FOREWORD
When retired Colonel Bob Ulin, CEO of the Command and General Staff College Foundation, asked me to contribute a foreword for a new book on interrogation, my interest was immediately piqued. Interrogating prisoners and detainees had been one of my personal and professional specialties during a thirty-year career as a military intelligence officer. Like many Americans, I suffered with each disappointing report of detainee abuse by American operating forces. The years have taught me that the only way to deal with such scandals is transparency—establish what happened, get it into the open—and deal with it. Major Doug Pryer’s excellent account in The Fight for the High Ground thus struck a responsive chord in me. If I could help by lending my voice to the work, I told Bob Ulin, I would gladly do so. Major Pryer and I had a lot in common.
*****
In late 2003, five years after retiring from a thirty-year career, I received an invitation from the Office of the Army G2 in the Pentagon. Brigadier General Barbara Fast, the senior intelligence officer of Combined Joint Task Force-7 in Baghdad, wanted me to come to Iraq. Seven months had elapsed since the dramatic entry of American forces into Baghdad and the electrifying images of Saddam Hussein’s statue toppling onto the pavement in Firdos Square. Hussein’s powerful and ruthless sons had been killed in Mosul, but the Dictator himself continued to elude capture, and an insurgency was brewing.
This was my second post-retirement mission at the behest of the Army leadership. In March 2002, two months after it opened, the Army requested that I visit the detention facility at Guantanamo to evaluate the new operation. If correctly organized, resourced, and run, the site was a critical intelligence collection opportunity. By my visit, the operation was in its infancy, as the intelligence community struggled to find qualified personnel to man it. It was, in those early days, a place where controlling the detainees was the priority, not interrogating them. Not surprisingly, the operation was already receiving a very bad press.
It didn’t take long to conclude that the hastily-established effort there was improperly organized and ill-equipped to successfully exploit the marvelous pool of sources that had fallen into our hands as a result of the lightning-like invasion of Afghanistan. There were 300 detainees on hand, with another 200 or more due to arrive within weeks. Of the twenty-six interrogators on hand, many were young and inexperienced. Only a few spoke Arabic, fewer still spoke other languages common to Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners, which necessitated the use of contract interpreters, never a good idea if it can be avoided. Of 25 vital analyst positions planned for the Task Force, only 12 were filled.
Under the command of a Marine brigadier, a strict, “one size fits all” treatment of detainees was the order of the day at Gitmo. Since its establishment in January 2002, it had been run as a maximum security cage to maintain control over prisoners whom the Secretary of Defense labeled “the worst of the worst.” Each inmate, guards were reminded, was a trained killer. The problem was, with this kind of an assumption, harsh treatment was the lead card in dealing with the closely-packed detainees, which, in turn, contributed to their militancy and solidarity (just as American pilots bonded in the harsh confines of the “Hanoi Hilton).
“Interagency” representatives on site (principally CIA and FBI), accustomed to handling sources out of safe-houses, not cells, were unhappy with the military’s by-the-book handling of prisoners and the ability of the detainees to converse with one another, to observe who was being interrogated, and to know which of their comrades seemed to be spending long hours in the interrogation booth. They implored me to do everything possible to persuade the Army that a human intelligence collection operation would best succeed if a rapport-building approach were adopted, and if the facilities could be modified to decrease the ability of the detainee population to organize and conspire.
The interrogation of al-Qaeda fighters and terrorist captives, I wrote in my report, was a difficult challenge that required that the Gitmo facility be run by intelligence personnel in a manner consistent with proven principles of human intelligence operations. This meant that “Treatment, rewards, punishment, and anything else associated with a detainee should be centrally orchestrated by the debriefing team responsible for obtaining information from that detainee.” Intelligence officers, not security types, should therefore be at the helm. My report contained many recommendations; most of them intended to remake the operation into a sophisticated human intelligence collection site modeled after successful interrogation operations in Vietnam, Panama, and Desert Storm with which I had first-hand experience. Under that model, decent, humane treatment plays a central role.
By the fall of 2002, two Army generals had come and gone at Gitmo, after which the Army assigned MG Geoffrey Miller, a hard-charging Field Artillery Officer, to command Joint Task Force 170—as the Guantanamo operation was called. Now, at least, the intelligence side of the house was in the driver’s seat, even if Miller himself had no experience in running an interrogation operation. By all reports, he presided over a “get tough” agenda over which considerable controversy developed, with allegations (many substantiated, some levied by the FBI) of interrogator misconduct. It took years, tens of millions of dollars, and more than a few ugly scandals, before Gitmo re-emerged from its descent into the “dark side,” and transformed itself into a professional intelligence collection facility along the lines I had recommended. By this time, though, its name was so tainted that the issue had become how to close the state-of-the-art facility, with critics pointing out that closing costs could approach $200 million.
Now, Baghdad-bound, I wondered if I would have better luck influencing events in Iraq.
*****
General Fast was concerned about two issues: the interrogation of detainees, a key command priority whose state of health she doubted, and the increasingly-unmistakable signs that a full-blown insurgency was taking hold—which meant that the command would have to wage a new kind of war. The general asked me to visit key interrogation and intelligence nodes, take a look at these two issues, and report back to her.
In the week that followed, I visited more than a dozen intelligence organizations, often after hair-raising trips in a speeding SUV. The exit briefing to BG Fast was blunt, as was the lengthy written report of findings and recommendations that I submitted to her and the Army G2 on December 12, 2003.
