the detention and interrogation operations in Afghanistan as part of CJTF 180. According to a Senate Armed Services Committee investigation conducted years later, the Iraq Task Force simply “changed the letterhead, and adopted the SOP verbatim.” The SOP “included stress positions, sleep deprivation, and the use of dogs.” The regime of torture techniques, built up on the demands from Rumsfeld, Cheney and their posses for more results in interrogations, was spreading.

The people taken to NAMA were not given rights as prisoners of war (POWs). They were classified as unlawful combatants. They would not see lawyers, be visited by the Red Cross or be charged with any crimes. Rumsfeld had issued guidelines to JSOC for its own “black” detainee program, which was off-limits to the conventional military. The task force could hold prisoners for ninety days without giving them anything resembling rights or transferring them to above-board military prisons. In effect, this meant that the task force had free rein over the prisoners for three months to squeeze out any information they might have held. Prisoners were often subjected to “beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation, and various forms of psychological abuse or torture,” according to Human Rights Watch. Access to NAMA was denied to the Red Cross, lawyers and family members. According to a former interrogator at NAMA, a colonel told him that “he had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in.” Similarly, army investigators would not be allowed to set foot in Camp NAMA. The task force members were told that such moves were “very necessary for the efficacy of the operation, and we don’t want people to know even our name, of the unit.”

When Colonel Stuart Herrington was deployed by Major General Barbara Fast to investigate conditions at detention facilities and intelligence operations in Iraq in December 2003, he was rebuffed by the task force at NAMA.

So secretive was NAMA that when General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the Guantánamo Bay prison, tried to visit, he was not permitted to enter the camp until he took his request all the way up the chain of command. There was a special ID to get into Camp NAMA, and the only people permitted to enter without it were prisoners, shackled and hooded. Ironically, even though NAMA personnel didn’t want General Miller in their camp, the general seemed to be on their side. During that trip to Iraq, while touring other facilities including Abu Ghraib, Miller reportedly chastised US military prison administrators for “running a country club,” charging they were being too lenient on detainees. Miller suggested they “GTMO-ize” their detention facilities and, according to military officials who met with the “GTMO team,” they discussed how using dogs was “effective in doing interrogations with Arabs” because of “Arabs being fearful of dogs.”

The task force at NAMA was run by JSOC, but it was built by pulling personnel from a variety of agencies and units. There were CIA and DIA interrogators, air force interrogators, and a variety of analysts and guards. “They told us we can’t tell our chain of command about who works here or what [the task force] does. You’re completely shut off. You can only discuss it amongst yourselves. That’s what they told us from the very first day,” recalled an interrogator who worked at Camp NAMA in 2003–2004. “It was pretty loose as far as chain of command goes. There was no rank within the task force….We called the colonel by his first name, called the sergeant major by his first name….I couldn’t tell you the sergeant major’s last name if I tried. Same with the colonel. When you asked somebody their name they don’t offer up the last name….The consensus was, more often than not, when they gave you their name it probably wasn’t their real name anyway.”

Many of the members of the task force would grow long beards and seemed eager to make themselves look as frightening or intimidating as possible. “This is the dark side of the forces. This is the realm where you have essentially a cadre of folks who have a great deal of freedom. The folks that get to this level are treated with a certain amount of deference,” Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer told me. “The culture is that where everybody essentially goes by their first name, no matter what rank you are, and the basic bottom line is, when you get to that level you just know what you need to do, and there’s no second guessing, there is no room for being babied.”

Back at the State Department, Wilkerson watched as this parallel detention system was being built up by Rumsfeld and Cheney and believed they used the task force specifically to avoid any scrutiny. “There is no oversight and when there’s no oversight you’re all-powerful. And when you know there’s no oversight, then you know that you can pretty much do whatever you want to do,” he told me. “We forget that when we create these special operating units, we create at least within a percentage of them—and this percentage is heightened incredibly in the special operations forces—you’ve got people who are killing instruments. That’s what they are. That’s what they’re honed and trained to be, is killing instruments. When you allow no oversight of them, and you allow them to repeat operations, over and over and over again, with no oversight, then you allow them to instinctually gain the knowledge that almost anything goes. Then, almost anything is going to go.”

