Fiasco, The American Military Adventure In Iraq Part 12

The U.S. Army vs. the principles of counterinsurgency In improvising a response to the insurgency, the U.S. Army had worked hard, and had found some tactical successes. There is no question that the vast majority of the soldiers in the field had poured their hearts and souls into the effort. Yet they frequently were led poorly by commanders who had been sent to do a mission for which they were unprepared by an inst.i.tution that took away from the Vietnam War only the lesson that it shouldn't get involved in messy counterinsurgencies.

It is striking how much of the U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in the late summer and fall of 2003 violated the basic tenets of such efforts. One of the essential texts on counterinsurgency is Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, written by retired French army Lt. Col. David Galula, who was born in Tunisia, raised in Morocco, and entered the French army in 1938. For the next two decades he received an advanced education in modern warfare. He served in World War II, studied Mao Zedong's guerrilla campaign in China in the late 1940s-and briefly was taken captive by the communists-and then spent eighteen months in Greece just as the civil war there ended. Finally, he fought the Algerian rebels in the late fifties. He wrote his book at Harvard University in 1963, and died four years later. In written by retired French army Lt. Col. David Galula, who was born in Tunisia, raised in Morocco, and entered the French army in 1938. For the next two decades he received an advanced education in modern warfare. He served in World War II, studied Mao Zedong's guerrilla campaign in China in the late 1940s-and briefly was taken captive by the communists-and then spent eighteen months in Greece just as the civil war there ended. Finally, he fought the Algerian rebels in the late fifties. He wrote his book at Harvard University in 1963, and died four years later. In Street Without Joy, Street Without Joy, a study of the French war in Indochina, military a.n.a.lyst Bernard Fall called Galula's book "the best of them all." a study of the French war in Indochina, military a.n.a.lyst Bernard Fall called Galula's book "the best of them all."

"Counterinsurgency Warfare is the primer and at the same time the bible" on the subject, agreed Terry Daly, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked with provincial reconnaissance units in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. "It describes what an insurgency is, how it differs from conventional war, and the steps to take to defeat an insurgency on the ground." is the primer and at the same time the bible" on the subject, agreed Terry Daly, a veteran of U.S. intelligence who worked with provincial reconnaissance units in Vietnam from 1965 to 1967. "It describes what an insurgency is, how it differs from conventional war, and the steps to take to defeat an insurgency on the ground."

Yet in 2003-4 the book was almost unknown within the U.S. military, which is one reason it is possible to open Galula's text almost at random and find principles of counterinsurgency that the American effort in Iraq failed to heed- especially in 2003-4. Take, for example, the divided structure of command, with both military and civilian chiefs of the occupation. "Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of single direction," Galula admonished in his clear, simple style. "A single boss must direct the operations from beginning to end." What's more, he noted, that overseer must be a civilian, because military actions must always be subordinate to political goals. In Iraq, the U.S. presence was controlled by no one person, and the civilian and military efforts frequently were at odds. For a counterinsurgency military, Galula prescribed a radically different approach than the one taken by the Army in Iraq. He warned specifically against the kind of large-scale conventional operations the United States repeatedly launched with brigades and battalions, even if they hold out the allure of short-term gains in intelligence. "True, systematic large-scale operations, because of their very size, alleviate somewhat the intelligence and mobility deficiency of the counterinsurgent," he wrote. "Nevertheless, conventional operations by themselves have at best no more effect than a fly swatter."

Galula did see one part of a country where a heavy military emphasis was required-its frontiers. "The border areas are a permanent source of weakness for the counterinsurgent," he cautioned. Yet the U.S. military neglected Iraq's frontiers for over a year, even though two neighboring nations-Iran and Syria- clearly were hostile to U.S. ambitions in the country and the region.

Galula also insisted that firepower must be viewed very differently than in regular war. "A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty; the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire." The U.S. military took a different approach in Iraq. It wasn't indiscriminate in its use of firepower, but it tended to look upon it as a good, especially during the big counteroffensive in the fall of 2003, and again in the battles in Fallujah.

One reason for that different tactical approach, of course, was the muddled strategic approach of U.S. commanders in Iraq. As civil affairs officers found to their dismay, Army leaders tended to see the Iraqi people as the playing field on which a contest was played against insurgents. Rather, Galula admonished, the people are the prize. "The population ... becomes the objective for the coun-terinsurgent as it was for his enemy," he wrote.

From that observation flows an entirely different way of dealing with the people. "Since antagonizing the population will not help, it is imperative that hards.h.i.+ps for it and rash actions on the part of the forces be kept to a minimum," Galula mandated. "The units partic.i.p.ating in the operations should be thoroughly indoctrinated to that effect, the misdeeds punished severely and even publicly if this can serve to impress the population." Even prisoners should be treated well, he added. He recommended this not on the grounds of morality but of military effectiveness: "Demoralization of the enemy's forces is an important task. The most effective way to achieve it is by employing a policy of leniency toward the prisoners." Fortunately for the U.S. effort, the insurgents frequently were even clumsier, abusing their own prisoners and alienating much of the international media.

Every indication is that the majority of U.S. troops did act well toward Iraqis most of the time. But the emphasis on the use of force, on powerful retaliation, and on protecting U.S. troops at all costs tended to push them toward harsh treatment, especially of detainees. Hundreds of small instances of abuse at bases across Iraq combined into a torrent that became the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Galula was hardly an outrider in counterinsurgency theory. Rather, his work amounts to an updating and refinement of methods British officers had developed during many decades of operations in India, Africa, China, and the Middle East. Sir Charles Gwynn, a British military educator, distilled those lessons in a 1939 textbook t.i.tled Imperial Policing, Imperial Policing, which prescribed four basic principles to govern the official response to an insurrection: Civil power must be in charge, civilian and military authorities must cooperate relentlessly, action must be firm and timely, but when force is required it should be used minimally. The U.S. effort in Iraq violated at least three of these rules for at least the first year of the occupation. which prescribed four basic principles to govern the official response to an insurrection: Civil power must be in charge, civilian and military authorities must cooperate relentlessly, action must be firm and timely, but when force is required it should be used minimally. The U.S. effort in Iraq violated at least three of these rules for at least the first year of the occupation.

c.u.mulatively, the American ignorance of long-held precepts of counterinsurgency warfare impeded the U.S. military during 2003 and part of 2004. Combined with a personnel policy that pulled out all the seasoned forces early in 2004 and replaced them with green troops, it isn't surprising that the U.S. effort often resembled that of Sisyphus, the king in Greek legend who was condemned to perpetually roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down as he neared the top. And so, again and again, in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006, U.S. forces launched major new operations to a.s.sert and rea.s.sert control in Fallujah, in Samarra, in Mosul.

