The road to Abu Ghraib - part two
Correspondent:: DrNerdware
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 20:48:07 +0000
--------
DrNerdware wrote:
> http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1339464,00.html
> Saturday October 30, 2004
> The Guardian
The road to Abu Ghraib - part two
Jon Ronson
Saturday October 30, 2004
The Guardian
A week or two passed. And then the other photographs appeared. They were
of Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib jail on the outskirts of Baghdad. A
21-year-old US reservist called Private Lynndie England had been snapped
leading a naked man across the floor on a leash. She featured in many of
the photographs. It was she who knelt laughing behind a pile of naked
prisoners. They had been forced to build themselves into some kind of
human pyramid. The pictures could hardly have been more repulsive. Here
were young Muslim men - captives - being humiliated and overwhelmed by
what looked like grotesque US sexual decadence. It struck me as an
unhappy coincidence that Lynndie England and her friends had created a
tableau that was the epitome of what would most disgust and repel the
Iraqi people, those people whose hearts and minds were the great prize
for the coalition forces - and also for the Islamic fundamentalists.
The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, flew to the jail. He told the
assembled troops that the events shown in the pictures were the work of
"a few who have betrayed our values and sullied the reputation of our
country. It was a body blow to me. Those who committed crimes will be
dealt with, and the American people will be proud of it, and the Iraqi
people will be proud."
Lynndie England was arrested. By then she was back in the US, five
months pregnant, performing desk duties at Fort Bragg. Then word got out
through Lynndie England's lawyers that her defence was that she had been
acting under orders, softening up the prisoners for interrogation, and
that the people giving the orders were none other than Military
Intelligence, the unit once commanded by Major General Albert
Stubblebine III.
It was sad to remember all that nose-banging and cutlery-bending, and
see how General Stubblebine's good intentions had come to this. I called
the general and asked him, "What was your first thought when you saw the
photographs?"
"My first thought," he said, "was 'Oh shit!'"
"What was your second thought?"
"Thank God that's not me at the bottom of that pyramid."
"What was your third thought?"
"My third thought," said the general, "was 'This was not started by some
youngsters down in the trenches. This had to have been driven by the
intelligence community.' Yep. Someone much higher in intelligence
deliberately designed this, advocated it, directed it, trained people to
do it. No doubt about it. And whoever that is, he's in deep hiding right
now."
"Military Intelligence?" I asked. "Your old people?"
"It's a possibility," he said. "My guess is no."
"Who then?"
"The Agency," he said (meaning the CIA).
"In conjunction with PsyOps?" I asked.
"I'm sure they had a hand in it," said the general. "Sure. No doubt
about it. You know, if they'd just stuck to Jim Channon's ideas ... "
"By Jim Channon's ideas, do you mean the loud music?" I asked.
"Yeah," said the general.
"So the idea of blasting prisoners with loud music," I said, "definitely
originated with the First Earth Battalion?"
"Definitely," said the general. "No question. So did the frequencies."
Frequencies, he said, dis-equilibrate people. "There's all kinds of
things you can do with the frequencies. Jesus, you can take a frequency
and make a guy have diarrhoea, make a guy sick to the stomach. I don't
understand why they even had to do this crap you saw in the photographs.
They should have just blasted them with frequencies!"
On May 12, 2004, Lynndie England gave an interview to the Denver-based
TV reporter Brian Maas:
Maas : There's a photograph that was taken of you holding an Iraqi
prisoner on a leash. How did that come about?
England : I was instructed by persons in higher rank to "stand there,
hold this leash and look at the camera". And they took a picture for
PsyOps and that's all I know ... I was told to stand there, give the
thumbs-up, smile, stand behind all of the naked Iraqis in the pyramid
[have my picture taken].
Maas : Who told you to do that?
England : Persons in my higher chain of command ... They were for PsyOps
reasons and the reasons worked. So to us, we were doing our job, which
meant we were doing what we were told, and the outcome was what they
wanted. They'd come back and they'd look at the pictures and they'd
state, "Oh, that's a good tactic, keep it up. That's working. This is
working. Keep doing it, it's getting what we need."
I was beginning to wonder whether the scenarios had, in fact, been
carefully calculated by a PsyOps cultural specialist to present a vision
that would most repel young Iraqi men. Could it be that the acts
captured in the photographs were not the point, and that the photographs
themselves were the thing? Were the photographs intended to be shown
only to individual Iraqi prisoners to scare them into cooperating,
rather than getting out and scaring the whole world?
Joseph Curtis (not his real name) worked the night shift at the Abu
Ghraib prison in the autumn of 2003. When I talked to him he had been
exiled by the army to a town in Germany. The threat of a court martial
hung over him. He had previously given an interview about what he had
seen to an international press agency, thus incurring the wrath of his
superiors. Even so, against his own better judgement, and against his
lawyers' advice, he agreed to meet me, secretly, at an Italian
restaurant in June 2004.
