THERE CAN BE LITTLE DOUBT THAT THE FLASH POINT OF the sudden rise in insurgent activity all over Iraq in 2004 was the result of our snatching the accountant. The spark that ignited the Iraqi powder keg was bound to occur; we just happened to provide the match. It did have one good consequence, however, in that it basically flushed out the rats. Every time an insurgent took direct action against us, we got a little more information about money routes and cells. The lines between Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shia militia and the Sunni insurgents became clearer and easier to detect and target.
As I mentioned, there were a lot of forces with different agendas in Iraq, and while they may not have been working together, more often than not they were hostile to us. We didn’t realize at the outset of our activity in Iraq that we weren’t dealing with one country opposing another. In Iraq, the typical order of patronage and loyalty is immediate family first, then tribe, then faith, and finally country. Iraq, in direct contrast with America, is a nation with a low-trust society. In a general sense, people there don’t trust or honor one another without an overlying framework of family and tribe. America, on the other hand, is a high-trust society where people trust one another regardless of relations, race, color, religion, etc. The resulting dynamics of each type of society have profound effects on freedoms, stability, and effective forms of government.
All we knew was that there were several groups out to kill us, and we had to take actions against as many of them as we could with the resources we had. Sanchez may have wanted Sadr, but he knew there were other targets of equal merit. One of them—a former general—was in the Anbar Province. And rather than bring him to a little temporary detention facility, we ended up taking him to one of the worst places on earth.
It’s an easy drive from Baghdad to the city of Abu Ghraib, home of one of the most infamous places on the planet. I’m going to tell you about the place, not because I want to but because I have to; the prison at Abu Ghraib is a stain on all of humankind. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when leadership lacks a moral compass and a population becomes so terrified, so submissive, that it becomes indirectly complicit in the process.
No, I’m not blaming the Iraqi people for anything that happened there. But we have seen throughout history—in Nazi Germany, for example—what happens when the iron heel of government crushes its population. For the record—and this is as good a place to mention it as any—I would warn even my fellow Americans to be vigilant against that. That is one of the reasons I went to Washington: to make sure that the voices of the people are heard and to fight for those voices with the same absolute conviction that I fought in Iraq. When federal institutions—whether a president or an Internal Revenue Service or a Department of Justice, as we have recently seen—begin to act unilaterally, by fiat, treating our precious Constitution as if its words were merely suggestions, it’s time to vote out the leaders of those institutions.
The Iraqi people did not have that option or that opportunity. Abu Ghraib was the infamous result.
I believe in my soul that there is no such thing as an evil tool. Forgive another digression, but it’s appropriate here. As Second Amendment defenders correctly point out, guns don’t kill people; people kill people. I recently saw a cartoon that showed four people, each committing their own separate murders. One used a club, one a rope, another a knife, and the last one used a gun. In the first three, an onlooker gasped, “What’s the matter with you?” In the fourth, the onlooker cried instead, “We’ve got to do something about guns!”
That’s the truth. My state is chockablock with good, responsible gun owners. I spent twenty-two years holding a firearm of some kind more than I did my canteen. So did the men who served with me. We never shot anyone who didn’t merit his fate, who didn’t want to do harm to another.
I mention this because of a simple historic fact: Abu Ghraib prison is just a building. What Saddam Hussein did with it—that’s the true horror story.
The prison was designed by a well-intentioned American architect, Edmund Whiting, and was built by British contractors in the late 1960s. Allow me to back up again and tell you how that came to be. It will provide some context for everything that follows in Iraq.
During World War II, the British maintained a heavy military presence in the region, wanting to keep the flow of oil in its own hands and out of Axis tanks and planes. After the war, the ancient Hashemite monarchy ran the show—a family that traced its bloodline directly to the prophet Muhammad. Unfortunately, those ties made them neither holy nor benevolent. A revolution in 1958 overthrew those boys, and one brigadier general, Abd al-Karim Qasim, came to power for a few years until he died in the so-called Ramadan Revolution of 1963. Colonel Abdul Salam Arif took his place, died a few years later, and was succeeded by his brother, Abdul Rahman Arif—another scoundrel. He was tossed out by the Ba’ath Party two years after that, in 1968. And then, a miracle: a pretty decent ruler, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, became the president of Iraq. Under al-Bakr there was sky’s-the-limit economic growth thanks to oil, and the standard of living of all Iraqi citizens increased dramatically.