It isn't clear why U.S. commanders seemed so flatly ignorant of how other counterinsurgencies had been conducted successfully. The main reason seems to be a repugnance, after the fall of Saigon, for dwelling on unconventional operations. But the cost of such willful ignorance was high. "Scholars are virtually unanimous in their judgment that conventional forces often lose unconventional wars because they lack a conceptual understanding of the war they are fighting," Lt. Col. Matthew Moten, chief of military history at West Point, would comment a year later.

Bremer vs. the world Back in Was.h.i.+ngton, frustration with Bremer was growing. "He ignored my suggestions," recalled Wolfowitz. "He ignored Rumsfeld's instructions."

One day late in 2003, while sailing in the Mediterranean, Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of Oracle, the big software company, received a phone call from the Pentagon: Can we borrow General Kellogg, who had retired from the Joint Staff and gone to work for the software giant? Sure, Ellison replied.

The CPA was limping, staffed at 54 percent of its estimated requirement. And, Kellogg remembered, many of those were "young, inexperienced, and didn't speak the language." He went out to try to fix things, and especially to repair a relations.h.i.+p with the U.S. military that had turned "adversarial."

Early on, Kellogg set up a back channel to Rice's office in the White House, in part because Rice had asked him to provide "ground truth," he said, and partly because he soon came to believe that Bremer was misleading Was.h.i.+ngton on how much progress he was making. "For example, Bremer would tell congressional delegations that there were one hundred thousand Iraqi security forces trained. I sent a back channel message to Wolfowitz and Rice saying, 'You're setting yourself up, this number isn't right, I am overseeing the training, and there are just ten thousand.' I also told them that electricity was much worse than they thought."

Rumsfeld's response was to send out survey teams that could determine the facts on the ground. Bremer objected to the first team, and its trip was cancelled, Kellogg recalled. The second team was led by Maj. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, an Army general fresh from working on training issues in Afghanistan. He reviewed the training of Iraqi police and military units and concluded that things weren't going well. U.S. commanders told members of the a.s.sessment team that "the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces," Bing West, a member of the team, noted in his account of U.S. military operations in Anbar province. The CPA was overseeing the training of the Iraqis while the U.S. military was trying to use those forces. To fix the program, Eikenberry decided, all training and employment of Iraqi forces should be consolidated under the U.S. military.

"You can't have disunity of command in the middle of a war," said the briefing Eikenberry's team prepared for Bremer, according to West, who helped write it. "We have split authority from responsibility."

When Eikenberry apprised Bremer of his plan to recommend the s.h.i.+ft, Kellogg recalled, "Bremer just unloaded on him: 'It's not gonna happen, it's wrong, I'll go to the president on this, I'll go to Rumsfeld.'"

West had a more succinct summary: "Bremer went bat s.h.i.+t."

But what Bremer didn't know was that Eikenberry held his own trump card. And he played it, taking the recommendation to Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the region-and his close friend since the two were roommates in the West Point cla.s.s of 1973. They had remained close ever since, a fairly unusual duo in Army culture, quirky intellectuals in a peer group that is, as one former officer once noted, more inclined to read Ba.s.s Fis.h.i.+ng Ba.s.s Fis.h.i.+ng magazine than serious military history. Both hold advanced degrees from Harvard and speak non-Western languages-Abizaid, Arabic, and Eikenberry, Chinese. A few months later Eiken-berry's consolidation recommendation was implemented, with Petraeus sent back to Iraq to oversee all training of Iraqi security forces, from the army and the national guard to border patrol, interior security, and police. magazine than serious military history. Both hold advanced degrees from Harvard and speak non-Western languages-Abizaid, Arabic, and Eikenberry, Chinese. A few months later Eiken-berry's consolidation recommendation was implemented, with Petraeus sent back to Iraq to oversee all training of Iraqi security forces, from the army and the national guard to border patrol, interior security, and police.

Another member of Eikenberry's a.s.sessment team was Gary Anderson, the retired Marine colonel who had b.u.t.ted heads with Bremer in the summer of 2003 when he mentioned Vietnam. Anderson, anxious to see what was happening on the ground, had been sneaking out of the Green Zone to go on patrol with Iraqi security forces. On the foggy morning of January 18, 2004, he headed across the Tigris River to patrol Sadr City with a platoon of Iraqis. He heard a blast from across the city. A pickup truck loaded with half a ton of PE-4 plastic explosives topped with a cl.u.s.ter of 155 millimeter artillery sh.e.l.ls had exploded at a checkpoint at the main gate of the Green Zone, killing twenty and wounding sixty others. When Anderson got back to the zone, he learned that he had been presumed to be one of the victims. "Everyone thought I was dead," he said later.

Holshek loses PFC Bush Every soldier who served in Iraq seems to have one day-even one moment- that stands foremost in their memory. For Lt. Col. Holshek, it was December 19 at 9:45 in the morning, during the last month of his tour, a few weeks after he had persuaded Col. Hogg to modify the 4th Infantry Division's tactics in Baqubah.

PFC Charles Bush, Jr., was an older private, a thirty-four-year-old from Buffalo, New York, who was a cook but had been retrained to man the Squad Automatic Weapon, a light machine gun, atop a Humvee. He was doing just that on a supply run to the big U.S. base at Balad, about 40 miles to the northwest. As is so often the case in violent incidents, what happened next isn't clear. The small, fast-moving, three-vehicle convoy was west of the Tigris and nearing Balad when the driver of the Humvee thought he heard AK-47s firing. The Humvees were armored, which meant that the soldiers were largely protected from small-arms fire. But it also meant that they were nine hundred pounds heavier than the Humvees the drivers were accustomed to, with a higher center of gravity.

