Decline and Fall

A former interrogator in Iraq has said in public what I have known to be the case since I was over there: prior to the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American interrogators was systematic and officially sanctioned, the interrogators themselves knew better, and they did nothing.

American authorities continue to insist that the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident in an otherwise well-run detention system. That insistence, however, stands in sharp contrast to my own experiences as an interrogator in Iraq. I watched as detainees were forced to stand naked all night, shivering in their cold cells and pleading with their captors for help. Others were subjected to long periods of isolation in pitch-black rooms. Food and sleep deprivation were common, along with a variety of physical abuse, including punching and kicking. Aggressive, and in many ways abusive, techniques were used daily in Iraq, all in the name of acquiring the intelligence necessary to bring an end to the insurgency.

I have heard this whispered in back corners, accompanied by winks and nudges from people who were there at the time and knew what was going on.

I know this because I too was an interrogator there. I arrived the week the scandal did, and spent my year-plus as an American interrogator in the post-scandal atmosphere of, "don't let the next scandal happen on my watch." My attitude was always that I didn't want to be the person who made the mistake, and I reported every claim of abuse that I heard.

There were many claims. A lot of them were false, as evidenced by what I have referred to as "waves" of abuse reports: we would go months without hearing anything, we'd hear a dozen reports per day for a few days, and it would quiet down again. People were so scared of another scandal that they would halt the interrogation to report the claim. The detainees figured this out pretty quickly, so word would get out and all of a sudden everybody had a tale of abuse to tell. Our policy was to document the claim and forward it to the proper authorities (who were also eager to make sure the next scandal didn't happen as a reult of their inaction) but not to allow the claim to interfere with intelligence collection. This tended to put the brakes on the waves of abuse claims, and put the question of whether the claim was accurate or not in the hands of others, which we were only too happy to do. I do not believe, however, that every report I heard was a fabrication. There were too many of them, humans have a tendency to go along with whatever horrors are de rigeur, and far too many people believe that the end justifies the means.

I never witnessed any violations of the Geneva Conventions. Again, I got there when the Geneva Conventions were all the rage. But who among my colleagues did, and failed to act? Who participated in cover-ups? Who secretly pined for the "good old days" when you could do a lot more to squeeze information out of an unwilling detainee? I don't know the answer to this question, and I frankly don't want to know. But the story must get out. Not to demonize those who participated in it, Milgram Experiment-style, but to have a full reckoning. To do whatever we can to ensure that this never happens again.

I am thankful that I didn't witness what Eric Fair witnessed. His story of sleepless nights resonates with me, because I have no doubt that I would be in the same boat were I witness to, and participant in, the horrors that he saw. I am also thankful that the timeline of my employment in Iraq shields me from suspicion on that count, if only a bit. It's a question I always have to answer whenever people find out what I do for a living.

What continues to disturb me, however, is the fact that I often get a very disturbing reaction: they're all a bunch of terrorists so they don't have any rights, and "they would do it to us, so why is it wrong for us to do it to them?" As if our yardstick for ethical behavior is Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Labels: GWOT, interrogation, personal, torture