Stanley McChrystal on Torture | Hainan Fresh Start Group Co.,Ltd

Originally published in the August 2006 issue

"No meaningful insistence on accountability has been discernible from either the Gonzales Justice Department or the Rumsfeld Defense Department. It has been left to human-rights organizations to piece together the alarming history of the CIA and U. S. Army's illegal descent into torture."

—BRIGADIER GENERAL DAVID R. IRVINE (RET.)

The rented car blasts down the Strom Thurmond Highway toward Georgia, taking Marc Garlasco to his meeting with the Army interrogator. Balmy air pours in the window.

It is spring. Garlasco has one hand on the wheel, light glinting off his wraparound mirrored sunglasses. He is talking about his wife and kids as he passes through countryside so brimming with green life that it's strange and almost obscene to imagine his goal.

Garlasco works for Human Rights Watch, a group that started in 1978 to monitor the Soviet Union and recently expanded its mission to include America's war on terrorism. With a partner named John Sifton, in the past year he has helped expose the secrets of CIA prisons and extraordinary renditions and discovered Captain Ian Fishback, the decorated West Point graduate whose account to the Senate Armed Services Committee last fall pushed the Congress to pass a historic and politically charged amendment banning torture. Now Garlasco is chasing after a fresh story of prisoner abuse committed by members of the United States military. Until now, the Bush administration has insisted that all prisoner abuse has been caused by low-ranking rogue elements. But the man Garlasco is coming to meet has a story about abuses at a secret camp used by Task Force 121, the ultimate Special Ops team, the elite titanium tip of Donald Rumsfeld's spear. Their names are state secrets. Their work is closely monitored and highly systematized. And they acted under the supervision of ranking officers and even — in one extraordinary instance that Garlasco expects to be exploring tonight — with the direct encouragement of lawyers from the Army's Judge Advocate General's office.

At the hotel, he checks into his room and goes back down to the lobby to wait. It's a vast, dismal place that reeks of some kind of fake mortuary perfume.

Half an hour later, the interrogator arrives. He's broad and muscular and his hair is shaved to a small top patch in the military style. He's wearing civilian clothes. He tells Garlasco to call him Jeff, which is not his real name.

The hotel restaurant is empty and overlooks the empty lobby, but still they take the most hidden booth and make nervous jokes about the little private roof that makes it a perfect cone of silence. Ordering dinner, Jeff says he grew up in a conservative Christian family and became "secular," then got bored with college and joined the military. That was just before 9/11. The Army gave him some tests and decided he was smart enough to handle one of the hardest languages, Arabic. That's how he became an interrogator.

He is here now, he says, because his conscience tells him it's the right thing to do.

Then Garlasco pushes the button on a small digital recorder. "It is now Wednesday, May seventeenth, at 6:30 P.M. Jeff, I just want to have your permission that I can record you."

"Yes, you do."

"Okay, great," he says, warming Jeff up with a few questions about his military experience in Iraq.

"Your MOS?"

"97 Echo."

"97 Echo. You're a trained interrogator. That means that you went to Huachuca, you went to DLI out in Monterey, is that correct?"

Huachuca is the Army's interrogation school, DLI the language-immersion academy. Garlasco knows these things because he spent six years as an intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, where he interrogated prisoners, briefed the Secretary of Defense, and charted the coordinates for the bombing campaign against Saddam Hussein in the early days of the war. It makes him an ideal confessor for a soldier with a troubled conscience.

Jeff was in Iraq early in 2004. That January, a sergeant named Joseph Darby at Abu Ghraib prison gave Army investigators a disc of pictures of naked human pyramids and a naked man on a dog leash, the seed of evidence that grew into the prisoner-abuse scandal. After that, Jeff heard that things at Abu Ghraib were changing fast. They were still doing things in January that were impossible by '04 May, he says.

"Like what?"

"Like put a prisoner in a stress position, or cuff them to the middle of the floor and scream at them and throw a chair. Hooding, cuffing, transporting a prisoner by yourself — all of that was forbidden later on."

But at the very same time the Army was cleaning up Abu Ghraib under scrutiny, Jeff arrived at an elite secret interrogation facility near Baghdad where nudity and hooding and stress positions were still routine, where ranking officers knew exactly what was going on and promised to protect the interrogators at all costs.

Now, at this deserted hotel, Jeff is taking an outsider into that program for the first time.

The waitress brings salads. In the pause, Jeff reminds Garlasco that he's still enlisted. The United States government can bring misery to a soldier who crosses it, so he doesn't want to be too specific about exactly who he is or when he started his assignment, giving himself the cover of reasonable doubt. Sometime in February or March, then, he reported for duty at an unmarked compound. This was Camp Nama, the home of Task Force 121, the Special Ops team that chased Osama bin Laden and caught Saddam Hussein and would ultimately locate and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the self-described leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. It was Rumsfeld's baby, the Platonic ideal of his fast and mobile army. From its size to its mission, everything about it was and remains an official secret. Except for the concertina wire, Camp Nama was a nondescript cluster of buildings.

The only thing Jeff knew about Camp Nama was that he'd be able to wear civilian clothes and interrogate "high value" prisoners. In order to get to the second step, he had to go through hours of psychological tests to ensure his fitness for the job.

