My Share of the Task(121)
Intuitively I knew leadership was key, but in the first months after I assumed command, we tended to place outside “augmentees,” not organic members of TF 714, in leadership roles in the screening facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the spring of 2004 I realized that was a serious mistake. The thought had been that we lacked the in-house expertise, so we’d leverage outside experience. But we quickly found out that augmentees lacked it as well. Our screening operations demanded mature, seasoned leaders whom I could trust completely, so from that point on we assigned only leaders from inside TF 714, professionals I knew and trusted, to the responsibility. To reinforce oversight I sent a cadre of TF 714 leaders on routine circulations to every one of our locations that conducted screenings. On these unannounced trips, they reviewed facilities and procedures and came back with best practices that could be applied across the force. Higher commands like CENTCOM also routinely inspected us.
There were lapses of discipline, but they were never tolerated. Never a wink and a nod. During the difficult summer of 2004, when we tracked and interdicted the truck leaving Fallujah carrying the two men and the thirteen-year-old, whose actions indicated to us that they likely knew Zarqawi’s location in real time, we knew that information like this was extraordinarily time sensitive: Zarqawi would quickly learn of the capture and move, rendering the intelligence valueless. Within minutes the detainees were taken to a forward operating base in Baghdad for questioning, while other parts of the force were alerted in preparation of acting on any useful intelligence.
Although trained interrogators appropriately conducted initial questioning of one of the men, two members of the capture force monitoring the interrogation, anxious to get Zarqawi’s location, mistreated the detainee by electrically shocking him several times with a Taser. The incident was clearly serious, and our reaction to it reflected the mindset I sought in the force. Human Rights Watch recovered and reported on a June 25 e-mail from an FBI official to FBI headquarters stating that several days earlier a detainee with burn marks had been brought in from one of Task Force 6-26’s outstations (TF 6-26 was then the numerical designation for TF 16) and noting that “immediately this information was reported to the TF 6-26 Chain of Command, and there is currently a military 15-6 investigation initiated. This information was shared with all members working at the [screening facility] (military, FBI, . . . DHS) and all were reminded to report any indication of detainee abuse.”
At the conclusion of the investigation, we acted swiftly. Included in the punishment of those responsible was expulsion from the unit, a uniquely difficult blow for soldiers whose very identity relied upon being part of the finest unit of its kind in the world. They weren’t the first to fall short of our standards and values, nor were they the last. But each time we acted.
Over time, as our experience and expertise grew, detention operations became a noted strength for the TF 714. They had to be. For operators, risking their lives night after night, capturing insurgents was not a theoretical undertaking. A calculus that felt self-evident in a classroom in Connecticut was more difficult in blood-drenched Baghdad, when Zarqawi’s bombers were wreaking havoc on innocent civilians. Finding themselves face-to-face with a person they believed was an insurgent who might have killed comrades and who might possess the information needed to help end the fighting, our operators had to have confidence that capture and exploitation would help us stop the violence. I could never have sent our forces out every night, pushing hard for more and more raids, without a screening facility that produced results in a manner that stood up to rigorous scrutiny and, even more important, to the values we sought to embody.
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True to form, in January 2006 the men and women at the task force screening facility got valuable information from Abu Zar. Shortly after being picked up, he identified a grouping of buildings in Yusufiyah that he told interrogators Al Qaeda in Iraq periodically used for meetings. Specifically, Abu Zar said, Abu Ayyub al-Masri used the houses for shelter. Al-Masri was an Egyptian who had previously been part of Zawahiri’s al-Jihad organization before its union with Al Qaeda. His relationship with Zarqawi reportedly stretched back to 1999, when they met in Afghanistan. Now he was the second-in-command of Al Qaeda in Iraq, running its daily operations. He did so as the emir of the foreign-fighter network, which, together with car-bomb operations, was the bread and butter of Al Qaeda in Iraq. They filmed the suicide and car attacks for propaganda, which created revenue and more recruits for the wider network.