"Black Room" abuses documented

As the Iraqi insurgency intensified in early 2004, an elite Special Operations forces unit converted one of Saddam Hussein's former military bases near Baghdad into a top-secret detention center. There, U.S. soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government's torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations.

The Black Room was part of a temporary detention site at Camp Nama, the secret headquarters of a military unit known as Task Force 6-26. The camp at Baghdad International Airport was the first stop for many insurgents on their way to the Abu Ghraib prison a few miles away.

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, "NO BLOOD, NO FOUL." According to Pentagon specialists who worked with the unit, prisoners at Camp Nama often disappeared into a detention black hole, barred from access to lawyers or relatives, and confined for weeks without charges. "The reality is, there were no rules there," another Pentagon official said.

Task Force 6-26

The following account of Task Force 6-26, based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people, offers the first detailed description of how the military's most highly trained counterterrorism unit committed serious abuses.

The abuses at Camp Nama continued despite warnings beginning in August 2003 from an Army investigator and U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement officials in Iraq. The CIA was concerned enough to bar its personnel from Camp Nama that August.

For an elite unit with roughly 1,000 people at any given time, Task Force 6-26 seems to have had a large number of troops punished for detainee abuse. Since 2003, 34 task-force members have been disciplined in some form for mistreating prisoners, and at least 11 members have been removed from the unit. Five Army Rangers in the unit were convicted three months ago of kicking and punching three detainees in September 2005.

Some of the serious accusations against Task Force 6-26 have been reported over the past 16 months by U.S. news organizations. Many details emerged in documents released after a request by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Details documented

But taken together for the first time, the documents and interviews with more than a dozen military and civilian Defense Department and other federal personnel provide the most detailed portrait yet of the secret camp.

Military officials say there may have been extenuating circumstances for some of the harsh treatment at Camp Nama. By the spring of 2004, the demand on interrogators for intelligence was growing to help combat the numerous and deadly insurgent attacks.

Some detainees may have been injured resisting capture. A spokesman for the Special Operations Command, Kenneth McGraw, said there was sufficient evidence to prove misconduct in only five of 29 abuse allegations against task-force members since 2003. As a result of those five incidents, 34 people were disciplined.

Task Force 6-26 was formed in the summer of 2003. A melting pot of military and civilian units, it drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

Military reservists and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) personnel with special skills were temporarily assigned to the unit. CIA officers, FBI agents and special-operations forces from other countries also worked closely with the task force.

Task Force 6-26 had a singular focus: to capture or kill al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant operating in Iraq. "Anytime there was even the smell of Zarqawi nearby, they would go out and use any means possible to get information from a detainee," one official said.

Defense Department personnel briefed on the unit's operations said the harsh treatment extended beyond Camp Nama to small field outposts in Baghdad, Fallujah, Balad, Ramadi and Kirkuk.

In January 2004, the task force captured the son of one of Saddam's bodyguards in Tikrit. The man told Army investigators that he was forced to strip and that he was punched in the spine until he fainted, put in front of an air conditioner while cold water was poured on him and kicked in the stomach until he vomited.

Army investigators were forced to close their inquiry in June 2005 after they said task-force members used battlefield pseudonyms that made it impossible to identify the soldiers involved. The unit also asserted that 70 percent of its computer files had been lost.

Despite the task force's access to a wide range of intelligence, its raids were often dry holes, yielding little if any intelligence and alienating ordinary Iraqis, Defense Department personnel said.

By early 2004, both the CIA and the FBI had expressed alarm about the military's interrogation techniques.

U.S. generals were also alerted to the problem. In December 2003, Col. Stuart Herrington, a retired Army intelligence officer, warned in a confidential memo that medical personnel reported that prisoners seized by the unit, then known as Task Force 121, had injuries consistent with beatings.

By May 2004, just as the scandal at Abu Ghraib was breaking, tensions increased at Camp Nama between the Special Operations troops and civilian interrogators and case officers from the DIA's Defense Human Intelligence Service.

The discord, according to documents, centered on the harsh treatment of detainees as well as restrictions the Special Operations troops placed on their civilian colleagues, such as monitoring their e-mail messages and phone calls.

In the summer of 2004, Camp Nama closed and the unit moved to a new headquarters in Balad, 45 miles north of Baghdad. The unit's operations are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy.

Senior military commanders insist that the elite warriors are now treating detainees more humanely. The CIA has resumed conducting debriefings with the task force, but does not permit harsh questioning, said a CIA official.

The Justice Department inspector general is investigating complaints of detainee abuse by Task Force 6-26, a senior law-enforcement official said.