As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
In the windowless room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.
The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a military unit known as Task Force 6-26. Located at Baghdad International Airport, the camp was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at
Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.
The following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.
It adds to the picture of harsh interrogation practices at American military prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as at secret CIA detention centers around the world. The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the abuse at Abu Ghraib was made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.
The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials in Iraq. The CIA was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.
For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago of kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.
Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by U.S. news organizations. Many details emerged in documents released after a request by the American Civil Liberties Union. But taken together for the first time, the documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp and the inner workings of the clandestine unit.
The documents and interviews also reflect a culture clash between the military commandos and the more cautious Pentagon civilians working with them. At one point, one of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top aides, Stephen A. Cambone, ordered a subordinate to "get to the bottom" of any misconduct.
Most of the people interviewed for this article were midlevel civilian and military Defense Department personnel who worked with Task Force 6-26 and said they witnessed abuses, or who were briefed on its operations over the past three years. Virtually all of those who agreed to speak were granted anonymity to encourage them to speak candidly without fear of retribution.
Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the increasingly numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.
Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth S. McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only five of 29 abuse allegations against task force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.
"We take all those allegations seriously," Gen. Bryan D. Brown, the commander of the Special Operations Command, said this month. "Any kind of abuse is not consistent with the values of the Special Operations Command."
The veil of secrecy surrounding the unit has helped to shield its conduct from public scrutiny. Even the task force's name changes regularly, and the courts-martial and other disciplinary proceedings have not identified the soldiers in public announcements as task force members.
Brown's command declined requests for interviews with several former task force members and with Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who leads the Joint Special Operations Command, the headquarters at Fort Bragg, N.C., that supplies the unit's most elite troops.
Cases of detainee abuse attributed to Task Force 6-26 demonstrate confusion over and, in some cases, disregard for approved interrogation practices and standards for detainee treatment, according to Defense Department specialists who have worked with the unit.
In early 2004, an 18-year-old man suspected of selling cars to the Zarqawi terrorist network was seized with his family in Baghdad. Task force soldiers beat him with a rifle butt and punched him in the head and kidneys, said a Defense Department specialist briefed on the incident.
The interrogation rooms at Camp Nama were stark. High-value detainees were questioned in the Black Room, nearly bare but for several 18-inch hooks that jutted from the ceiling, a grisly reminder of the terrors inflicted by Saddam's inquisitors. Jailers often blared rap music or rock 'n' roll over a loudspeaker to unnerve their subjects.
Another smaller room offered basic comforts like carpets and cushioned seating to put more cooperative prisoners at ease, said several Defense Department specialists who worked at Camp Nama. Detainees wore heavy, olive-drab hoods outside their cells. By June 2004, the revelations of abuse at Abu Ghraib galvanized the military to promise better treatment for prisoners. In one small concession at Camp Nama, soldiers exchanged the hoods for cloth blindfolds with drop veils that allowed detainees to breathe more freely.
Task Force 6-26 was formed in the summer of 2003. A melting pot of military and civilian units, it drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment. Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency personnel with special skills, like interrogators, were temporarily assigned to the unit. CIA officers, FBI agents and special operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.
Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: to capture or kill al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.
Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Fallujah, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk.
At the outposts, some detainees were stripped naked and had cold water thrown on them to cause the sensation of drowning, said Defense Department personnel who served with the unit. In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited. Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.
Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said.
By early 2004, both the CIA and the FBI had expressed alarm about the military's harsh interrogation techniques.
American generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart A. Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings. "It seems clear that TF 121 needs to be reined in with respect to its treatment of detainees," Herrington concluded.
By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the DIA's Defense Human Intelligence Service. The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, like monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.
In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.
Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors are now treating detainees more humanely and can police themselves. The CIA has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, said a CIA official.
The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law enforcement official said.