I spent a lot of my time during the War on Terror inside one secret prison or another. Gitmo resembles nothing so much as a very well-run animal shelter, the cells like kennels off spotless white corridors, the prisoners looking out the wired-glass windows in their doors with the same mute hope of strays waiting to be adopted, or the snarls of animals daring you to put them down. Abu Ghraib was like a haunted house, with the ghosts from Saddam’s atrocities watching hungrily over our own crimes there.
Those places got all the airtime on CNN, but Bagram was the only place that actually gave me nightmares.
The airfield was built by the Soviets during their own attempt to smack Afghanistan into behaving. When we came stomping into the country, we began using the base and rebuilding it to suit our needs.
And we needed cells more than airplane hangars.
At first, we just made cages out of wire and rounded up the prisoners into them. Then the military realized our temporary solution had been going on for seven years. We needed something more permanent, and started building cells in another building nearby. When it was done, it was renamed—more like rebranded—Parwan Detention Center. But everyone still called it Bagram. There were no bars on the steel doors that lined the long hallways; just a single slit window that gave a view inside the cinderblock rooms.
There were around 1,700 prisoners there on my last visit. Most of the men were held in bunk room accommodations.
Then there was the Black Jail: the place where we put the prisoners who no longer existed.
This was where they stashed the high-value detainees, the ones who were believed to hold the really big secrets. The ones who received what we liked to call “enhanced interrogation,” since the United States does not torture.
It was not far enough away from the other cells to completely muffle the screams. This was not an accident.
That was where they held Fahran.
BY THE TIME I got to the air base, I was sleepless and edgy and only half drunk, despite my best efforts with a bottle of Wild Turkey. I hated Bagram, and it seemed to hate me right back. The place throbbed like an infected tooth with barely contained pain and rage.
So I admit, I was not at the top of my game when I arrived. Still, it didn’t take a psychic to see that the prison staff didn’t want me and Cantrell around. As soon as our plane landed, we were treated like prisoners ourselves. They took our bags and marched us, under armed guard, to see the Black Jail’s commander.
We were taken into a trailer near the Black Jail, where a man sat with a little window-unit air conditioner laboring mightily behind him. He said to call him Townsend. He was probably Defense Clandestine Service, but it was hard, in those days, to find anyone willing to give his real name. The jail was nominally run by the Pentagon, but Department of Homeland Security, CIA, ICE, Secret Service, FBI, ONI, MI6, Mossad, ISR, OSI, and a half dozen other agencies wandered through the cells at any given time. Plenty of people willing to give orders, but very few who wanted their names attached if it turned into another Abu Ghraib. It could be terminal for a bright young officer’s career. The bureaucracy was like protective layers of Kevlar, deflecting any attempt at accountability.
Townsend was pissed. He covered it well—you didn’t get that far in the Pentagon without learning to hide your feelings—but it steamed off him like vapor. <fucking sideshow carnival con man> <best piece of intel we’ve had since I’ve been here> <finally get that son of a bitch> <derail my investigation> <my career> <with this bullshit> <finally get out of this hellhole> <back to Virginia> <have dinner with my wife more than once a year at Christmas> <find bin Laden> <find bin Laden> <find bin Laden>
“We appreciate you coming to facilitate the interrogation,” Townsend said. “But we don’t really wish to compromise our efforts at this point with any outside personnel. We are questioning the prisoner and gaining valuable intelligence.”
What he was saying, in translation: get the hell out of here. This was his ticket to fortune and glory, and more important, a way out of the country. He didn’t want to share.
I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be in Afghanistan either, and I’d spent a lot less time in the country than he had.
Cantrell tried to play mediator. He put an extra layer of shitkicker in his voice, scratched his head, and said, “Well now, if what you were doing was working, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”
Townsend’s eyes narrowed. “We’ll break him. Eventually,” he said.
That should have been the end of it. I should have walked away right there.
But I couldn’t. Probably it was just stubbornness. I hated it when anyone thought that I was lying or faking. Guys like Townsend were so full of contempt for me that I loved it every time I got to prove them wrong.
Cantrell gave me a look. I didn’t have to read him to know he wanted us to have a piece of this. He wanted to keep getting calls like the one that brought us here. He needed a market for our services so he could keep drawing on his no-bid Pentagon contract. If Townsend was an obstacle to that, my orders were to get him out of the way.
I scanned Townsend, looking for something I could use. Nothing classified, but something convincing.
I found it almost instantly.
“Hey,” I said, as if out of nowhere. “Refresh my memory. What’s the punishment for violating Article 134?”