Nama, it is said, stood for Nasty Ass Military Area. Jeff says there was a maverick, high-speed feeling to the place. Some of the interrogators had beards and long hair and everyone used only first names, even the officers. "When you ask somebody their name, they don't offer up the last name," Jeff says. "When they gave you their name it probably wasn't their real name anyway."

To this day, Jeff has no idea of the true names of his superior officers. His supervisor was a colonel who called himself Mike, although Jeff is sure that wasn't his real name.

It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. "Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. 'Will they ever be allowed in here?' And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in — they won't have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators."

Given Task Force 121's history, that was a remarkable promise. Formed in the summer of 2003, it quickly became notorious. By August the CIA had already ordered its officers to avoid Camp Nama. Then two Iraqi men died following encounters with Navy Seals from Task Force 121 — one at Abu Ghraib and one in Mosul — and an official investigation by a retired Army colonel named Stuart Herrington, first reported in The Washington Post, found evidence of widespread beatings. "Everyone knows about it," one Task Force officer told Herrington. Six months later, two FBI agents raised concerns about suspicious burn marks and other signs of harsh treatment. Then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that his men had seen evidence of prisoners with burn marks and bruises and once saw a Task Force member "punch [the] prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention." Despite this record, The New York Times has reported that as late as June 2005, the Army dropped yet another investigation into torture at Camp Nama because of the confusion created by the use of "battlefield pseudonyms." The confusion extends to the name of the task force itself, which is also known as Task Force 6-26 and Task Force 145.

During his first six or seven weeks at the camp, Jeff conducted or participated in about fifteen harsh interrogations, most involving the use of ice water to induce hypothermia. By his reckoning, at least half of the prisoners were innocent, just random Iraqis who got picked up for one reason or another. Sometimes the evidence against them was so slight, Jeff would go into the interrogation without even knowing their names.

Then he got a few days off and did a lot of thinking. "I had time to step back and say, Wait, this is not right. This is not who I am. This is not the way I was brought up. This is not the way I want to remember myself and my actions."

Finally a small group of interrogators went to the colonel and told him they were feeling uneasy — he was a nice guy, always approachable, and it was completely informal.

The colonel snapped into action. Within two or three hours, a pair of JAG lawyers showed up and gathered the entire staff into the main duty room at Camp Nama. "It was very fast. It was like they were ready. I mean, they had this two-hour slide show all prepared, and they came in and gave it to us and they stopped interrogations for it."

"What kind of slide show?"

"It was a PowerPoint."

This is a remarkable event, in part because there was significant opposition to harsh interrogation within senior elements of the JAG corps, who feared that the Army was opening itself to war-crimes prosecutions. As Jeff tells the story, there were between twenty and thirty people in the room; a third were interrogators, the rest were leadership and support staff. Most had folding chairs but a few stood against the walls.

The lawyers did not dim the fluorescent lights, and as the PowerPoint slides flashed on the wall, starting with a review of the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions, the soldiers interrupted with questions.

"Is this legal?" they asked. "Are we going to be investigated?"

The military lawyers explained the distinction between prisoners of war and enemy combatants to the packed room, insisting that the methods they were using at Camp Nama were appropriate. The JAG lawyers explained that none of these interrogation techniques were inhumane because they left no lasting mental or physical effects.

But that prompted more questions. "What if another authority comes along that disagrees on the rules?"

The JAG lawyers insisted that wouldn't happen, that any punishment would come from the top down and never get to them.

Someone asked about the innocent people, the ordinary Iraqis who weren't enemy combatants at all.

"We're in a new era," one of the JAG lawyers said. "We're in a war on terror, and these are things we have to do."

(Officials at the Pentagon, the Special Operations Command, and JAG headquarters did not respond to repeated requests for comment on these events.)

Before Jeff, there was another soldier.

A year ago last May was about the worst time in Marc Garlasco's entire life. His wife was very ill, so clearly wasting away that one night he caught his toddlers playing "dead mommy." Then a call came one Friday afternoon at around four o'clock, just as he was planning to slip out of the office to get home early. "I've got this guy on the line who says he's in the military," a coworker told him. "I'm going to patch you in."

With this began the episode that would put Human Rights Watch at the center of a controversy that has threatened America's standing in the world and sullied the American national character. The stranger on the line said he served in Iraq and had seen some things that might have been violations of the Geneva Conventions, Abu Ghraib-type things. He had talked to his professors at West Point and an Army attorney but he still had some questions.

The man's voice was so serious and solid, Garlasco felt a hunch. This could be significant. "Okay," he said, playing it cool. "Send me your RFIs."

That's Armyspeak for "Request for Information." Soon they were clicking through ROEs and FOBs and the coworker dropped off the line. Then Garlasco backed off and gave the man his e-mail address. "Look, I don't have your number. I don't know your name. If you want to keep this on a telephone basis, that's okay — I don't want to get you in trouble."

It was a long weekend. Monday came and went. But late that night, a message appeared in his in-box:

Mark,

Here is a summary of my RFIs:

Which of the following activities violate the Geneva Conventions: stripping prisoners naked and chaining them to the floor, intense periods of exercise, sleep deprivation, hitting or threatening to hit prisoners?

How did the U. S. interpretation of the Geneva Conventions change after September 11?

Can you send me any government reports related to prisoner abuse or Abu Ghraib? (Taguba report, IG report, the recently released investigation)?

Documents showing that senior U. S. officials permitted harsh interrogations?

Is this a case of the Army trying to tell the truth and poor media coverage, or of the Army intentionally misleading America?

