Eric Fair talking:
12 years now of thinking about Abu Ghraib and close to nine years of writing about it, the memories don’t—don’t go away. I grew up as a Presbyterian in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And part of being a Presbyterian was what we called communal confession. So you arrived on Sunday mornings, and you read your confession from a pamphlet, but you read along with the congregation. And that confession was a critical part of your weekly routine. So, as I continued to think about what had gone on in Abu Ghraib and what my own involvement had been and what I had done, it became necessary to confess. And I started with some smaller articles in a number of different newspapers, but ultimately produced this book.
I had been in the Army. I enlisted in 1995, presumably to become a police officer. I had sensed—again, as a Presbyterian, we sense a calling, which often has to do with vocation. And I had sensed a calling to law enforcement. The Army was a means to an end for me. This was 1995 to 2000. I ended up at a language school and became an Arabic linguist. But in those years, there wasn’t much going on overseas that the Army was involved in. So, in 2000, I took my honorable discharge, and I became a police officer in Bethlehem. About a year, a year or two into that, I was diagnosed with a heart condition, which ended my career. And at this point, the Iraq War was beginning to ramp up. And as a former soldier and as a police officer and as someone who had been in that community and around those types of people, I felt an obligation, and I had also supported the initial invasion, so I felt an obligation to be a part of that. Contracting was an opportunity for me to get over there without a health examination.
there were a number of different contracting companies that were looking for just about anybody at that time. The military would not take me, as the heart, but there were also a number of positions—again, the thought—the thought back then was that the war was going to be over very quickly, a matter of weeks, if not months—or, excuse me, matter of months, if not weeks. And so, the Army didn’t think that it had time to train certain positions, to include things like interrogation. And it also thought that it could save money on things like security and transportation. So the idea was that contracting companies like C-A-C-I, or CACI, would come and essentially hire former soldiers who had this kind of expertise and this kind of training, bring them over to Iraq to fill in the gaps, and then send us all back home.
CACI is an enormous organization. And this contract, this specific contract for interrogation, was a small part of it. I think the vast majority of my colleagues, even if they disagree with what I’m saying now, would agree that the management of CACI employees over in Iraq was a disaster—and lucky it wasn’t a physical disaster. We had vehicles that had been rented from Kuwait that had no armor. We had no medical kits. We had no communication equipment. We had no maps. And so, it was really on the fly.
Now, far be it for me to defend—be the one here defending CACI, which—and I write about—in some detail, about, I think, some of the failures, but CACI was an organization, like so many of the other contractors, that was, in many ways, forced to step up in this war because so few other Americans were joining up. Now, in 2003, something near—nearly 60 to 65 percent of Americans supported the invasion. I was one of them. And as someone who supported it, I felt an obligation to be a part of it. Many of us who ended up in Iraq, either as contractors or soldiers, were curious about where the rest of that 65 percent of the Americans were. Recruiting offices did not have lines out the doors. And the administration was not calling for people for national service. And so, organizations like CACI either accepted that responsibility or they sort of filled in the holes, depending on your perspective.
Some of us had heard of Abu Ghraib. There had been a downed American pilot in the first Gulf War who had spent some time there, and so we knew that it was a notorious prison in Iraq. But we didn’t have a sense—we didn’t have a sense that it had that kind of overwhelming sense of fear for Iraqis. We just thought of it as a typical prison. Many of us were former police officers, law enforcement officers—we had been in prisons. But Abu Ghraib, they—we arrived, they dropped us off, and they left. And they housed us in cells at the time. And there was something in the neighborhood of probably less than 500 American personnel, whether they be troops or contractors. There were thousands of Iraqi prisoners. And so, the idea that we were going to interrogate these people and gain any kind of useful intelligence was almost immediately impossible.
I spent one day in the hard site. As an Arabic linguist with—I had worked for the National Security Agency, so I had some high-level security clearances. And so, the idea was that I would be an effective sort of interrogator in the hard site with what they were calling high-value detainees.
The hard site was a—most Americans have seen the photographs at this point. It was a two-tiered, open-bay prison. And many, many of the prisoners, the Iraqi prisoners, were naked. Whether they were being forced to stand by being handcuffed to their cell doors or whether they were just sort of being paraded around on the floor, whether they were moving from place to place, most—most of the prisoners either were naked or down to their underwear.
So the Army puts out what are called PIRs, priority intelligence requirements, and PIRs can cover a variety of different things. They can cover an intersection, a certain intersection that you want to gain intelligence from, or they can cover much larger strategic ideas. Now, the number one PIR in 2004 was the location of chemical weapons. So every interrogation, on some level, we had to at least address the issue of whether or not this prisoner knew anything about chemical weapons. And again, in 2004, many of us, myself included, were still under the impression that they were there. Now, it was clear very quickly that many of the prisoners did not have that kind of information, and so then the PIRs would go down based on whether or not they were part of an anti-coalition cell or IED emplacement or mortar teams. And the idea was that you would fill in the blanks.