Townsend wasn’t made of stone. His mouth twitched and his eyes went wide for a second. He closed it down fast, but his head was spinning with panic.
<how did he know?> <one time it was one time> <nobody else saw> <no witnesses> <bluffing>
“Come on, man,” I said, smiling. “It was more than one time.”
Article 134 is the U.S. Military Uniform Code of Justice section forbidding fraternization between enlisted personnel and a higher-ranking officer. It’s the rule that says officers can’t screw their subordinates. Or, as anyone who’s spent longer than five minutes in uniform knows, the most violated rule in the military. Especially when there are officers like Townsend who don’t get home for almost a year at a time.
The female soldier’s image popped into Townsend’s head, hair damp with sweat, uniform wadded in a ball on the floor. Her name and rank went along with it.
“Maybe we should ask Corporal Karen McCowan. She probably knows.”
Townsend hissed something foul at me under his breath. “You think that’s clever? You think I’m scared of your act? I’ve played poker with guys at Binion’s who read minds better than you. Everybody’s got something to hide,” he said. “Like you and those pills you keep in your dopp kit.”
It bothered me that he had people rummaging through my bag, but I could hardly complain about an invasion of privacy.
I tried to shrug it off. “Medicine,” I told him. “Taken under the care and advice of a physician.”
“You’re a goddamn junkie,” he shot back.
“Now that’s a little harsh.”
It went on for a while like that, but we finally began talking honestly. Cantrell negotiated another questioning session, this time with me present. Townsend’s people would have a chance to prove that Fahran knew bin Laden’s location, and I would have a chance to confirm it. We’d all go away with a chunk of the credit.
Townsend agreed. The word <blackmail> kept echoing through his brain, but he agreed.
WE SET UP inside what they called the special interrogation room. It was me and Cantrell, a couple of MPs to manage the prisoner, the camp doctor to monitor his health, and Townsend’s lead interrogator, a corn-fed engine block of a guy named Hatcher.
Nobody was happy to be in there. The MPs were nervous, for obvious reasons. The officers didn’t serve any time after Abu Ghraib, but the MPs did.
The camp doctor was young, barely out of med school, where he was not exactly at the top of his class. It’s hard to find quality physicians when the job description includes keeping people alive while they’re being tortured. He was supposed to check the vitals of everyone who went into the Black Jail’s interrogation rooms. A brief dip in his head told me he thought signing up for government service was a good way to get out of his student loans. He regretted that decision roughly every four seconds.
Hatcher—not his real name, of course—was angry. He didn’t want me looking over his shoulder. Partially because he didn’t want to share any credit and partially because he thought I was a fraud. He wasn’t a sadist, or a particularly vicious guy, underneath his training. He didn’t like his job, or dislike it. He was simply convinced that it was necessary. As far as he was concerned, he was doing the right thing. He wanted to get bin Laden, by any means necessary.
And on a professional level, he was a little embarrassed that he had not been able to make the subject talk yet.
But he had the solution to that. An inclined bench had been brought into the room, along with a five-gallon bucket and a basin. There was a box of plastic bags sitting on the floor, the same kind you’d use to line an office trash can.
Time for the waterboarding.
SOMETHING I OUGHT to admit right now: I’d been in interrogation sessions before and watched them devolve into outright torture. It happened more than anyone would admit. I was usually tied in close to the subject’s brain stem while they were having the shit kicked out of them. It hurt. I always got a piece of their punishment.
One of the few people I could stand to hang out with when I did government work was a shrink. He oversaw interrogations, and it was in this capacity that we met, when he was one of my trainers. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we ended up spending time together off duty. He was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a good person. He once personally blinded a detainee in one eye when he felt the man was holding back. But his thoughts had a calm order to them that made him tolerable to be around, and he had a wide range of knowledge, both from theory and practice, about how the human mind worked. I learned a lot from him.
He told me it was possible to do terrible things to other people, despite listening to them beg for mercy, because of the fail-safes that evolution and civilization have built into the human mind over the past ten thousand years or so. We take a series of steps to wall ourselves off from the consequences of our actions.
The first, and most important, is dehumanization. We decide, consciously and unconsciously, that our enemy is not actually human, that they’ve chosen a path that reduces them to the level of animals or vermin or robots. It’s their own fault. They don’t feel pain the way we do. They’re not like us. And so on. Once we do that, it’s pretty easy to justify any other actions in the name of the greater good.
This is how we can continue to think of ourselves as good people even after we put a scalpel into the right eye of a young man from Lahore suspected of being part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.
I could never manage that trick. My talent wouldn’t allow it. Some of the people we dealt with were unquestionably evil, but I always had a hard time seeing them as inhuman.
