Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (42 page)

The new technique paid off almost immediately. In mid-June, a Delta intelligence analyst studying recorded Predator footage noticed a truck blocking a Fallujah street. Directing the drone back to that spot, he saw men moving weapons from a house to a pair of trucks. One drove off heading east. The Predator tracked it. When Green operators intercepted the truck near Baghdad without a fight, they found in it enough AKs, belted ammunition, fragmentation grenades, rockets, ammo vests, and medical supplies to equip a hundred fighters. The operators detained two men and a thirteen-year-old boy who were in the truck, brought them back to Mission Support Site Fernandez, and interrogated them.
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The boy said they had drunk tea with Zarqawi very recently and told the operators where.
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Meanwhile, the Predator returned to the original blocked-off street, from where it followed cars and trucks to a southwest Fallujah house exactly where the truck drivers had told Task Force Green the rest of the arms cache was being moved. Some operators were sure Zarqawi was there or in one of two other buildings they were watching. The task force dubbed the house Objective Big Ben and planned to bomb it the night of June 18, then raid it to exploit any intelligence in the rubble.

Delta's operators were on the verge of launching when Lieutenant General Jim Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told McChrystal the potential for civilian casualties meant that he didn't want JSOC to bomb the house, nor did he want Delta driving Pandurs into the city. After talking with McChrystal, Erwin canceled the mission, unwilling to risk insurgents swarming the convoy without the armored vehicles' protection and firepower. McChrystal then gained permission—presumably from Sanchez or Abizaid—to hit Big Ben with a precision air strike after all. At 9:30 the next morning, the strike destroyed the building. To the relief of McChrystal, whose task force's credibility was on the line, after a few tense seconds the arms cache began exploding, validating the target. The bombing killed an estimated twenty people, mostly Tunisian jihadists. Zarqawi, however, was not among them.
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Another upshot of Big Ben did not reflect well on the task force. A couple of days after the operation, one of the truck drivers that Task Force Green had captured arrived at the Camp Nama detention center. A routine medical screening found suspicious burns on him. A quick investigation determined that in their zeal to get the drivers to talk, four operators had been involved in shocking at least one driver with a Taser.
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The task force chain of command quickly punished the four: two were expelled from Delta for a year (which later became a permanent expulsion for one of them); the others received letters of reprimand from Sacolick, but were still in the unit as of 2013.
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In his autobiography, McChrystal described the episode as an isolated incident and said neither he nor his subordinate commanders ever ordered troops to mistreat detainees, or tolerated those who did.
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But others in and around the task force at the time said that explanation strained credulity, that the problem was far more prevalent than McChrystal suggested, and that the operators punished were “scapegoats.”
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Several news stories and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act lend credence to this view. A March 2006
New York Times
article reported that the task force's treatment of detainees was bad enough that in August 2003 the CIA barred its personnel from Nama.
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In December 2003, retired Army Colonel Stu Herrington had highlighted the excesses of the JSOC task force (then called Task Force 121) in a report for Major General Barbara Fast, the senior U.S. military intelligence officer in Iraq. To research the report, Herrington and two other intelligence officials toured U.S. detention facilities in Iraq for a week in early December. “Detainees captured by TF 121 have shown injuries that caused examining medical personnel to note that ‘detainee shows signs of having been beaten,'” Herrington wrote, before concluding that “It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees.” (When Herrington asked an officer in charge of interrogations at a high-value target detention facility whether he had alerted his bosses to his concerns that Task Force 121's prisoners appeared to have been beaten, the officer replied, “Everyone knows about it.”)
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Part of the problem was that prior to September 11, 2001, JSOC typically trained for operations of such short duration that its personnel were not used to having their own prisoners, let alone being responsible for squeezing actionable intelligence from them.
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This was compounded by the fact that, like the rest of the U.S. government, JSOC had very few trained interrogators, and almost none fluent in Arabic.
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JSOC used its cocoon of secrecy to shield itself from a series of investigations into overall U.S. military conduct with regard to detainees, repeatedly rebuffing investigators seeking access to Nama and other task force facilities.
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But at McChrystal's behest, JSOC deputy commander Air Force Brigadier General David Scott conducted a classified review of procedures at Nama, resulting in administrative punishment for more than forty task force personnel and ending the career of the colonel in charge of Nama at the time.
29

Media attention focused on Nama, but detainee abuse also occurred at smaller facilities where task force elements would hold detainees for as long as a few days before sending them to Nama. As the Taser incident indicated, this was particularly the case with Mission Support Site Fernandez in the Green Zone.

Fernandez functioned as the operations center and main living quarters for whichever Delta squadron was deployed to Iraq. It had two floors. The upper floor held the operations center and sleeping quarters, with each assault team of six to eight operators taking one bedroom.
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The lower floor—which operators sometimes called the basement—was divided into interrogation rooms and a room converted into a holding facility. These were built during one of A Squadron's first Baghdad tours, said a Delta source who estimated the holding room measured twelve feet by twelve feet. Along its walls, engineers built what he described as about twenty “stand-up closets” that prevented a prisoner from physical relaxation—“so a guy can't squat, he can't sleep, all you can do is stand.” Another Delta source seconded this description.