“Rather than going through the local command, the Baghdad command, up to CENTCOM and then back to the Pentagon, there seemed to have been some sort of an express elevator, from JSOC operations on the ground, straight back to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence [Cambone], and then to the Secretary of Defense. So it was going straight back to Washington—very, very high levels,” charged Scott Horton, a human rights attorney who, as president of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights, investigated the US torture program and JSOC’s role in it. “We know that a number of the normal rules that had applied, concerning the way that detention operations went forward, and the way interrogation operations went forward, were not being applied to JSOC. They had their own rules. So there were Special Access Programs and we know that these operations were associated with a lot of brutality, people being beaten up, being severely mistreated. So often as not, the torture cases and the serious abuse cases were far more frequently linked to JSOC operations than anything else.”

When JSOC first deployed to Iraq to lead the hunt for WMDs and Saddam’s top leadership, the prisoners they took early on were prioritized in terms of what, if any, intelligence or information they may have possessed that would produce results to support either of those missions. The harsh interrogation methods that were being refined in black sites and in Afghanistan were to be unleashed in Iraq. “There were two reasons why these interrogations were so persistent, and why extreme methods were used,” said a former senior intelligence official. “The main one is that everyone was worried about some kind of follow-up attack [after 9/11]. But for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that [former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi and others had told them were there.”

The Bush administration also wanted to find WMDs and to retroactively prove that its claims of Iraq possessing them were true. Rowan Scarborough, a conservative military journalist who wrote two books for which he received extensive access to Rumsfeld and his team, recounted how furious Rumsfeld would become each day when he was briefed on the lack of WMDs in Iraq. “Each morning, the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust. Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier. One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’ At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers,” according to Scarborough. Horton added: “A lot of this intelligence gathering operation, at the outset…was driven by a need to produce information that would justify [the war]. And I think that the use of torture was authorized largely because of an expectation that that would produce results. I don’t think there was ever any expectation that it was going produce the truth, but it would produce people saying what they wanted them to say, that would somehow back this up.”

But as the months went on in Iraq and the WMD and al Qaeda claims fell apart, the focus of the interrogations began shifting to crushing the insurgency. The list of targets and suspects quickly grew from the original deck of cards representing the Saddam regime to a potentially infinite catalog of names. “You saw the French do this in Algeria and you saw the Americans do this in 2003 in Iraq,” recalled Exum, who was deployed to Iraq at the time. “You start out with a target list, and maybe you’ve got 50 guys on it, maybe you’ve got 200 guys on it, but you can work your way through those 50 or 200 guys, and then suddenly at the end of that target list you’ve got a new target list of 3,000 people on it.”

McChrystal expanded JSOC’s role in detainee operations, but NAMA was up and running before he set foot in Iraq. The CIA, which inflicted more than its share of dirty deeds on prisoners, had become so shocked at the torture at NAMA that it withdrew its interrogators from the base in August 2003, though it continued to provide intelligence to the task force. In fact, the month before McChrystal assumed command at JSOC, an army investigator, as well as intelligence and law enforcement officials, were already voicing their warnings about detainee abuse, suggesting that the harsh techniques were being employed by JSOC. In September 2003, after a request from the “commander of the Special Mission Unit Task Force,” US military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) instructors, whose official job was to prepare US service members to endure torture and captivity, arrived at Camp NAMA.

The JSOC Task Force did not categorize Camp NAMA as a prison but rather as a “filtration site” where intelligence was being obtained. This gave cover for all the dirty activity and the secrecy that shrouded it. The Special Access Program that the task force operated under “would be given a mission and might be authorized to use all sorts of special practices, that not only deviate from normal military practices, but might actually violate military law, and military policy, and this would be done by means of a Special Access Program, that would usually come from the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence [Stephen Cambone]. There’s very clearly some criminal conduct,” said Horton, the human rights lawyer. “And yet, here in this special JSOC regime, this was being authorized—being incited—by officers who were running the camp, who were supposed to be prohibiting this kind of conduct.”

