Part 13 (1/2)

A few hours later, sometime after midnight, at the end of a series of raids on suspected insurgents in Balad, another soldier in the same company, Staff Sgt. Shane Werst, led an Iraqi into his home, allegedly struck him about ten times, then shot him at least six times with his M-4 carbine.

”I can't help but feeling like I was part of an execution,” PFC Nathan Stewart, the other soldier who was there, later testified. The facts of the matter aren't in dispute. Werst then pulled out a handgun, fired it into a wall, and told Stewart to smear the dead man's fingerprints on it. Charged months later with murder, Werst testified that he acted in self-defense, saying that the Iraqi had lunged for a weapon. Werst said he had planted the handgun on the dead man because ”I was second-guessing myself.” He was acquitted by a military jury.

In another raid at about this time, Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Tracy Perkins, the platoon sergeant for Alpha Company's 1st platoon, had a murky encounter with an Iraqi identified by Army intelligence as one of ten suspects in recent mortar and IED attacks in Balad. He told investigators that the man-”Target No. 1,” according to a statement by Perkins-had a pistol in his hand. ”I fired a controlled pair [of shots] and the man still continued to raise the weapon,” Perkins wrote. ”Then I fired a third shot into the man's head and killed him.”

Cunningham, the company commander, stated that multiple informants had said the man was a former Baath Party official who was head of an insurgent cell responsible for four bombings.

An Army inquiry found the facts of the matter somewhat less clear, largely because of conflicting and incomplete statements. ”After interviewing the majority of individuals present that night,” the investigator reported, ”it is apparent that all individuals are quite confused in determining the exact facts.” It recommended that no action be taken against Perkins.

But Perkins and others were later brought up on a variety of charges related to the bridge incident. Perkins was convicted early in 2005, just after the first anniversary of the event, on two counts of aggravated a.s.sault, obstruction of justice, and a.s.sault consummated by battery. A few months later, Saville pleaded guilty to charges of obstruction of justice, dereliction of duty, and aggravated a.s.sault and battery, and under his plea agreement was sentenced to a total of forty-five days in jail. (Prosecutors had a relatively weak case because they were unable to produce a body that was clearly that of the victim.) The young officer said he was pleased by the outcome because it allowed him to remain in the Army.

An Army lawyer recommended that Cunningham be charged with solicitation of murder, involuntary manslaughter, and other offenses. But after Werst's acquittal the Army decided against prosecuting him, and he left the Army in June 2005.

Saville said that he had had discussions with Sa.s.saman about how to mislead Army investigators. Despite that, Sa.s.saman received only a written admonishment. ”On 7 January 2004, you were briefed ... that soldiers of the 1st platoon pushed two Iraqi men into the Tigris River causing one of them to drown,” Odierno wrote. ”You ordered them to deny that the men were pushed into the river and to say that they were dropped off at the side of the road. Your conduct was wrongful, criminal and will not be tolerated.”

Sa.s.saman remained in command of the battalion for months, an outcome that shocked Poirier, his fellow battalion commander. ”When you have a battalion commander who leads his staff in rehearsing a story about a murder-and he's still in command?” Poirier said in April 2005, shortly after he retired from the Army. ”That's not right.”

Sa.s.saman left the Army at about the same time that Poirier did. He made his departure defiantly, taking a swipe on his way out at Maj. Gen. Odierno, whose division was headquartered in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Tikrit. ”If I were to do it all over again, I would do the exact same thing, and I've thought about this long and hard,” he testified. ”I was taught in the Army to win, and I was trying to win all the way, and I just disagreed-deeply disagreed- with my superior commanders on the actions that they thought should be taken with these individuals [charged in the Tigris bridge case]. And you have to understand, the legal community, my senior commanders, were not fighting in the streets of Samarra. They were living in a palace in Tikrit. So they lacked some of the situational awareness that I had and that the soldiers had on the ground.” His bitter bottom line: ”Big Army should be ashamed of itself in a lot of ways____________ Mistakes were made at every single level. Let me just leave it at that.”

Poirier said he remained generally much impressed by Odierno-but not in this instance. ”My experience with 4 ID was a good one,” he said. ”You make mistakes. And we didn't have a lot of experience in operating in a Muslim state that had been run by a crazy man.” His conclusion on the bridge case, he said, was ”I love Odierno, but he granted immunity to the battalion commander and company commander, and gave them letters of reprimand.” Generally, he said, ”there were some people in 4 ID who were out of control. But I think Odierno's leaders.h.i.+p was very sound. His failures, if that's what you want to call them, came from trusting his subordinates.”