When the driver thought he heard shots, he began to drive evasively, accelerating and swinging the wheel in order to present a more difficult target to hit. Just as he did, a front wheel caught a deep pothole, and the combination of speed and momentum flipped the vehicle forward, over its front end. Bush, manning the hatch gun, was crushed.

The incident hit Holshek hard just as the end of his unit's tour was in sight. "I was at the point of psychological exhaustion," he said, looking back from a year later. "All I wanted to do was get across the finish line, get my people home. I was beginning to doubt the mission, whether or not we were going to succeed. I was beginning to think about all the things we had done to work against ourselves- we had met the enemy, and he was us."

A month later, his tour of duty over and command of the unit transferred to his successor in a quick, middle-of-the-night ceremony at an airport in Kuwait, Holshek flew back to the United States. His first stop, even before seeing his own family, was Buffalo, where he visited PFC Bush's father-and delivered a case of Molson's beer to pay off a Super Bowl bet he had lost with Bush. It was his final act as a battalion commander. "I know what the cost is when you don't do this right," he said.

THE DESCENT INTO ABUSE.

SUMMER TO WINTER 2003.

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[image]V^/borne that was headquartered in Mosul, was told one evening late in 2003 by his intelligence officer that soldiers at their detention center had reported that one of their Iraqi prisoners had a broken jaw. As such incidents go, it was routine, similar to dozens of others that occurred across Iraq during the first phase of the American occupation. Yet a warning bell went off in Anderson's head. "I was suspicious," he said later. When people fall down, they sustain a broken nose or a cut chin, but jawbones are broken by a blow. "They said he fell."

What's more, news of the incident came just after the 101st had suffered its worst month ever of casualties while in Iraq, losing twenty-five soldiers in November, and Anderson knew his soldiers wanted payback. "Guys get p.i.s.sed when they see their buddies blown away," he said. He understood the emotion but felt strongly that it shouldn't be expressed through illegal or immoral acts. He ordered an informal inquiry, which soon turned into a formal investigation. On December 19, the investigation board concluded that the injury was caused either by the Iraqi's being struck or caused to fall. In either case, the harm was "the result of intentional acts by coalition forces."

The soldier directly involved was issued a letter of reprimand, but that was the least of the consequences. The investigation had uncovered a host of other problems. "The detainees were being systematically and intentionally mistreated," one investigator wrote.

"I saw the chief throw them down, put his knee in his neck and back, and grind them into the floor," one witness stated. "He would use a bullhorn and yell at them in Arabic and play heavy metal music extremely loud; they got so scared they would urinate on themselves. He was very aggressive and rough with detainees." Prisoners also were made to exercise until they couldn't stand, and then were doused in cold water. Some were made to wear sandbags on their heads on which were written "IED," signifying to soldiers-incorrectly in most cases, it appears-that their wearer had been caught trying to bomb U.S. troops.

Most important, investigators reported, the brigade detention center was being run by a military intelligence battalion untrained for the job. They knew how to interrogate prisoners, not how to guard and house them. Anderson and his commander, Petraeus, reacted with alacrity. Control of the detention facility was transferred "almost instantly" from the military intelligence battalion to a military police unit that knew how to manage prisoners, Anderson said. Latrines were moved closer to the holding area, to minimize the chances that prisoners would "trip" while being escorted. Fences were erected so detainees could move outside the building while still being controlled. Floodlights were installed. Also, the word went out across the division that abuse wouldn't be tolerated. "Tone is very important," Petraeus said much later. "People say this is a squad leaders' war. But what generals can do is set tone." In addition, to ensure a layer of oversight, Petraeus reached out to the Red Cross and to local religious, political, and civic leaders, inviting them to inspect the lOlst's detention facilities often, to talk to prisoners, and to bring any problems to his attention.

In the next two months there was only one case of possible abuse detected, Anderson noted, and that was an ambiguous situation. In his view, the quick reaction to the broken jaw incident was characteristic of the division's style. "We were constantly a.s.sessing our operations-were we doing it right, going after the right people, having the effects we wanted to have?" Anderson said. "Dealing with detainees was just part of this."

Communicating with violence In historical terms, the lOlst's broken jaw incident was minor, hardly worth remembering but for the swift and effective response of its leaders. Other divisions posted far different records of abuse than the 101st. It wasn't that soldiers were ordered to be cruel, it is that acts of cruelty were tolerated in some units, to the point that one officer in the 82nd Airborne, Capt. Ian Fishback, would later charge that it was systematic.

The atmosphere of official lawlessness in some Army units is significant for several reasons. It demeaned all those involved. It usually was militarily ineffective and counterproductive. And it tarnished the image of the United States and its military. When a policeman abuses or tortures a suspect, it inevitably diminishes the officer's humanity, wrote French army Capt. Pierre-Henri Simon, who was a prisoner of the Germans during World War II and, a decade later, a critic of his country's behavior during the Algerian revolution. But when a soldier uses abuse or torture, Simon argued, it is worse, because "it is here that the honor of the nation becomes engaged."

Much of the initial mistreatment of Iraqis by American troops seemed to be the result of soldiers' not being trained or mentally prepared for the mission. Faced with looting and unable to speak the language of the people they were trying to police, many soldiers flailed, using force ineffectively or brutally. "It is not uncommon to hear American soldiers explain that the only thing the Iraqis understand is 'force,'" Army Reserve Maj. Christopher Varhola, an anthropologist who traveled widely in Iraq, later noted. "For the most part, however, the people saying this do not speak Arabic and have had little or no interaction with Iraqis."

"Take them out hack and heat the f.u.c.k out of them"

An incident involving the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment captures the Army's predicament during the summer of 2003. It was the finest fighting force in the world for conventional combat, but it was ill-prepared for the irregular war in which it found itself. In this sense, abusive soldiers sometimes were victims of the Army's lack of preparation. One officer in the 2nd ACR, which was a.s.signed to eastern Baghdad in the summer of 2003, recalled to an Army investigator that when he brought looters back to his base, a commander there "told my sergeant that he didn't want them here. Then he told my platoon sergeant to 'take them out back and beat the f.u.c.k out of them'"-an account supported by other soldiers.

