| MURDER AT CAMP DELTA: A Staff Sergeant's Pursuit of the Truth about Guantánamo Bay Joseph Hickman New York: Simon & Schuster, January 2015 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-4516-5079-2 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-4516-5079-5 | 243pp. | HC | $28.00 | |
Joseph Hickman loved the military. Enlisting as a Marine at age 18, he alternated between military service and civilian employment such as corrections work. He was 38 when 9/11 happened. He left his security job and joined the Maryland National Guard. After several assignments, he was posted to Guantánamo.
Even before arriving at Guantánamo, Staff Sgt. Hickman encountered some of the snafus attendant to military life.
At Guantánamo, things get worse. To begin with, Hickam's group of 150 troops is replacing about 600 members of the California National Guard. Obviously their workload will be heavier.
But that was the least of it. Company 3 got to guard the military tribunals — a soft job — while SSgt. Hickman's mostly Black and Latino companies 1 & 2 drew QRF duty. The Quick Reaction Force was responsible for quelling disturbances by detainees, and on Hickman's watch they handled some rough ones. Hickman and his men had to get rough in turn; but when the prisoners were subdued and shackled he had to watch Navy troops beat the snot out of them while the camp commander stood by doing nothing. Still worse was the fact that he was made to falsify his report on the incident; the truth would have made the brass look bad.
SSgt. Hickman's team dealt with two major detainee uprisings during their year at Guantánamo. The first was at Camp 1. Detainees were thought to be hiding pills in their Qurans. Hickman defused that one by suggesting that a Muslim interpreter search the Qurans. The disturbance at Camp 4, on the very same day, was a different kettle of fish. Cells there held 10 men each, and in one the men had armed themselves by breaking up surveillance cameras and other items. One had a 6-foot pole from a fan. They had smeared the floor with soap. They were full of fight, and Hickman's QRF was charged with subduing them. When things got heavy, he ordered plastic bullets to be fired at close quarters.
SSgt. Hickman earned a commendation for dealing with this disturbance. But the disturbance he couldn't deal with was the loss of respect for the military the conditions at Guantánamo induced in him. His instinct was to protest the rampant violations of good practice, but he knew that would only bring retaliation on him and his men. The dilemma gnawed at him, making him testy and sullen. Complete relief was slow in coming, even after he left the island. But I think he is well on the way to obtaining it.
But many practices at Guantánamo made the brass look bad in Hickman's eyes. The Navy guards routinely harassed and provoked the detainees, shouting insults and flashing the Star of David at them. A common activity on the night shift was to shuffle detainees from cell to cell as a game of speed: the team that made the fastest transfer got free drinks the next night. None of this was in accord with standard operating procedures or the American military traditions he'd learned as a Marine, but protesting would have made his men subject to threats.
Finally there came the ultimate transgression. On the night of 9 June 2006, about halfway through Hickman's year at Guantánamo, three detainees died under mysterious circumstances. The official story was that they had hanged themselves in their cells. But Hickman had been on duty as Sergeant of the Guard that night, responsible for overseeing events in one camp. He saw three men taken from cells and driven off in a white van. Hours later the white van returned and backed up to the clinic. Hickman and his men watched from their towers while something took place at the rear doors of the van, but they couldn't see it clearly. Meanwhile, all was quiet within the camp itself. Word soon spread that the detainees had suffocated due to cloth stuffed down their throats. This contradicted the official story, which Hickman knew made no sense.
SSgt. Hickman was greatly relieved when his tour at Guantánamo ended. He was assigned to an Air Cavalry brigade in Maryland, and later became a recruiter in Green Bay, Wisconsin. It was a return to sanity. Yet he could not dismiss what he had seen. He began working with a team of lawyers, and with their help submitted a letter to the Inspector General asking for an investigation. Considerable time passed with nothing being done, despite repeated prompting from Hickman and his lawyers.2 At last it became clear that resolution meant putting his story in the public record. He resigned from the military in order to do this. Contacts with 60 Minutes and other news broadcasters proved useless as well. But what the lawyers were discovering in government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act boggled their minds.
One such document was the report of the NCIS investigation. Guantánamo is a naval base, and regulations require the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to probe any possible homicide under Navy jurisdiction. The NCIS is normally a gold standard of competence and integrity, but it wasn't in this case. The 3,000 pages of its report were sloppily copied and assembled in random order. Once Hickman's team had them in proper sequence, they began to notice gaps where pages were completely missing.
There were other things missing as well. One was the testimony of the senior medical officer at Guantánamo's naval hospital.3 Others were the interviews with SSgt. Hickman and his men, who had witnessed critical parts of the events of 9 June 2006. (But since they had never been interviewed, there were no interviews to include in the record.) Also damning was the conclusion that the three men had hanged themselves in their cells. As Hickman makes abundantly clear, no Camp 4 detainee at Guantánamo had enough sheets or blankets to cover the wire-mesh walls of his cell to the extent that a suicide attempt would be hidden from the patrols. There were video cameras all over the cell block too. But the NCIS presented no video records. The clincher was the fact that the bodies returned to the victims' families had no necks. Curious, is it not? The very part of the body an independent autopsy would examine for evidence of hanging turned up missing.
All these discrepancies, and many more, were discovered by SSgt. Hickman's lawyers. They worked essentially alone in the face of public denunciations of Hickman by senior officers involved in the case (sometimes contradicting their own previous testimony.) It was a long battle, but bit by bit the coverup unraveled. This book is the result. Hickman writes well and makes a solid case. The only aspect of it that caused even an inkling of doubt was his contention that Guantánamo had been set up to test advanced interrogation methods: specifically the drug Mefloquine.4
Many books have been written about the War on Terror and the treatment of combatants detained in the course of that war at Guantánamo and other places. I have read a number of them. This is the first I've read by a military service member who was posted to Guantánamo. It is good to read an account from "the other side" — as opposed to civil-rights advocates and attorneys for the detainees. Their accounts are thorough and straightforward. But SSgt. Hickman worked among the detainees daily for a year and knew the layout of their facilities; he is able to provide information unknown to civilians. Also, being a first-person account, his book is a quick read. It includes a map of Guantánamo's Camp America and an excellent index. It is an excellent complement to the CIA Torture Report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2014. I recommend it highly to anyone who appreciates the need to remove the stain Guantánamo places on America's honor.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.