Chapter 5: The Romper 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.
Around four o’clock on November 4, 2003, the eight-vehicle convoy returned from the Jamadi mission to Camp Jenny Pozzi. They had stopped on the way back to check in again at the same Army forward operating base they had alerted before the mission.
All three detainees—Jamadi, his neighbor, and the CIA source—were unloaded at the Sand Pit. During the day, the sand pit hosted volleyball games. At night, it became a staging ground for interrogations.
The SEALs placed Jamadi and his neighbor face down in the sand. The green plastic sandbag still covered Jamadi’s head, and he was still wearing the same clothes he had on when Dan Cerrillo burst into his apartment. He wore pajama pants and a “dishdasha”—the traditional robe Iraqi men wore. His hands remained bound in plastic flexcuffs.
CIA personnel began to gather around Jamadi in the Sand Pit. “Tell us the truth,” they barked at the prisoner. “Don’t make us bring your family in here.”
The SEALs had seen the CIA do far worse. Albert Hong told investigators with the CIA Inspector General’s office that on other missions, he “observed CIA personnel threaten to kill the prisoner, followed by the CIA interrogator placing the muzzle of the weapon to the detainee’s hooded head to show he meant it.”
None of the Frogmen were clear about what rules applied to the agency. No one in Foxtrot Platoon had ever been told what to do when a CIA interrogator put a gun to a detainee’s head. Was this legal? It wasn’t clear. All the men of Foxtrot Platoon had to rely on was their limited training from Duane Dieter’s hooded box in Close Quarters Defense class and their gut sense of right and wrong. And that put them in risky territory.
There had been no internal discussion at Camp Jenny Pozzi about how Seal Team Seven would work with the CIA. It was never made clear to the men in Foxtrot platoon who the intelligence personnel were. They only used first names and never said whether they were with the CIA. “In all honesty, I really don’t know exactly who they were. I have my second thoughts about their provenance,” said Lieutenant Justin Legg. “Whoever these guys were, they seemed shady.”
In this leadership vacuum, confusion ruled. Enlisted SEALs like Dan Cerrillo assumed that he took orders from the agency, and it was a long time before anybody told him otherwise. “It’s that big grey area. If you know the law, you can probably read into it, but as an operator who has worked with agency guys, and Secret Service guys, and FBI guys before, every time I’ve ever worked with them, you answer to them. You may not answer to them directly, but they tell your team leader something, and you do it,” Cerrillo says. “None of us were ever briefed that these guys do not fall under your chain of command.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Ice Man to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.