(The battery commander, whose name was redacted from doc.u.ments released to the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] under the Freedom of Information Act, responded to investigators, "I have never seriously told anyone to do that________ Even if I had said that, the NCO should never have thought I meant it.") Shocked, the sergeant went back outside and told his soldiers what the senior officer had said. "I told my squad leaders what Bulldog 6 told me to do with all the looters," the sergeant continued in a written statement. "I told them we are NOT going to do that." American soldiers were better than that, in his view. But, still wanting to make a point to the looters, he ordered that they be taken to the base's front gate, stripped naked, and set loose. He was trying to do the right thing, but he had violated the rules governing the treatment of detainees-an offense for which he was later charged.

The lack of preparation was also reflected in an incident involving soldiers in the 1st Armored Division. On the fly, they had devised a method of discriminating among the Iraqis they detained for looting: Those who when captured stared back at their captors were considered likely to loot again, but those who cried in fear were deemed to be deterred. On June 20, 2003, a lieutenant told soldiers to move a looter out of a truck. The officer was going to make him cry. "I was standing at the front of our truck when I saw [the name deleted] put the guy on his knees and put a gun to the back of his head," a soldier said in a sworn statement. "Then he bent down and said something to the guy. I did not hear because I was too far away. Then I saw him stand up ... and shoot. The barrel of the weapon was just high enough to miss the guy." The officer claimed in a statement that he fired his weapon to scare away a feral dog, but six soldiers testified that they hadn't seen any such animal.

Two nights later, a sergeant in the same platoon followed suit. This second incident occurred when an Iraqi man and his two teenage sons were detained for looting. The sergeant radioed his lieutenant, who asked, "Are they crying yet?" The sergeant then told the father he was going to shoot one of the boys, according to an Army investigator's report. Which one will it be, he asked?

"No, please shoot me, don't shoot my sons," the man responded, as would most fathers. The sergeant repeated the question twice, according to another soldier's affidavit. Then he walked one of the boys around to the far side of a truck, where they couldn't be seen, and fired his pistol by the boy's head. The three were then let go.

Many soldiers were troubled by such behavior. In this case, a soldier from another unit stated, "I reported the incident to my platoon sergeant and told him that I didn't want to work with these guys again."

The strategic confusion about why the United States was in Iraq, such as the Bush administration's insistence that the war was part of the counterattack against al Qaeda-style terrorism and so was somehow a response to the 9/11 attacks, may have led some American soldiers to treat ordinary Iraqis as if they were terrorists. Some indeed were. But many-certainly the majority of those raided and detained-were just average Iraqis, not necessarily sympathetic to the U.S. presence but not actually taking up arms against it, at least before they were humiliated or incarcerated.

The 3rd ACR in western Iraq Asia Times ran an extraordinary account of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's war, which was off the beaten track in western Iraq, far from most reporters, who tended to focus their work nearer Baghdad, especially as traveling the roads of central Iraq grew increasingly hazardous. ran an extraordinary account of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment's war, which was off the beaten track in western Iraq, far from most reporters, who tended to focus their work nearer Baghdad, especially as traveling the roads of central Iraq grew increasingly hazardous.

Lt. Col. Gregory Reilly, the commander of the regiment's 1st squadron, seemed to understand the nature of the war he was fighting. "I have to be very careful because what I do can have the opposite reaction from the intention," he told the magazine's Nir Rosen. But the 3rd ACR troops observed by Rosen during his two weeks with the unit in late September and early October 2003 didn't seem to him to translate that understanding into action. One raid began with a tank breaking down the stone wall of a house. Teams charged over the rubble and through the hole in the wall, breaking down a door with a sledgehammer and taking prisoners. None of the men detained in the first house was on the target list, but they were held anyway, Rosen reported. "House after house meets the same fate," he wrote. "Some homes only have women in them; they, too, are ransacked, closets broken, mattresses overturned, clothes thrown out of drawers." He continued: Prisoners with duct tape on their eyes and their hands cuffed behind them with plastic "zip ties" sit in the back of the truck for hours without water.... By daylight the whole town can see a large truck full of prisoners. Two men walking to work with their breakfast in a basket are stopped at gunpoint, ordered to "shut the f.u.c.k up" as their basket's contents are tossed out and they are questioned about the location of a suspect. The soldier guarding them speaks of the importance of intimidating Iraqis and instilling fear in them. "If they got something to tell us I'd rather they be scared," he explains. An Iraqi policeman drives by in a white sport utility vehicle clearly marked "Police." He, too, is stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid is complete. From a list of 34 names, Apache [the troop, the cavalry branch's equivalent of a company] brings in about 16 positively identified men, along with another 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 0830, Apache is done, and starts driving back to base. As the main element departs, the psychological-operations vehicle blasts AC/DC rock music through the neighborhood streets. "It's good for morale after such a long mission," Captain Brown [Justin Brown, Apache's commander] says. utility vehicle clearly marked "Police." He, too, is stopped at gunpoint and ordered not to move or talk until the last raid is complete. From a list of 34 names, Apache [the troop, the cavalry branch's equivalent of a company] brings in about 16 positively identified men, along with another 54 men who were neighbors, relatives or just happened to be around. By 0830, Apache is done, and starts driving back to base. As the main element departs, the psychological-operations vehicle blasts AC/DC rock music through the neighborhood streets. "It's good for morale after such a long mission," Captain Brown [Justin Brown, Apache's commander] says.

Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them-not knowing that the t.i.tles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam. The Crimes of Saddam. "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and a.s.sumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh s.h.i.+t," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub." "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and a.s.sumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh s.h.i.+t," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub."

The Army was understandably dismayed by Rosen's reporting. "I am devastated by the content of your article regarding my squadron," Lt. Col. Reilly wrote to the young reporter after the article appeared. The message conveyed, he said, was that "this unit has no respect for the Iraqi people and we are nothing but a bunch of hoodlums______ It is really too bad, we are trying hard to do the right things here and make a difference and now the reputation of my squadron is completely destroyed." Looking back on the article nearly two years later, during his second tour, Reilly said that the unit didn't dwell much on it.

Sgt. 1st Cla.s.s Gary Quails, a public affairs soldier, also wrote to Rosen. "I'm sure what you wrote was true, but I think you should tone it down, Nir," he began. "We came across as thugs in the article ... and I don't think that is an accurate portrayal. Yes, our soldiers were fired up, but if people were trying to kill you every day, you'd probably be fired up too."

