Chapter 6: Ghost Prisoner
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.
The CIA Suburbans took Jamadi to Abu Ghraib prison, a 45-minute trip from Camp Jenny Pozzi. The CIA usually drove up to a small alcove in the rear of the prison. Someone had stuck a walkie-talkie outside the door. The CIA would hit the call button. The guards would let them in.
Jamadi entered the prison nude from the waist down, shivering in the pre-dawn cold. An MP on duty that night watched the CIA personnel grab Jamadi by the hood and shove him through the door. The guards referred to the CIA prisoners as “OGAs,” which stood for other government agency. “1 OGA Brought in,” the Army prison guards noted in their log book. The CIA’s prisoners usually showed up wearing a sandbag for a hood and little in the way of clothing, as they had typically been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night.
Leading the CIA contingent was Steve Stormoen, head of the Detainee Exploitation Cell in Iraq. Swanner, the short, overweight interrogator, followed Stormoen into the prison. Trailing along with Swanner was the blond-haired Arabic-speaking translator and two of the bodyguards on the Global Response Staff, Tom Ahlborn and Paul Chavez.
Upon arrival at Abu Ghraib, Manadel Jamadi was placed in a holding cell a short distance from the back-door entrance to Abu Ghraib the CIA used. Stormoen and the agency bodyguards left the prison. Mark Swanner and his translator went to get a cup of coffee.
Abu Ghraib, as the BBC aptly put it, was a square kilometer of hell. Abu Ghraib had been designed by an American architect, and it looked like an old US prison with cellblocks and tiers. It stank of death and the sewage pipes that ran beneath it. Sometimes the smell was so bad that the US Army guards wore scarves over their faces. There were scorch marks everywhere from fires set after Saddam had emptied the prison before the invasion. Under Saddam, the cells were so overcrowded that prisoners took turns sleeping on the bunks in eight-hour shifts.
Thousands of Iraqis had been executed at Abu Ghraib. Many thousands more were tortured. There was a specially designed room where hangings took place. Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general who oversaw Abu Ghraib after the invasion and was punished for leadership lapses, recalled the hanging chamber in the prison vividly. “You walk into the hanging chamber and it takes your breath away,” Karpinski told me. In the center of the room was a raised platform with an iron trapdoor in the floor and a noose suspended above it. The prisoners would climb six concrete steps and would be fitted with the noose. A lever opened the iron trapdoor with a loud clang. Rumsfeld liked to show off the chamber on his press tours to the prison. “Drop the door, Karpinski!” Rumsfeld would call out. “Let them hear it!” Karpinski’s aide would pull the lever, and the press would gasp. Rumsfeld loved it.
The morale of the prison guards was already abysmal before the arrival of the ghost prisoners. Mortar fire from insurgents regularly rained down on Karpinski’s soldiers in the prison and surrounding camps. There were so many mortars fired so regularly that the guards would argue about what size it was while it whistled toward them. Soldiers were working 15 days in a row without a break. The reservists who guarded the crowded prison had temporarily put their lives on hold for six months. They were expecting to go home in May 2003. Six months became a year. They were overwhelmed, under attack, and largely unsupervised.
Coffees in hand, Swanner and the translator returned and started yelling at Jamadi, peppering him with questions. Where were the weapons? A staff sergeant on duty said Jamadi appeared lucid and talking. He wasn’t resisting. There was “no need to get physical with him.” Another Army MP described the scene vividly. “I could see the prisoner in the corner of the cell in a seated position like a scared child with the translator and interrogator leaning over him yelling at him," reported Army Specialist Jason Kenner.
After a few minutes of shouting, the CIA team asked the MPs to remove Jamadi’s flexcuffs. This took a bit of work. The plastic cuffs Cerrillo had used to bind Jamadi's wrists were so tight it was difficult to cut them off. Swanner and the translator removed what remained of Jamadi’s nightclothes.
The yelling resumed about the weapons while Jamadi sat now completely naked except for the green sandbag on his head. After a few minutes, Mark Swanner and his blond translator told the MPs to take the prisoner for further interrogation. The MPs dressed Jamadi in an orange prison jumpsuit with short sleeves and legs cut off around the knees. The jumpsuit was too small; several people noticed it lifted Jamadi’s buttocks, giving him a “wedgie.” The guards were told not to remove the sandbag covering Jamadi’s head. They handcuffed the prisoner’s hands behind his back with a pair of steel handcuffs and shackled his feet with a pair of leg irons. This was a common procedure for the CIA’s prisoners.
Some of the agency detainees had soiled themselves during their capture and needed a shower. The shower had the added benefit of getting the detainees to talk, as no hot water was available. If the CIA interrogation team stayed behind, that meant the prisoners were going to be interrogated.
There was a medical clinic at the prison staffed with doctors and medics. As was the case with other agency detainees, however, Jamadi was never given a medical exam. His name would not be entered into the prison’s official register. He would not be given an internment serial number.
Jamadi was one of the CIA’s “ghost” prisoners in Iraq. These prisoners were kept away from the Red Cross, the organization responsible for ensuring that detainees were being treated humanely, as required by the Geneva Conventions. The official military inquiry into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, led by Major General Antonio Taguba, found that the practice of ghosting was “deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law.”
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