We sat on the balcony of the restaurant and he pushed his food around
his plate. "You ever see The Shining?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Abu Ghraib was like the Overlook Hotel," he said. "It was haunted."
I assumed Joseph meant the place was full of spooks: intelligence
officers - but the look on his face made me realise he didn't.
"It was haunted," he said. "It got so dark at night. So dark. Under
Saddam, people were dissolved in acid there. Women raped by dogs. Brains
splattered all over the walls. This was worse than the Overlook Hotel
because it was real.
"It was like the building wanted to be back in business," he said.
Joseph remarked that he couldn't believe how much money was floating
around the army these days. These were the golden days, in budgetary
terms. This was not a side issue. In January 2004, the influential think
tank and lobbying group, GlobalSecurity, revealed that George W Bush's
government had filtered more money into their Black Budget than any
other administration in American history. Black Budgets often just fund
Black Ops - highly sensitive and deeply shady projects such as
assassination squads, and so on. But Black Budgets also fund schemes so
bizarre that their disclosure might lead voters to believe their leaders
have taken leave of their senses. Bush's administration had, by January
2004, channelled approximately $30bn into the Black Budget - to be spent
on God knows what.
"Abu Ghraib," Joseph was telling me, "was a tourist attraction. I
remember one time I was woken up by two captains. 'Where's the death
chamber?' They wanted to see the rope and the lever. When Rumsfeld came
to visit, he didn't want to talk to the soldiers. All he wanted to see
was the death chamber."
Joseph took a bite of his food.
"Yeah, the beast in man really came out at Abu Ghraib," he said.
"You mean in the photographs?" I asked.
"Everywhere," he said. "The senior leadership were screwing around with
the lower ranks ... "
I told Joseph I didn't understand what he meant.
He said, "The senior leaders were having sex with the lower ranks. The
detainees were raping each other."
"Did you ever see any ghosts?" I asked him.
"There was a darkness about the place," he replied.
Joseph was in charge of the super-classified computer network at Abu
Ghraib. His job didn't take him into the isolation block, even though it
was just down the corridor, but on one occasion he was invited to see
the model planes someone had made - and also to take a look at the "high
values". (The "high values" were what the US army called the suspected
terrorists, insurgent leaders, rapists or child-molesters.) He accepted
the invitation.
The isolation block was where all the photographs were taken - the human
pyramid, and so on. Joseph turned the corner into the block.
"There were two MPs there," he told me. "And they were constantly
screaming. 'SHUT THE FUCK UP!' They were screaming at some old guy,
making him repeat a number over and over.
"'156403. 156403. 156403.'
"The guy couldn't speak English. He couldn't pronounce the numbers.
"'I CAN'T FUCKING HEAR YOU.'
"'156403. 156403.'
"'LOUDER. FUCKING LOUDER.'
"Then they saw me. 'Hey, Joseph! How are you? I CAN'T FUCKING HEAR YOU.
LOUDER.' "
Joseph said that the MPs had basically gone straight from McDonald's to
Abu Ghraib. They knew nothing. And now they were getting scapegoated
because they happened to be identifiable in the photographs. They just
did what the Military Intelligence people, Joseph's people, told them to
do. PsyOps were just a phone call away, Joseph said. And the Military
Intelligence people all had PsyOps training anyway. The thing I had to
remember about Military Intelligence was that they were the "nerdy-type
guys at school. You know. The outcasts. Couple all that with ego, and a
poster on the wall saying 'By CG Approval' - Commanding General Approval
- and suddenly you have guys who think they govern the world. That's
what one of them said to me. 'We govern the world.' "
An aide to Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser,
visited the prison, to inform the interrogators sternly that they
weren't getting useful enough information from the detainees. "Then,"
Joseph said, "a whole platoon of Guantánamo people arrived. The word got
around. 'Oh God, the Gitmo guys are here.' Bam! There they were. They
took the place over." Perhaps Guantánamo Bay was Experimental Lab Mark
1, and whatever esoteric techniques worked there were exported to Abu
Ghraib.
Perhaps this is the way it happened: in the late 1970s Jim Channon,
traumatised from Vietnam, sought solace in the emerging human potential
movement of California. He took his ideas back into the army and they
struck a chord with the top brass who had never before seen themselves
as New Age, but in their post-Vietnam funk it all made sense to them.
Then, over the decades that followed, the army, being what it is,
recovered its strength and saw that some of the ideas contained within
Jim's manual could be used to shatter people rather than heal them.
Those are the ideas that live on in the war on terror
© Jon Ronson, 2004.
· This is an edited extract from The Men Who Stare At Goats, by Jon
Ronson, published by Picador on November 19 at £16.99. To order a copy
for £16.14, with free UK p&p, call 0870 836 0875. Jon Ronson's
three-part television series, The Crazy Rulers Of The World, starts on
Channel 4 on November 7.