Fixing Hell (12 page)

“Son, I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said. “Thank you for serving your country at this very difficult time in your life.”

He thanked me for the concern but tried to brush it off, probably feeling uncomfortable showing such emotion in a roomful of soldiers and sailors. I introduced myself and he told me his name was Danny. We chatted and I learned that this sergeant had come home from Abu Ghraib to bury his father, who had suddenly died of a heart attack in the middle of the night, and now he was headed back to the combat zone. He and I got up and walked over to the counter, poured ourselves large cups of some awful coffee, and talked some more.

“Danny, what was your favorite memory of your dad?” I asked.

“Sir, that’s an easy one. My best memories of my dad were fishing or when he taught me how to throw a football for the first time.” He smiled and the tears disappeared. He began telling me about the peacefulness of fishing and that he had actually gone fishing while in Iraq.

Eventually, Sergeant Danny asked me, “Colonel, where ya heading down range?”

“Well son, I’m going to Abu Ghraib and see if I can help fix that shit mess out there.”

His face brightened. “Hell, Colonel, we can use all the help we can get, sir. The higher-ups at that place . . . Heck, I never see ’em. I don’t even know if we have any colonels at Abu Ghraib.”

I was shocked at the coincidence. Out of all the soldiers I might have talked to, I happened on one heading back to Abu Ghraib. Then Sergeant Danny started telling me about how rough the area was, how he had lost some of his buddies because they got hit by mortars, roadside IEDs, or were shot by snipers.

“Sir, when you get there, make sure you stay in one of those prison cells rather than a tent or a trailer,” he said.

“Why the hell would I want to stay in a prison cell instead of a tent or trailer, Danny?” I asked. “Even a shitty trailer’s got to be better than a prison cell.”

“Hell no, Colonel,” Sergeant Danny said. “Those prison cells have a cement roof and the mortars and rockets hit the roof and bounce off. Now sir, you’ll have one hell of a headache from the blast impact but you won’t get your head blown off. Sir, if you stay in a trailer and that son of a bitch gets hit by a mortar, your ass is dead. A mortar will peel back a trailer like a tuna can.”

“Message received,” I said. “Stay out of the damn trailers.”

Sergeant Danny appeared to be in better spirits after our two-hour conversation. We shook hands and he headed for his plane that would take him to the military air terminal at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, then to Baghdad via Kuwait. Not long after, I was on my commercial flight to the same place.

While in the air, I watched the fifty-minute Quiet Rage DVD about twenty times. In Zimbardo’s video, he provides a synopsis of his famous Stanford Prison Experiment. I marveled anew at how these bright, well-educated students transformed so drastically that the experiment ceased to be a simulation and instead assumed real dimensions. The video showed the guards subjecting the prisoners to countless forms of abuse, including sleep deprivation, humiliation, and solitary confinement. They sadistically paraded the prisoners around with bags on their heads, some of the guards even seeming to enjoy performing for the camera. The images were eerily similar to the snapshots taken at Abu Ghraib, the deplorable pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and abused while U.S. soldiers smiled and smirked for the camera.

I asked a flight attendant for a napkin and found a pen. “How did Zimbardo fuck it up?” I wrote in big black letters. This was my basic question, the starting point. Answer this riddle and you can fix the mess in Iraq, I thought to myself. I knew Zimbardo’s experiment held the keys. I felt that if I could list the primary things that went wrong in his famous study, that would guide me in correcting the abuses occurring in Iraq.

Drawing on what I had seen in the video and my conversation with Zimbardo, I worked at answering that question, which would in turn help me outline a plan to fix the problems at Abu Ghraib. Scrawled on that napkin, I identified four major errors that led to the harm Zimbardo unleashed in his study:

1. There was no detached observer.
Zimbardo himself was the principal investigator and simultaneously played the superintendent role. He got caught up in the madness. As a result there was an inherent conflict of interest. I had to avoid the same mistake. If I was to be successful, my role at Abu Ghraib had to be clear at all times. I had to stay out of the interrogator role and be the detached, objective consultant and observer. If I were to get court-martialed for doing something stupid while at Abu Ghraib, it would be because I had assumed the role of an interrogator and lost my objectivity, as Zimbardo had done in his role as superintendent. I must be conscious of remaining firmly in the role of consultant.