Al-Bakr was undermined and ousted by one of his underlings, General Saddam Hussein, in July 1979. It was before, during, and after the Ramadan Revolution that new prison space was needed by whoever was in power. The Americans had a presence in the country, plus the British were still there, so we all put that prison together—or rather, our contractors did. They made a profit (as did the Iraqis they hired), we got the thanks of whoever was running the show, and all was well enough. Except for this: you will notice the insidious cancer that was starting to eat at the Iraqi people. Because they never knew who would be in power, they stopped publicly criticizing anyone. If you were a Hashemite, it wasn’t so good for you when Brigadier General Abd al-Karim Qasim came to power. If you were a supporter of Abdul Rahman Arif, troops controlled by Saddam Hussein might hunt you down and cut out your tongue.
So now you had a big prison capable of holding a staggering fifteen thousand souls (a number I mention with an asterisk; see below), a dictator named Saddam, and a broken, quiescent populace. In short, a perfect storm for god-awful misery.
Situated roughly twenty miles west of Baghdad, the Abu Ghraib prison sprawled over 280 acres with a security perimeter of more than two and a half miles. There were five different compounds, each with its own guard towers and high walls. It also had five gallows run by a staff of a dozen hangmen. In addition to whatever killings happened during daily operations, twice a week—on Wednesdays and Sundays—prisoners personally condemned by Saddam were marched up to the second floor of the gallows and hung. Sometimes he watched the executions. (It is perhaps fitting that years later, on December 30, 2006, when Saddam himself was hanged at the Iraqi-American military base Camp Justice in Kazimain, northeast of Baghdad, it was recorded on a cell phone and witnessed by countless numbers around the world.)
People have different opinions about our own penal system. You may believe that American prisons can reform people. You may believe they’re for warehousing people you don’t want on the streets. You may support “country club” type prisons for white-collar crooks. Or you may not think much about prisons at all, except for how to stay out of them. But whatever your view, most people certainly believe that when a criminal goes into a prison, unless that prisoner has been found guilty of a crime hideous enough to have been given the death penalty or life without parole, that prisoner is eventually going to walk out alive.
Under Saddam Hussein, walking out alive from the prison at Abu Ghraib was the exception rather than the rule. In 1984 alone, there were four thousand prisoner executions at that prison. Actually, I take that back: executions is the wrong word. It implies there was a process, such as a trial or something with a semblance of fairness. This absolutely wasn’t the case. In one instance alone, two thousand prisoners were killed in a single day in 1998 at the whim of Saddam’s evil son Qusay, the same punk who, with his brother Uday, had women snatched from the streets of Baghdad and taken to rape rooms. Whatever your feelings about the Iraq War—and there are good arguments on both sides of the fence—the Hussein family was a blight on the world stage.
Walk into a prison cell at Abu Ghraib and you might be surprised at its size. Cells were about thirteen by thirteen feet, which isn’t too bad until you realize that each one housed, on average, forty people. That’s why I mentioned the asterisk. Abu Ghraib was actually constructed to hold about one-tenth of the fifteen thousand it housed at its wretched peak.
In a way, the prison was a microcosm of the ills that have plagued the Middle East for millennia and continue to this day. The bulk of the captives—like 70 percent of the population in Iraq—were Shiite Muslims. Unfortunately for them, Saddam was a Sunni. Therein lies a tragic corruption of the sense of “community” I spoke of. Instead of belonging to a community of “humans” or “Iraqis,” Saddam did not consider Shiites to be either. Not really. And for those who don’t know the difference between the groups, the rift dates back to the seventh century AD. When the prophet Muhammad died, his friend and acolyte Abu Bakr as-Siddiq became caliph, the leader of Islam. Many Muslims felt this was wrong, that Muhammad’s blood relative, his cousin and son-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib, was the rightful heir. Abu’s supporters were the Sunnis; those who backed Ali were the Shiites.
That is the cause of so much suffering in that region.
Shiite or Sunni, even that sense of community was obliterated at Abu Ghraib. The crowding meant that prisoners took turns sleeping: there wasn’t enough room for everyone to stretch out at the same time. In situations like that, compassion and caring for each other can vanish. It was every man—and woman—for him-or herself.
