Fixing Hell Read Free

the sleeping guard, my loaded 9mm pistol hanging from my belt, and directly into the interrogation section of the facility.
    Beyond the guard station I walked down the long hall, encountering no one else. For a moment there was no sound but that of my boots on the concrete floor. But soon I could hear angry screams, cursing, and yelling, in both English and something else. I immediately surmised that an interrogation was in process and realized I was about to see the infamous interrogation process at Abu Ghraib.
    Here we go. Let’s see what’s really going on in this place. Sure sounds like some awful shit going down in there.
    I headed for the terrible sounds, fearing I would see an example of the abuses I had heard so much about already. As I continued toward the source of the screaming, I passed by empty interrogation booths, each roughly the size of a college dorm room, with cheap furniture, usually a table and three chairs. When I reached the occupied room the screaming became clearer to my ears and I began to make out the sounds of an Iraqi screaming in his own language and then a male voice I assumed was the interrogator, screaming equally loudly and viciously. I had seen plenty of interrogations before, but I wondered what I would see on the other side of that door. The images of abuse and prisoner degradation raced through my mind again, and I braced myself for the scene that might accompany the screaming.
    I took a deep breath and opened the door slowly, peeking in without the occupants noticing. Inside the interrogation booth was a twenty-two-year-old female soldier trying to conduct an interrogation. Sitting across the table from her was a shackled forty-year-old male prisoner, who had been brought into the prison for being a hardcore, killer terrorist, and he looked every bit the part. Alongside the prisoner was a male Arabic interpreter.
    The American soldier was slumped in her chair and had tears in her eyes as the prisoner yelled at her ferociously in Arabic. The translator interpreted the prisoner’s words effectively, repeating them in English with a harsh yell and fast pace consistent with the prisoner’s voice. It all made for a strange combination: the screaming vitriol from the prisoner, followed quickly by the translation of the harsh words from a kind-looking Iraqi translator.
    “I’ll kill you, bitch! When I get out of here, I’ll sodomize you before I cut your throat! You American women are nothing but whores! After I rape your mother I will set fire to that bitch’s body. In my country a bitch like you would be beheaded for looking in the eyes of a man like me!”
    Clearly the tables had turned in that room and the interrogator was in trouble. No supervisors were around, this violent prisoner was clearly out of control, threatening the life of a young soldier, and the lone MP guard was asleep. I chose to remain quiet and observe the wrongness of this awful place at that time—a young soldier abandoned by her superiors, practically on her own at night with a vicious terrorist, struggling to do her job in a horrible place, under wretched conditions. She was so young and innocent-seeming that she immediately reminded me of my niece, whom I pictured in the same situation. I felt sorry for this young soldier. As I watched her, I realized the reports of prisoner abuse, as bad as they were, did not tell the full story of Abu Ghraib.
    This, too, was Abu Ghraib.

2
    Journey to Gitmo
    May 2002
    W hen I was sixteen, I attended an all-black, all-male Catholic high school that was strict about rules and heavy on the discipline. For me, that meant constantly getting in trouble for running my mouth too much. A buddy named Tyrone and I were talking about what our parents did for a living one day, and he said his old man was a psychologist. I didn’t really have any idea what a psychologist did, so Tyrone explained that his father talked to people for a living. I didn’t think much more about it until I