A senior U.S. intelligence official was less charitable. He thought Odierno intentionally turned a blind eye to certain brutalities: ”He's a good guy. But he would say to his colonels, 'I don't want to hear the bad s.h.i.+t.'”

Maj. Gen. Odierno, who by 2005 had been promoted to be the military a.s.sistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at first agreed to be interviewed for this book, but later cancelled the interview. Then, when a copy of this section of the book was sent to him, along with an invitation for comment, he wrote back, ”That is clearly not even close to a complete picture of what happened nor my intent throughout nor with an understanding of the overall strategy of the division______ This is unfair to the soldiers and leaders of the division.”

In a subsequent interview, Odierno mounted a strenuous defense of his division's performance. He said the preceding description of the 4th Infantry Division makes it appear that ”all we did was kill people wantonly and abuse prisoners. In my opinion, that's totally false.” Odierno said that he had made detainee operations a major focus of his command after it became clear in the summer of 2003 that the division would have to hold prisoners. He had held a ”summit” with his commanders on detainee operations late that summer, and during the division's year in Iraq issued seventeen separate orders relating to detainees. ”That's what bothers me about this” discussion of the 4th ID. ”I spent so much time on this. It was important to me that we did this right.” He also said that no one had ever asked him for comment for the various Army reports that singled out the 4th ID for the abuse of Iraqi captives.

He said that while his division ”came in very hard across the AO [area of operations]” in the fall of 2003, he thought those raids were targeted precisely and helped develop the intelligence that had led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Most notable was the fact that after his division spent a year in the northern part of the Sunni Triangle that area remained largely quiet, even as Mosul and Anbar province exploded. And, he added, despite being attacked more than other divisions, fewer soldiers in his were lost.

Odierno's self-defense shouldn't be dismissed lightly, especially in the collection of intelligence, which clearly worked in the apprehension of Saddam. Yet there is little evidence that his division's unusually aggressive stance was particularly successful. Samarra especially continued to be a trouble spot for the U.S.

effort, and the insurgency remained robust and active in much of the rest of the area where the 4th ID operated.

But perhaps the best way to judge the 4th ID was that the division succeeding his chose a sharply different course of operations. Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division (which took over from the 4th ID in the spring of 2004), declined to discuss the operations of the 4th ID but emphasized that in his own unit ”from day one” that it was essential ”to treat people with dignity,” even captured insurgents. As Petraeus had done in the north, Batiste established a detailed set of procedures for his jails and brought in sheikhs and imams to inspect his facilities. ”I told commanders they would be responsible for everything that happened in them,” Batiste said. ”They all conformed to the Geneva Conventions, to the rule of law, and to my sense of what was right from the way I was brought up.” And like Petraeus, he had only one notable instance of abuse, and that happened not in a detention facility but when a sergeant appears to have had a nervous breakdown during field operations.

Inside Abu Ghraib One day in the spring of 2004, Maj. Gen. James Mattis was walking out of a mess hall in al Asad, in western Iraq, when he saw a knot of his troops intently hunched over a television, watching a cable news show. Marines weren't usually so attentive to current events. ”What's going on?” Mattis asked. It was, he learned, the revelations about Abu Ghraib, along with sickening photos of cruelty and humiliation.

A nineteen-year-old lance corporal glanced up from the television and told the general, ”Some a.s.sholes have just lost the war for us.”

The detainee abuses that would resonate most took place not out in the divisions operating in the provinces, but on the outskirts of the capital, in the Abu Ghraib prison. All of the Army's problems in Iraq in 2003-poor planning, clumsy leaders.h.i.+p, strategic confusion, counterproductive tactics, undermanning, being overly reactive-came together in the treatment of prisoners, a wide-ranging scandal that eventually was summarized in the phrase ”Abu Ghraib,” after the big prison west of Baghdad where many prisoners wound up, and where some were tortured.

