By Any Means Necessary: Veterans Talk Torture in the War on Terror

By John Tsukayama

If you thought the only way for you to return home safe was to embody the vilest evil, would you do it?

We’ve always viewed veterans as patriots who defended our nation and destroyed worldwide threats. As such, we would never imagine them as perpetrators of institutionalized evil. In times of war, they’re called upon to be their bravest selves. When times get desperate, they are forced to be their darkest. Few people know of the numerous abusive acts our soldiers have been compelled to take part in and how it ruined their humanity.

By Any Means Necessary dives deep into stories of how fourteen veterans went from justice-seeking liberators to unplanned abusers. Drastic hazing punishments desensitized soldiers to the extent that they soon had no problem inflicting such abuse. With implied authorization from superiors, some of them moved from replicating the hazing they experienced to committing torture and murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balone Publishing
• Release date: Jan 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781642377651

John Tsukayama

John Tsukayama spent twenty-four years as a specialist investigator, starting with the U.S. government. In his twenty-two year career in the private sector he led joint public-private investigation teams while exercising authority as a law enforcement appointee. John’s areas of practice concentration included private sector investigations of theft of goods, embezzlement of funds, drug use and sales in the workplace, and illegal discrimination. He also conducted public sector investigations involving financial crimes, public corruption, embezzlement of public funds, and political campaign fundraising crimes. In addition, John specialized in high-stakes threat assessment and management to prevent targeted violence. John formerly held the designations of Certified Protection Professional (CPP), Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE), and Professional Certified Investigator (PCI). John holds a PhD from the University of St. Andrews School of International Relations, as well as a Master of Letters in Terrorism Studies (Distinction) and a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (Political Science/History). Currently John teaches International Relations, Political Philosophy, and Terrorism Studies classes. He is also doing authoring and research in Political Violence, and is preparing to conduct research on American counter-intelligence during the Cold War.

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Scotland

INTRODUCTION

WHAT GOES THROUGH the mind of a soldier when considering whether to abuse an unarmed captive? What is the experience like for that soldier while abusing a person whom he believes to be a terrorist or insurgent? Is it the same if the soldier regards the captive as simply a member of a resentful, occupied population? And when, years later, while recounting the abuse and reflecting on its meaning with a stranger, does the soldier view those actions with satisfaction or chagrin? Is daily existence in the relative tranquility of the homeland peaceful or troubled by the war-time experiences? In short, what was the soldier thinking then, and what is he or she thinking now?

These questions lie at the heart of this book. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American soldiers and intelligence operatives were sent to the far corners of the Earth to hunt down and kill or capture those responsible for the outrages of the attack on the Twin Towers or who were deemed to pose a threat to the United States. Suspects were plucked from battle scenes in Afghanistan and Iraq and in clandestine operations in countries whose governments looked the other way. Captives were spirited to locations around the world where they were questioned by the Americans or their allies. Reports of torture, sexual humiliation, and killings came to light, none more spectacularly than the revelations of the abuses in Saddam Hussein’s infamous prison, Abu Ghraib.

Although the American government was quick to dismiss the military police guards at Abu Ghraib as rogue soldiers, the soldiers’ defenders pointed to a system and situation that ensured that abusive conduct was all but inevitable. The world was left to conclude that either abnormal individuals happened to be grouped together to play extreme frat house pranks, or the barrel into which honorable soldiers were cast had been rotten all along and thus produced bad apples. In any case, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and stories of detainees being water-boarded, chained in stress positions, or dying suspicious deaths in American custody pointed to the possibility that abusive violence was part of sanctioned institutional practices. It was also possible that such methods had been used not only in detention centers like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo but perhaps even by regular troops during the wide-ranging field operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

This book originates in the Detainee Interaction Study (DIS) that I conducted in 2011-2012 to understand the experiences of American military and intelligence operatives who had the choice to abuse captured enemies in the Counter-Terrorism (CT) and Counter Insurgency (COIN) campaigns after September 11, 2001. I interviewed veterans of military and civilian US forces who had first-hand experience with captured insurgents and terrorists in the so-called Global War on Terrorism.