Are there other officers with similar concerns?

International case law (other countries' standards) on the Geneva Conventions. For example, I remember that a Japanese general (or admiral) was found guilty for War Crimes because of the Bataan Death March even though he was unaware of it at the time.

Documentation of warnings to U. S. officials not to change the policy. There are a lot of reasons not to do this and I suspect that at least JAG would have brought them up.

Constitutional case law on officer responsibilities to speak up . . . I don't know of any cases either way.

Congressional testimony about what is permitted before and after 9/11.

As it happened, all of the soldier's questions involved the very thing Garlasco was researching. Known as the doctrine of command responsibility and formalized by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, it is the idea that officers must shoulder the blame when they know their troops are committing war crimes and fail to take "all feasible measures" to stop them, the principle linking the Nazi trials at Nuremberg to Lieutenant William Calley and Slobodan Milo_eviÃ,Â´c. That history took an unexpected turn five months after 9/11, on February 7, 2002, when President Bush signed the memo titled "Humane Treatment of Taliban and Al Qaeda Detainees." Because Al Qaeda was not a High Contracting Party to the Geneva Conventions, he said, "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world." He especially rejected Article 3, the clause that forbids torture and other insults to human dignity. On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized twelve new methods of interrogation, including stress positions, hooding, nudity, and the use of threatening dogs — and also four harsher methods that were "legally available" but did not have blanket approval, including exposure to cold, mock executions of prisoners (or their family members), and the sense of drowning suffocation caused by the method known as waterboarding. A month later Rumsfeld rescinded blanket approval but still permitted harsh techniques as long as interrogators first asked permission.

For three years, not a single ranking military officer had raised a critical word in public about any of this. But the e-mail in Garlasco's in-box was signed:

"w/ Respect, CPT Ian Fishback."

In person, on a spring day, in a pair of cargo shorts and a KEEP ON TREKKING T-shirt, Ian Fishback looks like any twenty-six-year-old guy, maybe a high school swim coach. He's stocky and short, does the cowboy squint as he takes things in, talks about his plans for the weekend. It's no surprise that he grew up in a small town in northern Michigan, the gentle type who protected kids from bullies and campaigned against drinking at football games.

Then he puts on his uniform and presto, he's Captain Ian Fishback, West Point graduate, creased and gleaming with two Bronze Stars, son of a Vietnam veteran and married to an Iraq veteran, now training to go back to Iraq at the head of a twelve-man Special Forces team.

This is a man who has excelled at everything. He was voted most valuable player of the football team and president of his senior class in high school, made squad leader and company commander at West Point. The only regular complaint he seems to have inspired is that he is maybe just a bit too obsessed with following every rule to the letter.

In subsequent e-mails he sent to Garlasco, Fishback was relentless and detailed:

Afghanistan (Sep 02 - Jan 03): witness deliberately planned, harsh interrogations sanctioned by the chain of command. Prisoners are referred to as PUCs (persons under control) or detainees for the express purpose that they are not afforded Geneva Convention rights. My chain of command states this explicitly. Trained OGA (other government agency) interrogators conduct interrogations including sleep deprivation, intense exercise, and stripping prisoners and exposing them to elements. These activities violate the Geneva Conventions as I learned them at West Point.

Iraq (Sep 03 - March 04): while operating throughout Sunni triangle witness OGA interrogators take prisoner into a building and instruct infantry not to allow anyone into the building. I heard banging noises from inside the building and assumed that the prisoner was either being hit or being threatened to be hit. This activity took place in the middle of the day in the center of a cavalry squadron base camp. It was commonplace to hold family members until someone gave himself up in Iraq.

When he was in Iraq, Fishback thought all of this was permitted under the Bush administration's new "take the gloves off" policy. So when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke and Rumsfeld appeared before Congress to blame the conduct on rogue elements, Fishback got so steamed he wrote up a memorandum for the record and took it to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Marshall A. Hagen. It started off on the strongest possible note.

"The Secretary of Defense's testimony on Friday 7 May was inaccurate. He stated that the United States follows the Geneva Convention in regards to both the Taliban and Iraq. My personal experiences show this is not true."

Listing specific Geneva Conventions by clause and subsection, Fishback said that he worked with some of the most disciplined units in the world — the 82nd Airborne, the U. S. Army Rangers, and Special Operations Forces — and it was an insult to call them rogue troops. Furthermore, all three of his battalion commanders not only allowed troops to violate the conventions but "provided reasoning" why it was morally acceptable to do so. Therefore it was his duty and also his moral obligation to register an objection.

After a conversation that lasted nearly two hours and went nowhere, Hagen put his signature at the bottom of the document. "I have read and understand the above statement, dated 10 May 2004. I am aware of LT Fishback's concerns."

Fishback persisted up the ladder, going to his battalion commander to an Army lawyer to his congressman to Senator Carl Levin, a ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Some took notes, some shrugged him off, some asked him to consider the gray areas. The Secretary of the Army told him that corrective action had been taken.

That was the summer of 2004, when his wife was deployed to Iraq to work with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion. This was the same outfit that had helped set up the Army prison at Abu Ghraib one summer earlier. She heard that back then, they'd started right off with stripping prisoners naked and harsh interrogations, and anyone who expressed concern was scapegoated. Finally the battalion commander objected to the harsh techniques and requested new "rules of engagement," and it took four months to get the new ROE from the Pentagon, a shocking delay in the rule-obsessed world of the Army. And the new ROE called for the same harsh interrogation techniques as before.