Under pressure from their chain of command to get information immediately from the detainees in the basement, Delta operators routinely resorted to abusing them, the first Delta source said. Trained interrogators or intelligence personnel were rarely if ever present. “We might go talk to the intel guy and he gives us the twenty questions he has and then we go down there and fucking get [the answers] from [the detainee],” he said. The second Delta source said the failure to push trained interrogators down to the lowest echelons was a major factor behind the abuse. “A lesson learned from this is we should have … had the right guys doing it and not the operators,” he said. “Instead we let the operators do it, and you've got a commando sergeant major saying, ‘Get this fucking shit now.' There was a lot of consternation in A Squadron about that.… [They] could have said, ‘It's an illegal order, I'm not going to do it.' However, that's easier said than done.”

The first Delta source defended Delta's harsh methods, which he said were “a necessary evil” that were not only an inevitable by-product of the emotions produced in close quarters combat, but also effective. “You can't go out and catch these guys who shot your buddies and expect we're going to fucking hand them tea and crumpets,” he said. “Saddam wasn't caught on tea and crumpets. Saddam was caught on ass whuppings.” Trained interrogators such as Herrington were critical of the notion that detainee abuse produces better intelligence than a more patient approach of building a relationship with a prisoner. But the pressure to produce immediate results meant there was no time for such niceties, the operator said. “When you got a year to crack someone's brain, your technique is best,” he said. “When you've got minutes to save American lives, that shit don't fucking work.”

The operator was particularly aghast at what he viewed as his chain of command's efforts to blame the detainee abuse on a few “rogue” personnel. “You know how much scrutiny you're under as a Delta Force operator? You think you can just go rogue? You think you can do something without orders?” he said. “The detainee abuse happened in the fucking basement of the house we all lived in, at the bottom of the stairs, under the commander's bedroom.… Everybody who lived in the house knew what was going on.” Indeed, sometimes residents on the upper floors heard screams coming from the basement, he said. “There's times I'd go down there and tell people, ‘Hey, keep it the fuck down, I'm trying to relax up here,'” the operator said.

Other Delta operators took strong issue with the suggestion that this behavior was par for the course in the unit. “You never thought of beating somebody up or applying physical torture to anybody,” said an experienced operator who was in Delta during the Iraq War's opening stages. “The culture of the unit wasn't anything like that.” He cited the case of an operator forced out of Delta for kicking a Balkan war crimes suspect struggling in a net that operators threw over him after pulling him from his car. Another operator who made multiple deployments to Iraq in 2003 and 2004 said only a very few individuals in the unit abused detainees and that they did so without any authorization, tacit or otherwise, from above. “None of the leaders that I know there, not a one, do I think would allow that,” he said. “It's a small few who did that and those who got punished deserved it.”

But documents, press reports, and interviews with special operations troops leave little doubt that JSOC personnel engaged in widespread detainee abuse during the first thirteen months of the American occupation of Iraq.
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Already under scrutiny because of the warnings from Herrington, the CIA, the FBI, and others, this practice may have been in its final days by spring 2004, anyway. But in late April news of conventional soldiers' abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison hit the headlines, resulting in a much closer examination of all U.S. forces' treatment of prisoners. As described by Delta operators, their chain of command's attitude changed immediately. One special operations officer likened what happened to “a game of musical chairs.” The operators punished for the Taser incident happened to be those left standing when the music stopped.

In midsummer 2004, McChrystal made a change that went some way toward solving his Camp Nama problem. He simply moved his entire headquarters to the sprawling Balad air base, almost fifty miles north of Baghdad. There, he built a new “clean and sterile” detainee facility that he described as “clearly the most important building constructed during” the move. This facility remained off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, but McChrystal made it “internally transparent” within his growing “network” by allowing carefully controlled visits by partner agencies and, on occasion, allied representatives.
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Whether it was the move to Balad that made the difference, or a heightened sensitivity to the potential political fallout from incidents of detainee abuse, reports of such transgressions declined sharply once the task force moved north.
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There were practical reasons for moving the JOC to Balad—the Iraqi government was taking control of Baghdad airport—but also psychological ones. After ten months in command, McChrystal's concept for how JSOC should operate had crystallized, and he wanted to start from a clean slate as he turned that vision into reality.
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“JSOC on Steroids”

With the move to Balad under way, McChrystal held a commanders' conference at Bragg in late July. Attended by JSOC's senior staff officers and component unit commanders, the conference was McChrystal's chance to outline the direction in which he intended to take the command. That direction was away from the large set-piece operations that for so long had dominated JSOC's thinking. Instead, McChrystal wanted to expand the capability to operate on the left side of a spectrum that had large-scale joint readiness exercise-style operations at the right end, and small, completely clandestine missions on the other. “He wanted to go blacker, faster, smaller,” said a source familiar with the meeting. McChrystal expressed preferences for smaller tailored packages for such missions and for a Joint Readiness Training paradigm, in which JSOC elements trained together on specific tasks, but without the massive joint readiness exercise umbrella. In this context, he announced his intention to review the “internal role” of all JSOC's tiered units. The JSOC commander also left subordinates in no doubt about where they stood in the long war now under way. JSOC, he told them, was now the nation's “main effort” in the “war on terror.”
1

The JOC McChrystal built in a corner of Balad air base was the physical embodiment of his insistence on a networked, flattened command structure in which organizations shared information with each other instead of hoarding it in their own “stovepipes.” Housed in a massive concrete clamshell-shaped hangar dating from Saddam's time, the operations center had an entry control point at one end and offices for McChrystal and other senior figures at the other. Between these, separated by a plywood wall, were two big rooms that functioned as the nerve centers for the Iraq task force and for JSOC globally. Each had a right-angled horseshoe of desks at the center facing a wall of flat video screens, with rows of workstations behind and to the sides of the leaders and senior staff officers who occupied the horseshoe.