Chapter 8: Cracking and Splintering
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.
Warning: This chapter contains graphic descriptions of torture and abuse.
It took me a long time to answer the question I heard in a military courtroom, the question that launched this book—“What position was Jamadi in when he died?”
In one sense, I have known the answer for years. As I first reported in 2005, Jamadi had died hanging from his shoulders, which looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets. But there was much I still didn’t know. For one, I didn’t know the name of the position in which Jamadi died. Every position or technique the CIA used had a name: waterboarding, attention grasp, cramped confinement, etc. I didn’t know whether it was authorized or not. I didn’t know much.
So I plunged headlong into the dark history of CIA torture. It was a small part of the story of Foxtrot Platoon and the Ice Man, but it was one of the most difficult pieces to understand. As I write this, I still don’t have all the answers, but I can shed some new light on one of the darkest corners of the spy agency’s dark history.
The first step was figuring out the position in which Jamadi died. The official records didn’t provide an answer, but one clue was the instructions the CIA personnel in the shower room had given the Army guards who escorted Jamadi to the shower room. “The OGA interrogator wanted Jamadi standing during interrogation, so leg shackles were attached to/from his handcuffs to the barred window of the shower room,” Mark Nagy, one of the guards, told investigators with the CIA Inspector General’s office. “Jamadi may have been able to kneel from this position, but to do so, his arms would have been stretched up and behind him.”
This position was what the CIA called forced or prolonged standing. The more prolonged the standing, the more the position crossed the line into torture. A 1956 study commissioned by the CIA concluded that forced standing for long periods produced “excruciating pain,” circulatory and renal failure, and psychosis. It was a “form of physical torture.” The CIA employed forced standing nevertheless throughout the Cold War and the War on Terror.
The technique had come, oddly, from Communist prisons. Albert Biderman, a social scientist with the US Air Force, examined how North Korean and Chinese interrogators had attempted to elicit false confessions from American prisoners of war during the Korean War. One form of “torture” experienced by many Air Force POWs was forced standing. “Returnees who underwent long periods of standing and sitting, however, report no other experience could be more excruciating,” Biderman wrote in a 1956 study in the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine.
Forcing someone to stand for long periods changed the nature of an interrogation, Biderman found. In the torture of popular imagination (think extracting fingernails), the interrogation session was a contest of wills between the interrogator and the victim. Forced standing was something different. It turned the interrogation into an internal conflict, the victim’s struggle “against himself,” Biderman wrote. The source of the pain was not something the interrogator was doing, Biderman wrote, but something the victim was doing to himself.
The CIA found forced standing appealing for the same reason its Communist adversaries did. It was seen as more humane than, say, delivering electric shocks. In a paper for the Air Force, Biderman expanded on this notion of techniques that salved the conscience of torturers. Forced standing was consistent with the “mythical principles of legality and humaneness important to the Communists,” Biderman wrote. “Adherence to these principles protects the interrogator from potential punishment at some future for ‘mistreating prisoners.’” His study was quoted approvingly in declassified CIA interrogation manuals written in 1963 and 1983.
In the 1960s, the CIA employed forced standing on Yuri Nosenko, a KGB defector. Nosenko had been the officer responsible for the KGB file on Lee Harvey Oswald, and he assured the CIA that the KGB wasn’t involved with Oswald or the Kennedy assassination. Some in the agency, including James Jesus Angleton, the head of counterintelligence, doubted that story and suspected Nosenko of being a Soviet plant. With the approval of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the CIA kept Nosenko in isolation for 1,277 days to “break” him, during which the KGB defector was forced to stand for long periods to force him to “confess.”
Two decades later, CIA interrogators also used and taught forced standing during the agency’s dirty wars in Central America. It was one of the techniques taught in a program called “Human Resource Exploitation”—a euphemism for interrogation, which was a term the CIA decided to abandon in 1981 due to its unsavory connotations. First exposed by reporters at The Baltimore Sun, the Human Resource Exploitation program taught interrogators in at least five Latin American countries to “create unpleasant or intolerable situations” using sleep deprivation, forced standing, isolation, threats and fear, and other tactics to destroy a subject’s ability to resist. The agency terminated the program in 1986 amid allegations of human rights abuses.
During the war on terror, it resurfaced again. It was the primary technique employed on ten high-value al Qaida detainees in 2003, according to a memoir by the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services released in 2016. The CIA kept high-value detainees standing for up to four days and fitted them with diapers. The technique produced compliance, but it also produced edema in the lower legs.
As the CIA began to use forced standing again in the war on terror, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, aware of the potential dangers, drafted specific guidelines for the position. The Office of Medical Services specified that detainees were to be shackled with their hands below their hearts and in front of their bodies—not behind their backs like Jamadi’s were. If the detainee could no longer support himself, the forced standing was supposed to end immediately.
The Office of Medical Services was concerned that detainees forced to stand for long periods would fall asleep hanging by their arms. It turned out their worries were misplaced. The detainees did not fall asleep while hanging by their arms, even after several days of standing. “This resilience actually deprived them of an effective counter-measure because had they simply allowed themselves to ‘collapse’ their weight onto their arms, the standing would have been discontinued,” the chief of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services noted. That’s not what happened in the Abu Ghraib shower room. Jamadi collapsed onto his arms and died.
The CIA’s use of forced standing in Abu Ghraib spilled into the rest of the prison. The evidence for this is perhaps the most famous image from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. The guards forced an Iraqi prisoner clothed in a pointed black hood to stand on an MRE box with arms outstretched. Electrical wires are attached to his fingers and his penis. “I was joking with him and told him if he fell off, he would get electrocuted,” said Sabrina Harman, one of the MPs who also photographed Jamadi’s corpse in the shower room. The purpose was to keep the prisoner, whom the MPs called “Gilligan,” awake. Harman testified that it was the job of two other enlisted men to “do things” for military intelligence and the CIA and “get these people to talk.”
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