Iraq Prison Diary: Whatever Happened to the ‘Six of Clubs’?

Our friend Michael Bronner, in the Huffington Investigative Fund, here

".... Then, on April 12, 2003, Amin’s friend and former colleague, chemical engineer Amer al-Sa’adi (the “Seven of Diamonds” on the card deck, also a high-profile liaison to the U.N. before the war), made a gallant public surrender, declaring before news cameras that he would prove to America that Iraq had been honest all along. Amin made what he calls a patriotic decision to join al-Sa’adi and arranged a meeting ....

“I am sorry,” Amin said, rebuffing me when I reached him, through a series of intermediaries, in the country of his exile far from Iraq. “We signed a paper, at the prison when we were released, [agreeing] not to talk to any media, or not to say anything. I am sorry,” he said again. “I am a refugee now.”....

A few days later, however — a few hours before my overnight flight back to New York — Amin let me know that he would be sitting at a small coffee shop in his neighborhood. He’d be wearing a gray shirt, he said. He asked that I not bring along any Iraqis, or disclose his whereabouts..........

Stories about what was happening at Camp Nama began circulating later, after the military responded to the welling Iraq insurgency by expanding operations at the base. Interrogations were conducted in “the ‘Black Room’…a windowless, jet-black garage-size” cell where “some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts…and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball,” according to a 2006 report by the New York Times. A Human Rights Watch report from the same year includes whistle-blowing soldiers’ descriptions of physically abusive interrogations “of hundreds of anonymous, and often innocent detainees” at Camp Nama and other facilities in Iraq, noting that a policy of abuse was “apparently built into the interrogation regime.”