The Battlefield Interrogation Facility at NAMA had four interrogation rooms and a medical screening room, where Saddam was first processed after his capture. Furnished with rugs, prayer mats, couches, tables and chairs, the “Soft Room” was where cooperative and high-ranking detainees were brought for questioning—and tea. The Blue and Red (or Wood) rooms were larger (about six by ten feet), rectangular and plain; the Blue Room had a coat of blue paint over the plywood walls. These rooms were used for medium-intensity interrogations, reportedly employing techniques approved by the US Army Field Manual. The Black Room was preserved from its days as a torture chamber under Saddam and, for good measure, the task force kept the meat hooks that hung from the ceiling during the Iraqi dictator’s reign of terror in place for their use. The Black Room was the largest room—approximately twelve by twelve feet. It was here that JSOC would perform its harshest interrogations.

Detainees were moved between rooms, depending on their cooperation with the interrogators. “We would do that to show him if you tell us what we want to hear, then this is the treatment that you’ll get,” recalled “Jeff Perry,” the pseudonym of a former interrogator at NAMA who provided eyewitness testimony on his experiences at NAMA to Human Rights Watch. “If you don’t, then this is the treatment that you’ll get. So there was a lot of that, going back and forth between the rooms.” If a prisoner was believed to have info on Zarqawi, he would be sent to the Black Room. It would also be used if “the interrogator thinks he’s being lied to or he’s not going to get anywhere with just talking to him,” Perry recalled. “We would march with him into the black room.” It would also be used if interrogators were “angry at [a detainee] and want[ed] to punish him for some reason.”

Inside the Black Room, the full-spectrum of SERE tactics were unleashed on detainees, along with a slew of medieval freestyle techniques. “It was painted black floor to ceiling. The door was black, everything was black,” recalled Perry. “It had speakers in the corners, all four corners, up at the ceiling. It had a small table in one of the corners, and maybe some chairs. But usually in the black room nobody was sitting down. It was standing, stress positions.” The interrogations there often incorporated extremely loud music, strobe lights, beatings, environmental and temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, twenty-hour interrogation sessions, water and stress positions, and personal, often sexual, humiliation. The forced nudity of prisoners was not uncommon. Almost any act was permissible against the detainees as long as it complied with the “No Blood, No Foul” motto. But, eventually, even blood was okay.

One former prisoner—the son of one of Saddam’s bodyguards—said he was made to strip, was punched repeatedly in the spine until he fainted, was doused with cold water and forced to stand in front of the air-conditioner and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Prisoners held at other facilities also described heinous acts committed against them by interrogators and guards, including sodomizing detainees with foreign objects, beating them, forcing water up their rectums and using extreme dietary manipulation—nothing but bread and water for more than two weeks in one case.

Members of the task force would beat prisoners with rifle butts and spit in their faces. One member of the task force reported that he had heard interrogators “beating the shit out of the detainee.” According to a former interrogator with the task force, one of his colleagues was “reprimanded and assigned to desk duty because he pissed in a bottle and gave it to a detainee to drink.” Members of the task force would also interrupt non-harsh interrogations and begin slapping or beating detainees. On at least one occasion, they abducted the wife of a suspected insurgent being hunted by the task force “to leverage the primary target’s surrender.” The woman was a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was still nursing her six-month-old baby. After interviewing numerous members of the task force at NAMA, Human Rights Watch concluded, “the abuses appear to have been part of a regularized process of detainee abuse—‘standard operating procedure.’”

Steven Kleinman, at the time a lieutenant colonel in the air force, arrived at Camp NAMA in early September 2003, just as McChrystal was taking over as commander of JSOC. Kleinman was a veteran interrogator and an air force SERE instructor. When he was first dispatched to Iraq, he believed his job was to observe the interrogations at the camp and analyze how they could be done more effectively. A year earlier, Kleinman had investigated the program at Guantánamo and found “fundamental systemic problems” that he believed had undermined the stated goals of the interrogations. But the task force at NAMA had different plans. They told Kleinman they were having trouble getting actionable or reliable intelligence from their prisoners, and they wanted Kleinman and his SERE colleagues to help them apply SERE tactics to the interrogations. In essence, they wanted Kleinman and his colleagues to use the very torture tactics against detainees that they had taught US military personnel to resist.