It was another damning piece of evidence, especially because the famous night-shift abuse episodes began soon afterward. If the rules of engagement had taken a clear stand against torture, those terrible events might not have happened. So Fishback started up again, taking his concerns to the Inspector General at Fort Bragg — who told him to work within the system. Don't do something stupid, like go to the media. Why not wait for Vice-Admiral Albert T. Church to finish the official investigation?

So that's what Fishback did. But when Church issued his report in March 2005, it found "no link between approved interrogation techniques and detainee abuse" and blamed all the trouble with torture on rogue soldiers.

That's when Fishback contacted Garlasco.

Bottom Line: I am concerned that the Army is deliberately misleading the American people about detainee treatment within our custody. This behavior violates the professional military ethic of "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do" and it violates the constitutional principle of a government accountable to the people.

Marc Garlasco pushes the tape recorder across the table, a little closer to Jeff.

At Camp Nama, Jeff says, the tone was set right at the beginning, when he was still in his observing phase. One day they arrested a man who was believed to have given money to al-Zarqawi or helped found his resistance group. They dragged him into a courtyard between the buildings and stripped him naked, then sprayed him with a hose of freezing water and rolled him in a mud puddle and stood him up in front of an air conditioner. It was winter and bitter cold. Then they pushed him back into the mud puddle and sprayed him with the hose and did it all over again. "This happened all night. Everybody knew about it. People walked in, the sergeant major and so forth, everybody knew what was going on. And I was kind of walking back and forth seeing — this is how they do things."

Jeff wasn't sure how to react. It all seemed very official.

There was a range of treatment for prisoners available to the interrogators. If a suspect cooperated he might get the red room or the blue room or even the soft room, which had rugs and black leather chairs. But if he was difficult or important he went to the black room with the black door and black speakers in four black corners blaring earsplitting music.

"What techniques were authorized for the black room?"

"There was a checklist template on a computer with entries for environmental controls, hot and cold, strobe lights, music, working dogs, and so on. You would just check what you want to use and get it signed off, and they were always signed off."

"Do you know where those techniques came from? I mean the techniques you describe, are they in the Army Interrogation Field Manual?"

"No, they're not."

"So where did you get those from?"

"Oh, they're just not hard to come up with. There's really no manual to take somebody's clothes off. But you find it in Mosul, you find it in Baghdad, you find it at Abu Ghraib, you find it in Tikrit, you find it everywhere. Disrobing and these type of methods. But humiliation is on the interrogator's mind. You know, I want to humiliate this person to get them to talk to me. What's more humiliating than, I mean, just take off your clothes? That's just the first thing that pops into people's minds, apparently. And then you've got some ice water and pour the ice water on them and make them very uncomfortable that way."

The harshest frequent technique used at Nama was the use of cold water, Jeff says. Cold can be a serious torment to a naked man on a winter night; in Afghanistan, one prisoner died from hypothermia. Sometimes, to maximize the humiliation of the Iraqi men, American women would be brought in to watch them undress. Sleep deprivation was also used to an extreme extent, especially in Jeff's early days at Nama. They could keep a prisoner on his feet for twenty hours, and although the rules required them to allow each prisoner four hours of sleep every twenty-four hours, nowhere did it say those four hours had to be consecutive — so sometimes they'd wake the prisoners up every half hour. Eventually they'd just collapse. "This was a very demanding method for the interrogators as well, because it required a lot of staff to monitor the prisoner, and we'd have to stay awake, too," Jeff says. "And it's just impossible to interrogate someone when he's in that state, collapsed on the ground. It doesn't make any sense."

Since these techniques violate both the Geneva Conventions and the Army Field Manual, the all-important rule book that carries the force of military law, the Bush administration has attempted to finesse the issue by creating the distinction between "prisoners of war" and "enemy combatants," promising to reserve the harsh techniques only for hardcore Al Qaeda members and not for the Iraqis or even the Taliban.

This creates a conflict with existing laws, as well as a more practical problem. Camp Nama is a perfect example of this, because Task Force 121 was in fact looking for a hardcore Al Qaeda member, al-Zarqawi — but to find him, it was using the techniques reserved for the "worst of the worst" on ordinary Iraqi civilians.

"What was the level of occurrence of these harsh techniques? Was it weekly?"

"Sometimes it was every day if it was a multi-interrogation plan on one individual. Sometimes we didn't have anybody to talk to for maybe a day or two."

"Was the colonel ever actually there to observe this?"

"Oh, yeah. He worked there. He had his desk there. They were working in a big room where the analysts, the report writers, the sergeant major, the colonel, some technical guys — they're all in that room."

To Garlasco, this is significant. This means that a full-bird colonel and all his support staff knew exactly what was going on at Camp Nama. "Do you know where the colonel was getting his orders from?" he asks.

Jeff answers quickly, perhaps a little defiantly. "I believe it was a two-star general. I believe his name was General McChrystal. I saw him there a couple of times."

Back when he was an intelligence analyst, Garlasco had briefed Stanley McChrystal once. He remembers him as a tall Irishman with a gentle manner. He was head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the logical person to oversee Task Force 121, and vice-director for operations for the Joint Chiefs. That put responsibility right in the heart of the Pentagon.

