I first met Dan Cerrillo in a military courtroom in San Diego in 2004 back when I worked for The Associated Press. Dan, who passed away last month, was a veteran Navy SEAL. He was short and powerfully built with a body like an NFL center. He had been accused of prisoner abuse in Iraq—wrongly, as it turned out.
Dan was fearless. He was a breacher. His job in Iraq was to run up to a door in the middle of the night, attach an explosive charge, blow the door open, and charge in. One of his SEAL teammates testified to his courage in military court, holding back tears as he described Dan as the bravest warrior he knew. Dan had put his life on the line for his country, time and time again. He had the scars and a Purple Heart to prove it. But now he was being accused in a murder he did not commit.
Dan's SEAL platoon had gone on a joint CIA/special operations mission in 2003. The mission was to capture or kill an Iraqi man suspected in the bombing of the offices of Red Cross in Baghdad. Dan took the suspect into custody after a brutal fight. Then the SEALs handed the Iraqi over to the CIA. Within hours he was dead. The CIA interrogators had watched the man die in the shower room of Abu Ghraib prison.
The Iraqi's name, Manadel al-Jamadi, would have been lost to history but for one twist of fate. Some of the infamous members of the Army National Guard doing MP duty at Abu Ghraib decided to sneak in to the shower room and take photos of the Iraqi. You might remember the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal of a corpse packed in ice. The ice man, they called him.
When those photos came out, someone had to be held accountable. Guess who took the blame? Dan Cerrillo.
A few years later, Dan reached out to me. He had left the Navy and he wanted me to tell the story of what happened in Iraq. How his unit took the fall for what turned out to be a rogue CIA operation. How the CIA had escaped justice. How he and his teammates had been betrayed by one of their own, a liar and a thief. How his commanding officers had not stood behind him. How he had nearly died from the PTSD and the trauma he suffered from his time in Iraq. How he had finally found peace at the end through psychedelic therapy.
Dan passed away from a heart condition that he said was another legacy of his time in Iraq. So I guess this is as good a place as any to announce that I'll be dedicating my next book, The Ice Man, to Dan.
Oh Jesus...the best die, the mfkrs remain.