Kleinman agreed that the intel was a mess, but he did not believe it was because the interrogations were not harsh enough. He described a chaotic situation lacking any effective screening of new detainees, with some prisoners appearing to have no intelligence value. But the task force wanted Kleinman and his colleagues to participate in interrogations, and eventually, they were ordered to do so. Kleinman soon found himself in the Black Room at NAMA. “I walked into the interrogation room, all painted in black with [a] spotlight on the detainee. Behind the detainee was a military guard…with a[n] iron bar…slapping it in his hand,” Kleinman recalled. “The interrogator was sitting in a chair. The interpreter was to his left…and the detainee was on his knees…. A question was asked by the interrogator, interpreted, the response came back and, upon interpretation, the detainee would be slapped across the face…. And that continued with every question and every response. I asked my colleagues how long this had been going on, specifically the slapping, they said approximately 30 minutes.”

Kleinman said he considered the tactics used on the prisoner to be “direct violations of the Geneva Conventions and [actions that] could constitute a war crime.” Kleinman says he told the commander of the Special Mission Unit at NAMA that his force was engaged in “unlawful” conduct and systematic violations of the Geneva Convention. It had no impact on the commander or Kleinman’s other JPRA/SERE colleagues. Kleinman said his superior told him that they had been “cleared hot to use SERE methods” in interrogations. Kleinman said he believed that was an “unlawful order,” adding that he “wasn’t going to have any involvement with it, and I didn’t think that they should either.” He was told that the prisoners were not entitled to Geneva Convention protection because they were “unlawful combatants.” The torture continued.

Kleinman also recalled a detainee whom the task force was trying to break. His colleagues decided to make the man believe he was being released and actually drove him to a bus stop. Moments later, they snatched him again and returned him to NAMA. The man “was literally carried by two of the guards into the bunker struggling against them. He was taken down there,” Kleinman said. His two SERE colleagues “took over from that point…. They ripped his [clothing] off—not cut—they ripped it off… ripped off his underwear, took his shoes, they’d hooded him already, then they—they had shackled him by the wrist and ankles—being screamed at the entire time in his ear in English about essentially…what a poor specimen of human that he was…. And then the orders were given that he was to stand in that position for 12 hours no matter how much he asked for help, no matter how much he pleaded, unless he passed out, the guards were not to respond to any requests for help.”

Despite Kleinman’s objection to SERE tactics being expanded at NAMA, the task force and Kleinman’s bosses forged ahead. In September 2003, they began developing a CONOP, or “Concept of Operations,” for HVT “exploitation” for the camp. Similar to the “Exploitation Draft Plan” that SERE’s chief psychologist, Dr. Bruce Jessen, had developed a year earlier for use in Afghanistan, it called for taking enemy torture tactics used to train US forces and reverse-engineering them. The CONOP called for “tailoring detainee punishment consequences to maximize cultural undesirability.” Less than a month after he arrived, Kleinman was pulled out of NAMA, in the words of the Pentagon inspector general, because it “became apparent that friction was developing” between the task force and Kleinman. Kleinman later told the US Senate that “friction” was an understatement and that he believed his life was being threatened by members of the task force in retaliation for his dissent. One task force member, he said, sharpened a knife while telling Kleinman to “sleep lightly” because the task force does not “coddl[e] terrorists.”

Another source of torture at NAMA was that members of the HVT Task Force responsible for hunting people would continue to have access to the prisoners they seized. According to Major General Miller, at times the task force at NAMA would use special operators as interrogators. That created scenarios where the rage from the battlefield would spill over into interrogations, even after the prisoner was disarmed and in custody. Malcolm Nance, the former SERE instructor, told me, “Captives captured on the battlefield, first thing you’re going to learn is the guy that is capturing you is going to be very upset that you just lost the fire fight to him, and you killed some of his buddies so be prepared for having an ass whipping. It’s just that simple.” It becomes even worse when the soldiers who did the assault then have access to those prisoners for days on end. “It’s army doctrine that when you take a prisoner, one of the things you do is secure that prisoner and then you speed him to the rear. You get him out of the hands of the unit that took him,” recalled an army officer of his experience at a different filtration site. “Well, we didn’t do that. We’d keep them at our holding facility for I think it was up to seventy-two hours. Then we would place him under the guard of soldiers he had just been trying to kill.” The officer described one such incident where a detainee who was suspected of having killed a US soldier had his leg whacked by one of the soldier’s comrades with a baseball bat.

