Chapter 13: Court-Martial
This is the latest chapter of The Ice Man, my book about the Navy SEAL platoon in Iraq that took the blame for a CIA homicide. The book is available only to paid subscribers.
On July 14, 2004, the leader of Foxtrot platoon, Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, was told to appear for an interview with Navy criminal investigators. Ledford was in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii for a new assignment with SEAL Delivery Vehicle Team One. That was a unit that operated an underwater submersible that could covertly deliver Frogmen ashore for secret missions.
Ledford arrived at the NCIS Pearl Harbor Office at 1 p.m. dressed for a Hawaii summer in his short-sleeved khaki uniform. He was led to a small office with no windows with room for only one desk and two chairs. A hum came from a large air-conditioning wall unit that seemed oddly out of place for such a small room.
As soon as he walked into the room, the NCIS agent, Eric Barrus, frisked Ledford. His previous interviews with NCIS and the Army criminal investigators were very laid back. Something had changed. Agent Barrus asked Ledford whether he knew why they wanted to speak with him. Ledford had heard rumors of an investigation involving photos. He figured that Jeff Harper was involved. Agent Barrus then said Ledford was accused of some serious crimes and read a list of a dozen allegations. At the top of the list was manslaughter.
Over three to four hours, the agents asked Ledford to go over the night of the Jamadi mission. When he was finished, the agents asked him to go over it again. Ledford asked if he could come back tomorrow. He was told no. The San Diego office wanted this statement ASAP. Ledford began to feel that he had no choice but to stay.
By now, the room was very cold. Ledford sat shivering in his short-sleeved khakis. He asked if they could turn down the AC.
They showed Ledford the photos that Harper had handed over to investigators. Ledford saw himself in one of the photos, crouching in front of Jamadi while holding up a can of Red Bull. Another photo the agents showed him, which Ledford had never seen before, he found disturbing. His assistant officer in charge, Lieutenant Justin Legg, and Jared Holforty pointed the barrels of their loaded handguns at Jamadi’s head. In that same photo, Holforty had also stuck a black-and-yellow sticker depicting two crossed ice axes to the sandbag covering the prisoner’s head. Agent Barrus said the photos had been up the chain of command, hinting that even President Bush himself had seen them.
Agent Barrus then started to interrogate Ledford. He told him was lying about what happened on the Jamadi mission. Other people had remembered the events of that night differently, the NICS agent said. One of Ledford’s men had accused him of hitting a prisoner at the Army forward operating base after Jamadi’s capture. Ledford was shocked. He suspected that Harper had fingered him. Harper would be willing to say anything to avenge the loss of his Trident for stealing a teammate’s body armor. Agent Barrus nodded that yes, that makes sense, but someone else was saying Ledford hit a detainee. Ledford was stunned. He prided himself on a good relationship with his men and couldn’t fathom why anyone would say that. He added that a bomb disposal technician, Nicholas Wilson, might have been the one to speak out. Wilson had been shocked at the levels of force the SEALs routinely used or in the way the CIA questioned prisoners.
Ledford had been trained to resist interrogation at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school. SEALs, Navy pilots, and other troops at high risk for capture were given a taste of life in a mock POW camp. They were hooded, locked in concrete cells, and forced to go to the bathroom in a coffee can. They had to deal with sleep deprivation, hunger, boredom, exhaustion, and isolation. They were waterboarded. A small number of people lost their minds in SERE school. Instructors were encouraged to be brutal. They were authorized to slap students in the face, douse them with water, and throw them against a plywood wall. James Mitchell, one of the psychologists who worked on SERE, would borrow some of the techniques taught in the course to design the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program.
While Ledford was trained for an enemy interrogation, he wasn’t ready for an interview by an NCIS agent. Weren’t they all on the same team? They all worked for the Navy. They were on a base in Pearl Harbor. Ledford’s defenses were down. He began to wonder if there was anything he did that someone couldn’t have mistaken for abuse. If there was, he had no clue what it would be. He told Agent Barrus that the only time he could remember doing anything was a prisoner was still talking despite being told to be quiet. Dan Cerrillo had told him about it and added, “Hey L-T, give this turd a knock.” It was clear to Ledford what Cerrillo was asking. He wanted Ledford to get the detainee to shut up. Ledford tapped the prisoner with the back of his hand on the shoulder and said “ezkot,” meaning shut up in Arabic. That was the only time he ever remembered touching a detainee. Ledford demonstrated on the NCIS agent, tapping him lightly on the shoulder with the back of his right hand.
Agent Barrus zeroed in on this episode. His demeanor became much more adversarial. “SEALs don’t do anything half-assed,” he said. Ledford’s “tap” had to have been more like a punch. Agent Barrus brought his boss, Bruce Warshawsky, into the interrogation room.
Agent Warshawksy gave a speech about his time as a Marine officer. While deployed in Somalia, Warshawsky said he had watched his men beat up a Somali they had captured who had been shooting at them. Warshawsky knew how things could get out of hand. Ledford had probably lost control of his men, Warshawsky suggested. When Ledford tried several times to interject to say that’s not what happened, Warshawsky told him to shut up and listen. Officers lose control of their men, the NCIS investigator told him. It happens and Ledford would sleep better at night if he just told the truth.
By this point, the interrogation was entering its eighth hour. The temperature in the room fluctuated wildly. This was environmental manipulation, a tactic the SEALs knew well from their prisoner interrogations in Iraq. It was freezing in the room when the AC was on. When it was off, it was sweltering from the heat of all the bodies in such a tiny room. The NCIS agents had been writing up a statement for Ledford to sign at the end of the interrogation. Ledford couldn’t remember when he had tapped the detainee on the shoulder. He wasn’t certain but he didn’t think it was the night of the Jamadi mission. It had happened eight months ago. The agents kept pressing: Was it possible that it was Jamadi? Ledford said it was possible but he didn’t think so. Agent Barrus typed in a few sentences saying Ledford had punched a prisoner in the arm.
Agent Barrus finished typing the statement and suggested to Ledford that he might want to put a personal statement at the end. The agent said it may help to say he was sorry for what his men did and take responsibility for their actions. Many people were interested in this case, Agent Barrus said, and such a statement might help mitigate things. Exactly who was interested in this case? He didn’t say.
Some of those people who Agent Barrus said were “interested” in this case worked in Langley, Virginia. One of the documents the CIA handed over in 2014 in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU was a copy of Ledford’s statement. The NCIS office in Pearl Harbor had faxed it over a few days after the interview. Some of those people whose testimony had helped “mitigate” worked in the CIA.
At the end of the statement, Ledford added a personal note:
“In regard to this incident, I believe there was a momentary lapse of judgment by my men and myself in striking our detainee. This was not a premeditated act on my part, and I did not observe any treatment that would result in his death. I am willing to submit to a polygraph examination to verify this account. In retrospect, allowing my photograph to be taken with the prisoner was probably an error in judgment, but at the time it was commonplace. As commander, I understand I am responsible for the actions of the platoon.”
Ledford read over the whole statement and signed his name at the bottom.
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