Women? Yes. There’s a story about a women’s prison cell. One of the inmates died, and the corpse was left to sprawl on the floor. I remember reading what one of the survivors told The New York Times: that her only feeling at the time was “a dull flash of annoyance”1 aimed at the body, which was now taking up room. A month before, that same woman might have been a fellow student or a beloved teacher at a university (which, ironically, were legal for women under Saddam).
Still, most of the captives in Saddam’s prisons were men, and jailers took pleasure inflicting all sorts of tortures on their private parts. A typical punishment was to attach electrodes or heavy weights to genitals. There was a psychological component to that as well as a physical one: attack the essence of manhood and you break the man. Not that there was always information to be gained from these poor souls. More often than not, they were just ordinary folks who had said the wrong thing that was heard by the wrong set of ears at the wrong time.
Those demonically talented interrogators had techniques that covered prisoners from head to toe. If you’re skittish, you might want to skip ahead a few paragraphs. For me, it’s important that some of the details be told and retold. Remember the quote I mentioned earlier from Edmund Burke about not ignoring the lessons of history: the world must never forget what went on at this place. In fact, maybe if members of our government had been more vividly aware of what human beings could do to their fellow human beings, they wouldn’t have been so quick to pull our troops out of the region, leaving those poor, poor people in the vile hands of ISIS. Those jihadist monsters are Saddam Hussein writ large.
The prison keepers were sadists. The human head offers numerous torture opportunities. Captors plied out teeth, gouged out eyes, or broke noses and jaws. When jailers wanted to abuse a prisoner’s whole head, they would often squeeze it between the plates of a vise or cover it with a metal cover, which they then would bang repeatedly. Members of the regime were especially fond of cutting off ears; rumor has it that one wall in a prison cell was covered with severed earlobes.
Move down the body a bit. Prisoners were often suspended by their arms and beaten or subjected to electrical shocks—after being doused with water, of course. A prisoner might be hung from a large metal ceiling fan and hit hard with baseball bats as he spun, allowing multiple captors an opportunity to participate at the same time.
Down a little farther. Some captives were forced to sit on the broken neck of a bottle. They weren’t allowed to move until the bottle had filled with blood. Most of the prisoners who were forced to do this didn’t survive.
Down to the legs. Saddam’s jailers used drills on knees and ankles, hammers on toes, flames on the soles of feet.
Former prisoners have told us that there were times when Saddam wanted to make sure no part of the body survived. Perhaps it was an opposition figure whose remains could make him a martyr; perhaps it was someone the dictator simply did not want to “enjoy” the dignity of burial. Such a person might be torn apart by a machine like a wood chipper. Depending on the mood of a jailer, a prisoner could be fed in headfirst, allowing for a relatively quick death. Some were not. Some were put through feetfirst.
Yet even that form of murder was relatively quick. Jailers had a full-body torture that might or might not be fatal, depending on their whim. It involved encasing a prisoner in a suit, like armor, but made of metal bars or slats. The prisoner was then placed in the sun for hours. He would be given just enough water to avoid dying of dehydration, but the hot metal would sear his skin wherever it touched him. Such a person was constantly writhing, constantly crying out, never sleeping. For even when the sun went down, the pain was intense.
At times, prison in Saddam’s Iraq was a family affair. If jailers wanted someone to sign a confession or to incriminate his neighbors, his wife and children might be brought in. Guards might rape the prisoner’s wife right in front of him (which often meant the wife was doomed even if the family were released, because some cultures within Iraq require that women who are victims of rape be killed for losing their honor).
Children were burned with cigarettes in front of their parents. If that didn’t produce the desired result, the captors might start cutting off ears. Or fingers. Or limbs. And jailers were not above killing children if their parents didn’t do what was asked of them.
Sometimes it didn’t matter if they did. The children were killed anyway. Not that it was a mercy to let them survive. Abu Ghraib didn’t make any special provisions for such kids. Children had to scramble for the same foul water and spoiled food shared by the other captives.
In Saddam’s prisons, wild dogs were kept around for sport. Sometimes the dogs were trained to attack prisoners—although when a dog was hungry enough and a live inmate was thrown in front of it, it didn’t need much training. As one of my SEAL members said, if we wanted to put a scare into someone we grabbed, all we would have had to do is train a mutt to come bounding up to him and sniff at his crotch when we first led him into a room for questioning.