In the following months, the Army itself would conclude that some other 3rd ACR soldiers had indeed acted like criminals. Nine soldiers from a howitzer platoon in the 3rd ACR's 2nd squadron, who were a.s.signed to checkpoint duty in western Iraq, allegedly stole thousands of dollars from Iraqis, but they weren't prosecuted because investigators couldn't locate the alleged victims, according to an internal Army doc.u.ment obtained by the ACLU. One private confessed that "the robberies occurred on nearly every TCP [traffic control point] he partic.i.p.ated in," Army investigators reported. Another soldier said the criminal acts were common knowledge in the platoon.

Capt. Shawn Martin was the commander of the regiment's Lightning Troop, which was a.s.signed to occupy the isolated town of Ar Rutbah in far western Iraq, where Maj. Gavrilis's Special Forces company had operated so successfully- and so modestly-that spring. Martin took a different approach. "He thought Ar Rutbah was his private domain," Lt. David Minor later testified.

The captain ordered soldiers to fire a weapon over a prisoner's head and hit people with a baseball bat that was called his Iraqi beater, according to subsequent testimony. One detainee held by Martin was bagged over the head, driven deep into the desert, and ordered to dig the hole that, he was told, would be his grave. Another was told, through an interpreter, to "kiss your family goodbye because I am about to bury you in the desert."

After a roadside bomb exploded and Iraqis in the area were detained and handcuffed, Martin "casually walked over to one of the detained Iraqi civilians and kicked him in his back, saying, 'Motherf.u.c.ker, did you have something to do with this?' and proceeded to kick him in his ribs at least an additional three times," a soldier in his company wrote in a statement. Martin "put his foot on the Iraqi civilian's neck and [said], 'Don't you know I'll kill you, motherf.u.c.ker?'" The a.s.saulted Iraqi was released a few hours later. Martin also threatened one of his own soldiers with a pistol for declining to fire a weapon near a detainee.

"I traveled everywhere" with Martin from mid-May to mid-June 2003, an Arabic-speaking Army lieutenant who was attached to the company as an interpreter said in a heartfelt statement given to investigators. "On many occasions I saw him treat Iraqis in a very disrespectful manner, to include leaders of Rutbah, such as the police chief. He would yell at them, cuss them out, belittle them in front of their subordinates, put his finger in their face, etc. On numerous occasions I saw him draw his pistol and wave it around in people's faces as he yelled at them. They had presented no threat to us and were involved in no illegal activity. I have heard him say on numerous occasions how all Iraqis are crooks and thieves and his actions toward them would indicate that he truly believes this. I have often apologized to Iraqis for his treatment of them."

Ar Rutbah, which had once seemed so tranquil and promising for U.S. forces, s.h.i.+fted into the loss column. By November 2004, insurgents were active in the town and attacking the police. In early June 2005 a Marine was killed by a roadside bomb in the town, and later in the month a soldier from the Army's 10th Mountain Division suffered the same fate. Later that summer another soldier was killed, and three more were wounded, by another bomb east of the city. Two Marines were shot to death there in October 2005, and another was blown up near the town a month later. On the first day of 2006, an Air Force F-15 conducted an air strike near it. In March 2006, an Army sergeant was killed there by another roadside bomb.

Col. Teeples, who commanded the 3rd ACR during its tour in western Iraq from April 2003 to March 2004, addressed Martin's wrongdoing with a written reprimand. But after a new commander took over, a review of the unit's operations in Iraq was conducted, and charges were brought in some cases. Capt. Martin was charged with ten counts of a.s.sault, obstructing justice, and conduct unbecoming an officer. He ultimately was found guilty of three counts of a.s.sault and sentenced to forty-five days of imprisonment and fined $12,000.

In another case, on November 26, 2003, four soldiers from the 3rd ACR put an Iraqi general, Abed Hamed Mowhoush, into a sleeping bag, sat on him, and rolled him around the floor. That abuse followed two weeks of brutal interrogations of Mowhoush by Iraqis working under U.S. supervision, who began with slaps and punches, then used a hose, and finally turned the interrogation into a melee in which "the room collapsed" on Mowhoush, according to testimony by Curtis Ryan, an Army criminal investigator. Redacted doc.u.ments obscure whether the Iraqis who did this were supervised by the U.S. military or by CIA personnel, but reporting by the Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Was.h.i.+ngton Post's Josh White found that they were members of the Scorpions, a group of Iraqis recruited before the war by the CIA to carry out small-scale subversion, and then employed afterward for help in interpreting and interrogations. The Scorpions had a technique of holding someone's tongue, then using a rubber band to wrap a rag around it, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to that information. "It just swells up inside your mouth like a giant Tampax," making the victim painfully thirsty, he said. Josh White found that they were members of the Scorpions, a group of Iraqis recruited before the war by the CIA to carry out small-scale subversion, and then employed afterward for help in interpreting and interrogations. The Scorpions had a technique of holding someone's tongue, then using a rubber band to wrap a rag around it, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official with direct access to that information. "It just swells up inside your mouth like a giant Tampax," making the victim painfully thirsty, he said.

Mowhoush was a former head of Iraqi air defenses who had walked into Forward Operating Base Tiger in Qaim two weeks earlier, seeking the release of his sons from custody. (At the time the U.S. military incorrectly stated that he had been captured in a raid.) He told interrogators at the outset that he was commander of al Quds Division, an organization supplying the insurgency with mortars, RPGs, and small arms. He died of smothering and chest compression, a subsequent Army report found. "He had what's referred to as 'facial suffusion,' which is blood basically being congested in the face," Maj. Michael Smith, a military forensic pathologist, later testified. "He also had numerous bruises on his chest, abdomen, arms, legs, one bruise on the head, and he also had several rib fractures"-five, in fact. After a lengthy investigation three of the soldiers were charged with murder, while the fourth was given immunity so he could testify against the others.

Teeples said that he didn't have enough troops to do a better job. "The year that we were there, we were in an 'economy of force' organization, and that means that we are put into a position to perform a very large mission with a small force," he told investigators. Nor did he have some of the right sort of troops, he added: "In the realm of detainees and interrogation, we did not have official interrogators."

