The Unaccountables

[Jcrowley]

The Unaccountables

From the September print issue -- Forget the soldiers: The 25,000 civilian contractors in Iraq are an occupying army unto themselves. Some may have engaged in torture -- and, by evident design, they can’t be prosecuted for their crimes.

By Tara McKelvey
Web Exclusive: 09.07.06

One December night in 2003, Adel L. Nakhla, a chunky, broad-shouldered Egyptian American interpreter with a soft, almost feminine voice, went to Cell 43 in Abu Ghraib’s Tier 1A. He was accompanied by Army Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a reservist convicted in January 2005 of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, to the cell where a former Baath Party member, A.A. (his attorney asked that his name not be used for safety reasons) was lying on a mattress. A.A. had been classified as a “high-value target” because of suspected terrorist activities.

Officials had departed from custom when A.A. arrived at Abu Ghraib the month before and had not issued him an identification number. He was placed under the supervision of the OGA -- an acronym that stands for Other Government Agency but in practice means the CIA. Officially, A.A. was a “ghost detainee”; he did not exist.

“Get up, you criminal. You’re pretending to be asleep,” A.A. later recalled the man he recognized as Nakhla saying. Then he asked A.A. to walk backwards toward him.

I spoke with A.A. in March during a trip to Amman, Jordan, arranged for him by his lawyer, Susan L. Burke, a Philadelphia attorney representing former detainees like A.A. In June 2004, she jointly filed a lawsuit with the Center for Constitutional Rights against Nakhla’s former employer, Titan Corp., and another military contractor, CACI International Inc., which sent 60 employees to Iraq to work as interrogators between August 2003 and August 2005. A.A. told me he had been arrested on November 19, 2003, less than three weeks after going to a dinner party in Baghdad. It had been nearly eight months since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and troops had cordoned off an area of the city, known as the Green Zone, where A.A. had once worked as deputy to the general manager of the Military Industrialization Commission.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11951