Immediately sensing the importance of these new captures and concerned something might fall through the cracks, Wayne had flown down to Baghdad to ensure everything was properly sorted out, and that a plan was in place to prioritize the detainees and work through the extensive material found on the target. Now, he briefed Scott, M.S., J.C., C.M., who was the officer in charge of the screening facility, and me on his initial conclusions.
The one-page slide he showed had a map and a few bullet points summarizing the target. Also on the slide were pictures of each of the captures. Their faces were those of older men, not twenty-year-old thugs.
“This is very interesting,” Wayne continued. “Only one phone.” To find twelve Iraqi men in 2006 with only one phone among them was nearly impossible. One of the many irrigation canals that crisscrossed Yusufiyah’s lush farmland passed along the edge of the objective where they were captured. We later surmised that they must have thrown all the phones into the water when they heard our team approach. Or all but one of them was smart enough not to show up with a phone. In either case, it indicated savvy.
“This is not just a bunch of fighters,” Wayne said. “These guys are different.”
It wasn’t just the age of the detainees that piqued the interest of interrogators and analysts. By 2006, most of our intelligence people had been working Al Qaeda in Iraq for two years. Many had prior experience in Afghanistan, some in the Balkans. The best had made an art form out of reading detainees. While at the time still hindered by an almost complete lack of Arabic skills within our force, many had learned to quickly parse demeanor and came armed with enough understanding of the environment to recognize inconsistencies or holes that detainees deliberately left in their accounts. Almost immediately that night, those skills paid off. During the detainees’ initial questioning, the intel teams knew something was awry. The team could see them thinking at a higher level. In some the team sensed a stubborn but concealed professional pride, as if they wanted the Americans to recognize they were not mere thugs but had tradecraft.
Within a couple of days, all the Yusufiyah captures had been brought from Baghdad up to Balad. That week, the second of April, I walked over to the screening facility for one of the multiple meetings they held each day to review the current evaluation of each detainee. The pace of the meeting was rhythmic. With the detainee’s name, biographical information, and picture displayed on a large screen, the lead interrogator would make the case for why a detainee should be retained for another day in the task force screening facility, turned over to the larger Coalition-run facilities, given to the Iraqi court system, or released. The Department of Defense and CENTCOM had set firm policy limits on how long we could keep captives for screening. Outstations, like those in Fallujah or Mosul, could hold detainees only briefly before either releasing them or sending them up to our Balad screening facility, where we could keep detainees for only days before having to submit a written request to CENTCOM. When detainees were thought to be especially important, we could request authorization from the secretary of defense to hold them longer. The approval process was bureaucratic but necessary to ensure that detainees were not held for inappropriate times in temporary facilities and that every detainee was properly accounted for throughout the process.
The substance of these discussions and briefing slides was the product of an intense exploitation effort conducted in a honeycomb of adjacent rooms. Inside rooms for captured phones, documents, and computers, like surgeons over a patient, analysts huddled around the electronics and documents laid out on big stainless-steel tables. By design, they worked in the same building as the interrogators who questioned the men whose handwriting or names were on the documents and who were the onetime owners of the phones and computers.
As we evolved, the amount of talent and manpower we were able to put against detainees became a key strength. At this time, we had interrogators working both night and day shifts, so that important detainees were questioned during each cycle. Even at full capacity, our screening facility’s staff of analysts and interrogators was six times as large as the number of captives they oversaw. In stark contrast, at its fullest, Camp Bucca—the Coalition’s central-theater detention facility—held more than eighteen thousand detainees. As was common practice in historical counterinsurgencies, the United States used incarceration to reduce near-term violence. Although detention took fighters off the battlefield, these holding facilities unfortunately became incubation chambers in which the insurgency grew in intensity and commitment—where more hardened insurgents radicalized young Iraqis.