I did not interrogate high-value targets. And I can’t say exactly how those teams were formed. By the time I got there in January of 2004, the setup had already been arranged. I was not placed on that team. I was placed on a different team; it was called FRE team, the former regime elements. And the idea was to interrogate and debrief people that had worked closely with Saddam Hussein.
I’m focusing on my own sort of behavior, my own sort of actions. So, for me, yes, personally, Fallujah was worse than Abu Ghraib.
From the book, Consequence:
“We pass by the interrogation room where Tyner has been working on Raad Hussein. We haven’t heard Tyner scream or throw anything today. The door to the room, a flimsy sheet of plywood, has blown open in the hot desert wind. Inside, Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It’s as if he’s been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent.
“Henson comes out into the hallway and walks past the room. He covers the side of his face as he walks by and says, ‘I don’t even want to know.’
“I am silent. This is a sin. I know it as soon as I see it. There will be no atonement for it. In the coming years, I won’t have the audacity to seek it. Witnessing a man being tortured in the Palestinian chair requires the witness to either seek justice or cover his face. Like Henson in Fallujah, I’ll spend the rest of my life covering my face.”
I was never clear on the actual origin. The rumors within the interrogation cell were that Army interrogators had learned to use this chair by Israeli interrogators, and the Israeli interrogators presumably called it the Palestinian chair because they were torturing Palestinians in it. I certainly don’t know if that’s true. And quite frankly, for my own story, I’m not sure that it necessarily matters.
Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch said, “The description by an American interrogator of a ‘Palestinian chair’ torture device that he says the Israeli military taught US soldiers how to use is disturbing and shameful on more than one level, suggesting as it does a means of torture used against Palestinian detainees eagerly copied by Americans seeking to interrogate and torture Iraqis.”
There were a variety of different ways to interrogate someone under what were being called enhanced interrogation. One of those enhanced interrogation techniques was confined spaces. And we know now that that was used by putting people in boxes and eventually putting insects in the box, and as well as closets. The Palestinian chair was simply a confined space. It was a way, rather than putting someone in a box and confining them inside, was to essentially confine them with the chair. And it was designed, like all enhanced interrogation techniques, to simply break the will, to simply break them down physically in this case and then essentially break their will.
recognizing that there was an actual device that we were using in interrogation was—I was surprised by that. And so, a close friend of mine and I made sure that we—I think we at one point had been tempted to use it. I did not use the chair. And that’s not to suggest that I wouldn’t, if I hadn’t stayed longer. But we thought that if we were going to use it, we should sit in it, and we should get a sense for what it was.
And so, we strapped each other in. And it locks you into what is essentially a squat, a permanent squat, from which you can’t recover. We only lasted about a minute. And physically, we may—we certainly could have lasted longer, but it was the—it’s the overwhelming sense of fear that a horrific sort of pain is on its way. And because your hands are bound, you recognize that there’s no way to recover from it. So, certainly, the physical pain is excruciating, but the mental and sort of emotional strain of knowing that you can’t—there’s simply no way to recover from that is what amounted to torture.
I wish that I could say one thing haunts me most, and I wish it were limited to one. But the entire experience—and I know other interrogators disagree with me vehemently on this, but the very act of simply forcing a detainee to violate his own will through interrogation is, in my mind—is, in my mind, torture. The one that certainly has, and appears in the book and has appeared in other articles that I’ve written, is the sleep deprivation I participated in in Fallujah. It was actually my last night in Fallujah; I’d been tasked to go back to Baghdad the next day to form another team. And another interrogator was working a sleep deprivation on a detainee. He was on the day shift, I was on the night shift. And so, when I came in, he asked me to, throughout the course of the night, every hour, to wake this detainee up, or this—I try to use the word “prisoner”—to wake this prisoner up.
shifting gears, as a police officer, I could detain people almost as I saw fit, and, in some ways, to protect them. I could detain someone on the street if I thought that they were going to cross on the wrong spot, or I could detain someone who had just blown through a stop sign. That was not necessarily an arrest. Iraqis were not detainees. We were not detaining them. They were prisoners of war. Now, I recognize that people say we didn’t declare war, but anyone who was in Iraq in any of those years, to include right now, it’s a war. They were prisoners. They were prisoners of war.
I went in that evening to utilize sleep deprivation. And he was in an isolated cell with no windows. He had already been asleep for an hour or two. I had been doing paperwork. And I walked in, and I flipped on the light and woke him up, stood him up, and I was going to take off his robe. It was cold. This would have been early spring, cold in Iraq. So I was going to take off his robe. And what I didn’t realize was that under his robe he was naked. And it was a shock to me. And it was an instant sense that I had violated his—his well-being. To say really nothing of torture, it was, in some ways, an assault.