This isn't to conclude that the 3rd ACR did terribly in its first tour in Iraq. Rather, what is significant is that despite the killing of a detainee, the abuse of others, and the taint of criminality in one unit, it was in the middle of the pack- not as effective as the 101st Airborne, but not as wanton as the 4th Infantry Division. Like the 82nd Airborne, it began badly, but unlike the paratroopers, it had a strong learning curve, and did better with the pa.s.sage of time.

"PUCf.u.c.king" in the 82nd Airborne "s.h.i.+t started to go bad right away," an infantry fire team leader in the 82nd Airborne later told Human Rights Watch, looking back at September 2003. Beating prisoners until they pa.s.sed out or collapsed quickly became routine at his outpost near Fallujah, Forward Operating Base Mercury, he said. "To 'f.u.c.k a PUC [for person under control, and p.r.o.nounced "puck"] means to beat him up," he recalled. "We would give them blows to the head, chest, legs, and stomach, pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day."

These attacks weren't inflicted to collect intelligence but simply to blow off steam. "Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport." One day in the fall of 2003, a cook came by, ordered a prisoner to hold a metal pole, and "broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that was a metal bat." Broken bones from beatings occurred "maybe every other week," the sergeant added. "I think the officers knew about it but didn't want to hear about it."

Another sergeant told the organization that he saw "hard hitting" and heard other things, but didn't pay much attention because "I was busy leading my men." He faulted the Army for putting soldiers in the position of watching over groups of prisoners that included men who had attacked them.

Gen. Swannack said in 2005 that all abuse allegations were investigated, but that he never received "any prisoner abuse allegations from Camp Mercury."

Trouble in the 4th Infantry Division Of all the major conventional combat units operating in Iraq in 2003, the one that most consistently raised eyebrows was Gen. Odierno's 4th Infantry Division. The warning signals, first picked up by the Marines who temporarily occupied Tikrit in April 2003, grew steadily louder. In July, a member of a psychological operations team attached to the 4th's artillery brigade, which was known as Task Force Iron Gunner, filed a formal complaint about how its soldiers treated Iraqis. (Artillery units seem to have been particularly p.r.o.ne to abuse in Iraq, perhaps because their core mission involves indirect fire, which may make them less comfortable with face-to-face confrontation.) Psyops and civil affairs are parts of the Special Operations Command, but in Iraq they were frequently placed under the command of regular combat units, such as infantry, armor, or artillery, where they often were unhappy with what they saw. In this case, the psyops specialist said his team was especially concerned that the brigade's commander was employing ineffective tactics. "Few of the raids and detentions executed by Task Force Iron Gunner have resulted in the capture of any anti-coalition members or the seizure of illegal weapons," he wrote. He placed the blame squarely with the artillery unit's commander, Col. Kevin Stramara. "This team has witnessed the colonel initiate these events." He charged that detention practices were capricious, sometimes based on the whim of the commander or because more than one hundred dollars in Iraqi dinars had been found in someone's possession.

One day in June, the psyops soldier said, a Bradley fighting vehicle had opened fire on a house, causing it to burst into flames. In a separate incident, a father of a twelve-year-old boy who had been accidentally killed by U.S. forces and then buried was made to dig up the body himself. In a subsequent sworn statement, this member of the team, whose name was blacked out in the doc.u.ments released by the Army, conceded that some of his charges were based on hearsay, but he stood by his bottom line: "My overall feeling of the treatment of the civilian population is negative. I go out to the civilian community about three times a week to communicate with the Iraqi population to get an overall a.s.sessment of how the people see us. Through interpretation the Iraqi people ask us why we are so unfair to them."

One of the sworn statements filed by a civilian employee of the Defense Department working at the brigade's jail-apparently as an interpreter, although he didn't say so-seemed to back up that conclusion. "I think 80 percent of the people we bring in are 'at the wrong place at the wrong time' [and] have no intelligence value," he said.

The Army's investigation found credible explanations for most of the specific charges. The house was fired on, the investigation concluded, because it had a bunker on its roof that was found to contain mortars and artillery rounds. The dead boy was buried because there was no place to keep his body, and unearthed without U.S. help because the family had asked that there be no U.S. partic.i.p.ation. But the fundamental question of whether the brigade's tactics were misguided wasn't addressed by the investigation.

Lt. Col. West joins an interrogation There was one unexpected bit of fallout from this inquiry: Investigators learned that Lt. Col. Allen West, commander of an artillery battalion in Stramara's brigade, had threatened one night in August to kill an Iraqi prisoner, fired his pistol next to the man's head, and been present while the man, a policeman, was beaten. Trying to obtain information about an alleged a.s.sa.s.sination plot against him in the town of Saba al Boor, West had personally questioned the policeman, who had been taken prisoner as a suspected member of the conspiracy. "We're here for one reason, and that's to find out who's trying to kill me," West said as he entered the detainee's cell, according to the young soldier who served as the gunner on West's Humvee.

Everyone questioned by investigators agreed that West then removed his 9 millimeter pistol from its holster and "told the detainee he would be shot if he did not provide information."

First the female interpreter kicked the man. Then the gunner grabbed him and shouted, "Who the f.u.c.k is trying to kill him?" Then, according to several accounts, everyone in the room but West beat the man for some time-"about an hour or so," according to one private.

During this a.s.sault, the Iraqi "kept contradicting himself, and he would say, T love you' to Lieutenant Colonel West, cry and scream," a staff sergeant told investigators.

West then took the man outside. "Either you answer the questions, or die tonight," West said, according to his gunner. He then had two soldiers hold the man's head inside a clearing barrel-a sand-filled oil barrel that is tipped sideways, and which soldiers use when returning to a base to ensure that there isn't a live round in a weapon's firing chamber. "If you don't start giving answers, I will kill you," West said, according to one of the soldiers who held the man. West then fired one or two shots past the prisoner's ear into the barrel. "As Lieutenant Colonel West pulled the trigger, the individual went stiff," this soldier added.

At that point, the senior sergeant present decided he had seen enough. "Sir, I don't think he knows," he said to West. ("It was something I had never experienced before and don't care to again," the sergeant first cla.s.s added in his statement.) "Put him back in the cell," West responded.

