I don’t know where else to post this because they shut me down in the military subs and r/conspiracy is the new T_D, so I guess this is the best place for it.
I was in Iraq in 2006 doing interrogations in support of 5th Special Forces Group. We were located in the southwestern corner of Victory Base complex. This was the area they called the Radwaniyah Palace complex, because of the absurd number of palaces and other fancy resort-style living arrangements used by Saddam and the Iraqi ruling elite. Our job was to question high-value individuals. This meant we had priority for anyone we thought was more important, influential, or knowledgeable than the average bomb-thrower. The idea was that we would do some intensive, long-term interrogation but the reality was pretty disappointing. Everything was pretty mundane and even boring, and by this time everyone had accepted that there were no stockpiles of WMD’s. At the same time, the Iraqis were starting to turn on each other. This was after the Golden Mosque bombing, which basically kicked off the Iraqi civil war. But that’s not what this post is really about.
We were looking for a place where we could have an isolated facility for our high-value detainees, where they wouldn’t be able to interact with each other or the ‘general population’ you’d find in one of the larger detention centers. This was back when Cropper and Abu G were still in business. We found a couple of small buildings that looked decent, with high walls and enough space for maybe 20 closet-sized cells. One of the places we looked at was this brick building in the middle of the forest.
I’m using the term ‘forest’ loosely, as nothing in Iraq qualifies as a ‘forest’ the same way you’d think of Washington state or Yellowstone or something. This was just a bunch of trees kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Every night you could see big swarms of bats coming out of the trees from the south. They would fly over the big lake in front of the Radwaniyah Palaces and eat the insects. (The water was pretty stagnant.)
Anyway, this forest had a small gray building in the middle of it. It was a round building that was covered in dark marble on the outside, but made of reinforced concrete on the inside. It had a heavy metal gate hidden behind a thick wooden door. At the time we had no idea what the purpose of this building was. Some kind of storage facility for Saddam’s palaces? There were no windows, plumbing or furniture. We didn’t think it was some kind of residence, because it looked more like a prison. The EOD guys had already inspected it and found nothing wrong. We had no idea what the building was supposed to be. But we also didn’t really care. So we said, “Fuck it,” brought in a bunch of plywood and started setting things up.
What we ended up with was a large circular room the guards could hang out in, and a second room where we would keep the detainees. Each detainee had their own plywood cell with a foam mattress, a blanket, and a Koran. The place didn’t have any plumbing, so the guards would escort the detainees outside to use a port-a-potty they set up. The MI team had a separate wooden shack where we could run our classified computers and write our reports. It took us like two weeks to get everything set up, and then the SF guys started bringing detainees in.
Like I said, this was boring work. This was a really shitty time to be in Iraq because the violence was exploding and nobody knew what was going on. Our soldiers weren’t trained as investigators, so they tended to just grab anyone they thought looked suspicious and bring them in for questioning. Like, if a bomb went off they would just snatch everyone on the street and bring them in. Their philosophy was that they were too busy to care who was actually guilty and the MI guys would sort it all out. We also had an Iraqi SOF team who were supposed to be really, really good. Looking back on it, I’ll bet they were basically just a Shiite hit squad that would target old-regime Sunni Baathists they wanted gone. Everything in Iraq was a gang or a mafia or whatever. We didn’t really care, because they were on our side for the moment and that was good enough for us.
So we’ve been running this place for basically a week, when the Iraqi SOF brings in a detainee. I don’t remember his name and it isn’t important. They accused him of being some high-level Baathist in Saddam’s government, and he had been a fugitive since the original invasion. At this point we were all pretty jaded. Saying someone was part of the Baath regime didn’t really mean anything. You could throw a rock in Baghdad and it would probably hit a former regime Baathist. I’m just going to call him ‘Hajji.’
They bring in Hajji blindfolded, which was the SOP for transporting detainees. The guards led him, still blindfolded, to the rooms where they took his photo and fingerprints and all that. Then they brought him to the interrogation booth. I call it a “booth” because that’s the generic term Army interrogators use for any interrogation space. We just say, “I’m going in the booth” or whatever. This particular room was a small space with marble floors and tiles on the walls. Basically everything in these fancy palaces was covered with mosaic tile patterns on the walls.
Anyway, they bring Hajji into the booth with “Sergeant Smith.” I’m not going to use his real name for obvious reasons, but it will suffice to know that he was an E6 who transferred in from the infantry. He didn’t really know what he was doing. (Nobody at that time REALLY knew what were doing, but he was worse than most.) He had been paid an obscene amount of money to reclass into 35M because they were trying to expand the MOS and we were short on NCOs. SSG Smith was great at running teams, training weapons, keeping accountability, and all the stuff you would expect an infantry NCO to be good at. But he was freaking useless when it came to anything MI related. So we used him as an administrator and a screener.
SSG Smith’s job was to to ask the detainee some basic questions, like their name, their religion, their birthplace, and so on. This was all basic background stuff that anyone should have been able to answer without provoking any resistance. Then once we had the basic information down, we would assign the detainee to an interrogator and they would start formulating their strategy. This was basically the extent of the work we could trust SSG Smith to do as far as actual interrogations.