The suffering for families did not stop with the horrible death of a loved one. Where there was a body, the captors demanded a payment from the family for the remains and a death certificate—which would without exception state that the prisoner died in an accident. Sometimes there was a perverse variation on this extortion: a family was required to pay for the bullets that had been used to kill the prisoner, only to discover that the cause of death was hanging.
Before going further, I want to discuss the well-known reports that coalition forces abused captives in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In March 2003, soldiers of the US Army and personnel with the Central Intelligence Agency committed a pattern of human rights violations against detainees. The allegations included torture, sexual abuse, and murder.
To most Americans, the pictures of prisoners being abused by our soldiers conjured up outrage and disgust. However, many Iraqis I spoke with had a very different response, given what Saddam had done to them. That doesn’t make it right, but it helps explain the fear that most Iraqis had for the prison and the wrath of their former dictator.
There is a difference between torture and interrogation, but it is easy to blur the line. When information was needed now—and often it was—“enhanced interrogation techniques” were employed. I’m not going to finely slice the question of whether that was a euphemism for torture or exactly what it says: interrogation. Is it torture to swap food and water for information or to use what we called a “no touch” technique like sleep deprivation? Is waterboarding—laying a prisoner on his back, covering his nose and mouth with a cloth, and pouring water over his face to simulate drowning—torture? At one point, when the navy was doing its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), water-boarding was part of the curriculum. It is not fun, but it is far better than being made into Swiss cheese by a half-inch drill. That is what the terrorists do.
I was a soldier, not a psychologist. I served with the SEALs, not Amnesty International. At times we needed actionable intelligence to save Iraqi and coalition lives. A policy of thinking you can deal with terrorists in the same manner as you do with those committing a crime in the United States is a policy built on fantasy. There is evil in this world, and no amount of negotiation and logic will change the mind of a radical Islamic terrorist. They detest freedom and the ideas of liberty and view critical thinking as a threat. With this in mind, there is a values judgment in interrogation. When you know that an individual has critical information that will save lives, do you authorize enhanced interrogation methods? If enhanced interrogation on a member of Al-Qaeda could have prevented the tragedy of 9/11, I am sure that most Americans would say yes. Especially those who lost loved ones.
There was no doubt that the United States used a wide range of accepted practices at Abu Ghraib that were effective. Poor leadership and the lack of supervision allowed effective practices to become disgraceful. Yet, even before the Washington liberals created a media scandal over allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib, greater controls were in place elsewhere. Anyone within Special Forces who undertook the task of enhanced interrogations—which, I admit, we all knew were extreme, albeit legal, tactics—had to submit a list of what they wanted to do, as well as the reason and justification for these types of interrogations.
Each list was reviewed by a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer, one well versed in the acceptable application of US military law. The list was then signed off—but only if it passed the standard of potentially having useful tactical value. For example, if we wanted to make a prisoner squat or use white noise in an effort to extract information, we would do so only after these proposed actions had been reviewed, discussed, and approved. Our actions were documented, and someone on our side would always be held accountable—whether the end results were good or bad. A lot of people may not have approved of these methods, but they were not without checks and balances.
And here’s the thing: we almost always got something useful when interrogators employed enhanced controlled tactics. Plus, I can honestly say that I have never seen or authorized any interrogation technique that I had not personally experienced or seen administered in my SEAL training and/or command upon my own men.
In the same way that urban gangs can take basically good kids and turn them into killers, the culture that permitted these techniques for so long in Abu Ghraib also brought out the worst in some of the practitioners, including those soldiers in March 2003.
After investigations by our own government and various international organizations—which, honestly, are no fans of the United States—the Department of Defense pulled seventeen soldiers and officers from active duty and charged eleven soldiers with dereliction of duty and aggravated assault and battery. From May 2004 to March 2006, these soldiers were found guilty in courts-martial, sent to military prison, and discharged other-than-honorably.
Yeah, we screwed up at Abu Ghraib. The stink of abuse was in those very walls, in the stories we heard, in the old blood that had soaked the concrete of every damn cell and corridor there. Add to that a few bad people and bad oversight of the personnel guarding some forty-five hundred prisoners, and you have a clear path to disaster.
But as we did in My Lai during the Vietnam War, we arrested and tried our own. We took a moral position against what were clearly immoral acts. Are there abuses, still, in Afghanistan and places like Guantanamo Bay? Most likely. But here’s the key question that our detractors keep pressing: Are these abuses part of the overall military culture?