There was never supposed to be a problem with detainees, because there weren't supposed to be any, at least in U.S. hands. The war plan had called for the Iraqi population to cheerfully greet the American liberators, quickly establish a new government, and wave farewell to the departing American troops. It was not to be. ”As the need for actionable intelligence arose, the realization dawned [among U.S. commanders] that pre-war planning had not included planning for detainee operations,” a subsequent Army report noted. And so a series of steps were taken that ultimately would lead to a scandal that would shake the Army and tarnish the U.S. effort in Iraq. As Gen. Mattis put it a year later, ”When you lose the moral high ground, you lose it all.”

The mess at Abu Ghraib arguably began on October 1, 2003, when Staff Sgt. Ivan ”Chip” Frederick II and Spec. Charles Graner, Jr., arrived there as part of the advance party for the 372nd Military Police Company, an Army Reserve unit from rural Cresaptown, Maryland, in the Appalachian foothills. They were part of a larger, troubled unit that until September had been based in southern Iraq. Many had deployed to the country that spring to handle the flood of enemy POWs that war planners had expected but that had never materialized. Their mission completed, they had expected-like many other soldiers in Iraq that spring-to go home sooner rather than later. Instead, the reservists were a.s.signed a new mission. Someone had to run the Iraqi prison system, and in the absence of an Iraqi government, they were handed the job. Their morale plummeted, an official Army inquiry later found. Some began exaggerating medical complaints, such as back pains, to get evacuated out of the country, their brigade commander, Brig. Gen. Karpinski, later complained. In mid-October the 372nd took responsibility, from a Nevada-based MP unit, for Tiers 1A and IB, the permanent, concrete-walled part of the prison. Called One Alpha, or the hard site, by the soldiers, this was the cell block where interrogations took place and where detainees believed to possess useful information were kept. Other prisoners, deemed to be of less intelligence value, lived in tents in an open area.

Just how poorly prisoners had been treated during the summer, before the 372nd MPs arrived, is a matter of dispute. Some had been kept naked and handcuffed to bars, and others were made to wear women's underwear on their heads, according to Frederick's statement. What is not in question is that once Graner and Frederick took control of the night s.h.i.+ft on Tier 1A, they wasted little time in going on a rampage of abuse. ”I took it to another level,” Frederick said in a sworn statement given much later to Army investigators.

The torture of detainees was first recorded photographically on October 17, according to the time stamp from one of the digital cameras the MPs used. ”Graner was a picture person, he loved taking pictures,” Frederick said in his confessional declaration. ”Graner took pictures all the time.” (Indeed, according to Frederick's sworn statement, Graner went so far as to have Frederick photograph him while he was being f.e.l.l.a.t.ed in a prison supply room by PFC Lynndie England, another member of the unit, who had become Graner's girlfriend. In one photo, England is giving the thumbs-up she would later use in photos of detainee abuse.) The October 17 photo showed a man stripped naked and handcuffed to his cell door. The next day an Iraqi man was photographed handcuffed to a cot with women's underwear draped over his head. About a week later-official accounts differ on the precise date-PFC England posed holding a dog's leash that had at the other end a naked detainee, nicknamed Gus by the MPs. On October 25, naked Iraqi men with their hands cuffed and legs shackled were piled on their backs like cordwood. Adel Nakhla, a civilian working as a translator on contract, said in a statement later that ”they handcuffed their hands together and their legs with shackles and started to stack them on top of each other by ensuring that the bottom guy's p.e.n.i.s will touch the guy on top's b.u.t.t.”

In the following nights, detainees were kept naked, with some forced to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e in front of female soldiers. On November 4 a detainee was hooded and placed on a box, and had wires attached to him that he was told would electrocute him if he stepped off the box. On the same night a CIA detainee died in custody on Tier IB, having been beaten by the Navy SEALs who had captured him. One detainee later described to Army investigators being made to ”bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing unconsciousness.” He also said he had been sodomized with a stick. Investigators found it ”highly probable” that his allegations were accurate.

Many if not all of these acts were violations of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war and of civilian noncombatants. Most notably, Article 3 of the 1949 convention stated that people being detained shall be treated humanely, without ”outrages on personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” The abuses occurred not only because of the failings of those who committed them, but because of the lack of supervision and leaders.h.i.+p by their superiors. One reason for this was that everyone was overworked, taking twelve-hour s.h.i.+fts in a hostile environment, frequently for seven days a week. Yet good officers know their soldiers, and part of that is knowing who to keep an eye on. They also enforce discipline, so other soldiers understand that the unit has standards all its members are responsible for. Yet here leaders didn't supervise or lead, and other soldiers lacked the discipline to stop the s.a.d.i.s.tic acts, or at least to report them.

