Shock Factor (28 page)

The cop nodded in understanding. The prisoner was loaded into a vehicle and taken away to the nearest police station, where I have no doubt a metal bed and a car battery awaited him.

Some things you cannot change overnight. When the Volunteers showed up a year later, they discovered the same behavior, different actors. The Iraqi police uniform still represented repression and fear to the people, and beatings were just part of a day's job on the street. The Shia cops turned out to be just as bad as the Sunni ones. There was a lot of payback to dish out after decades of brutal repression by the Ba'athists.

That spring, as the Oregonians tried to get a handle on the chaos, a small number of American military police injected a dangerous new dynamic into the equation. It started at the end of April when media reports surfaced alleging that American MPs were torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Photos taken by the abusers found their way into the press, and these shocking images made international news for months afterward. America lost the moral high ground in Iraq and received near universal condemnation for the twisted behavior of a few bad American cops.

The media spent weeks publishing scores of horrific photos from Abu Ghraib. The story not only didn't go away, the scope and depth of the scrutiny increased.
The Economist
called for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Editorials blasting the administration, the U.S. Army, and the effort in Iraq filled hundreds of newspapers from the
Denver Post
to France's
Le Monde
.

This happened just as the American occupation of Iraq was about to enter a delicate new phase. Since the end of the initial invasion in the spring of 2003, Iraq had been governed by the Coalition Provisional Authority, a civilian agency headed by Paul Bremer, a career diplomat. This was a temporary arrangement, and Bremer planned to hand power back to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, 2004.

For the men and women patrolling the streets, Abu Ghraib stirred up massive anti-American sentiment. The ranks of the various insurgent groups swelled with indignant and hate-filled volunteers, some of whom came from all over the Muslim world to join the battle.

In the weeks that followed, the violence in Iraq intensified. In retaliation for Abu Ghraib, al-Qaida kidnapped, tortured, and beheaded American civilian contractor Nicholas Berg. His execution was videotaped by his murderers and posted on the Internet.

The Oregon snipers saw an uptick in attacks from their vantage points at the hotel and the MOI. While out on patrols with the scout platoon, they also detected a shift in the mood of the locals. Everyone in an American uniform was paying the price for what had happened at Abu Ghraib.

On June 4, 2004, the battalion lost two enlisted men and a promising platoon leader during a firefight on the edge of Sadr City. The Oregonians had rushed to the rescue of a New Jersey MP unit that had been hit by rockets, roadside bombs, and machine-gun fire. A secondary bomb detonated, killing five Americans altogether. The ambush was carried out by a cell of Mahdi Militiamen and was witnessed by several Iraqi reporters who were working for Western news agencies, including the Associated Press. Within minutes of the attack, film and photos of the dead and dying Americans were published on the Internet. Various news outlets picked them up and used them for months after. One of the reporters embedded with the enemy that day, Karim Kadim, later received an American Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism for his work during the uprising.

Aside from the firefight downtown, the snipers had yet to do anything they felt to be substantive. Maries and the rest of his section seethed at what was going on. A week after the June 4 attack, the scout platoon captured several members of the Mahdi Militia cell that carried out that operation, but the snipers were minimally involved in that coup. It seemed that everyone else in the battalion was contributing while they were sitting on their hands in the two observation points. Their frustration level grew daily.

On June 17, the snipers rotated assignments again. Kevin Maries and Keith Engle took the MOI observation point along with Darren Buchholz and one other team. Darren had lost his spotter a few weeks before and had not picked up a new one yet, so he had been working with Maries and Engle. This time, the snipers brought with them two “Fisters”—forward artillery observer—whom they hoped would help them take out the mortar and rocket teams operating out of eastern Baghdad. They would be up there for almost two weeks this time, and the snipers settled in as best they could. They shucked off their heavy body armor, left their helmets and BDU tops with the rest of their gear to stay as comfortable as possible, then took turns glassing the neighborhood. Each team had an M24, a semiautomatic Barrett .50 cal, several M4s, and Buchholz's venerable scoped M14.

