We Have Met the Enemy (II)

By Greyhawk

(Or "we have met the enemy and he is us, too")

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Part one is here.

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There's much to be gained from dialog with "the enemy" in any conflict. Reporters, however, don't have a monopoly on that dialog. Here, for example, is a story on efforts by US Army Capt. Samuel Cook, operating in Iraq's Salahuddin Province, to "turn" insurgents there into allies.

One man who came in to talk was Sarhan Hassan Wisme, a local legend, described by Cook as "the Robin Hood figure at the height of the insurgency in 2006." Sarhan boasted of having planted more than 200 bombs for attacks on U.S. troops, a claim he later happily repeated to Cook. His other specialty was killing locals who cooperated with the Americans. "The thing that intrigued me about him is that he was not afraid to tell us exactly what he had done to U.S. forces proud of it almost." The Americans had raided his house six times but never caught him.

Read the whole thing to learn why Cook didn't shoot him on the spot. But understand that if he had (or if Tom Ricks had decided not to include that story in his new book) we wouldn't have insight into details like this:

During several more meetings in January, Sarhan told Cook his life story. He worked at a fertilizer factory in nearby Bayji, home of a major oil refinery, and obtained some of his bombmaking materials there. He had started attacking the Americans in the spring of 2004, motivated by news of the American abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

Note that he said spring of 2004 - that's when CBS news first broadcast the now infamous abu Ghraib pictures - and not fall of 2003, when the abuse took place, or winter 2004, when a soldier stationed there provided those pictures to Army investigators.

That soldier was then-Specialist Joe Darby, who would describe the abuse in graphic detail years later:

You have to understand, we were the most heavily mortared compound in Iraq. From the day we got there until the day I left, nobody took more mortars than we did. Nobody. We were taking them morning and night. It was just something you got used to. It became normal. After a while, we started having these surreal conversations while the mortars were flying. We’d hear the boom of the launch, and then we’d argue about what size it was while the shit was still coming in.
<...>
As long as the mortars landed on a building, it wasn’t a big deal—they weren’t powerful enough to pierce the roof. But if one landed in the yard or in the tent camp, it could do a lot of damage. Like, one night they got lucky and split our fuel tanker in half. Dropped a mortar right through it. It caused a fire you could see for miles, probably 4,000 gallons of burning fuel. Another time, they dropped one in the middle of a prisoner prayer group. That was pretty bad. These guys had just been sitting in rows, facing Mecca and praying, when the mortar came in. We had fifteen to sixteen dead and a bunch more wounded. We had to dig through the bodies, put them in body bags, and take them to the processing area to check them out of the prison. Whenever a prisoner was brought in, we would ID them with a retina scan and fingerprints, so when they died, we had to process them out the same way. Which meant that, for the rest of the day, we were digging through body bags looking for eyeballs. Sometimes there wasn’t an eyeball we could use, so we’d look for a finger.

Whoops - once again I used the wrong quote. I meant to cite a description of the horrific naked pyramid inflicted on the prisoners by the sadistic guards at abu Ghraib but instead I've provided Darby's account of the actions of the "freedom fighters". Perhaps most people - like Sarhan Hassan Wisme - are already familiar enough with the torture photos and the story behind them.

Or perhaps not. There are still those among us who - in spite of a media barrage to the contrary - believe those actions were merely the work of rogue night shift guards at the prison camp, and not the result of direct orders from Donald Rumsfeld. Among that number - Joe Darby:

The general in charge of the prison was Janis Karpinski, but that didn’t mean she was ever there. To actually lay eyes on Karpinski took an act of God. She spent all her time in Kuwait or in the Green Zone Palace. She kept her happy ass in the nice, safe places. The only time she’d come by was when a dignitary was visiting. She’d fly in a half hour before they got there, get briefed, lead the tour, and then fly back out. Other than that, she had no idea what was going on. She did nothing but suck dignitary ass. I guess she didn’t like being in an overcrowded, violent prison with constant mortar fire coming in. In the five months I was at Abu Ghraib, I only saw her twice.
<...>
Everybody thinks there was an order from high up, or that somebody in command must have known. Everybody is wrong. Nobody in command knew about the abuse, because nobody in command cared enough to find out. That was the real problem. The entire command structure was oblivious, living in their own little worlds. So it wasn’t a conspiracy—it was negligence, plain and simple.

Darby's description of some of the night crew:

But most of these soldiers I had doubts about already. Like Sabrina Harman. She was a piece of shit from the day I met her. Before we ever got to Abu Ghraib, when we were still in Hilla, she had this kitten for three days when a dog came and killed it. So Harman decided to dissect it. She said there were no marks on the outside, so she dissected it and found some ruptured organs or something. And then she decided to mummify it. She tried different methods, but all she ended up with was the head. A damned mummified cat’s head, for Christ’s sake. This rotted-out head with pebbles for eyes. She stuck it on top of a soda can and carried it around with her everywhere. I didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to her. I just tried to avoid her. Or Ivan Frederick, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the night shift. He and I avoided each other, too. We didn’t get along. Or Charles Graner. He and I got along, but we weren’t friends. Graner is one of those guys, he’s got an overpowering aura about him. People just like him. But if you see the other side, you understand that he’s not someone you want to get too close to. He’s manipulative. He has multiple personalities. He can be this religious guy, talking about God and the way things are supposed to be done, but he’s also got this very, very dark, evil side. We were talking in Hilla one time, before we got to Abu Ghraib. I’d been walking around smoking a cigarette, and he was working the gate to our compound, so I was talking to him for like ten minutes, and he was telling me about when he thought his wife was cheating on him. He said that he found himself across the street from their house, up on a hill, with a loaded rifle trained on the door, just waiting for them to come out. I said, “What happened?” and he said, “They never came out.”

