Fixing Hell (8 page)

I had a hundred scenarios we could try. No matter which strategy we employed, the goal was always the same: get the prisoner to say something in response. Anything. Once the prisoner said, “Okay,” or “Thank you,” or “Praise Allah,” I knew we had him. From there it was only a matter of time before he told us something useful.

There would be many more challenges to come at Gitmo, and I had no idea at the time that how we handled those challenges would shape the future role for military psychologists in this global war on terrorism. For example, one afternoon I was having lunch in the chow hall and a female nurse who was a Navy lieutenant commander came to see me in a fit of anger. Her name was Lieutenant Commander Pearl Henderson from northern California. “Commander, I have been hearing about you and I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” I said with a smile. “Pour yourself a cup of coffee and let’s see if we can work this thing out.”

She began talking really fast and I regretted offering her coffee. This was an intense woman. I captured enough of what she was saying to understand that she was upset with how interrogators were coming over to the medical clinic and demanding unhindered access to detainees’ medical records. This was a surprise to me, and a disturbing concept to a psychologist. I had to ask her to slow down and give me a better understanding of what was going on.

“I’m not tracking with you at all,” I said. “They’re doing what with the medical records?”

She explained to me that there was a federal regulation that made it perfectly legal for any interrogator, regardless of rank, educational background, or age, to have legal open access to any detainee’s medical record. What I discovered was that on any given day, FBI, CIA, Army, Navy, and contract interrogators would go to the hospital and demand to see detainees’ records immediately. If any of the doctors or nurses hesitated—and they naturally would as medical professionals—these interrogators, some of them only eighteen or twenty years old, would simply walk into the medical records room and help themselves. It was allowed by federal law but it ran counter to everything the doctors and nurses held sacred about the privacy of medical records.

I told the lieutenant commander that in spite of what the regulation or law said, from a practical standpoint this system just didn’t seem to be working. Not only was I sympathetic to the staff’s desire to protect those records, but I also could see that the animosity generated by interrogators snatching records from the clinic was counterproductive to our overall mission. So Lieutenant Commander Henderson and I devised a plan that would keep the interrogators from having any physical access to the records. We painted an invisible red line around the entire medical hospital by declaring that the hospital and all doctors and nurses were completely off-limits to anyone from the intel community. The biscuit staff were the only members of the Joint Intelligence Group or the entire intel community who would have any access or discuss any medical information with the doctors and nurses. Even though the interrogators were incredibly pissed at this, and though technically it circumvented federal law, the plan actually worked. It streamlined the process and stopped thirty or forty interrogators on any day of the week from storming over to the hospital and creating havoc.

Now, we thought this was a fine solution to a real problem. But then the media got hold of the story and, of course, they completely distorted what was happening. We later saw and heard reports in the news media about how biscuit was supposedly stealing medical information and using it to help interrogators craft interrogation plans. On June 10, 2004, the Washington Post reported that “Military interrogators at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been given access to the medical records of individual prisoners, a breach of patient confidentiality that ethicists describe as a violation of international medical standards designed to protect captives from inhumane treatment.”

The newspaper went on to say, “How military interrogators used the information is unknown. But a previously undisclosed Defense Department memo dated Oct. 9 cites Red Cross complaints that the medical files ‘are being used by interrogators to gain information in developing an interrogation plan.’”

The October 9 memo, however, contained no information or proof to support these accusations. In fact, the intent of the biscuit was to be the keepers of the relevant medical information so that no detainee would ever be harmed. We had to have that information because if someone in our position did not know of a detainee’s disease or medical condition, detainees could be harmed. So we, the biscuit, became the gatekeepers of this information in order to protect it. We used the information to make sure all prisoners received their medications and that detainees with major psychiatric illnesses, such as psychotic patients, were not interrogated at all. Most importantly, we used this information to eliminate the possibility that any ill or fragile detainee would be harmed as a result of some abusive interrogation technique. So what came out of the new arrangement was that any time interrogators needed to know if there were any medical complications, they would first come to us before starting their interrogations. But the International Committee of the Red Cross and the media reported the exact opposite—that we were hoarding the information for nefarious reasons and using it, in effect, to tell interrogators exactly where to poke the prisoner with a sharp stick.

The next month seemed to go by in a blur. I was starting to feel some satisfaction that we were making progress in turning this ship around, and especially when I stepped out into the dark Caribbean night air, the stillness and quiet could lull me into thinking that all was well. On one particular night, I learned this was just an illusion. I decided to make some rounds on one of the cellblocks. It’s always good to see what’s going on at night, I thought.

I entered the prison building and started looking around. Everything seemed relatively calm, nothing out of the ordinary. I figured I would look through the rest of the cellblock and then head back to my place for some sleep. But as I walked toward the cellblock the detainees started throwing feces, urine, and other bodily fluids all over the place. It was a full-scale, all-out riot. I had heard this was a pretty common occurrence, sometimes sparked by an action like one of the detainees being taken out of his cell for interrogation, but just as often by nothing at all. The cellblock would be quiet and suddenly erupt into chaos. On this night, I had no idea what started the riot, if anything, but I could see that the guards and other staff were trying to dodge urine, feces, and other bodily fluids thrown at the nineteen- to twenty-one-year-olds. I was amazed at the level of discipline shown by the guards. There was no yelling, no cursing, and none of the guards threw the cups filled with feces back at the detainees. They were better Americans than me, I thought as I watched. Night after night for twelve-hour shifts, the guards stood steadfastly on duty to cope with the horror of these attacks. There was no way at nineteen I could have handled this, a foreign prisoner spitting in my face only to be followed by the same knucklehead hitting me in the back of the head with a cup of feces. On many nights I asked myself, where did we get these young Americans from? As I watched, a Styrofoam cup filled with feces and urine hit a young female sergeant directly in the face. She calmly turned and instructed the detainee to “knock it off.”