Perry recalled an incident soon after he arrived at NAMA involving an alleged financier of Zarqawi who was taken to the camp. The man was allegedly refusing to give any information to his interrogators. “I had no part in this interrogation, I was just observing….There was kind of a garden-like area with dirt and mud and a hose out there,” Perry recalled, adding:

Perry also recalled watching a British SAS officer—not authorized to conduct any kind of interrogation—mercilessly beat a detainee until he and another soldier intervened. As early as the summer of 2003, the CIA’s Baghdad Station was complaining to Langley that Special Operations troops were being too aggressive with detainees. The CIA’s general counsel, Scott Muller, said that the techniques being used at NAMA were “more aggressive” than those the CIA was using.

The task force would fly new detainees to NAMA using unmarked helicopters. The prisoners were clad in blue jumpsuits, and during their journey, they would have blacked-out goggles placed over their eyes. Interrogators at NAMA used an “authorization template” on their computers to check off which harsh interrogation techniques they intended to use on detainees. The request to use harsh interrogation would, in theory, need approval from higher-ups. “I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed. It would be signed off by the commander, whoever that was,” recalled Perry. “He would sign off on that every time it was done.” Another interrogator added that “every harsh interrogation [was] approved by the J2 [the unit’s chief intelligence officer] of the TF and the Medical prior to its execution.” Perry continued: “Some interrogators would go and use these techniques without typing up one of those things just because it was a hassle, or he didn’t want to do it and knew it was going to be approved anyway, and you’re not gonna get in that much trouble if you get caught doing one of these things without a signature.”

When Perry and a handful of colleagues began expressing their discomfort with the events at NAMA to their commanders, those commanders would call in military Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG) lawyers, who lectured the dissenters on the distinction between unlawful enemy combatants and POWs, and the legal loopholes therein. “Within a couple hours a team of two JAG officers, JAG lawyers, came and gave us a couple hours slide show on why this is necessary, why this is legal, they’re enemy combatants, they’re not POWs, and so we can do all this stuff to them and so forth,” Perry recalled. “I mean they had this two hour slide show all prepared, and they came in and gave it to us and they stopped interrogations for it. It was a PowerPoint.” The lawyers, Perry alleged, said that “we didn’t have to abide by the Geneva Conventions, because these people weren’t POWs.” Perry said he thought the lawyers “just came in and said whatever they had to say to patch it up and continue with the war.”

All task force personnel were required to sign nondisclosure agreements. Interrogators were often told that the White House and Rumsfeld were watching their operations closely. Perry stated that he saw McChrystal at NAMA on more than one occasion. The personnel at NAMA, he alleged, were given the impression that the techniques had been approved from on high because they “were only like a few steps away in the chain of command from the Pentagon.” The task force commanders, he said, would tell the interrogators that the White House or Pentagon had been directly briefed on their progress, particularly when it came to intel on Zarqawi. The commanders would tell them: “Rumsfeld was informed, such and such a report is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning, read by Secdef.” He added, “It’s a big morale booster for people working 14 hour days. Hey, we got to the White House!” Malcolm Nance told me, “When you have the President of the United States setting the pace, well you’re gonna get Abu Ghraib, you are going to get abuse. You’ve got the intelligence community throwing the book out to the point where, in their world, no one was ever subjected to ‘abuse’ by the US Armed Forces.”

Major General Keith Dayton, the commander of the Iraq Survey Group, which was established in June 2003 to coordinate the hunt for WMDs, described the situation at NAMA as “a disaster waiting to happen,” warning the Pentagon’s inspector general that he needed to “slam some rules on this place right away to basically keep ourselves from getting in trouble and make sure these people are treated properly.” Dayton described cases of prisoners transferred to conventional military custody from the task force with signs of being “badly burned,” having two black eyes, “back almost broken,” “multiple contusions on his face.” Soldiers and personnel from Camp Cropper (near Camp NAMA) stated under oath that detainees arrested and interrogated by the task force and SEAL Team 5 had been delivered to Camp Cropper showing obvious signs of abuse.