Even the man who’d gleefully beheaded a captured U.S. contractor. He smiled as he brought the machete down, felt light-headed with joy when the shock of impact ran up his arm. I knew. I could feel it all, in his memory. I knew he was one of the bad guys, no question. But he still pictured his infant son in his arms as he looked for the strength to resist our questions.
He broke, in the end. Everybody breaks.
No matter what I knew about the prisoners, I couldn’t shut down my empathy, as much as I wanted to. So I blamed the prisoners for that, on top of everything else. Just one more thing I had to deal with, along with the bad food and lousy accommodations and stifling heat and freezing cold. I had to carry their pain too.
I complained about it to Cantrell once.
He listened to me carefully, then smiled. “Well, sheeeeit,” he said, turning it into a five-syllable word. “Nothing in this world’s free, son.”
I learned to live with it.
THEY BROUGHT THE prisoner—Fahran—with a black blindfold covering the top half of his head. The MPs carried him, feet off the floor, without difficulty. He looked like he weighed maybe a hundred pounds. They stripped off the blindfold so he could see what was next. He started moaning in fear. He was bruised and shaking and utterly broken. He was in pain and terrified and convinced his god had abandoned him, left him to the demons. He stank of piss and sweat and fear and there was snot crusted into the wisps of mustache he’d tried to grow to prove he was a man.
He was seventeen, according to his paperwork, but looked about twelve. It was easy to see why he’d been called a bacha.
I looked at Cantrell. He was thinking the same thing: This was the hard-ass who had resisted all the questioning so far?
They strapped him down and inclined the bench over the basin. Then Hatcher got to work.
The thing is, waterboarding doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t seem that terrible from outside. Hatcher was almost gentle as he put the plastic bag over the lower half of Fahran’s face. He poured water from a bottle over the plastic for less than ten seconds. It’s like a magic trick. One moment you’re pouring water in a guy’s face, the next he’s promising to kill his own mother if you’ll only stop. I imagine it makes normal humans feel like they can do what I do.
Despite that, and what some overpaid talk-show hacks would have you believe, waterboarding is torture.
Inside Fahran’s head, bombs were going off. He could feel the water on his face, in his nose. He couldn’t breathe. He sucked desperately for air and got only the taste of cellophane. He tried to break free, but he was strapped down securely. Every reflex in his body told him he was drowning. He devolved into an animal in mere instants, thrashing and desperate. He was sure he was dying.
Hatcher stripped away the bag and let him have a few mouthfuls of precious oxygen. He spoke enough Pashto for Fahran to understand him. But he wasn’t asking any questions. He wanted to soften Fahran up first. Let him know who was in charge.
He slammed Fahran back down and poured the water again. He did this maybe ten, twelve times, before he asked anything.
Fahran prayed. He whined. He begged. But he didn’t give anything close to a useful answer.
Inside his head, I wasn’t doing any better. It was nothing but fear and pain and prayer.
Hatcher’s rage kept growing. He started using his fists instead of the water. He leaned over and punched Fahran in the head several times.
As if on cue, the camp doctor tried to step in right then.
“He’s not doing well,” the doctor said. “You should consider stopping.”
Hatcher said, “No.”
The doctor crumpled inside. He was used to being overruled, and it took a little more out of him each time. He left the room.
Hatcher went back to screaming at Fahran. He got nothing but more babble. I began to have a bad feeling about all of this.
Cantrell gave me a look again. <Time to pull a rabbit out of your hat, kiddo> came through as clear as if he’d spoken it.
“Let me try,” I said.
Hatcher wheeled on me. For an instant, I saw the impulse to punch me instead of the prisoner. But he pulled back at the last second.
“Be my guest,” he snapped.
I focused and went into Fahran’s head.
With the break in the physical assault, I could read him in a second. He was an open book with big Day-Glo letters on the pages.
Oh, sure, he hated us. In his head, he was some kind of holy warrior, fighting against the latest oppressors who’d come to Afghanistan to defy the word of God.
And so on. If you think religious fanatics are boring when they talk, you should try hearing it inside their own personal echo chambers. It’s even more tiresome.
If he’d had access to movies or comics or anything normal, he might have seen himself as Luke Skywalker, fighting the evil empire with an old AK-47 instead of a lightsaber. He was a true believer, ready to strap on a suicide vest if anyone gave the order.
But he didn’t know a damned thing about bin Laden, outside of what he’d been told. In his mind, Osama was a near-mythical figure. He knew nothing about the man in real life.
Fahran wasn’t going to lead anyone to bin Laden. He was a follower. He barely knew where to take a piss when he was out on patrol with the other hard-liners.