Within the unit, the interrogators got the feeling they were reporting to the highest levels. The colonel would tell an interrogator that his report "is on Rumsfeld's desk this morning" or that it was "read by SecDef."

"That's a big morale booster after a fourteen-hour day," Jeff says with a tinge of irony. "Hey, we got to the White House."

Since leaving the church, Jeff had been going through a period of reexamining his values. Joining the Army was part of that, and he was always prepared to fight in a battle if it came to that. But this was different. One time, they had a prisoner who was obviously lying and stalling. He was one of those red-flag guys, the kind where a memo shot up the chain of command and everyone was waiting for the interrogation results. Supposedly he knew where al-Zarqawi was. Finally a soldier from the elite British SAS unit took him out to a kind of bunker behind the main building. Two or three other people followed, and Jeff's supervisor told him to tag along to keep an eye on things. "He gave the guy a pretty good pounding," Jeff says. "Nothing really in the face. A lot of stomach shots, and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh. A knee to the abdomen. Thrown against the wall and so forth."

Someone reported the beating to the sergeant major, but no one in a position of responsibility seemed to care much. "They weren't upset about any type of abuse or anything. They were just upset that he was interrogating, because he wasn't signed on to do that type of job."

Jeff saw the effects of beatings "all the time" in the captives as they arrived, usually after they were arrested by Delta Force members working for Task Force 121. "They'd fall on their knees and beg you not to kill them," he said, "completely terrified because of the way they were treated the previous forty-eight hours."

And it wasn't easy to clear suspects, either. One time Jeff told the senior interrogator that the guy he was interrogating was a chump, just a nobody picked up by accident, and the colonel dressed him down in an open meeting: "You don't know that! You just couldn't break him!"

Then for Jeff the doubting began.

"Even if these people did do these things, I don't want to do these things to them," he says. "I want to be humane about it. I want to keep my dignity."

Experimenting with more-traditional "soft" techniques like the appeal to a man's pride or to the futility of resistance, he found them both more successful and more reliable. At least you knew it was more likely to be genuine when a person decided to cooperate. "From what I've seen of harsh physical tactics," Jeff says, "[it's] harder to tell if they're just saying something to stop the discomfort. But if a prisoner breaks by the more-traditional means, you instantly know it.

"I'd done harsh interrogations, with little or no results at all. And I saw a lot of other people do harsh interrogations, too, and just never saw any type of results to speak of at all." But most of the interrogators in the camp were totally gung ho and wanted to go harsh on everybody. It was that kind of unit. "They thought that was their job and that's what they needed to do, and do it every time."

He began to feel more and more repelled, he says. I don't want to hang out with these people. I don't want to see them do these things.

By then it was spring and the Army was starting to hum with tales of Abu Ghraib, although it had not yet broken in the media — the first story would hit TV on April 28. But Jeff and some of the other interrogators started talking about the things they were doing at Nama. They weren't as sexually abusive as the things that went on at Abu Ghraib, but they were making a daily mockery of the Army Field Manual and the Geneva Conventions. "Nobody was stupid enough to take pictures, but you know, it's the same stuff," says Jeff. "You kind of got the sense that some people thought it was fun. And I think kind of an underlying thing was it was fun for people, but they had this guise of like it was always, you know, for the information."

Then the JAG lawyers were summoned by the colonel to put down feelings of unrest among a few of the Camp Nama interrogators by offering a legal justification for their conduct.

The lawyers brought up September 11 a lot, Jeff says. That put him off. "I never thought Iraq had anything to do with 9/11," he says. "But I was very annoyed with them because they were saying things like we didn't have to abide by the Geneva Conventions because these people weren't POWs. It just went against everything we learned at Huachuca. And just faulty logic, you know? Just really bad argument."

Over and over, Jeff says, the JAG lawyers told them that blame would never get down to their level. "It would go through us first," they said. "You will never have any culpability whatsoever."

That's the last thing the interrogators heard from the colonel, too. "It will never come down to you. You guys have nothing to worry about. You're not doing anything wrong."

Then he sent them back to work, case closed. The interrogators of Camp Nama were still working a few weeks later when the Abu Ghraib story blew up and Donald Rumsfeld went before Congress to insist that the United States was following the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.

Twenty years ago, Marc Garlasco was a pudgy science-fiction geek whose social life was going to Star Trek conventions for autographs. He toughened himself up in ROTC and went to work for the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he interrogated more than fifty Arabs and spent a year searching for a pilot who was lost in the first Gulf war. He was in his office at the Pentagon when the plane hit on September 11, and in the run-up to the war he was the guy who came up with the idea of putting the faces of Saddam Hussein and his top henchmen on a deck of cards. By the start of the war, the DIA put him in charge of high-value targeting, which is how he came to be watching on a monitor at the Pentagon when they dropped the bombs on Chemical Ali. The monitor flashed white and when the image came back, they saw two tiny flapping legs and took bets on how many times they would flap — after all, it was Chemical Ali, the guy who had gassed thousands of Kurds.

But when the bombing campaign ended, Garlasco abruptly quit the Pentagon and flew to Baghdad to visit the crater at Chemical Ali's house for Human Rights Watch. The bombs had hit unintended targets. And although he's the low-key type, always joking, it's not hard to read his emotions in his report.