2. In the Zimbardo study, he did not clearly define what behaviors were prohibited and what behaviors were allowed.
Thus, the “guards” in his study made it up as they went along. The only rule that was firmly stated was that you couldn’t harm the prisoners. But harm was never clearly defined. I would need to review processes at Abu Ghraib, and if rules were not crystal clear, I’d need to set forth new, detailed guidelines.

3. There was no medical monitor to assess the psychological consequences of the sleep and food deprivation that occurred in the prison study.
I would find out what monitoring was occurring in the Iraq prison on my arrival. I suspected not much.

4. Zimbardo’s study lacked tiers of supervision.
The guards were the final law. It seemed as though they supervised themselves because Zimbardo—the “observer”—was also role-playing as the superintendent. This told me that superiors needed to be present at Abu Ghraib, and their roles needed to be clearly delineated.

Keeping these four lessons in mind, I devised five major goals and a plan for turning this misguided train around at Abu Ghraib:

Goal #1. Do no harm.
This is the first rule every doctor learns. I wanted to leave Iraq knowing that no prisoners were physically or psychologically hurt while I was there, and that the structures I put in place would ensure that none would be hurt after I left. I also felt that it was my duty to improve the physical and psychological safety of the Army prison guards and interrogators. It was clear that the guards who observed the torture but did not participate in it were themselves tortured psychologically and harmed by what they had witnessed. They would need mental health care.

Goal #2: Nobody dies or gets injured on my watch.
Keep everything safe at all times and put procedures in place to prevent torture.

Goal #3: Nobody goes to jail on my watch.
Be certain that everything remains legal at all times. Stay within the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Goal #4: Be ethical.
As a psychologist, never do anything that violates the ethical code of the American Psychological Association.

Goal #5: Improve the effectiveness of the operation
by teaching these young men and women how to interview—rather than interrogate and torture—prisoners.

For the first ten hours of the long flight, I focused on these goals, watching the video again and again to look for clues about how to achieve them. After I had firmly established the goals in my mind, I began to ask myself,
How are you going to accomplish these goals?
I then turned my efforts to crafting my eleven-step action plan. My napkin was getting filled up:

1. Have one boss and only one boss for myself: the commanding general.
I needed to be a separate observer/ consultant and not have to report to the commander at Abu Ghraib nor to the intel unit commander. Why was this so important? If I reported to the intel unit commander, I knew that I would lack effectiveness. Reporting to one or two other officers prior to discussing anything with the general would significantly dilute my concerns. Instead, I needed to be a special staff officer who was part of the general’s staff, and who reported only to him. I would request that Major General Miller have me report to him and only him.

2. Be an active, positive influential force at all times.
I learned from my tour at Gitmo that I needed to be visible, involved, active, solution-focused, and not blame any of the young soldiers for the previous failures. Bad leadership was to blame, first and foremost, not the poor efforts of the young Americans that I had the privilege of serving with.

3. Actively engage leadership in the work.
My briefings on Abu Ghraib suggested that one problem that led to abuses was that junior enlisted men and women operated under the cloak of darkness, without supervision by senior officers or senior noncommissioned officers. I resolved, as the new leader, to become actively involved in all aspects of the mission.

4. Provide 100 percent supervision at all times to the soldiers overseeing the prisoner interviews.
I would advise the intel leadership that if a psychologist was not present, we could not do interrogations—plain and simple. By having a psychologist present, the prisoner would be provided a level of protection. In the beginning it might be hard to accommodate this step due to massive understaffing of psychologists, but I intended for it, in time, to become standard practice.

5. Add cameras in all interview booths
so that all interviews could be monitored simultaneously from one office.

6. Add multiple layers of supervision.
Have a supervisor observing at all times either from behind a one-way observation mirror or on a video monitor.