Thirteen military veterans and one civilian intelligence operative agreed to tell their individual stories after being promised anonymity. Most did not engage in the perverse behavior seen in the photographs from Abu Ghraib. The study, however, documents that some of the fourteen study participants abused detainees in ways far more atrocious than did the Abu Ghraib military police guards. All were confronted with the choice to commit, eschew, or oppose abusive violence (AV). The military personnel all served in Iraq, and it was there that they gained most of their experience with abusive violence.¹ They all had opportunities to witness abusive violence against detainees and the general populace.

The study defined abusive violence as violence directed at people that is not necessary for immediate self-defense. This definition was meant to include violence and the threat of violence against non-combatants, detainees, and members of the public; it was not intended to include normal combat operations. The definition did not seem to confuse the study participants, some of whom did participate in traditional combat during the invasion of Iraq or while under attack in convoys, patrols, or raids. It should be understood that the definition addresses unnecessary force used against unarmed people. And indeed, none of the study participants mentioned armed persons when describing violence that they observed or committed.

The study used three main questions to understand the experience of Americans who committed abusive violence: Why did abusive violence make sense at the time to participants? How did abusers choose the method of abuse they employed, and how did they learn about possible methods from which to choose? How do veterans now view the abusive violence they observed or perpetrated?

This book is intended to contribute to the literature about counter-terrorism. For more than thirty years, terrorism research pioneer Paul Wilkinson wrote about the approaches he believed that democracies should use to respond to terrorism. He warned that unless government responses were lawful, governments would risk a loss of legitimacy and public trust in the administration of justice. Wilkinson addressed the US war-framing of post-9/11 counter-terrorism, the abandonment of criminal justice systems, and the rise of a view that even torture is justifiable. Wilkinson describes the problems at the heart of policies that countenance abuse:

By abandoning the due process under the rule of law and by violations of human rights of suspects, we betray the very values and principles [that] are the foundation of the democracies we seek to defend. We are also corrupting our democracies and those public officials, members of the military and others who are ordered to carry out such policies. We are also perpetrating major injustices in the name of national security.²

Wilkinson also noted that violations were useful to al Qaeda’s propaganda and recruitment campaigns by reminding potential recruits of the abuse of Muslim detainees at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

Research into terrorism should identify which measures are effective in combatting it. Research also should examine counter-terrorism measures that may have unintended or adverse consequences—what we might call Actions to Avoid. The impetus for the Detainee Interaction Study (DIS) was the failure of American military and intelligence services to control, or to intentionally permit, abusive violence in CT and COIN campaigns. The study focuses on individuals and on what Wilkinson described as the corruption of public officials and military service members who carry out policies that allow abuse and torture.

This book also takes up some of the research considerations first developed by Alex Schmid, a scholar of terrorism and former Officer-in-Charge of the Terrorism Prevention Branch of the United Nations. In 2007, Berto Jongman, a former Dutch Ministry of Defense analyst and longtime political violence researcher, updated Schmid’s list to include topics relevant to the DIS study. The category Counterterrorist measures and responses comprises:

• licit and illicit practices of interrogating terrorists;

• the prevalence of torturing terrorists to gather intelligence;

• the justification and effectiveness of a policy of terrorizing the terrorists (do to the terrorists what they do to innocents).

In this book I include descriptions relevant to the first subject, and while I offer no statistical insight into the second, I do analyze motivations and practical opportunities (such as commanders condoning abuse and small units working independently and without oversight) in CT and COIN campaigns that could foster widespread torture. The third subject is touched upon in the study at the personal level of individual actors, rather than the policy-setting echelons of armies and states.