In the early morning hours of Saturday, April 5, Abd al-Hussain Yunis al-Tayyar, a fifty-year-old laborer, went to his garden to get water. Moments later an American bomb slammed into the targeted house next door, destroying his house as well. He picked himself up and immediately began to search the debris. He spent the rest of the day working to pull the dead bodies of his family from the rubble of his home, finally reaching his dead son at 4:00 P.M.

The dead included:

As'ad 'Abd al-Hussain al-Tayyar, 30, son.

Qarar As'ad al-Tayyar, 12, grandson.

Haidar As'ad al-Tayyar, 9, grandson.

Saif As'ad al-Tayyar, 6, grandson.

Intisar 'Abd al-Hussain al-Tayyar, 30, daughter.

Khawla Ali al-Tayyar, 9, granddaughter.

Hind Ali al-Tayyar, 5, granddaughter.

Garlasco wrote down the names and ages, trying to keep his emotions off his face. Seeing the effects of his own handiwork might have changed him, might suggest some kind of conversion, but that's not exactly the case. Garlasco still maintains close ties to his old colleagues, even taking part in a conference on counterinsurgency at Fort Leavenworth this past February. He's probably the only human-rights activist who is also a member of the NRA, certainly the only one with a gun collection that includes an M4 assault rifle, a Sig P229, and his beloved Pardini competition pistol. He even ended his Chemical Ali report with a modest suggestion that is probably a first in NGO history. Since the size of the crater suggested "the smallest PGM available," a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb, it might be a good idea for the military to develop "smaller munitions with lower yields that will reduce collateral damage."

Somehow this odd collection of qualities made him the perfect man to meet Captain Ian Fishback. Setting up their first face-to-face meeting late last May, they chose a little town in Georgia called La Grange, a dot on the map with a Baptist church in every direction. It felt safe enough at 450 miles from Fort Bragg. They met at an Applebee's.

At first, things were awkward. Garlasco suggested a beer and Fishback said he'd prefer a lemonade. When the food came, Fishback said grace. I'm sitting with a Jesus freak, Garlasco thought. He began to wonder if this was some kind of religious crusade. Soon, though, they clicked on the peculiar mutual grounds of guns, military history, and Battlestar Galactica. But

Fishback balked when Garlasco asked to talk to the soldiers in his unit. He was their superior officer and it was his duty to protect them, he said. He wasn't ready to do a taped interview yet, either. And he didn't feel comfortable talking to any more Democrats. It might come off as partisan and soldiers shouldn't get mixed up in politics. He had to make it clear that he was fighting for a principle and not a party, and the best way to do that, he thought, was through a Republican. "Do you think you could set up a meeting with John McCain?" Fishback asked.

Garlasco flew home empty-handed. A month later, still trying to set up a meeting with McCain, he kept sending Fishback friendly e-mails:

"Hope all is well. I just watched Occupation: Dreamland. Really brings home how freaking random the violence is over there."

When Fishback got through to one of McCain's aides, he sent Garlasco an update.

"He agreed with almost all of my points and agreed that the Army is misleading Congress and America. I asked point-blank for reasons that I should not go to the media and he could give me none other than concern for my own career."

Finally Fishback agreed to a formal recorded interview. Flying to another anonymous southern city, Garlasco met him in a hotel room and hit the button on his little digital recorder. "It's the twenty-first of July, 2005, at four o'clock, and this is Marc Garlasco from Human Rights Watch, and I am with LG-Alpha from the U. S. Army. LG-Alpha, I just want to have your permission to record our conversation."

"You have my permission."

For the next four hours, he took Fishback through every detail of his story. "Did you actually observe detainees stripped?"

"Down to their underwear, yes."

"Do you know who stripped them?"

"No."

"Did you observe them placed in the stress positions?"

"Yes."

"And when you speak about sleep deprivation, how did you observe sleep deprivation?"

"They had a horn, a really loud horn. Any time the detainee would go to fall asleep they would blare the horn in his ear so that he had to wake up and they would do that until he stood up again and stayed awake."

"And you observed that?"

"I observed that once. I observed them carrying the horn to the detainees multiple times."

"And 'exposure to the elements.' Can you explain that to me a little bit better?"

"Leave them outside, in the cold, and it got pretty cold."

"How did you feel about the treatment of these people at the time?"

"My feelings were that it clearly violated what I had learned as the appropriate way to treat detainees at West Point. . . . You don't force them to give you any information other than name, rank, and serial number. That's the gist of the Geneva Conventions."

If he had thought they were supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions, he said, he would have immediately stopped what was going on. That is a failure of command responsibility that he feels acutely, and he can't understand why so few officers feel the same. "It is infuriating to me that officers are not lined up to accept responsibility for what happened. It blows my mind that officers are not. It should've started with the chain of command at Abu Ghraib, and anybody else that witnessed anything that violated the Geneva Conventions or anything that could be questionable should've been standing up saying, 'This is what happened. This is why I allowed it to happen. This is my responsibility.' That's basic officership. That's what you learn at West Point."

Last July, amid news of abusive interrogations at GuantÃfÂ¡namo featuring a disturbingly familiar story of a prisoner forced to wear a leash and women's underwear, John McCain started floating an amendment to ban torture.

In an immediate and surprisingly aggressive counterattack, Vice-President Dick Cheney began meeting with leading Republican senators to urge them to kill any such measure. To bring the point home, the White House threatened to veto any bill that would "restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice."