They hated him. He was weak and he was slow and he was not very bright, so they called him bacha. When they were captured by our troops, they blamed him, and then one of them had made the joke about Osama coming to rescue his little boyfriend.
That started the whole thing. The others in his group saw a chance to save their own skins, so they lied about the kid.
He wasn’t resisting interrogation. He was telling the truth. He didn’t know anything. If he’d been smarter, he would have lied.
The kid was not innocent, as I said. Fahran would have happily unloaded a full clip from his rifle into me if he got the chance.
He wasn’t innocent. He was ignorant.
I jumped out then, took a glance in Hatcher’s head. He was still convinced. As far as he was concerned, they’d found Osama’s boyfriend. Getting him to let go of that idea would have been like getting a pit bull to unlock its jaws from a rib eye.
They would keep at him. They’d torture him to doomsday. He’d lie to buy time or a break in the pain, and then they’d figure out he was lying, and they’d start it again. He was going to spend the rest of his short, unhappy life locked in a cycle of pain and abuse and humiliation.
But the kid simply didn’t know what we wanted to know. Like it or not, I was the only friend the little bastard had.
So before I could talk myself out of it, I told the truth. “He’s got nothing.”
“What?” I think Cantrell and Hatcher said it at the same time.
“He doesn’t know anything,” I told them. “He’s never even seen bin Laden, outside of a photograph.”
It didn’t go over well.
“Bullshit,” Hatcher said. He got in my face. He had to lean over. He was a good eight inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than me. I knew I’d see his punch coming. I wasn’t sure that would be enough.
Instead of hitting me, he went back to the prisoner and grabbed him and shook him. “Tell me what you know!” he shouted, first in Pashto, then in English. “Tell me about bin Laden!”
“Bin Laden will make all of you pay!” Fahran wailed in Pashto.
Hatcher shoved him down on the board. The board tipped toward the basin, which was still full of water from the earlier sessions.
Hatcher kept screaming for Fahran to talk. He was dangerously close to the edge of something. I saw it in his head. There was no future there, just a big black wall like an approaching thunderstorm.
In desperation, I sent a message to the kid, direct into his brain. <Give him something.> <Give him anything.> <Christ, don’t you know anything?>
Fahran looked at me, his eyes full of terror. He didn’t know how he could hear me inside his brain. He was one generation removed from shepherds. He’d been conscripted by the Taliban and given an automatic weapon. He’d never even made a phone call in his life. This was all black magic to him. He couldn’t lie properly when his life depended on it. He could only fall back on one word, practically the only word in English that he knew.
“No,” he said.
Absolutely the wrong word, as it turned out.
Hatcher heard defiance. And he snapped. He began pounding on the kid again. Big, swinging, meat-hook punches to the head. He grunted with the effort each time he pulled his arm back.
I was still off-balance, and now I was getting a fraction of each blow, sending my head spinning. I was still too deep in the kid’s brain. I put my hand on Hatcher’s shoulder, told him to stop.
He shoved me hard into the wall. My skull bounced off the cinderblock. Black dots swarmed around the edges of my vision. The room became a tunnel. Cantrell shouted something. Hatcher ignored him as he lifted the kid bodily from the board and plunged his head into the basin.
I felt the water around the kid’s chin, the sudden rush of it up his nose and down his throat, no plastic in the way this time, the jangling alarms going off in his nervous system as he desperately struggled to get back up. Hatcher held him down.
I heard Hatcher scream both in my ears and through the kid’s, a garbled stereo: “Give us a location! Where is he! Where is he!”
Cantrell was still shouting at Hatcher. The others were trying to pull him off the kid.
Like I said before, I’d always felt the pain of the interrogation sessions. But in that instant, with the kid underwater, dying for a breath, the reality behind them finally broke through. Up until that moment, I felt it only as another burden inflicted on me, another injury heaped on top of my own. At that moment, I finally understood that there was an independent human being out there, going through everything I felt, and that I was getting only an echo of their trauma. He was experiencing far worse.
I got it. True empathy. Being in the place of another person. Just as Hatcher put the kid under for the third time.
I’ve never had good timing.
The kid choked and gasped. I felt the water enter his lungs.
He was drowning. I was drowning with him.
I pulled back as hard as I could, told myself there was no water, my lungs were clear, I was out in the air. It was no good. I couldn’t get a breath.
Something kicked me in the head. And mercifully, everything went black.
I WOKE A few minutes later, in the corridor outside the cell. Cantrell was there, looming over me. I realized I was on the floor.
For a moment, I thrashed around like I was trying to swim.