I was tense and worried about what else might come flying through the air, maybe something that would do some real damage instead of just disgusting me. One of the guards ran to me and took me by the arm in a firm grip, yelling in my ear to be heard over the noise of the riot in the background.

“Don’t worry, Colonel. We’ll get these shitheads under control. And Colonel, it will get a whole lot uglier before it gets better.”

My escort rushed me to the exit and I burst outside, the door slamming behind me as the guards continued their efforts to quell the riot. Standing there alone in the Cuban breeze, covered in Taliban feces and urine, I was utterly disgusted and couldn’t decide if it was better to ride in my car to my hooch or walk. I decided walking was a better option to avoid getting this foul smell permanently imprinted into my car. As I walked, I had to acknowledge the absurdity of the situation I found myself in, and it was actually a relief to laugh at myself and give myself a few moments of respite from the deadly serious thoughts that occupied my mind the rest of the time at Gitmo. I kept coming back to the young men and women we had serving as the guards on the cellblocks. They were an amazing, untold story, steadfastly doing their duty without ever retaliating. By the time I reached my hooch, I had created a new term for the military—the TOW. The TOW acronym was not new to the Army, but it usually stood for “tank offensive weapon,” a missile launched from a Humvee designed to kill Russian tanks. After that night, I always thought of TOW as the Turd Offensive Weapon. I learned from talking to the MPs afterward that the prisoners also had a variation we came to call the SOW—the Semen Offensive Weapon. No matter which primary ingredient was used, the methodology was the same: make the deposit in a cup, add some toilet paper for stability when throwing, douse liberally in urine, and hide the concoction in your cell for a while to let it ferment. Then wait for an opportune moment when the guard lets his attention wander and suddenly—wham!— fling the TOW or SOW by reaching through the “bean chute” used to pass in meals. One detainee explained to a guard that he omitted the toilet paper in his preparations because that promoted a better dispersal on impact. And he insisted that he had done “scientific studies” to confirm the benefits of his approach.

I went home and took the longest shower of my entire time in Cuba. As I stood there scrubbing and scrubbing, I realized that though I could laugh about the insanity of that moment, the riot reminded me that I still had plenty of work to do. The next day we had many long meetings to come up with safe ways of disrupting the detainees’ tendency to throw TOWs at the guards. The first move was to take away all their cups and water bottles, followed soon by the erection of Plexiglas walls that would prevent them throwing anything into the middle of the cellblock. My experience that night also gave me a newfound respect for the guards who watched over the detainees and who were subjected to that kind of abuse day in and day out, yet still found the discipline to be professional and not respond the way most people would when someone throws shit at them.

I decided I needed to get back to walking the halls of the interrogation buildings on a regular basis. A few days went by and I showed up at about 2 a.m. to see what was going on in a particular building. Like on many of the nights before, I heard a noise, yells and screams, and decided to check it out.

As I watched through a one-way observation window, I saw a detainee being held straight up in a corner by two large, mean, badass-looking MPs, an interrogator, and an interpreter. The four of them yelled at the prisoner as loudly as they possibly could. The interrogator decided it was time for a break after the detainee spit in the left eye of the shortest MP. They put the prisoner down and started exiting. Once the interpreter, Hakim, came out of the room, I asked him how long had they been going at it and he told me it had been three hours.

“Three hours of that?” I asked.

“Yes sir,” he said. “This one won’t talk, so we’re on him pretty hard, sir.”

“Okay . . .” I said, trying not to signal any criticism. “Hakim, has the detainee been to the bathroom or had anything to eat or drink during this time?”

“No sir.”

When the interrogator returned from wherever he’d gone for a break, I asked if it was okay if I came into the room and simply observed. I didn’t really need his permission, but I wanted to let him retain his authority in the interrogation and not lose face in front of the other men. He replied that he wouldn’t mind. We all went into the interrogation room and the prisoner immediately noticed that there was now a fifth person to scream at him and toss him around the room. Before the interrogation began again, I pulled the interrogator aside.

“How about if you get the detainee something to eat and drink? And maybe he could be allowed to go to the bathroom?” I said. “What do you think?”

The interrogator seemed a bit surprised by the suggestion but he didn’t want to argue with a colonel, so he said yes. After about another half hour the detainee was allowed to go to the bathroom and get some water. When the MPs brought him back to the room, he looked directly at me and said something in broken English that sounded like a thank-you.

I asked the interpreter what he had said. “He said, ‘Thank you,’ sir,” the interpreter confirmed.

The comment didn’t impress me much, because I wasn’t looking to coddle the prisoner. If anything the expression of gratitude just confirmed to me that a softer touch might get more intel out of this guy. But then I looked from the interpreter back to the detainee and found him staring at me intently, with a dark, piercing look that did not convey appreciation.

The prisoner continued looking into my eyes as he began to speak to me in Arabic. When he paused, I kept my eyes on him and asked the interpreter what he had said.

“Sir, I don’t know if you really want to know what he said to you,” the interpreter said.

I turned to the interpreter and said, “Tell me exactly what he said, Hakim. Word for word.”

“Sir, the detainee told you thank you for being kind to him but he said he was going to kill you as soon as he got out of here.”

Hmmm . . . well, that’s an interesting sentence.

“Ask the detainee why on earth would he want to kill me,” I told the interpreter. “I’ve done nothing to harm him.”

The detainee responded quickly and forcefully as soon as he heard the question in Arabic. “He says you’re a Kaffir, sir.”

“A Kaffir? What does that word mean?”

Before he could reply, the detainee screamed, “Infidel!” The prisoner was growing agitated, as if he had to get through to me why I had to die.