The answer is a firm no. Members of the United States military still have a moral compass. However we are brutalized by the enemy, however many of our brothers and sisters fall—sometimes not in battle but with a knife across the throat—we do not systemically do the same. We are the good guys.
The idea to let loose a hound or two was not practical, and it did not fit with my way of doing things. The question was how to get the information in a way that was effective but caused no physical distress or—and this is essential—left as little psychological scarring as possible. You want an enemy to respect you, even fear you, but you do not want them hating you if at all possible. When the struggle is over you want them to lay down their arms, not seek revenge and bond with others who have the same bloodlust. I’m not saying it’s always possible: this is war, after all, not softball in the park. But that’s the goal.
Even though we were not a part of the US military security force assigned to manage Abu Ghraib, the legacy of the infamous prison itself provided us with valuable leverage. In one case, just the idea of being sent to Abu Ghraib gave us the advantage we needed over a former Sunni Iraqi general.
Let’s call this man simply “the General.” Though the General wasn’t on the “most wanted Iraqis” playing cards the military issued in 2003, concurrent with the invasion of Iraq, he was informed enough and dangerous enough for us to: (a) want him off the field, and (b) get what was inside his head.
A few words about the above-mentioned cards. These card decks—officially called “personality identifying playing cards”—have been used by the US military since the Civil War. They are traditional playing cards that typically feature likenesses of persons of interest, along with tactical information about them—at least, as much information as can fit on the back side of a playing card. Military personnel play a lot of cards in the field, and the hope is that they’ll get familiar with the names, images, and information of the opposition’s key players in case they encounter them.
As I said, the General was not on those cards, mostly because he wasn’t in Saddam Hussein’s innermost circle. The General was on the next level down. And the reality was, that level was where the real work was done. Above him, officials were too busy retaining their jobs and their lives by fawning over Saddam and telling him only what he wanted to hear—as was the case with Adolf Hitler and Julius Caesar and their inner circles.
Sic semper tyrannis indeed: “Thus always to tyrants,” the infamous words shouted by John Wilkes Booth after shooting President Abraham Lincoln. Only in this case, the despots were truly that.
The General was a former intelligence officer whose fortunes had risen and fallen as much because of Saddam’s whims as his own actions. The General had even spent time in Saddam’s prisons before being released and subsequently returned to Saddam’s confidence. But he was a soldier first and a loyalist second.
Another bit of background here before we discuss the General. This is not just my opinion but the opinion of many of our policy makers then and especially now, with hindsight. We should have left the Iraqi military intact, with the exception of those officers in Saddam’s closest circle. Instead, we scattered it and lost effective control over those who were bound more to duty than the Ba’athist regime under Saddam. If we’d let the General retain his position, he might not have become such an adversary. He had standing in the military community and could have been a useful tool for us. But once we destroyed the Republican Guard and the rest of the army as part of the de-Ba’athification of Iraq, we sent half a million people to the unemployment lines—many of whom were highly trained in the use of weapons and explosives—and into the hands of anyone who could provide money. Because apart from loyalty, cash was the grease that motivated the Iraqi soldier. And that left us with forces we didn’t control, who weren’t sympathetic to begin with, who disliked us as they starved, and who learned to hate us as we were described as “invaders.”
We talk an awful lot today about “radicalization,” and that’s where and how it begins. People finding other people who cannot find work, who are lured into a belief set by a sympathetic arm around the shoulder … and cash. You may be a moderate Muslim who has the Quran recited to you, and, in the context of the people you already hate, you start to hear words that describe your needs, new goals. You find yourself buying into that reinterpretation and corruption of the text to fit your needs. You get fired up by the enthusiasm of others, by the easy-access desire for revenge.
In a very short time, you have been seduced and brainwashed. And not just seduced figuratively: with cash-in-hand, a number of the 9/11 terrorists bought time with hookers before their unholy mission. I guess some of those true believers couldn’t wait to get to those virgins they were told would be waiting for them in Paradise.
The General was not one of these zealots. But he was someone who, by our policies, we managed to turn from a mere opponent into an active enemy. He hated us for taking away his prestige and cursed us for removing his ability to provide for his family.