Although this research is anchored squarely in the experiences of fourteen individuals who took part in major CT and COIN campaigns, their accounts can help us understand what Wilkinson describes as corrupting effects on the intelligence operatives who were told that the detainees did not enjoy the same rights as honorable captured soldiers. Others’ stories describe the effects on soldiers who are sent into combat with units primed to view the civilian population as hostile, and of protecting their soldiers as being dependent on waging counter-insurgency through the shock and awe mentality that was brought to bear against the Iraqi armed forces.

Since the public revelation of the Abu Ghraib abuse, much has been written about the steps taken by the American government to create a regime in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and at foreign detention centers operated by the Central Intelligence Agency that permitted physically and psychologically coercive interrogation of detainees.³ This book does not focus on such issues as state-level decision-making about detainee combatant status, legalistic opinions of what constitutes torture, or standard and enhanced interrogation techniques. Instead, it closely examines the thoughts and experiences of Americans who carried out CT and COIN initiatives, paying particular attention to the moments when abusive violence seemed a viable option.

Sources of Abusive Violence, Methods, and Reflections on Experiences

My study identified some surprising aspects of abusive violence from the participants’ reports. The participants described abusive violence mostly as a response to frustration, anger, or to the pressure to gather intelligence and suppress insurgency. They also described being almost completely unprepared to effectively interrogate detainees taken in a counter-insurgency campaign. Participants therefore did not commit abusive violence as part of carefully designed and controlled tactics. Instead, troops who committed violent acts were frustrated by their dealings with a people whom the Americans believed possessed information useful to identifying insurgents but who appeared to be stubbornly affecting ignorance to aid the enemy. The Americans, viewing everyone as either an active terrorist/insurgent or an enemy sympathizer, believed that harsh methods were justified to combat violence against US forces.

In many other cases, participants abused detainees and Iraqis in general simply because they could. They could because they had the overwhelming force of arms, the authority to exert powers of detention and transportation of detainees to secluded and sometimes illicit locations, and therefore the ability to abuse with impunity as long as their comrades remained silent. The participants described fear, frustration, rage, and a desire to reclaim power in an environment where insurgents could bomb or ambush American forces and avoid capture by disappearing into the populace. This classic counter-insurgency fighter’s problem, the unseen foe, caused anxiety, frustration, and anger.

The participants also described the weakness of official constraints on abusive violence, and the tacit or explicit encouragement by their immediate and senior commanders to forgo prohibitions in favor of being effective. The commanders, participants believed, signaled to troops that abuse, intimidation, and fear were the best tools to obtain information or to isolate insurgents from the community.

A stated respect for human rights prevented the Americans from creating the formal types of torture training common to less punctilious regimes. Violent abuse thus was informal, ad hoc, and improvised. Abusers, in fact, did what they knew. They used abuse techniques that they learned from movies, their fathers, other abusers, and even from detainees who described what had been done to them by other soldiers. They hazed because they had been hazed. They punched, kicked, and beat because that is what angry people do. They sometimes could not explain why they chose to maim or disfigure; yet in recounting those incidents, they were most concerned by their own enjoyment of atrocity.

Participants mostly expressed disappointment with their behavior. As abusers, observers, or objectors, all but one regretted the abusive violence they saw or committed. The experience of abusive violence marked them to varying degrees. Some considered the abuse they committed to be their worst wartime experiences. Others were gnawed by regret that they did not do more to prevent the abuse, because of how it harmed the perpetrators as well as the victims. Only one participant believed after the fact that the abusive violence was necessary and tactically effective; however, even he described the devastation that the worst abusers in his unit suffered after discharge. They became drug users, lost their families, or went to jail. Other abusers regretted the gratuitous brutality they committed and report post-service bouts with anger, violent thoughts and behavior, and suicide attempts. They viewed abusive violence as unnecessary and toxic to everyone involved.