The burgeoning insurgency was real trouble. Observing events, it was impossible not to think about Vietnam, and the lessons we had learned at considerable cost of American and South Vietnamese blood. In Vietnam, our conventionally-oriented military leadership had not understood the insurgency and what was required to defeat it until too late. Our Army and Air Force’s use of firepower in the Vietnamese countryside had exacerbated the situation, often making enemies of the very people we were trying to save from Communism. Ultimately, after the departure of General William Westmoreland, the focus shifted to securing and protecting the South Vietnamese population. The Viet Cong movement soon began to falter.
But it had taken too many years to learn this lesson. American public opinion had turned against the war, and my last glimpse of Vietnam was in predawn Saigon, April 30, 1975, from the bay of an evacuation helicopter as it extracted me from the roof of our Embassy.
Now Iraq was being consumed by an insurgency, but it was obvious that the basic importance of securing the population and winning their loyalty had been forgotten. Many Iraqis had valid reasons to welcome our removal of Saddam, but the first order of business after the Ba’athist regime was score-settling time. Human life had become cheap. Sectarian violence was brutal, supplemented by the fact that al-Qaeda had decided that Iraq was a good place to kill Americans and humble Washington. American soldiers and ordinary Iraqi citizens, Sunni, Kurd, and Shi’ia, were subject to vicious and bloody fates. Overstretched coalition forces simply could not provide security. As in the darkest days of the Vietnam War, our hard-pressed Army and Marines only controlled the ground they occupied. Outside the gates of their compounds, danger lurked. Particularly hard hit were those decent Iraqi citizens who voted, and who volunteered to serve in the military, the police, or in government. Bodies laid out on the highways each morning testified to these grim risks.
Because we had too few forces, the borders with Iran and Syria were open—sanctuaries for the enemy, conduits for weapons and foreign fighters—shades of Laos and Cambodia. Worse yet, the paucity of coalition forces left much of California-sized Iraq as a sanctuary for any group that wanted to oppose the coalition.
To further complicate matters, yesterday’s liberators were well on their way to becoming today’s occupiers. In many cases, those who might have wished to assist us were alienated by heavy-handed coalition operating forces that were charging around the country, kicking down doors at midnight in search of Saddam and his loyalists, sweeping up suspects for incarceration as threats to the security of the coalition. We were, I reported to the general, “making gratuitous enemies.”
In the detainee interrogation arena, there was little positive to report. My tour began at Abu Ghraib, months before it became a place more infamous than My Lai. The prison was a grim reminder of the past, a blood-soaked symbol of Saddam’s oppression. Its gallows and adjacent death row cells, their walls scarred with the graffiti of the doomed, evoked brutality and excess, but tone-deaf coalition authorities had decided to use the hated prison.
The prison was dank, seemingly afloat on a sea of mud and toxic waste. Security was a myth. Insurgent mortar teams regularly attacked the sprawling facility, killing guards, interrogators, and prisoners alike. Within the walls, security was also weak. Unvetted Iraqi police personnel assigned to assist the American MPs included some who were in collusion with the insurgency. Shortly before my visit, one Iraqi police officer smuggled a weapon into the facility and gave it to a prisoner, who engaged in a firefight with guards from inside his cell.
Abu Ghraib was a time bomb awaiting detonation. There were too few interrogators, too few MPs, and a growing sea of detainees. At the time of my visit (early December 2003), some 6000 Iraqis were housed within its walls. Approximately 10% were regarded as worthy of intelligence exploitation, but there were far too few interrogators, linguists, and support facilities to conduct 600 or more properly-planned and administered interrogations. As a result, detainees and their captors were crouched in place, struggling to survive until someone sorted it all out. Many detainees were common criminals; others had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Throngs of inmates were so-called “security detainees,” picked up by our operating forces and deemed a threat to the coalition. They were housed in large tents pitched in a muddy courtyard, cheek-to-jowl, awaiting interrogation, making it easy for them to collude with one another. It was a recipe for failure.
Every morning, fresh lots of detainees, swept up in midnight raids by American units hunting for Saddam and his loyalists, were dumped at the prison, in spite of MP protests that the facility was bursting at the seams and at risk of a prisoner revolt that could take American lives.
One Abu Ghraib detainee whose case came to my attention was an 85-year old man who had been picked up in July by a unit searching for an alleged captain in the Fedayeen Saddam. The American sergeant and lieutenant who detained him reported that their target was not present during the raid of his home. They detained the older man because he lived at the target’s address and his name was similar. The hapless octogenarian had appealed his detention weeks earlier, claiming that he was 85, deaf, and certainly not an officer in Uday Hussein’s fanatical Fedayeen Saddam. But by December, the coalition bureaucracy had still not managed to figure out how to release him. One can imagine what he and his family thought about our liberation of their country.
The MI unit that was supposed to conduct interrogations was under-resourced and demoralized, its soldiers convinced that they had been forgotten at the far end of the supply chain. Their officer-in-charge was a civil affairs officer, not an experienced human intelligence operator. Nonetheless, they toiled gamely trying to get the job done, in spite of shortages of linguists, reports officers, computers, paper, electrical power, radios, and vehicles. Effective leadership, be it on the MP or the MI side, was lacking, with bad blood between the two sides over who should do what.
Worse than all of this was the most obvious deficiency: the facility was completely unsuitable for the professional exploitation of high-value detainees. This was not a place where patient human intelligence professionals could employ the sophisticated, developmental methods with which I was familiar from successful interrogation experiences in Vietnam, Panama, and Operation Desert Storm. Within the walls of Abu Ghraib, there might have been a bonanza of possible sources, but they were warehoused in the worst possible facility, and no one seemed to have a clue about who they were, let alone how to exploit them. The interrogation “rules of engagement” shown to me were heavily weighted on the harsh side.