In August, Fishback finally agreed to put Garlasco in touch with some of his men. Working together, he and Sifton were able to tape six interviews that uncovered a host of ugly new details. "We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach," the soldiers said. "Pull them down, kick dirt on them . . . withhold water for whole guard shifts . . . withheld food, giving them the bare minimum like crackers . . . poured cold water on them all the time to where they were soaking wet and we would cover them in dirt and sand . . . broken bones didn't happen too often, maybe every other week. . . ."

It was much worse than anything Fishback had seen.

Dismayed, he went back for another meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Hagen, then one more. In an e-mail, he told Garlasco that the stuff on TV was breaking his heart. He couldn't watch the administration's "highly crafted talking points" without wanting to weep for his country. "I'm almost ready to go forward. Can you get to McCain?"

Finally, Senator McCain gave him an appointment. But just before the appointed day, a Senate staffer called the Pentagon to clear the interview. A few hours later at Fort Bragg, Fishback's supervisor asked if he had a pass to leave the base.

No, Fishback said, he hadn't applied for one yet.

Don't bother, the supervisor told him. You won't get one.

Also, the Army Criminal Investigation Division was going to begin an investigation into his charges. He would be needed to answer questions. So would the sergeants who talked to Garlasco and Sifton.

Starting with an implicit threat to the whistle-blowers, the CID promised to investigate only the beatings and broken bones, ignoring the larger point about the collapse of standards that gave rise to those extreme acts. Bristling under the pressure, Fishback gave Garlasco permission to pass on his much-revised Summary of Concerns. "I want Mr. McCain's office to control the information; use it however they want."

A week later, a Senate staffer leaked Fishback's story to Time magazine and Garlasco rushed out his report, which still referred to Fishback as "Captain C." With that, the story jumped onto front pages and TV news all over the world. Down at Fort Bragg, as CID investigators continued to grill Fishback, he allowed himself a rare burst of public frustration in a phone call with The New York Times. "They're asking the same questions over and over again," he said. "They want the names of the sergeants, and they keep asking about my relationship with Human Rights Watch."

But the story gave wings to McCain's amendment. He had honed it to its purest form, simply asking the Army to follow the rules in the Army Field Manual. On October 5, he rose to the Senate floor and paid tribute to Fishback. For seventeen months, "this one brave soldier" stood up and took a stand, he said, demanding an answer to a simple and essential question. What did America really stand for? What are the standards? It was like a scene out of a Frank Capra movie. "I thank God every day that we have men and women the caliber of Captain Fishback serving in our military. I believe the Congress has a responsibility to answer this call."

That afternoon the Senate passed his amendment with an overwhelming vote of ninety to nine — an unprecedented rebuke of the President of the United States of America by members of his own party.

It would be nice to end the story there, with the balance restored to our happy land of dreams. But the counterattack came swift and fierce. The first target was Fishback. The Army allowed one spokesman to dismiss his concerns as "verbiage" and another to say they were just philosophical, not a formal complaint. "It's just a shame that he didn't bring it to somebody in the chain of command in some kind of written form," said Major General Bill Caldwell.

Back at the office, Garlasco went through his hate mail:

"Your organization sucks donkey balls. Your entire organization is anti-American. Your bosses are assholes and your friends are scumbags."

And another:

"Fuck you dickless pukes."

And another:

"You bunch of bed-wetting assholes want to pamper monsters who kill women and children regularly and gleefully. Why don't you get the fuck out of this country and join your fellow shitheads in Paris?"

Then we tumble down the rabbit hole. In January, President Bush adds a "signing statement" to the McCain amendment that says that he will construe the law "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President," meaning that the White House will do exactly as it pleases and Congress be damned. A fight explodes over a secret ten-page section on interrogation being added to the new Army Field Manual, which subverts the McCain amendment by other means. In the trial of an Abu Ghraib dog handler, the general who originally introduced the snarling dogs and stress positions at the prison refuses to testify on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. The colonel who supervised the Abu Ghraib interrogators is given immunity to testify against his troops, which is like giving a drug lord immunity to testify against a small-time user. The Justice Department begins investigating reporters and their sources.

The pressure reaches down to John Sifton and Marc Garlasco. While Garlasco had been consumed with taking the testimony of soldiers, Sifton, a scholarly thirty-two-year-old lawyer, had committed himself to searching for the truth about the CIA's secret prisons. For his troubles, Sifton finds himself on a collision course with the government.

In February he receives a solid tip from a reputable source that the CIA has put a new secret prison in Mauritania. So he hops on a plane and two days later, he's walking up a flight of marble stairs at the presidential palace to meet a senior government official and ask a bunch of pointless questions about Mauritania's security arrangements before coming to the point. What about the secret prison?

The government official laughs. That sounds like nonsense to me, he says.

Back in New York, at the modest Empire State Building offices of Human Rights Watch, looking glum and tired, Sifton briefs Garlasco. "I went at it from every different angle. I set up interviews with all these officials and politicos and army people. They all said the old government would have done it in a heartbeat — not these new guys."

"So our source was wrong?"

"I think he got bad information."

A year and a half ago, through a reporter at Newsweek, Sifton got a look at a batch of flight logs that linked CIA planes to the secret prisons that hold several dozen "high value" prisoners, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11. The logs seemed to point to one location in Poland and another possibly in Romania. On a trip to Afghanistan last September, Sifton was able to connect the transfer of the ghost prisoners to a specific flight that had landed at a small airfield in Poland, which suggested that the world's most notorious terrorists were being held in an old Soviet-era intelligence facility nearby. A couple of reporters were coming to the same conclusion, but nobody had published anything. Twice the story was about to hit the press, first in the Washington Post piece that won Dana Priest a controversial Pulitzer prize. After the editor of the Post was summoned to a meeting with President Bush himself, Priest withheld the words Poland and Romania from her story when it was published in early November, adding this disclaimer: "The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U. S. officials."