Detainee abuse was not confined to the interrogation booths in detention centers where the Interrogation Rules of Engagement served at least as a nominal restraint on abuse. Rather, the study found that abuse could be easily adopted by combat units whose soldiers penetrated the communities under occupation. Patrols could abuse civilians while in view and, much more grievously, when hidden from scrutiny in combat vehicles, derelict buildings, and curfew-obscured fields and byways. The somewhat restrained coercion of the detention centers migrated to and mutated in the larger area of combat operations in much the way that opponents of genetically modified organisms fear that newly engineered bacteria will escape the laboratory and transform into virulent strains to infest the natural environment.

The Ethics of Research

In keeping with the requirements of human subject research, I applied for and obtained approval from both the University of St Andrews School of International Relations Ethics Committee and the University Teaching and Research Ethics Committee to conduct research interviews of American veterans. To obtain those approvals, I made clear that I would take measures to minimize potential harm to study participants, including ensuring their anonymity.

Method, Recruitment, and Interviews

I conceived, planned, and conducted this study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to understand the experiences of men and women who were exposed to abusive violence as part of their involvement in America’s Global War on Terrorism campaigns. I chose IPA as my method for interpreting the interviews because its focus on the experiences of individuals and the subjective meanings they give them can provide the rich description that most quantitative analysis cannot. IPA concentrates in part upon the "individual’s personal perception of an account or event as opposed to an attempt to produce an objective statement of the object or event itself⁴."

IPA studies can be done in various ways, but the preferred method is to analyze transcripts of semi-structured interviews⁵. I therefore sought to identify and recruit Americans with direct experience of abusive violence perpetrated in American CT and COIN operations after September 11, 2001. I applied IPA to two groups of participants who shared experiences and duties. To deepen understanding of why soldiers commit abusive violence, I paid particular attention to two whose small units often engaged in abusive violence. For one soldier, abusive violence usually was instrumental in achieving mission objectives; for the other, violence was often used to vent rage. I then focused on the account of a single individual whose attitude toward Muslims in general, and Iraqis in particular, fueled everyday beatings and torture, punctuated with the occasional murder. But as he began to acknowledge the humanity of the Iraqis, his treatment of Iraqis became more humane, and even protective.

I recruited participants in several ways, including direct appeals to local veterans’ groups in two states. These efforts largely were unsuccessful. I reached out to lawyers and family members of some persons who had been prosecuted for detainee abuse. In other cases, I tried direct contact with individuals who in news stories, legal proceedings, and their personal written accounts had been publicly associated with detention operations that resulted in alleged abuse.

I did not attempt to recruit any defendants in the Abu Ghraib courts martial, primarily because I felt that they already had been intensely studied and, having given their accounts so many times, were likely to provide rehearsed responses to my interviews that closely adhered to their earlier testimony.

I sought assistance for my recruitment efforts from the national leadership of several organizations of former members of the US armed forces and intelligence agencies. I also sought participants through colleges and universities, in some cases through contact with academic departments and in others through on-campus veterans’ organizations.

I contacted more than 400 individuals and organizations. I also set up a university-hosted Web page, a stand-alone website and a Facebook page.

In my initial conversations with potential participants, I discussed the study’s aims, procedures, and ethical safeguards. I tried to pre-qualify participants by asking some general questions about their experience with detainees and with observing abusive violence. I made it clear that agreeing to meet me did not obligate them to participate in the actual interviews.

In most cases, the information I provided in my initial contacts with potential participants or that they’d gotten from referral sources was enough to pique their interest and willingness to participate. I answered their questions about my interest in the topic, the confidentiality of their interviews, how much time the study would take, and how their information would be used. I urged them to review the information I gave, reflect on our conversation, ask any additional questions they might have, and then to contact me if they wished to proceed. All agreed to do so, but I still insisted that they think it over at least overnight before I would accept that they had fully considered their commitment to the study.

I discussed the logistics of meeting only after potential participants clearly stated their willingness to participate in the study. I then offered to travel to where they lived to interview them or to meet at some other location of their choosing, with their travel costs covered by me. I also offered to cover the costs of their travel to my locale. If they did not wish to meet in person, a distance interview could be arranged via telephone or video-conferencing. During the study, some participants who traveled to be interviewed were concerned about being away from home, without their usual support networks while they were relating potentially troubling recollections. To address this concern, I covered travel expenses for a companion/supporter to accompany participants.

