The Raid on the Apartment Block
The detail that matters in the death of Manadel al-Jamadi is a clock. On Nov. 4, 2003, at 2 a.m., a convoy that mixed humvees with blacked-out CIA Chevy Suburbans rolled into a deserted street in a hostile suburb of Baghdad and stopped outside a three-story apartment building. A platoon of Navy SEALs tumbled out and raced up the stairs. Jamadi, an Iraqi insurgent, was dead within five-and-a-half hours of that moment, and he died while being interrogated by the CIA.
The assignment that night, as an NPR special report reconstructed it from thousands of CIA and military documents, was “kill or capture”. The agency had identified Jamadi as a key leader of a terrorist cell and a former officer in Saddam Hussein’s army. He was also considered a suspect in the attack on the al-Rashid Hotel while Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was visiting in October 2003.
SEAL Dan Cerrillo described the arrest to CIA investigators six months later. As he set a charge on the apartment, the door swung open and he rushed it, striking Jamadi. He then hit Jamadi “in the face with two fists and attempted to wrestle the subject to the ground, but Jamadi resisted and they engaged in hand-to-hand combat.” After a considerable struggle, Cerrillo subdued and cuffed him, a hood went over his head; from there he went first to an Army base and then to the SEALs’ field base, Camp Jenny Pozzi.
Interrogation, Then a Window Bar
At Camp Jenny Pozzi the questioning ran for nearly an hour and a half. Those present, interviewed later by CIA investigators, said Jamadi was seated and stripped while cold water was poured over him, and one Navy SEAL recalled the interrogator leaning into a pressure point on his chest. Then he was moved to Abu Ghraib for another round. There, military police stretched his arms directly back, shackling his wrists to the bars of a window, a position that turns extremely painful when the arms carry the body’s full weight. The MPs later told investigators he had been given slack enough to kneel or stand. Midway through questioning by CIA agents, Jamadi slumped forward, his weight on the shackled wrists. While trying to reposition him, the MPs discovered he was dead.
Those interviews also exposed a discrepancy between the military police and the CIA agents about what happened immediately before the death, and that gap has never been publicly resolved.
The Autopsy’s Technical Reality
A military autopsy ruled the death a homicide, the result of “blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration.” The autopsy photographs show lacerations and multiple bruises on the feet, thighs and arms. The most significant injuries, five broken ribs, appear in none of them. There were no bruises in that area, which led military medical examiners to say the fractures were probably the product of force applied slowly and deliberately, of the kind produced by someone kneeling on his chest. At what point the ribs were broken remains unclear.
NPR ran the findings past Dr. Edmund Donoghue, who presides over the American Academy of Forensic Scientists and serves as chief medical examiner of Cook County, Ill. He agreed with them. The way Jamadi was shackled “makes it very difficult to breathe because you are suspended in a very awkward position,” Donoghue said. “When you combine it with having the hood over your head and having broken ribs, it’s fairly clear that this death was caused by asphyxia because he couldn’t breathe properly,” he added.
Careers Wrecked, No Convictions
Investigators of the wider Abu Ghraib scandal had already put the agency’s role in writing. Major General George Fay’s 2004 report concluded that “CIA detention and interrogation practices led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation, and an unhealthy mystique that further poisoned the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib.” The SEALs denied that any blow landed during the capture or transport was forceful enough to cause lethal injury. Their platoon leader, Lt. Andrew Ledford, was acquitted of dereliction of duty charges accusing him of allowing his men to beat Jamadi. No one was convicted of a crime, though careers were wrecked, and the CIA took no action.
When NPR’s report was published in late October 2005, the CIA was still investigating the death. Some members of Congress and human rights groups had already voiced frustration at the slow pace of the agency’s response to alleged detainee abuse. Photographs of grinning GIs crouched over Jamadi’s iced-down, battered corpse had by then become one of the most powerful symbols of the 2003 Abu Ghraib prison scandal for opponents of the American invasion of Iraq. An Army trial scheduled for that December was expected to put the CIA back under scrutiny over its role in an Iraqi general’s death; the general had been stuffed into a sleeping bag; an autopsy blamed his death on asphyxia from smothering and chest compression. For Jamadi himself, nobody had been held accountable.