West then reported his actions to his commander, but nothing happened until the officers conducting the general investigation of the climate of command in the brigade stumbled across the incident. "I accept full responsibility for my actions and accept punishment," West wrote in a sworn statement a month later. "I acted in the best interest for my soldiers and yes myself." He ultimately was charged with aggravated a.s.sault, fined five thousand dollars, removed from his position as a commander, and then retired from the military.

"I was and am proud to say that I never lost a troop in a combat engagement in my time as a battalion commander," West, who went on to teach high school in Florida, said a year later. "We were tough, and it kept my men alive and Iraqis in my area secure____ We also let the local people know that we would not tolerate attacks and that our response would be quick and equitable, not wanton violence------------------------ Rules and regulations are necessary and proper, but I have never seen one cry at a funeral or accept an American flag after it had been taken off a casket of one of my fallen comrades."

That view represents the logical outcome of making force protection a top priority in U.S. military operations. Every commander wants to take care of his or her troops, and few of West's peers would fault him for his concern. Yet the relentless pursuit of that goal can undercut what should be a higher priority for a commander: winning. After all, if keeping soldiers alive is the top goal, that could be achieved simply by staying at home.

A shot in the stomach A subsequent instance of abuse in the 4th ID carried no such moral ambiguity. On September 11, a soldier shot a handcuffed Iraqi detainee named Obeed Radad in an isolation cell in a detention center in Camp Packhorse near Tikrit, supposedly when the Iraqi attempted to cross a barbed-wire fence. Radad had turned himself in nine days earlier, after learning that U.S. forces were looking for him. The bullet pa.s.sed straight through his forearm and lodged in his stomach. Eighteen hours later an Army investigator began to look into the incident, according to an internal Army summary of the case. Maj. Frank Rangel, Jr., the executive officer of a military police battalion attached to the 4th ID, was a.s.signed to investigate. He didn't believe the soldier's account that Radad was trying to escape. "I thought the suspect might have committed negligent homicide" and lesser offenses, Rangel said later. Lt. Col. David Poirier, Rangel's boss as commander of that MP battalion, which was based in Tikrit from June 2003 to March 2004, thought the shooter should be court-martialed. "This soldier had committed murder," Poirier said.

But the division commander, Maj. Gen. Odierno, overruled that recommendation, and ultimately the soldier was simply discharged from the Army for the good of the service. "I made the decision to dishonorably discharge him because of mitigating circ.u.mstances," Odierno said. "He was a cook, he didn't get proper training, and this detainee was very aggressive, a bad guy."

"They are terrorists and will be treated as such33 A few months later another 4th ID soldier, the staff sergeant overseeing the interrogation section at the division's main detainee holding pen in Tikrit, was reprimanded after an Iraqi was beaten with a baton while being questioned. "These acts could... bring extreme discredit upon the U.S. Army," Lt. Col. Conrad Christman, the commander of the 104th Military Intelligence Battalion, warned him in writing on November 6. The incidents of abuse of the detainee, his letter added, "show a lack of supervisory judgment on your part."

Surprisingly, the sergeant hurled those very conclusions straight back at his chain of command. His detailed and eloquent response amounted to a powerful critique of the U.S. Army's entire approach to Iraq. What previous cases of abuse had implied, he now stated explicitly: The Army wasn't prepared for this mission, so soldiers were being trained, equipped, and led poorly. "With the exception of myself, all interrogators at the TF IH ICE [Task Force Iron Horse Interrogation Control Element] were, and most remain, inexperienced at actual interrogation," wrote the sergeant. The division's intelligence efforts generally were "cursory," he added, because of "insufficient personnel, time and resources." Nor had the Army prepared the sergeant and his soldiers for the job they'd been a.s.signed. "Our unit has never trained for detention facility operations because our unit is neither designed nor intended for this mission.... [My soldiers] are a.s.signed a mission for which they have not trained, are not manned, are not equipped, are not supplied and ... cannot effectively accomplish."

What's more, he wrote, the inst.i.tutional Army hadn't even taken the proper steps to prepare for this kind of war. "To my knowledge, no FM [field manual] covers counterinsurgency interrogation operations."

But most striking from this NCO was a lengthy denunciation of the strategic confusion of those leading the Army in Iraq. This was, after all, not a stately war college symposium or a retired colonel pondering the past in the quiet of his study, but a staff sergeant writing in the field under near combat conditions responding to a formal admonition issued three days earlier. He laid the mess squarely at the feet of Gen. Odierno and other top officers in the 4th ID. "I firmly believe that [name of subordinate soldier redacted in doc.u.ment] took the actions he did, partially, due to his perception of the command climate of the division as a whole. Comments made by senior leaders regarding detainees such as, 'They are not EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War]. They are terrorists and will be treated as such' have caused a great deal of confusion as to the status of detainees." (Odierno said that he had made that comment not about detainees but in discussing combat operations. "In some cases, because of their acts, I would call them terrorists," he said. "And we would treat them as such, not in detention, but in operations." But that does not appear to have been the universal practice in his division's detention centers.) As was occurring elsewhere in Iraq, the NCO also reported signs of U.S. forces practicing a form of hostage taking, detaining family members of suspected insurgents in order to compel those suspects to surrender. "Personnel at the ICE regularly see detainees who are, in essence, hostages," he charged. "They are normally arrested by coalition forces because they are family of individuals who have been targeted by a brigade based on accusations that may or may not be true, to be released, supposedly, when and if the targeted individual surrenders to coalition forces." In fact, the U.S. tended not to keep its end of the bargain because the detention system was so badly operated: "In reality, these detainees are transferred to Abu Ghraib prison and become lost in the coalition detention system regardless of whether the targeted individual surrenders himself." This coercive taking of such prisoners had at least the "tacit approval" of senior leaders in the division, he said, because it had been discussed in front of them at briefings.

The military intelligence commander, Christman, impressed by the staff sergeant's arguments, came to think that it would be wrong to fault him for lack of supervision, and so decided against making the written reprimand part of the staff sergeant's permanent record. "It became apparent to me that since we were dealing with far too many detainees for the small number of personnel and the limited facilities we had available, a close supervisory relations.h.i.+p was not feasible," he later explained.