One night, while Buchholz was on watch, two gunshots rang out. They seemed to have come from the nearby Iraqi Police Academy. Buchholz began glassing it. A few moments passed. Suddenly, a door to one of the academy buildings flew open and a hunched-over Iraqi cop appeared. He dragged a limp body across a courtyard and into another building. A second cop pulling another limp figure followed not long afterward.

Buchholz called Maries and Engle. The snipers conferred. This smelled like an execution. Maries radioed the battalion operations center and reported the incident. The Volunteers were later told that prisoners at the academy had rioted, leading to a crackdown by the Iraqi Police that resulted in several injuries, but no deaths. The Oregon snipers didn't buy it, but they hadn't seen enough to prove the story was a cover for something more sinister. They couldn't even be sure that the bodies dragged from the building were dead or just unconscious. Maries told his men to keep a close eye on the academy and watch for anything further that was suspicious.

A few days later, the Iraqi Police conducted a raid in Al Betawain, a Sunni Baghdad neighborhood that included a small population of African immigrants. They rounded up dozens of men, about half of whom were Sudanese. Some of them lacked passports and work papers. The police arrested them on the spot. Others displayed their documentation, which the Iraqi cops confiscated and demanded a bribe for their return. The police detained anyone who couldn't pay the bribe. They also arrested a few who did shell out the money. The detainees, which included elderly men and young boys, were bound and blindfolded and packed into waiting buses.

That afternoon, Keith Engle was on watch. He had his own .50 caliber Barrett beside him, Maries's M24 bolt-action rifle, their spotting scope, and a pair of M22 binoculars. Instead of using his scopes, he happened to have the binos in hand when a bus drove up alongside the Police Academy's main wall and lurched to a halt. A bunch of police officers appeared, some of whom were armed with sticks and rubber hoses. They began pulling men off the bus and lining them up single file.

Keith observed this with great interest. He had heard nothing of the Al Betawain raid, and this was the first time any of the Oregon snipers had seen prisoners delivered to the academy.

The Iraqi police shoved and kicked their detainees until they were lined up to their satisfaction. Engle counted thirty of them. Toward the front of the line, two cops grabbed a prisoner, who tried to resist. Bad move. The cops dragged him out of the line and threw him into the dirt. Another Iraqi policeman rushed over to help. Together, the three began whipping the detainee with rubber hoses.

Engle's jaw dropped. He'd seen police beatings before, but the sheer viciousness of this one left him spellbound in horror. He pulled his eyes from the binos and called to one of the forward observers, “Go get Sergeant Maries. He needs to see this.”

Maries, who had been on his sleep cycle, appeared next to Engle a few minutes later and asked, “What've you got, Keith?”

He pointed down to the bus. Maries got behind his spotter scope and watched the tail end of the beating. It had lasted five minutes. The detainee had been flayed from head to foot by the rubber hoses and was flopping around in the dirt, wracked with pain. At length, the police pulled him to his feet and pushed him back into the line.

After that, nobody else offered any resistance.

About a dozen police now patrolled the line of detainees. After a few minutes, the entire group was led into a walled compound next to the Iraqi Police Academy, where they disappeared into a rectangular-shaped building.

More buses arrived. Each one parked in the dead space between the compound and the academy. The drill was always the same: the police would herd the detainees off the bus, line them up, and lead them into the rectangular building. By the end of the day, Engle counted ninety-three detainees offloaded from three buses.

This compound, which had been virtually unused prior to this development, began to bustle with activity. More cops showed up until eighteen stood guard around the rectangular building. Others periodically went inside, retrieved a prisoner, then took him to a smaller building on the other side of the compound.

The next morning, Maries, Engle, and Buchholz watched as a group of cops congregated on a small concrete pad in front of the rectangular building. A wooden overhang shielded them from the summer sun as they stood around, talking animatedly to each other. Some of them held rubber hoses and aluminum bars that the snipers recognized as spreaders for U.S. Army–issue cots.