Abu Ghraib was falling apart. Even in a nation sinking into chaos, the prison stood out as particularly troubled. It was regularly being sh.e.l.led by mortars. Prisoners were routinely escaping-no one knows exactly how many, but at least three dozen. On November 5, during the night s.h.i.+ft's watch, several fled Tier 1A. Two days later another detainee went missing. The next day five or six left. ”Note: No power. No water. Prison in state of lockdown,” a soldier wrote in the One Alpha log on November 17,2003.

Army teams with working dogs arrived at the prison on November 20, and were used to abuse prisoners four days later, the day an MP was shot with a smuggled pistol. Using dogs to scare prisoners was called the doggie dance, according to Frederick.

On November 24 the prisoners rioted, resulting in the shooting deaths of nine and injuries to nine U.S. troops. A subsequent Army report concluded: Contributing factors were lack of comprehensive training of guards, poor or nonexistent SOPs [standard operating procedures], no formal guard-mount conducted prior to s.h.i.+ft, no rehearsals or ongoing training, the mix of less than lethal rounds with lethal rounds in weapons, no AARs [after-action reviews] being conducted after incidents, ROE [rules of engagement] not posted and not understood, overcrowding, uniforms not standardized, and poor communications between the command and soldiers.

But to Karpinski, the female MP general overseeing detention operations in Iraq, that catalog of missteps merely reflected the lack of support she was getting from her superiors. A few months later she would be blamed by the Army as the seniormost officer to have made grave mistakes in handling Abu Ghraib. She would argue in her own defense that she had worked to call attention to her problems and had sought help from the top commanders in Iraq, generally in vain.

In November, as the Ramadan offensive surged, the 82nd Airborne's commanding general, Swannack, came to see Karpinski. The eastern boundary of his division's area of operations ran up against Abu Ghraib, and he wanted to know about her security arrangements. ”What platforms do you have?” he asked her. He was asking a basic commander's question: Do you have Humvees? Armored Humvees? Bradley fighting vehicles? How do your soldiers investigate enemy movement, or respond to attacks? ”None, sir,” Karpinski responded.

”What weapons do you have?” Swannack asked.

”Just M-16s, SAWs,” she said, referring to the Army's basic rifle and the light machine gun known as a squad automatic weapon. These were the most basic arms a unit could have, but nothing that any platoon leader would want as his only tools available for combat. Such light weaponry was useless, for example, against mortar attacks, which could be fired from miles away, and which needed mortars or artillery pieces for an adequate response, as well as a sophisticated counterbattery radar system to detect the point of origin of the enemy fire. His own troops worked constantly to hone their response time on mortar fire, eventually getting it down to one hundred seconds. One night they were able to hit back in just that amount of time, and the next day a patrol found a 60 millimeter mortar tube on the far bank of the Euphrates, and three dead men at a nearby hospital.

Swannack appeared almost incredulous at the inability of Karpinski's troops to respond in a similar fas.h.i.+on, she recalled in an interview. ”What do you have for force protection?” he asked.

”An armored division that doesn't want to help me,” she said, referring to the 1st AD, which operated just to her east, in and around Baghdad. He also was stunned that her sentries did not respond to hostile fire from the villages adjacent to the prison. Nor did they conduct patrols through those areas. That amounted to an invitation to the insurgents to launch attacks.

Swannack looked at Karpinski. She remembered him slapping her on the back and saying, ”Well, Sanchez really f.u.c.ked you.” (Asked about that, Swannack recalled commenting in a slightly less charged way. He believed he said ”something like 'CJTF-7 was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g you by not giving you sufficient a.s.sets to do this job.'”) He got into his Black Hawk and flew off. But that night he made sure that a mortar platoon from the 82nd was on her western flank, and two days later he a.s.signed an infantry company to patrol in that area to keep insurgents away from the prison.

In December, at the next monthly meeting of commanding generals in Iraq, Karpinski recalled, she confronted Odierno. ”Look, sir, your mobile interrogation teams need to do a better job,” and not keep dumping thousands of unscreened Iraqis on her facility.