Stunned by this, Sifton told every journalist who called where he thought the prisons might be. From then on, every newspaper or news broadcast that ran a story on the secret prisons in Poland and Romania attributed the information not to its own reporting but to Human Rights Watch.

Finally, on December 5, an ABC reporter named Brian Ross told Sifton he had made the breakthrough, confirming the prison sites through his own CIA sources. Would Sifton give a supporting quote on camera for the evening show?

He certainly would.

But when the show aired that night, it started with an announcement: "ABC News has been able to identify two countries in Eastern Europe where there were in fact CIA facilities to hold terror suspects in secret, but the CIA has asked ABC not to name the two countries, citing security concerns."

Once again, the information was attributed to John Sifton. But this time, his pale, earnest face was caught on camera. "The military and the CIA are not infallible," he told ABC.

That's when the Justice Department began leak investigations, and Sifton didn't even have the thin protection of being a journalist.

In the weeks that followed, he and Garlasco stopped talking freely on the phone. There were nervous jokes about wiretaps. They grew careful of e-mails. Their sources dried up.

On a crisp day in March, Garlasco is running cold calls from a thick duty roster of all the soldiers and contractors who have served at Abu Ghraib, complete with their home addresses and phone numbers — just a little telemarketing in hell. This number has been disconnected. . . . The number you are calling has call intercept.... The number you are calling has call intercept. . . . The number you are calling has call intercept....

Sometimes there are sudden breaks, tantalizing with possibility. Like the day Garlasco's sitting in his office when the phone rings and it's Sifton with a tip about a secret prison on a Navy vessel.

Garlasco finds it in a military database.

"It's part of the Military Sealift Command Fleet's Maritime Prepositioning Force, operating out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, where it prepositions Naval Mobile Construction Battalion equipment, fleet hospital equipment, expeditionary-airfield material, and headquarters-unit-support material. It also alternately holds evil Arab terrorist motherfuckers."

The source seems credible and the story has a certain logic, but the lead proves impossible to confirm.

Late in March, Garlasco flies to Little Rock to meet a soldier with a story about abuse at a detention facility in a small base in a town called Al Qa'im.

"We're here with Ben Allbright, and the date is the twenty-first. Ben, I just wanted to make sure that we have your permission to record you."

"You do."

"So you were there when Abu Ghraib broke?"

"We were at Habbaniyah at the time."

Allbright is twenty-five years old and already has eight years in the military, having joined as a junior in high school. He's bright and patriotic and says that he would blindfold prisoners and bind their hands, then put them in metal Conex boxes that were like big ovens in the heat and that he'd hit the box with metal rods or rocks to keep the prisoners awake.

Allbright saw some guys get beaten. "I mean beat — bloody nose, bloody face. One guy, it started off with a couple gut shots, a punch to the neck. The chair had a little bar down here, you know? Shoved him down, put the chair on top of him.

"There was definitely a push to get more intel," he says, a sense of "do what you have to do."

On April 9, Garlasco gets an update from Captain Fishback on the Army's investigation into his charges.

Marc,

Like I said on the phone, I won't be surprised at all if the investigation wraps up while I'm out in the field. I expect that the Army will try to portray HRW in a negative light. I am also still concerned about the investigation "scapegoating" younger soldiers with no officer accountability.

By now the plates are long gone, and Jeff has friends waiting. The mood turns for a moment. He doesn't know if it is true, Jeff says, but someone reliable told him they stopped the harsh interrogations after he left Iraq. Garlasco says he wants to give credit for the good things, and he would love to write that if he can confirm it. At the end of confessions like this there is always a feeling of emotional overflow, a kind of patriotic stir in the blood as these young men struggle with their vision of American decency. Jeff looks like a college boy with an especially aggressive sports buzz. Garlasco has the long patient mug of the coach who just decided to recruit him. "The things I saw were wrong," Jeff says. "I made a decision there in Iraq to start doing what I think is right. This is about clarity. Clarity is a good thing." They stand up and shake hands and there is a sense of mutual gratitude, a sense that something good has been accomplished. For Garlasco, the feeling lasts the whole time he walks down the hall and opens the door to his room and sits down at his computer, and also during the time it takes him to log on to Yahoo! News. Back in December, the Army said the new Army Field Manual would soon be finished and coming to a footlocker near you. It would answer Fishback's questions and McCain's amendment with some clear rules and old-fashioned standards. Then the delays began. Now it is being held up again, and this time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explains:

"There is a debate over the difference between a prisoner of war under the Geneva Convention and an unlawful combatant in a situation that is different from the situation envisioned by the Geneva Convention, and those issues are being wrestled with at the present time."

And so it is that Garlasco drives back up Strom Thurmond's insanely green highway and misses his connecting flight and gets stranded in the City of Brotherly Love, finally arriving home in a small plane that slips through a battery of black clouds. At home, his wife is healthy again. His five-year-old is thrilled with her birthday doll, which can drink from a bottle. On his answering machine, he finds a message from a friend at the CIA who wants to talk.