Now, there are all sorts of discussions about sleep deprivation, about how I was sleep-deprived in—excuse me, sleep-deprived in basic training or people are sleep-deprived in college. That is not the same thing. Sleep deprivation, as I’ve said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they’ve been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they’ve since—within 45 minutes, they’ve lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he’s been living for four or five days, when it’s really only been an hour.
The complete lack of hope. It is to strip away someone’s hope and to insert a different way of thinking into their mind, which would be my mind into theirs, so that they’re going to cooperate with me.
I quit my job with CACI about a month later after the sleep deprivation. And I left Iraq knowing that things had happened that I was not going to forget and that were going to leave an impact on me. But I was not—I had not processed it enough at that point to recognize or to admit or confess that I had tortured anyone. We were still calling these enhanced techniques. I had not done these things behind closed doors. We had filed paperwork. Most other interrogators, on some level, had used some of these techniques. And so I recognized that there was something dehumanizing about it, but I hadn’t made that leap. It has taken me 12 years to come to terms with this. When I first started writing in 2007, even then, even then as I was essentially confessing what I had done and saying I had done wrong, I was not ready to call it torture. I’m well aware of, by calling it torture, what I’m accusing people of. And I’m well aware of what I’m accusing myself of. But in the last couple of years, I’ve recognized that it’s the only other way to call—it’s the only word for it.
Information can be gathered in a number of different ways. My most effective interrogation in Iraq was a prisoner that simply wanted to cooperate. He walked in, and I was tired. It was near the end of my time in Fallujah. And I simply wanted to write a report and send him home. But within the first five minutes, he said that he wanted a piece of cake and some juice, and I spent hours with him gathering what was essentially critical intelligence information.
Now, certainly, the argument can be made—or, well, I shouldn’t say “certainly.” People have made the argument that torture can gain information. But this brings me back to what you started with, with the statements from Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and those. But what you didn’t show was the next statement, was from Marco Rubio. And Marco Rubio said that he would not tell his enemies what we were doing, and he would not advertise what our techniques are. And that is exactly wrong. That is not the way the United States should operate. We should absolutely be telling people what we do. And we should absolutely be telling our prisoners what they will expect in detention, that they will be well taken care of, that they will be watched over until the end of the conflict. If they want to cooperate, they will be—we’re more than happy to speak with them, but we will not in any way torture.
I think veterans, in general, get so frustrated with this tough talk and this idea that these men—and, quite frankly, some women—have any idea what the difference between soft and weak and tough and hard is. This is not about being soft and weak; this is about being smart. And far more importantly, this is about—this is about being Americans, and it’s about adhering to the values that make us Americans—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And those—I’m not suggesting that we read the Miranda rights to prisoners of war or that we give them constitutional rights, but we absolutely are obligated to treat them humanely.
I’ve suggested that the word “Alcatraz” has kind of a similar meaning to Americans. So Americans hear the term “Alcatraz,” and they think of a difficult prison. But over the course of the last few years, I’ve recognized that that’s not true, that we don’t really have a word in the English language that sounds the same way as Abu Ghraib for Iraqis. Many Iraqis that I spoke to, interrogated at Abu Ghraib, had been there under Saddam Hussein, and it had been a return. Had been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, either for being Shia or they had fled during the Iran-Iraq War, for any number of different reasons—or for no reason at all. So, Abu Ghraib had a—the idea that we would empty out that prison and turn it back into a prisoner of war camp was the very definition of foolish.
the first images that were released from Abu Ghraib in Sy Hersh’s The New Yorker piece. I was in Fallujah at the time. We had access to Armed Forces Network. So I’m not sure that I saw it as breaking news, but we eventually kind of felt the story coming out and people talking about it. And as I’ve said before, we weren’t shocked, and so we weren’t afraid to see this stuff coming out, because we had figured all along that people knew about this. I think in some ways we were shocked that the American people were so shocked and that they had this kind of idea—or that they were so ignorant about what was going on. Now, some of the images that we saw were unfamiliar to me. Mock execution that showed up and the use of dogs were not things that I had seen or done. But I’m also not here to suggest that I would not have done those things. Right? The story remains about my confession of my own failures. If someone had come into my interrogation booth with a dog and said, “This is a useful tool,” I may very well—may very well have used it.
drone strikes have become the new topic. And I think if Americans had a better sense of what a drone strike really was, if we saw digital photographs of the after-effects of a drone strike up close, I think we’d be having an enormous discussion about the efficacy of drone strikes, or certainly a different discussion. And I think we need to have a different discussion about issues like interrogation. A year or two ago, people—as I got ready to publish this book, people—the question being asked was “Why are we still talking about this? Why is this still an issue?” Well, we’ve seen, with the clips from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and many others, that aggressive interrogation and torture and enhanced techniques remain something that—it’s a door that is still wide open. Those of us who were there need to tell our stories. We need to be honest about it, and we need to let the American people have a really good look at what this stuff was.