My recruitment campaign attracted five former soldiers who agreed to be interviewed. The remaining nine participant interviews were the result of snowball referrals (study subjects recruit more subjects from among their acquaintances). The first interview took place in early 2011; the final late in 2012. All interviews were conducted face-to-face except for one via telephone. Most of the in-person interviews took place in Hawaii, where I live; the rest at other locations chosen by participants.

I interviewed everyone in settings I chose for privacy and minimal interruption. Most interviews took place over two sessions, with the first generally focusing on individual background history, initial entry into military or intelligence service, pre-deployment training, and deployment experiences relating to detainees in general and abusive violence in particular. The second session, at least one day after the first, allowed me to clarify first-session account details, post-deployment experiences, and current views and reflections on deployment and post-deployment experiences.

The entire study, from the planning stages to the interviews, took more than two years. There were fourteen two-session interviews, ranging from three hours to more than five hours, with an average time of four hours and twenty-five minutes per participant. The sixty-one plus hours of recordings resulted in nearly 1,600 pages of interview transcripts.

The difficulty of obtaining data from a large number of veterans of the CT and COIN campaigns who would be willing to disclose their exposure to and involvement in abusive violence meant that my analysis would have to focus on individuals. This reliance on the individual account and comparison to a small number of similarly situated study participants means that the insights gained from the study should not be generalized to the larger population of all, or even any, other intelligence and military veterans. My objective, therefore, was to discover what can be learned about abusive violence in CT and COIN from the experiences of individuals, and the meanings that emerged from those experiences.

The Participants

I collected information from the participants about their age and education level when they enlisted. They also provided information about their age, rank, and general duties at the time they came into contact with detainees, as well as their time in government service. For all but one participant, Iraq was the country where detainee interactions took place. Eight went into government service between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Two were aged 22-23 years, two were aged 24-25 years, and one was aged 26-27 years at enlistment. Most of the participants (13) were younger than twenty-five when they had their first contacts with detainees, with only two over age 30 and only one older than 40.

Eight participants had only high school educations, two had college degrees (one had a master’s degree), and four had some college, but no degree. Several have continued their education since leaving military service.

With the exception of the civilian intelligence officer, the participants were mostly lower-ranking, enlisted personnel at the time of the deployments that put them in contact with detainees and the Iraqi populace. The military ranks ranged from E-1, private, to E-6, a staff Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO). The majority of reported ranks are E-4 or higher, which represent the positions occupied by soldiers⁶ who have supervisory duties over others, usually at the lower organizational levels such as within a single vehicle or squad.

The participants also reported their detainee-related tasks: capture (9 participants); transport from point of capture (10); guard in field (7); question in field (9); guard in holding facility (6); question in holding facility (6); in-process at holding facility (similar to booking procedures at a police station) (8); provide medical services (3), and language translation (6).

The variety of tasks reflects the diversity of positions the participants held. Some were assigned to units such as infantry, mechanized infantry, special operations, paratroopers, and rangers. Their units would have been engaged in direct combat, raids, patrolling, checkpoints, and guard duty where the interactions with detainees and the general population would have exposed them to abusive violence. Others were involved in intelligence gathering, including interrogation of detainees in the field and at holding facilities, which presented other situations where abusive violence could occuer.

Why Participants Enlisted

I asked the participants why they enlisted in government service. Their replies ranged from a need to earn money, to a desire to do something other than pursue higher education after high school graduation, to a yearning for adventure and a desire to be of service. Charles Wilson⁷ described a combination of motives for enlisting:

I was just not wanting to do any more school at that point, so the [military] was kind of the complete opposite of that and I suppose being a Boy Scout—I was an Eagle Scout, and so there