Without Saddam and without fully drinking the radicalism Kool-Aid, people like the General fell back on their traditional loyalty structures—family, community or tribe, faith, and country. In some ways, these priorities made the General in particular more dangerous: he lent his knowledge and expertise to many factions, including Sunni-led Al-Qaeda. Our surveillance revealed that an Al-Qaeda leader we had killed had been part of his circle. But more than that, the General had made himself a connector for a lot of unaffiliated cells. Each of these cells could and did operate independently—some as bandits, preying on the citizenry, others as militia-killing coalition forces. Our target had devised command and operational structures for groups large and small so that each of these bands could operate with their available manpower and weaponry. And, of course, as they grew in strength, they came back to him for more advice. It had grown into a lucrative business for the General.
You had to hand it to him: that was probably how he managed to get himself back into Saddam’s good graces after his own fall, by making himself so essential to the larger operational structure that he couldn’t be eliminated on Saddam’s whim.
Therein lies the problem for the US military, the question any commander such as myself has to address in a situation like this—indeed, the problem we faced and continue to face across the breadth of Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Syria: How do you deal with enemy combatants who are inured to the horrors of war? In the case of the General, someone who has been wounded himself and gone back to the fight after he recovered. Someone who believes in systemic violence and terror as a means of crowd control and obtaining information, who uses extreme torture as an opening salvo—and we’re not talking waterboarding here but cattle prods to the genitals and flaying skin from arms and disemboweling family pets and announcing that the children are next. Someone who may or may not believe that enduring pain and death in the name of his religion may earn him a choice spot in Paradise.
In short, how do you rattle a man who has already endured and expects, inevitably, the fate you are planning? The answer is: you change the plan. If a man is prepared for physical suffering, you give him a very different kind of pain.
We decided that with the General, when we caught him, we would do the unexpected. We would let the reputation of the infamous Abu Ghraib prison speak for us. We would let the psychology of the place he helped create do the heavy lifting.
I should pause here and note that everybody in Iraq knew the stories about Abu Ghraib. Everybody knew someone who had been tortured when it was Saddam’s overcrowded-by-a-factor-of-ten, go-to prison. Everyone had seen returned prisoners whose shoulders had been dislocated as a result of being hung up by their arms, or who would never walk well again because their feet had been placed in wooden vises, or whose tongues had been partly hacked away. Go to any village or city in Iraq today, and you will encounter one of those poor souls every hour of every day.
There was another reason why people knew about Abu Ghraib. In large cities across the nation, young Iraqi men would play videos of torture and killing in Saddam’s prisons on televisions set up right next to market stalls. You could pick up your vegetables, your eggs, your rice … and also buy a laser disc of your neighbors being shot, beheaded, or blown up alive. The discs cost a thousand Iraqi dinars or around forty or fifty cents. There was always a market for new discs.
We knew all this. So what we decided to do was to use the infamy of the place to get what we wanted.
There was something else working against us beyond the presumed thick skin of our subject: time. The General had information we needed about militia movements and tactics, and we needed it fast. Through multiple intelligence sources, we had determined the General knew about, or was coordinating, a major series of IED attacks against one of our high-level individuals and that the attack was imminent. We just did not know the specifics of where and when. We’d originally planned on keeping the General under surveillance for a long time, but once we got wind of that impending attack, we knew we had to move quickly. As we say, the hourglass had been tipped.
Unfortunately, all we knew was that something involving explosives was imminent. Whom would it be against and when? Would it be an inside job or a brute-force external attack? Would it target the individual’s convoy? We knew nothing else … except that the General could give us the details. Not moving against him would likely result in the loss of American lives. This was a classic case of the necessity for an extreme operation. Get it done successfully and fast.
Our initial plan to grab the General involved a nighttime compound raid. He had a residence in a smaller town of Al-Sejar, east of Baghdad, in a small, gated compound. This meant we had to plan a double-breach operation—drive up to the gates in Humvees, get out of the Humvees and set explosive charges, blow the gates open and drive through them and up to his doorstep, get out of the Humvees and set explosive charges, blow his door open, and take him in. Double-breach operations involve two sets of explosions with lapses, which of course would mean he’d have time to either arm himself or flee.