”I don't have the f.u.c.king time to do it,” Odierno responded dismissively. ”Tell Wojdakowski to get you more facilities,” referring to Sanchez's deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, who handled a lot of dull but important issues such as logistics and other support functions. Odierno's riposte was a cla.s.sic combat commander's response, and captures the unequal nature of the exchange. He was an active-duty two-star general, the commander of an armored division, one of the Army's premier units. He was the youngest division commander in the Army. And he was physically imposing, six foot five inches tall and weighing 250 pounds, with a bulletlike shaved head. Everyone around him knew he was destined for three or four stars, and might be chief of staff of the Army one day. She was smaller, a woman, a reservist one-star general, the commander of support troops. In Army terms, that meant her job was to solve his problems, not add to them.

But Karpinski stuck to her guns, according to her account. In a previous confrontation, she'd found that if she weathered his initial bl.u.s.tery response, she could get through to him. She told him that the torrent of detainees, many of them s.h.i.+pped by his outfit, was swamping her operation at Abu Ghraib.

Odierno relented a bit. ”Tell me more,” he said. ”What kind of numbers would you like?”

She said she needed more discrimination in who was s.h.i.+pped to her. ”He said he would look into it, and he did,” she said in 2005, ”but they [Odierno's 4th ID] were still worst offenders.” (Asked about this account, Odierno insisted it never happened. ”That's bulls.h.i.+t,” he said. ”I never talked to her about detainees,” except for one instance of dealing with an anti-Iranian militia.) On Christmas Day she went out to Abu Ghraib to check on the state of the operation. The staff there told her, a bit chagrined, that they were over capacity, and just the night before had turned away a s.h.i.+pment of seven prisoners sent down from northern Iraq by Petraeus's 101st Airborne Division. They actually had told the incoming flight to put the Iraqis back on the helicopter and take them away. That worried Karpinski. ”I knew Petraeus wouldn't be happy,” she recalled. So instead of waiting to be hauled in to explain what was going on, she went to see Wojdakowski. Standing six foot four inches tall, Wojdakowski had played basketball at West Point under Bob Knight, and had gone on to a career in which he specialized in infantry training.

He told her not to worry about all the detainees coming in, she recounted. He got angry. He put down his pen and looked her straight in the eye. ”I don't care if we're holding fifteen thousand innocent Iraqis, we're winning the war,” he told her, she later said in a sworn statement to Army investigators.

”No, sir, you are not,” she responded. ”Not inside my wire, you are not winning, you are making enemies. You're making enemies out of every one of those people you're holding without a reason.... This isn't a fair carriage of justice. This isn't dignity and respect. This isn't the road ahead you are allegedly preaching all the time. This is smoke and mirrors, a facade of security in Baghdad. There is no such thing.”

Wojdakowski didn't respond to requests for an interview.

The Army turns over a rock at Abu Ghraib On January 12, Karpinski was on a mission near the Iranian border, sent there by Gen. Sanchez, when she checked her e-mail on the military's SIPRNET, its secure internal Internet system. She saw one from the head of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division-its internal FBI. Curious, she opened it first, and read two short sentences notifying her that her unit was being investigated for prisoner abuse. It isn't clear what had sparked that inquiry.

The next day, Spec. Joseph Darby put photographs of the abuse occurring in cell block One Alpha into a plain envelope and slipped them under the door of the CID investigators. They looked at them, then accelerated their inquiry into hyperdrive. Just after midnight on January 14, Capt. Donald Reese, the thirty-nine-year-old commander of one of Karpinski's subordinate units, the 372nd Military Police Company, was awakened and told that his battalion commander wanted to see him. After he had dressed and arrived at the unit headquarters, he was greeted by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Paul Arthur, an official from the Army's CID. ”We have to do an investigation on your soldiers,” he was told, according to a statement he gave later. ”We believe they're involved in some alleged abuse.”

Two hours later, Reese, who in civilian life was a salesman from New Stanton, Pennsylvania, knocked on the door of Frederick, the sergeant who was chief of the night s.h.i.+ft on One Alpha. ”Freddy, CID is here, and they want to talk to you,” Reese said. Arthur and other CID agents seized Frederick's weapons and computer and interrogated him until 4:00 a.m a.m. Frederick claimed in a statement that he had questioned some of the practices in the prison, but that ”the answer I got was this is how Military Intelligence wants it.”