Anyway, Hajji comes in and they take off the blindfold. He takes one look around the room and sees the tile patterns on the walls. And the guy starts screaming. I mean, SCREAMING. I’ve never heard anything like it. He is absolutely freaking out. SSG Smith doesn’t know what to do. He hasn’t even asked a question yet. But the guy keeps screaming and kicking and thrashing about to the point we think he is going to hurt himself. Eventually we have to just cancel the interrogation (terminate) and the guards basically drag him out of the room.
Of course this is the start of a total shitshow. I should mention that this was post-Abu Ghraib, so everyone involved was very anxious about abuse allegations. When they hear about this detainee screaming at the top of his lungs, everyone from the guard commander to the VBC Commanding General wants to know what happened. SSG Smith, the guards, and the observers all have to give sworn statements that say they never saw any misconduct. SSG Smith didn’t touch the guy. Didn’t even speak to him. Like I said, he just looked at the walls and lost his mind.
Eventually Hajji calms down and we try to re-engage the next day. We had to drive him to Cropper because he was going insane being in that building. The interrogators at Cropper let SSG Smith go in again, and this time the guy is willing to talk. He claims he was a senior police officer in the Saddam regime, and he knew that building was something called ‘The Hole.’ He had been in it before, and he knew that anyone who went into the Hole never came out. When he saw what room he was in, he assumed we were about to murder him.
So we go back and we ask the guards if they’ve seen anything weird. We’re starting to think this was some kind of execution chamber, so it’s possible there is still some evidence of human rights abuses or murders that we could use against Saddam. (This was still 2006, so Saddam’s trial was in progress. He wasn’t executed until December.) Some of the guards in the round office tell us the tiles in the floor are loose. Okay, great. Now we have to call in CID to look for human remains or something.
But SSG Smith doesn’t want to wait. He thinks he’s cool and he wants to do everything himself. So he just starts pulling up the tiles, and we find that there’s a false floor with a few layers of plywood covering a hole. And this was pretty new. Like, definitely installed within the last few years. We’re thinking, at this point, that somebody tried to cover up a mass grave or something during the invasion and hope the Americans would never find it.
The hole itself is basically round and two meters wide. And it goes down a long way. Literally the first thing SSG Smith does is break a chem-light and drop it down the hole. It falls down so far we can’t see the light. There’s no splash, or echo, or anything. It just drops until the light vanishes. So we toss a few more bricks and stuff in there, and there’s no sound at all. SSG Smith is determined to figure this out. This was before smart phones had high-quality cameras, and we didn’t have any cameras on hand that we could lower on a rope or anything like that. But SSG Smith went to Pathfinder school. And he’s really proud of it. He knows how to rappel down and he’s a certified expert at moving equipment on ropes. So he grabs a decently long rope from the Humvee, ties a Swiss seat, and clips himself on.
I can’t over-emphasize how stupid this is. But nobody stops him.
So SSG Smith starts to rappel down. At first, everything is going great. He talks to us, and tells us how it’s cold in the hole, but he can’t see or smell anything. The rope is at least 100 feet long (tied to the Humvee’s trailer hitch outside), so we can’t imagine he would abruptly run out of rope. We’ve got a Private sitting in the Humvee in case we need to pull him out quickly. SSG Smith keeps going down, and he shouts up to tell us he is breaking another chem-light. So we wait about three seconds and then he starts screaming.
He didn’t even have time to tell us what he was scared of. SSG Smith just screams, “SHIT SHIT SHIT,” and then he starts screaming in pain. It’s even worse than the Hajji’s screaming before. I have no idea what was happening down there. I imagine that’s how someone would scream if they were being eaten alive. Now the guards are shouting at the Private to get him out of there. He starts letting the Humvee roll forward, and the rope starts coming up. The guard sergeant is standing over the edge of the pit, looking down into the hole while the rope comes up.
I should mention at this point that SSG Smith did not have a weapon. None of the interrogators did. The guards had night sticks, but the only weapon allowed in the facility was an M9 the guard’s sergeant carried. The other weapons were locked up. So everyone is shouting, and SSG Smith is screaming down in the hole, and the rope is coming up but not fast enough. Then the guard sergeant pulls out his weapon and fires three shots down the hole.
Everything stops. Most people underestimate how loud a gunshot actually is. Especially in a small concrete room like that. We can’t hear anything. Just the squealing sound of early onset tinnitus. But SSG Smith isn’t screaming anymore. I’m sure of that. The rope keeps coming up, but SSG Smith never comes with it. Eventually the rope is covered in blood and black slime. The guards ordered everyone out. I never saw what happened next.
To this day, I have no idea what happened. There was a 15-6, then CID got involved, and we all wrote a bunch of sworn statements. They transferred all of the interrogators to Cropper and we were never allowed to speak to the guards again. We weren’t from the same unit, so I didn’t have much reason to ever interact with them. All I know is what I heard from some buddies in 5th Group. The Army brought in demolitionists and did a controlled det that leveled the entire building. They paved over it with a slab of concrete and set up a fence around the site. There were signs telling people not to enter the forest because the bats carried rabies.
I never found out what happened to SSG Smith. I never saw a copy of the 15-6 or any official determination on the cause of death. I looked up his obituary later and saw it was attributed to a mortar attack. The kind of random thing that could strike anybody for no reason.
I also heard the guard sergeant killed himself.
I wish I had more answers. I wish I could make this a better story. I just don’t know for sure what happened after we left. If anyone else was there, please let me know.
The only thing I know for sure - and I put this on all my sworn statements - is that SSG Smith wasn’t the only person screaming in that hole.