When I turned the pictures in, that’s the story that stuck with me. Because I knew what this guy was capable of.

On a side note, Lynndie England - perhaps the most familiar of the accused abu Ghraib guards - has told the cat's head story, too:

Not long into their stay, two of the soldiers appeared at the base one day with animal carcasses. They'd found a dead goat and a dead cat somewhere and started slicing them up. Someone took a photo of a soldier pretending to have sex with the goat's head. "Then they cut off the cat's head and shoved it on the top of a soda bottle," England says.

For several weeks, the decaying animal heads provided entertainment for the soldiers. "Someone put sunglasses on them, and put the rifle next to the heads and took a picture. Some soldiers put a cigarette in the cat's mouth," she says. The soldiers stashed the severed heads in their rooms.

"It was funny," England says. "So funny."

"I still didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it turned out to be." Darby said of turning a handful of dirtbags over to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. "I thought they would be taken off duty and tried, but I didn’t think the world would ever hear about it. I never thought it would explode the way it did."

What Darby didn't know was that one of the Soldiers - Ivan Frederick, the non-commissioned officer in charge of the night shift - was going to blackmail the Army in hopes of avoiding prosecution.

"The Army had the opportunity for this not to come out, not to be on 60 Minutes," he said. "But the Army decided to prosecute those six G.I.'s because they thought me and my family were a bunch of poor, dirt people who could not do anything about it. But unfortunately, that was not the case."

Ultimately Frederick would enter a guilty plea and spend three years in prison for his part in the abuse. Meanwhile, in addition to an increase in "insurgent" recruits there were other immediate results of the CBS broadcast of his photo collection:

You’ve also spent some time downrange. Where were you from January 2004 to January 2005?

Primarily, I was at the Abu Ghraib prison. I was part of the 53-person team — 53 give or take — that set up the first hospital there to treat the detainees. I was there until end of September.

What was it like to be at Abu Ghraib amongst all the controversy, the photos, etc., with so much attention focused on the detainees and their treatment there?

In February, we started setting up at Abu Ghraib, and the stories broke in April, I believe. At that point of course, the frequency of attacks increased. It got bad. We had [mass casualties] of 120 and 109 patients. Mortars landed in the detainee camps. Our primary mission was to treat detainees. It was very frustrating because every news reporter that came through, every VIP that came through from all over these countries, the only thing they wanted to know was what we did with the abused prisoners.

Elsewhere:

At the beginning of May, the spotlight of national publicity had swung completely away from Fallujah and onto the Abu Ghraib scandal. The prison abuse story also pushed Sadr's rebellion to the back pages. MajGen Dempsey had backed Sadr and his bruised militia into a corner in Najaf. Instead of arresting him, the Iraqi politicians agreed to let him go free. The reason they gave was that the Coalition could ill afford to make him a martyr at a time when the Arab press was showing the Abu Ghraib pictures as proof that Americans were the oppressors in Iraq. Sadr was allowed to leave Najaf and resume his plotting, with the warrant for his arrest abated.

And...

Twenty-three-year-old Nicholas Berg, a friendly Californian - part entrepreneur, part youthful wanderer - was traveling by himself in Baghdad when he disappeared in mid-April. In mid-May, the terrorist Zarqawi posted a video on his web site, Al Ansar. The grainy pictures showed a bearded and gaunt Berg, clad in an orange prisoner jumpsuit, sitting in a white plastic chair in front of a beige wall. Five men clad in black, with facemasks and green chest vests holding AK clips, stood behind Berg as Zarqawi proclaimed retaliation for the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Then shouting "God is great!" Zarqawi drew a long knife and leaped upon Berg. There was a scream, and a few seconds later Berg's severed head was placed on his bloody torso. The gory videotape made the prime-time news on Al Jazeera.

And to all that we can now add

Sarhan boasted of having planted more than 200 bombs for attacks on U.S. troops, a claim he later happily repeated to Cook... He had started attacking the Americans in the spring of 2004, motivated by news of the American abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.

...as did many others. US deaths in Iraq skyrocketed "post-abu Ghraib", and not until the surge operations did they return to pre-April 2004 levels. But prior to (and even throughout) the surge, US domestic pressures in response to the increasing violence in Iraq would lead many to demand withdrawal - and many more to anticipate it:

In January 2007, he had affiliated with al Qaeda after hearing its local mufti speak about the need to unify because the Americans were retreating from Iraq, and the insurgency had to stand as one to oppose the inevitable Persian attempt at domination.

"He" in this case being Sarhan Hassan Wisme, the "Robin Hood" who was motivated by abu Ghraib.

*****

"I still have a lot of bad feelings toward the press." Joe Darby says.

Me too.

Posted by Greyhawk / February 13, 2009 10:24 PM | Permalink