Haunting horrors of Abu Ghraib

‘Consequence’ tells of one man’s experience in Iraq prison.

The infamous photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that became public in spring 2004 — a pyramid of naked prisoners, a hooded man forced to stand in a crucifixionlike pose, a cowering man on a dog leash — were evidence not of just a “few bad apples” among the prison guards but, as an Army investigation found, but documentation of a systemic problem: Military personnel had perpetrated “numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses.” The abuses had roots in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush administration, which asserted that the United States need not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

Fair, who worked for CACI, a private contractor that provided interrogation services at the prison, participated in or witnessed physical abuse, sleep deprivation and the use of what he calls “the Palestinian chair” (a monstrous contraption that forces a prisoner to assume an excruciating “stress position”). He sees naked men handcuffed to chairs, stripped of their dignity and their clothes. He and his colleagues “fill out forms and use words like ‘exposure,’ ‘sound,” ‘light,’ ‘cold,’ ‘food’ and ‘isolation’” — ordinary words that become shorthand for methods of inflicting fear and pain. He rips a chair out from underneath a boy and shoves an old man, head first, into a wall.

Of the Abu Ghraib torture photos broadcast by “60 Minutes” in April 2004, Fair writes: “Some of the activities in the photographs are familiar to me. Others are not. But I am not shocked. Neither is anyone else who served at Abu Ghraib. Instead, we are shocked by the performance of the men who stand behind microphones and say things like ‘bad apples’ and ‘Animal House’ on night shift.”

In 2007, Fair says, he confessed everything to a lawyer from the Justice Department and two agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, providing pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations and techniques. He was not prosecuted. “We tortured people the right way,” he writes, “following the right procedures, and used the approved techniques.”

Fair, however, became increasingly racked by guilt. He began having nightmares. Nightmares in which “someone I know begins to shrink,” becoming so small “they slip through my fingers and disappear onto the floor.” Nightmares in which “there’s a large pool of blood on the floor” that moves as if it’s alive, nipping at his feet.

His marriage starts to unravel. He drinks heavily despite a heart condition that threatens his health. When his best friend from Iraq, Ferdinand Ibabao, is killed by a suicide bomber in Baghdad, Fair thinks that maybe he, too, deserves to die there. He returns to Iraq for another tour — this time, in a job with the National Security Agency.

Fair recounts all this in understated, staccato prose. He tells us about the important role the church played in his childhood in Bethlehem, Pa. He tells us about his dreams of becoming a police officer. And he tells us about the twists and turns that took him to Iraq as an interrogator.

Having come from “a long line of Presbyterians who valued their faith and marched off to war,” Fair enlisted in the Army in 1995, stumbled into one of its language programs and became an Arab linguist. The diagnosis of a heart condition in 2002 would mean he could not continue in his postmilitary career as a police officer or re-enlist in the Army when the invasion of Iraq began in early 2003. Working for CACI, which requested no medical exam, was a way for him to ensure that he didn’t miss out on the war.

Fair draws an alarming portrait of CACI as “disorganized and unprofessional” in its deployment of civilians, not to mention “dangerous and irresponsible”: “as former soldiers and marines, none of us were comfortable with the lack of planning, lack of support and lack of proper supplies,” he writes. “No weapons, no communications equipment, no maps and nothing for first aid. We all expect something to go wrong very soon.”

Things are chaotic at Abu Ghraib, where Fair is assigned to a team tasked with debriefing former associates of Saddam Hussein. He writes that it is “never entirely clear how the Army determines whether any of us have the proper security clearance,” and the shortage of interrogators means “there are thousands of detainees who will never be processed.”

Those detainees “are given no information about their status,” he observes, “and they have no way of knowing when or if they will see their families again. Some of them are guilty; some of them are not. All of them are jailed under intolerable circumstances.”

Some of Fair’s descriptions of Abu Ghraib and the National Security Agency facilities at Camp Victory recall the absurdities of “Catch-22” and “Animal Farm,” but here the sense of the absurd is infused with horror and injustice.

Fair says he and Ibabao often thought about quitting, but didn’t “want to be seen as the type of people who aren’t cut out for doing their part” in the war. At home, he will come to realize that he needs to earn his way back as a human being: He does not believe he will ever be redeemed, but thinks he is “obligated to try.”

He begins writing about what he did and what he witnessed — first, with articles for The Washington Post and The New York Times, and now, with this profoundly unsettling book. He is still haunted by voices: “the voice of the general from the comfortable interrogation booth, the cries from the hard site, the sobs from the Palestinian chair and the sound of the old man’s head hitting the wall.”

“It is nearly impossible to silence them,” he writes. “As I know it should be.”