There are at least two known cases of Iraqis dying immediately after being transferred from the custody of task force Navy SEAL commandos. After what a SEAL team described as a “struggle,” on April 5, 2004, the SEALs delivered prisoner Fashad Mohammad to a conventional base, where he was interrogated and then allowed to sleep, at which point he became unresponsive and later died. The medical examiner’s report on his death, which was released under the Freedom of Information Act, said that Mohammad “died in U.S. custody approximately 72 hours after being apprehended. By report, physical force was required during his initial apprehension during a raid. During his confinement, he was hooded, sleep deprived, and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood.” Although the report described “multiple minor injuries, abrasions and contusions” and “blunt force trauma and positional asphyxia,” it concluded that the cause of death was “undetermined.” On November 4, 2003, Manadel al Jamadi died at Abu Ghraib prison, amid allegations that he had been beaten to death by members of SEAL Team 7. One team member was court-martialed but was ultimately acquitted—and nobody was charged with homicide.

By December 2003, a confidential Pentagon memo warned, “It seems clear that” the task force “needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” But the torture and abuse at NAMA continued, particularly if a detainee was believed to have any information about Zarqawi or his network. All of the interrogations were aimed at extracting intel that would lead to the next raid, the next strike and the next capture or kill. In an “operations center” near NAMA, “task force analysts pored over intelligence collected from spies, detainees and remotely piloted Predator surveillance aircraft, to piece together clues to aid soldiers on their raids,” the New York Times reported. “Twice daily at noon and midnight military interrogators and their supervisors met with officials from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and allied military units to review operations and new intelligence.”

In early 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross issued a scathing report on the mass arrests of Iraqis. It asserted that “over a hundred ‘high value detainees’ have been held for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells devoid of daylight” at a “High Value Detainees” section at the Baghdad Airport. Without specifically singling out the task force, the report described the raids that led to arrests of scores of Iraqis. Soldiers would burst into homes

The report cited “military intelligence officers” who told the Red Cross “that in their estimate between 70% and 90% of the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” The Red Cross findings echoed those of the classified military report in late 2003, which warned that the task force’s abuse of detainees combined with the mass arrests of Iraqis gave the impression that the United States and its allies were acting like “gratuitous enemies” of the Iraqi people.

When the military finally was permitted to investigate NAMA, its agents received threats from personnel at the camp, while DIA interrogators had their vehicle keys confiscated and were “ordered” not to discuss what they had seen with anyone. On June 25, 2004, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, then director of the DIA, sent a two-page memo to Stephen Cambone with a list of complaints from DIA personnel at Camp NAMA. One interrogator had his photos confiscated after taking pictures of injured detainees, and others complained that task force commandos forbade them from leaving the camp without permission, even for a haircut, and from talking to outsiders; they threatened them and screened their e-mails. Despite these efforts at suppression, news of detainee abuse at NAMA made its way up the ranks, and eventually to lawmakers.

In 2004, under pressure from a handful of lawmakers, Stephen Cambone, whose SSB was actually enabling the harsh interrogation ops at NAMA, scribbled a handwritten letter to his deputy, Lieutenant General Boykin. Dated June 26, 2004, it read, “Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable. In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26.” An aide to Boykin said, “At the time [Boykin] told Mr. Cambone he had found no pattern of misconduct with the task force.”

Despite all the whistleblowers’ reports, an official US military report on alleged abuses at NAMA and other facilities concluded that the prisoners’ descriptions of torture were lies. Accusations of wrongdoing and misconduct by members of the task force were handled in-house rather than through traditional military disciplinary procedures. In one case, when an Army Criminal Investigations Division (CID) agent attempted to investigate a member of the task force for abusing a detainee, it was quashed because, in the words of the CID, “the subject of this investigation is a member of TF 6-26” and the task force’s own security officer “has accepted investigative jurisdiction in this matter.”