On September 21, 2003, Odierno issued a memorandum on the treatment of detainees to everyone in his division. "Soldiers will treat all detainees with dignity and respect, and, at the very least, will meet the standards for humane treatment as articulated in international law," he ordered. "While detainees in U.S. custody may be interrogated for intelligence purposes, the use of physical or mental torture, or coercion to compel individuals to provide information, is strictly prohibited_____ Neither the stresses of combat, nor deep provocation, will justify inhumane treatment."

That sounded good, but it isn't clear how much effect it had. A subsequent review by the Army inspector general said interrogators reported "detainees arriving at the cage badly beaten. Many beatings occurred after the detainees were zip-tied by some units in 4ID. Some units wouldn't take THTs [Tactical Human-Intelligence Teams] on raids because they didn't want oversight of activities that might cross the line during capture." An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that soldiers in Iraq sometimes would lie about injuries inflicted in interrogations, having learned that there would be no questions asked if they told medical a.s.sistants that the damage had been done during the capture.

Sa.s.saman's battalion reacts to a loss The most striking instance of abuse in the 4th ID occurred shortly after January 2, 2004, when Capt. Eric Paliwoda, an engineering company commander in the division's 3rd Brigade, was killed by a mortar attack while in his command post. Most losses. .h.i.t comrades hard, but Paliwoda's death was a particularly cruel blow. Like Lt. Col. Nathan Sa.s.saman, the commander of the battalion of which his company was part, Paliwoda, who stood out at six foot seven inches, had been an athlete at West Point. He was well liked. Sa.s.saman held the dying officer before putting him aboard a medical evacuation helicopter. Paliwoda "basically died in Nate's arms," said Col. Frederick Rudesheim, commander of the brigade that included Sa.s.saman's battalion.

"When Captain Paliwoda died, it pretty much ruined the war for me," Sa.s.saman said later in sworn testimony. "It ruined my experience in Iraq. Not that the previous deaths didn't, but he had been a friend of mine. I kind of leaned on him."

At West Point twenty years earlier, Sa.s.saman had quarterbacked the Army football team, taking it to its first bowl game, the 1984 Cherry Bowl, where Army beat Michigan State University, 10-6. He had made headlines back then for playing much of the season with three cracked ribs. He would take a similarly tough approach in Iraq.

Sa.s.saman and his men in the 1st Battalion of the 8th Infantry Regiment were already deeply unhappy with the situation around them when Paliwoda was killed. "I was angry because the previous battalion could not get the job done," Sa.s.saman would later say. "I mean, I actually went over there and tried to win. I tried to win the peace, and I actually really did try to help the Iraqi people." He pointedly added: "I can't say that for every other unit that was over there." He singled out another 4th ID unit, the 1st Battalion of the 66th Armored Regiment, which was operating just to the north of him in the unruly Tigris River city of Samarra. "They lost control," he said; "1/66 Armor failed in their mission. They failed in their mission to secure the city and to set it up for civil infrastructure projects."

Sa.s.saman had spent months trying to pacify the town of Balad, and thought he had done so, when he was ordered in mid-December to move most of his men about 30 miles north to Samarra, in an operation the Army dubbed Ivy Blizzard. "We went in hard," he recounted. "There is a reason why 1/8 Infantry was sent up there, and it wasn't to go up there and babysit. So we used explosive breaches on the target we went into.... No one really told us to win the hearts and minds, but they did tell us to bring the peace, to stop the insurgency, stop the fighting, so that we could make the life better and build projects."

While there he was quoted by the New York Times New York Times as saying, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." At that time, there was an incident, not known outside the unit, in which some of his troops forced an Iraqi to jump from a bridge into the Tigris near Balad. The man survived, complained, and later sought compensation. as saying, "With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." At that time, there was an incident, not known outside the unit, in which some of his troops forced an Iraqi to jump from a bridge into the Tigris near Balad. The man survived, complained, and later sought compensation.

While Sa.s.saman was fighting in Samarra there was trouble back in Balad, he testified at the court-martial of one of his subordinates, Lt. Jack Saville. "While I'm in Samarra, seven of my Iraqi police that we had trained, that Lieutenant Saville had trained, were killed in an IED blast. Four ICDC [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps soldiers], which are now considered Iraqi National Guardsmen, were killed, and we lost two Americans, Captain Paliwoda and then another engineer soldier up on the ad Diwanijah bridge." Then, at the end of the three weeks, he was told to head back to Balad and clean up the mess that had erupted there in his unit's absence.

He and his men were feeling put upon: "I mean, I just felt like, 'Does anybody want to help us here with the fight, besides 1/8?"'

The death of Paliwoda had left the unit in the mood for revenge-and it knew how to exact it. When the sun went down that chilly January night, soldiers from 1/8 set out to kill some specific Iraqis. At about nine-thirty a patrol from Sa.s.saman's Alpha Company was stopping drivers outside of Samarra who were violating the curfew. The patrol was led by Lt. Saville. The first car his men stopped had a family returning from a hospital, where the mother had just given birth. They were told to go home. The second was a city council member, who also was given leave to go. The third vehicle was a white pickup truck. Its two occupants were handcuffed, driven to the Tigris, and forced from the ledge of a pump house into the river, a drop of about six feet. One of the men, Zaidoun Fadel Ha.s.soun, age nineteen, drowned, according to the other, Marwan Fadel Ha.s.soun, twenty-three, his cousin.

When 1/66 Armor learned of the incident and pa.s.sed the word to Gen. Odierno, he tried to check it out but was lied to by his subordinates, he said. "I went to 1/8, and they said, 'Didn't happen,'" he recalled in an interview. "The bottom line on the Sa.s.saman case is ... he directed a cover-up of an incident, and didn't come clean until he realized the CID had figured it out."

Sa.s.saman's soldiers at first insisted that they had released the men-without mentioning that they had "released" them into the river. Pressed, they subsequently said they'd seen both men swim to sh.o.r.e and emerge. That was a lie, Saville later testified. In fact, he had gone out that night with an order from his company commander, Capt. Matthew Cunningham. "I understood he was directing me and my subordinates to kill certain Iraqis we were seeking that night who were suspected of killing the company commander in our unit," he testified, referring to the death of Paliwoda. "I understood that the order meant that if they were captured, regardless of the circ.u.mstances of their capture, they were not to return alive." That order was given twice that night, he added. Saville also testified that his company commander had given him a list of five Iraqis who "were not to come back alive" if captured during the patrol.