this will sound like a dodge, but as the police officer, when I pulled someone over or pulled them on the side of the street, I did not ask them whether or not a felt they had committed a crime. Their sort of view in that process meant nothing. It was to be—it was up to me, and it was up to what would then essentially be a judge. I feel the same way about this sort of process. I have an absolute obligation to be as honest and as clear as I possibly can with these things. That being said, if a friend of mine came to me as a former police officer and said, “Eric, I have these memories. I did these things. What’s the best way not to be prosecuted?” the last thing I would do is say, “Write a book.” Right? I would not. So I’m aware. I recognize your question, and I know the possibilities here, but that’s not something that has anything to do—my opinion in there means really nothing.
when we were there in Iraq, we were never under the impression that we were doing anything illegal. Whether or not we thought we were doing something wrong, I think, is a much broader question. I think some, like me, were confused and not certain. Others quit immediately. There were people that showed up, saw it, quit, and then others who certainly stayed long-term.
Hanns Scharff was a Nazi interrogator in World War II, and he was known specifically for interrogating downed American pilots and airmen. And Hanns Scharff became famous for never using any aggressive techniques. And he was, quite frankly, the most effective Nazi interrogator. And he would take the American pilots for walks in the woods, and he would get to know—he would talk to them about their families. He had lived in the United States, so he could relate to them in terms of the universities they had gone to. And they formed relationships. And he ended up acquiring an enormous amount of valuable intelligence information. Now, those relationships were so good that he had developed that after the war, that a number of the Americans that he had actually interrogated invited him back over to the United States for Christmas dinner. And he eventually became a U.S. citizen, naturalized U.S. citizen, and went on to teach interrogation, I believe, to the U.S. Air Force.
If I’m being honest, for the people that quit immediately, we thought negatively of them, and we thought that they were simply not up to the task, which was one of the reasons why, even as I began to have my own sort of moral questions, that I hung on as long as I did. There was a view we—most of us had been soldiers and marines, and the idea that you quit something didn’t sit well with all of us.
it’s something that I continue to live with every day. And I suspect that I will, and I suspect that I should. I mean, this clearly has had some negative effects on me, but nothing like the negative effects of the prisoners that we encountered in Iraq, which, again, is then—it then circles back to why I continue to struggle. I know that a part of me is still with those prisoners, those that are alive, with those prisoners in Iraq.
the violence that ensued in Iraq over the—this was 2004, when I was there. The number of people that were killed—and again, maybe most Americans don’t like to think about this, but the bloodletting was on a biblical scale, in terms of 2005, 2006, 2007. I can’t say for sure—I don’t know—but I suspect that certainly some of the people that I talked to became victims of that violence.
I talked about not wanting to quit, because it was part of sort of who we had been taught to be. And so, even though when I did leave Iraq the first time, my intention was to return a second. And so, the second time that I returned, in 2005, was with the National Security Agency. I had actually worked for them very briefly prior to my first deployment, so this was my second stint. Now, anytime you have publish anything about the National Security Agency, you’re required to go through publication review. And I had signed that agreement, and I—so I fulfilled my obligation. And this—the redacted sections are what the NSA essentially decided was not something for the public.
Who exactly was guilty at Abu Ghraib? Why were they there in the first place? Why were they in prison? Certainly, there were men in that prison, some of whom I talked to, deserved, quite frankly, to spend the rest of their lives in a cell. But as far as who was innocent and who was guilty, what exactly—they were Iraqis. It was their country. Right? And they absolutely should have been trying to oust us. So, I’ve heard those percentages, and I recognize, again, what you’re getting at, but I don’t like the idea that it was OK to sort of torture some of these guys who were guilty. But it was not. It was simply wrong to do it to anyone who was there.
I had ended my very first opinion piece in 2007 by suggesting that the consequences of imprisoning large numbers of people are typically huge. And the names that you can start ticking off in terms of people that spent time in oppressive prison environments and then came on to be just monsters in history is a long list. We are 12—12 years removed from Abu Ghraib. We are zero years removed from Guantánamo Bay. There remain detention facilities in places like Afghanistan and probably Iraq. I don’t know what those consequences are. Some of them at this point are unavoidable. But I do feel that if we address this issue, and that we do have a significant change and we do go back to essentially those core values that we absolutely will treat prisoners of war humanely, and that we broadcast that, that we can shift the narrative.
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Eric Fair
Army veteran who worked as a contract interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He is the author of the new book, Consequence: A Memoir.
— source democracynow.org