Chapter 7: The Shower Room
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.
Dressed in his ill-fitting orange jumpsuit, Jamadi was escorted by two Army guards to the shower room in Tier 1-B for interrogation. One guard recalled that Jamadi was “groaning and breathing heavily” as if he was out of breath. The other had a different recollection. "The prisoner did not appear to be in distress," Specialist Kenner said. "He was walking fine, and his speech was normal.”
It was close to six o’clock in the morning when Jamadi arrived at the shower room. Dawn was starting to break over Baghdad. CIA interrogator Mark Swanner made it clear he wanted Jamadi to be kept standing during interrogation. One of the guards left and fetched some leg irons. The MP attached one end of the leg irons to the prisoner’s handcuffs that bound his wrists behind his back. The other end was affixed to a barred window in the shower room about five feet off the ground. Jamadi could remain standing, but if he tried to sit or kneel, his arms would be stretched painfully above and behind him.
Senior officers at Abu Ghraib had allowed the CIA to break the rules in another critical way. The CIA was allowed to interrogate the prisoners without any Army personnel present. The agency did not want anyone from the military to sit in their interrogations. “This would open our interrogators to liability,” a military operations officer explained. It was an acknowledgment by the agency that it was operating way beyond the bounds of military and human rights law. There were to be no witnesses. The Army guards left the room.
After the CIA had been alone with Jamadi in the shower room for an hour or so, Swanner called out to the Army MPs for help.
“This guy doesn’t want to cooperate,” the interrogator said.
A change of shift had taken place during the interrogation in the shower room. Sergeant Walter Diaz responded to the call for help. Diaz had been assigned to the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib. Back home, he worked security for the State Department. On November 4, 2003, he was the sergeant of the guard on the day shift, supervising the enlisted MPs.
Diaz entered the shower room and noticed that Jamadi’s knees almost touched the ground. Almost, but not quite. The prisoner was just “hanging” with his arms wrenched painfully up behind his back. Swanner explained that he wanted the prisoner’s handcuffs repositioned so that he would be forced to stand during interrogation. Diaz went off to get help. He returned with Specialist Dennis Stevanus. The two men struggled to lift Jamadi for a while. Then they called for additional help from Sergeant Jeffrey Frost.
Frost was stunned by what he saw when he entered the shower room. According to Frost, the CIA interrogator had told the MPs that Jamadi was faking injury—“playing possum.” As they struggled to reposition Jamadi, the prisoner slumped forward. His arms were wrenched painfully behind him in a way he had never seen before. Frost was surprised Jamadi's hyperextended arms didn't "pop out of their sockets."
The three MPs struggled to lift Jamadi and reattach his handcuffs to the barred window in the shower room. "He didn't stand up," Frost later said in an interview. "His arms just kept on bending at this awkward—not awkward position, but it was—you know, I was almost waiting for a bone to break or something and just thinking, you know, this guy—he's really good at ‘playing possum.’ And then after we lowered him down and took our hands off him, that's when kind of we realized something may be wrong."
Specialist Stevanus said he thought Jamadi was faking injury because he had seen other Iraqi prisoners do just that. He pressed hard on a pressure point on the prisoner’s jaw. There was no response. “There’s something wrong here,” Diaz told the CIA interrogator.
Diaz felt the prisoner’s chest but did not detect a pulse. He lifted the green plastic sandbag on Jamadi’s head. The detainee’s face was swollen. One part looked “deformed.” Stevanus grabbed a cup of cold water and dumped it on Jamadi’s head. No response. The guards released the shackles, lowered Jamadi, and removed the nylon bag on his head. Blood gushed from his mouth “as if a faucet had been turned on,” one guard recalled.
There was silence in the room. Diaz looked at the interrogator and told him, “This guy’s dead,” Diaz said. “It’s on you.” He turned and walked out of the room.
“No one’s ever died on me before when I interrogated them,” Swanner told the guards.
The interrogator whipped out his cell phone and started making calls.
“They were just normal like every other day when they are finished with interviews,” Stevanus said. “After we found out he was dead, they were nervous. They didn’t know what in the hell to do.”
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