7. Institute a medical monitoring process to identify abuses.
If all detainees were given a brief physical prior to being interviewed, and then another one directly afterwards, it would be easy to identify if any overt physical abuse had occurred during the interview.

8.
Perhaps most important of all the steps:
Bring on board a military lawyer with expertise in the Geneva Conventions.
Interrogations and plans must be reviewed to determine if the procedures and techniques were harmful, illegal, or violated the Geneva Conventions in any way.

9. Institute specific training for all interrogators.
Similar to what I had found at Gitmo, my briefings indicated that most of the interrogators in Abu Ghraib were nineteen to twenty-five years old and had attended a three-month training school. The skill levels varied greatly, and as a result I would want to start holding training seminars to improve interviewing techniques.

10. Put clear policies on acceptable and unacceptable behaviors into place in writing.
What constituted “abuse” needed to be defined precisely—and not tolerated.

11. Add roaming military police patrols.
These MPs would make rounds at the intel facility for the entire time interrogations were being conducted.

My two days at Fort Bragg with Colonel Banks seemed to fly by. I read all the necessary classified reports, reviewed the classified and unclassified versions of the Taguba inspector general report and had several long conversations with Colonel Banks, who was disgusted with what we were seeing from our soldiers in Abu Ghraib but, like the rest of us, was not yet sure how to explain it. He did tell me that, from what he saw, one thing was clear: there was no effective leadership at the prison. He was sending me to determine the details of what had gone wrong and how to fix it, but he was already sure that the photos of abuse were evidence that no one had the reins in Abu Ghraib, that no one was exerting any control.

“Larry, remember, people will do what their leaders allow them to do,” he said.

I thought about that comment quite a bit as I continued my journey. I boarded a plane from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, International Airport that took me all the way to Germany. There I transferred planes and boarded a chartered DC-10 with four hundred other soldiers headed for Iraq via Kuwait City. As we flew, there was nothing but silence in the cabin. It seemed odd that we were flying into the heart of a dangerous combat zone, where death could await some of us, and most of these twenty-year-old boys and girls slept while listening to their iPods.

We arrived to a pitch-black abyss in Kuwait City at the Air Force Military Air Terminal. It was Zero Dark Thirty—impossible to know the day and time. I glanced at my young comrades and realized that even this darkness was strange to most of them. Most Americans have never experienced the level of darkness found in these countries.

We exited from the plane and a tall Army first sergeant yelled, “Fall in!” All four hundred sleep-deprived soldiers fashioned themselves into a crisp military formation. We remained in formation for about forty-five minutes until the semi truck with our bags arrived. Arranging ourselves in a long line, we passed the duffel bags down the line, stacking them side by side. Despite the orderliness of the process, it was indeed a shit mess. Finding my five Army green duffel bags among the identical five Army green duffel bags all four hundred soldiers brought took three hours. Finally, bags safely in my possession, I headed to the nearby huge tin warehouse that housed about one thousand Army green cots. I threw myself onto a cot, desperate for sleep.

It was hot as hell, despite being 3 a.m. As I dozed off to sleep, I didn’t feel right. It was hard to determine if it was the 130- degree heat or if I was getting sick. Finally, I sank into unconsciousness. The next day, I didn’t feel any better, and for the following forty-eight hours I did nothing but eat and sleep—and neither very efficiently. I was losing my voice but I couldn’t tell if I actually had a fever because it was 125 degrees outside and rising, and everything felt overheated. I had a hard time figuring out if I was sick or just plain miserable from the heat like everyone around me.

From Kuwait I boarded an Air Force C-130 cargo plane into Baghdad. As I boarded the plane I noticed there were three female MPs loading their gear onto it. The tallest of them could only have been five feet. The senior sergeant of the three picked up a .50 caliber machine gun—that’s a big, badass weapon—and slung it over her right shoulder while she carried an M16 and a can of ammo in her left hand. The other two female MPs had a double-barreled shotgun, an M16, and a 9mm pistol on each hip. The crew chief asked me, “Colonel, where would you like to sit?”