Packed for the Wrong Trip by W. Zach Griffith

Author:W. Zach Griffith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2016-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

9 Ken Ballen, Terrorists in Love(New York: Free Press, 2012).

ELEVEN

HUMINT

“At a tent camp used for detainees with medical conditions, prisoners ran out shouting. Some hobbled on crutches; one man waved his prosthetic leg overhead. ‘Why? Why?’ he shouted in Arabic. ‘Nobody has told me why I am here.’”

—Associated Press, May 6, 2004

ACOUPLE OF years after they’d returned home, Dizl received a phone call from Chiclets. He had had enough; he couldn’t take the images of the dead Marines’ faces in his head any more. Unlike Dizl, who chose not to look at the faces of his dead and wounded comrades so he wouldn’t have to for the rest of his life, Chiclets had had no choice. His mission at FOBAG mandated that he get very personal with them, the dying Marines, like holding their shattered skulls in his hands as he desperately tried to keep their brains from falling out.

Dizl was on the next ferry to Rockland. Chiclets, his young wife, father-in-law, and Dizl all took a ride down to the Togas VA to find Chiclets the help he so desperately needed.

A few years after that, in July 2011, Dizl was leaving the hospital after a surgery on his foot when he heard someone shouting his name, “Kelly! Hey, Kelly!”

It was Chiclets, who was now working as a VA nurse in the primary-care wing alongside Dizl’s own doctor.

“I asked my primary-care doctor if she knew what they had in a guy like him,” Dizl said. “She said, ‘Yes, we do!’”

In the summer of 2003, the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) sent a team to Iraq to review intelligence-gathering efforts in Iraq. The team found a series of wide-ranging problems in using technology and in training and managing intelligence specialists. Younger officers and enlisted soldiers were unprepared for their assignments, “did not understand the targeting process,” and possessed “very little to no analytical skills,” the CALL team found. It said that there were sixty-nine “tactical human intelligence” (HUMINT) teams working in Iraq, and that they should have been producing at least 120 reports a day, but instead were delivering a total average of 30. Overall, it said, the teams lacked “guidance and focus.” They were also overwhelmed, and at least fifteen more teams were needed.10 In August 2003, Captain William Ponce, an officer in the Human Intelligence Effects Coordination Cell, sent out a memo to subordinate commands. “The gloves are coming off regarding these detainees,” he told them. (Quantock told his guys to put the gloves back on.)

Captain Ponce stated that Colonel Steve Boltz, the second highest ranking military intelligence officer in Iraq, “has made it clear that we want these individuals broken”—intelligence jargon for getting someone to abandon his cover and relate the truth as he knows it.

“Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks,” he wrote. Ponce ordered them to “Provide interrogations ‘wish list’ by 17 Aug 03.”

“I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban

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