During the initial strategy briefing, one of the staff officers in attendance was a tank commander. He suggested we use one of his M1A1s and forget about the explosive charges. As he put it, gates and doors can’t stand up to sixty-eight tons of armored vehicle traveling at forty-five miles per hour, which is about as fast as we’d be going in our Humvees. The tank would roll through the gate and smash the door, and our guys could swarm around it and into the General’s home in one smooth action.
Naturally, we embraced this idea immediately. But even then we still had details to iron out. We started talking about fields of fire as our guys would move around the tank and into the General’s home, with an eye toward avoiding a blue-on-blue scenario. It was the same conversation we would have had if we were still using Humvees.
Well, this tank commander started laughing, and I asked him what was so funny.
“We’re going to be buttoned up,” he said. “There is nothing you have that’s going to hurt us.” He was right, of course, and that was pretty much the end of that part of the conversation.
There was one significant problem with our plan: the General didn’t keep to a regular schedule and our surveillance teams had not seen him at his residence for weeks. We couldn’t predict when he’d be home, when he’d be out walking, or whom he’d be with. About all we could say with certainty was that he usually had two bodyguards with him.
As fortune would have it, we did not have to wait for him to arrive home and conduct a compound raid. The surveillance team spotted him at a nearby coffee shop. They made a couple of passes and parked the car. Then they waited for him to walk out. He was alone. The team simply drove up, got out of the car, and put a gun to his head. The whole snatch took less than thirty seconds, and not a shot was fired. He was back at the detention center within an hour. We knew we were running out of time and he was not going to tell us anything. It was time to execute an alternative plan quickly. I knew we’d gotten lucky, and that that was the easy part.
We had the General’s rap sheet, so we knew he had been in Saddam’s prisons and had been tortured by Saddam’s henchmen. We were pretty confident that we did not have anything in our limited arsenal that would break him, and every indication was that we did not have much time left to stop whatever violent acts were planned.
This is where the General showed his steel. He knew there was no enhanced integration method under our rules of engagement that was going to work on him.
To put it bluntly, we were out of ammunition.
But we had a pretty good idea that Abu Ghraib prison might work and not necessarily because of what it meant for him. We were still keeping his residence under surveillance and informed him that we were watching his family for their protection. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. The truth of the matter was we needed his family as leverage. So after realizing the usual tactics weren’t going to break the General, we loaded them into vans to meet the General at Abu Ghraib.
Grabbing the General’s family was easy: after we had snatched the General, the family was eager to be reunited with him and grateful for the ride. We basically just rolled up to the front door, knocked on it, and loaded all of them into the vans.
When the family arrived at the prison, the General was walked by the vans so he could see his family, every single one of them. He could not communicate with his family; he could only look at them through the windows. But he could see their eyes, and that told the story. He saw where they were going, and he knew he had to make a choice.
We off-loaded his family, and the last thing the General saw was us walking them right through the very gates of the hell that he knew so well. Of course, that’s only what the General assumed we did. There was no reason to take them inside. We brought them to the gates, only to turn them back around and put them back in the vans and drive them home, no worse for the wear.
They had only been outside Abu Ghraib for maybe two or three minutes, but that was enough. The General didn’t speak much English, but he managed to hiss out “you son of a bitch” clearly enough, although he added some words in another language after it. But he talked and later talked some more. His play now was to be useful and try to cut a deal. He gave us target locations that saved American lives. It came as no surprise that General Sanchez was being targeted. He was on everyone’s hit list. He gave us what we needed. I thought to myself about the sorrow and pain that Abu Ghraib had inflicted on so many innocent people. Ironic that the same place was also responsible for saving some too.
We changed General Sanchez’s travel patterns and either rooted out or disrupted the insurgent cells that had been exposed. We were also able to find and destroy thousands of pounds of high explosives and detonators. You’ll never get me to say I liked the General. He was a good soldier, I guess, provided he kept his sights focused on military targets, but that’s a pretty dubious consideration, given terror cells’ lack of concern for civilian casualties and casual disregard for the rules regarding non-uniformed combatants.
But I’ll give him this: when the chips were stacked against him and he had to weigh family against fanaticism, family won.
That sentiment didn’t stop us from turning him over to the Iraqi authorities. (The same ones who ultimately betrayed us and threw us out of the country when Barack Obama failed—no, barely tried—to get a SOFA, a Status of Forces Agreement. But that’s another discussion.) In truth, though, I have a hope in my heart that he was able to see his family again. I saw how precious they were to him. I can at least empathize with that.