“Easy,” Cantrell said.
My mind cast out immediately, instinctively. As always, as I’d been trained, to find the nearest people and assess the situation, to present an intuitive and immediate picture of my surroundings.
Silence. Fear. And a hole where the kid’s mind used to be.
Cantrell had put me into the recovery position. I sat up and regretted it instantly. There was a lump, getting bigger, at one temple.
“Knocked you out,” Cantrell said. “Your face was turning blue. You weren’t breathing. Seemed like you were having trouble disconnecting the wires.”
“Thanks,” I managed.
Hatcher was gone. Well out of my range. Probably on his way to a plane off the base, if not already in the air.
The camp doctor was there too. Cantrell stepped back, and he went to work. Checked me with everything in his kit.
“You had an event,” he said.
“What do you mean by ‘event’?”
Seemed like a reasonable question at the time. He looked away from my one eye that could focus. The other one I kept shut because it felt like the light was too bright on that side. When I finally got in front of a mirror, I discovered my pupils were different sizes. One looked as big as a Frisbee.
The doctor hemmed for a moment. “I think you’ve had some bleeding in your brain. I don’t have access to an MRI, so I can’t really say for sure. You’re presenting like someone who was badly concussed.”
“But you don’t know for sure.”
He shrugged, misery coming off him in waves. “You need to get to a hospital. A properly equipped hospital. You need proper care. You could have an aneurysm waiting to burst. Or there could be ongoing damage. You might stroke out any minute, for all I know.”
“And he might be fine. I’ve seen him look worse with a hangover,” Cantrell said. “No offense, doc, but you know you’re kind of a Chicken Little around here. You’re always saying we’re going to kill someone sooner or later.”
The way Cantrell said it, it almost seemed polite. The doctor bit back something that sounded like a scream. <You DID kill someone!>
He didn’t say it out loud, of course. Instead, he went into the cell. A moment later, I saw the doctor escort a body bag, along with the two MPs hauling it. None of them glanced in our direction.
I looked at Cantrell. He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “We lost him. Bad day.”
Sometimes being a telepath means knowing exactly what someone else means. It’s the complete erasure of ambiguity. There were a lot of different concerns competing for attention in Cantrell right then. He was worried about how Townsend would handle the incident. He wanted to make sure this didn’t become another scandal somewhere down the line. He had a brief vision of himself hauled before a congressional committee live on CNN. But mostly he felt a burned-out regret.
Not for the loss of the kid’s life. For the missed opportunity. This could have been thousands of man-hours, all billable under the contract.
<Nothing like chasing a rabbit to fill the hours> slipped out of Cantrell’s head.
“What was that?”
He looked at me. He knew he hadn’t said anything.
“You know you’re not cleared for everything that goes on between my ears,” he said.
It was too late. I knew what Cantrell knew. What he’d known before we ever set foot on the base.
“You never thought he knew where bin Laden was.”
Cantrell shrugged. “I had my doubts.”
I took a good long look inside Cantrell’s head. I could see it clearly. The word from above was that bin Laden was safe in Pakistan, protected by the ISI. The question wasn’t finding him. It was finding the nerve to kill him, and possibly start a war with an unstable country that was supposedly our ally.
I didn’t quite know what to do with the information. From where I sat, I could see into the interrogation cell. There was discarded sterile wrapping all over the floor. A defibrillator sat on its crash cart, paddles hanging off the sides. The basin with the water was still half full.
Or half empty, I suppose. Depending on how you looked at it.
“He didn’t know a thing,” I said, mainly just so someone would say it out loud.
Cantrell made a face like his lunch was repeating on him. I felt the stone wall go up, along with weariness and contempt. He began thinking of a scene from Debbie Does Dallas to block me out. “Well,” he said, “we’ll never know now, I guess.”
“I’ll know,” I said.
He considered several replies and discarded them all. “You need some leave,” he said. “Get your head on straight. See a real doctor. Spend a little time in bed with that pretty girl of yours.”
He signaled to another one of the soldiers nearby, who helped me to my feet. I couldn’t walk on my own.
Eight hours later, I was checked out by a confused doctor at the army medical center in Darmstadt, Germany. He said the MRI showed head trauma: tiny blossoms of blood flowering in my skull. They were healing rapidly, on their own, without clotting, so he thought surgery presented more risks than benefits. “Nothing too bad, really,” he said. He mostly got patients who were missing actual sections of their skulls, so I could see his point. He gave me a full bottle of OxyContin for the headache, and then signed me out.
Sixteen hours after that, I was back in Washington, D.C., and back in the world. As if nothing had changed at all.