In all, some thirty-four task force members would be “disciplined” for misconduct, and at least eleven members were removed from the unit. In 2006, Human Rights Watch reported that “a small number of task force members have been administratively disciplined, but not court-martialed. Five Army Rangers associated with the task force were reportedly court-martialed for abuses they carried out against detainees,” but “the sentences were all six months or less. There are no indications that officers up the chain of command [were] held accountable, despite serious questions about officers’ criminal culpability.”

An air force interrogator who worked with the JSOC task force hunting Zarqawi told me that he “did not see any form of oversight for the kill or capture campaign.” He said he witnessed and stopped several cases of abuse, which he communicated up the chain of command. “With the cases in which I reported abuses, there was no accountability. In one case, an interrogator was merely recalled from a remote location and then put right back to work at the main prison. The atmosphere was such that secrecy was the priority.” He added, “My general impression is that occasional law-breaking would be tolerated as long as it never got out to the press.”

The abuse and torture at Camp NAMA was not an anomaly, but rather a model. When the US government began probing how the shocking horrors meted out against prisoners at Abu Ghraib happened, how it all began, the investigation revealed that those running the prison had looked to the example set at Camp NAMA, Guantánamo and at Bagram in Afghanistan. When Abu Ghraib prison was taken over by US forces and converted from a Saddam-era prison and torture chamber into a US-run gulag, the Americans who set it up simply took the task force’s standard operating procedures and, once again, changed the letterhead and implemented them.

The Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke wide open in April 2004, when major news organizations released photos showing systematic abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners being held at the prison by the US military. As more photos became public, they showed naked prisoners stacked in pyramids, angry dogs growling over shuddering prisoners, mock executions. When Major General Antonio Taguba eventually investigated, he found documentary evidence of acts even worse than those depicted in the published photos, but the White House chalked up the torture and abuse to a few “bad apples,” and the public would never see the full extent of the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib.

The horrors of the US-run prisons of Iraq may never come fully into light, but one thing was abundantly clear: Tactics that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, had been considered the sovereign realm of America’s most unsavory “dark side” forces, and that had required approval from the highest levels of power in the United States for each escalation, now had become the widely accepted standard operating procedure for handling detainees in a huge battlefield with massive numbers of prisoners being held by the US military.

CAPTAIN IAN FISHBACK graduated from West Point in 2001 and deployed with the 82nd Airborne to Afghanistan for a combat tour from August 2002 to February 2003. In late 2003, he deployed to Iraq, where he was based at Forward Operating Base Mercury. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Fishback witnessed the migration of the tactics from the black sites to the military’s own prisons and filtration sites. On May 7, 2004, Fishback heard Rumsfeld’s congressional testimony. The defense secretary had said that the United States was following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and the “spirit” of the conventions in Afghanistan. Rumsfeld’s statement did not jibe with what Fishback had seen, so he began seeking answers through his chain of command. “For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command through battalion commander, multiple JAG lawyers, multiple Democrat and Republican Congressmen and their aides, the Ft. Bragg Inspector General’s office, multiple government reports, the Secretary of the Army and multiple general officers, a professional interrogator at Guantánamo Bay, the deputy head of the department at West Point responsible for teaching Just War Theory and Law of Land Warfare, and numerous peers who I regard as honorable and intelligent men,” Fishback recalled, adding that he was “unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment. I and troops under my command witnessed some of these abuses in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”

When Fishback began asking questions about the torture and abuse he had witnessed, he was blackballed by the military. He was confined to Fort Bragg and was denied permission to leave the base to attend a scheduled briefing on Capitol Hill. In a letter to Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, Fishback wrote: “Some do not see the need for [investigations]. Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States?” Fishback’s protest barely registered a blip on the radar.

In the summer of 2004, McChrystal officially moved the task force forty miles north of Baghdad to the Balad Air Base and brought the HVT interrogation and “filtration” site that had been housed at NAMA with him. But a change of venue would not end the abuses.

McChrystal flatly denied that commanders at NAMA “ordered the mistreatment of detainees,” asserting that any abuse was the result of “lapses of discipline” among individual members of the task force. Allegations of systematized torture at NAMA, he said, were false. “That wasn’t the case before I assumed command and wasn’t true under my command nor under my successors,” McChrystal wrote in his memoir.