They smoked and joked for a while, then two cops tied handkerchiefs behind their necks, covered their mouth and noses with them, and approached the main entrance to the building, hefting a rubber hose and a bar. They flung the door open and plunged inside. Some of their brethren gravitated toward the windows, which the snipers could not see through.

Minutes passed. The two cops emerged, smiling and laughing. The others clustered around them as they began talking. Through their scopes, the Oregonians saw the two cops use their hoses and the cot spreader to pantomime beating somebody. They hammered at their invisible subject, then pretended to be their victims. They cringed and cowered. The other Iraqi cops burst out laughing. Two more of them put on handkerchiefs and went into the building. They came back with fresh tales to tell the others.

Maries reported this to the battalion operation center, but since the Volunteers had already become jaded about the behavior of the local police, the battalion took no action. To those who weren't witness to the beating beside the bus, this seemed like normal Baghdad cop behavior—thuggish and wrong, but not the U.S. Army's problem.

The refusal to do anything rankled Maries. He had seen enough of how the cops operated to know that what was going on in this little compound beside the academy represented a level of violence not seen on the street. Though he had no conclusive proof, it appeared that the police were systematically torturing their detainees.

And it continued throughout the day. Pairs of cops would enter the building with blunt weapons, emerge and be replaced by two more. Each time they came out, they would recount to the other officers waiting outside what just happened.

While the snipers kept watch over the compound, forces far above their pay grade clicked into motion. Paul Bremer disbanded the Coalition Provisional Authority two days ahead of schedule and turned over control to the interim Iraqi government. After a year of occupation, Iraq was once again a sovereign nation, which meant that the U.S. military had to defer to the new government in the course of its operations.

Bremer boarded a flight home on the morning of June 28, 2004, just as Keith Engle took a shift behind his Barrett. For the past few days, the activity in the compound had settled down to a grim routine. The eighteen guards on hand took turns going inside the building carrying blunt objects or hoses. They never took food or water inside, and the snipers hadn't seen the prisoners since the first day they'd been brought in. As a result, they had no way to determine their condition, or whether they were actually being harmed.

The police broke the routine later that morning when two of them dragged a prisoner out of the building and dumped him in the middle of the compound's courtyard. A gaggle of cops piled on him, hoses and spreader bars flailing. They kicked, punched, and beat him as he rolled in the dirt, hands tied behind his back and his eyes blindfolded. Finally, the police lifted him off the ground and flung him, headfirst, against the side of a white pickup truck. The detainee collapsed in a heap, knocked cold from the impact.

Maries joined Engle in time to watch the beating. Keith fumed with anger and wanted to start shooting cops to put an end to the mistreatment. Kevin Maries calmed him down, “Look, we're going to sit tight, observe, and report.” Besides smoke-checking guys who need it, this is the primary mission snipers have. Engle, who had not yet been with the section for a full year—and had not gone to sniper school yet either—forced himself to be more patient. He stowed his emotions, though inside he still seethed. Later he recalled, “I was indignant. It was like watching your neighbor abuse his dog and being unable to do anything about it.” He felt sick.

As the cops hauled the unconscious man back inside the building, Maries reported the incident over the radio to the battalion operations center. This time, the level of violence the snipers witnessed, combined with the other reports, alarmed Lieutenant Colonel Hendrickson. Had the incident happened the day before, he would have gone to investigate. But that morning, Bremer was somewhere in the air en route home and that left the Iraqis in charge. Hendrickson no longer had the authority to burst into an Iraqi Police facility and demand to know what was going on. It was their sovereign business now, no matter how ugly.

The next morning, June 29, 2004, Maries was on watch behind the scope when a group of guards gathered at the concrete pad. All at once, they poured into the rectangular building, armed with 2x4 wooden boards, more hoses, and cot spreaders. A few cops remained outside and took station at the window to watch whatever was going on inside. About a half hour passed with no further activity, then a group of Iraqi civilians approached the compound from a driveway that led to the Ministry of Interior's main entrance. The snipers concluded that these new arrivals had come from the very building they were observing from.