Joseph Hickman - Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth about Guantanamo Bay

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Copyright 2015 by Joseph L. Hickman

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2015

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Map copyright 2014 by Jeffrey L. Ward

Jacket design by Marc Cohen

Jacket photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4516-5079-2

ISBN 978-1-4516-5081-5 (ebook)

Dedicated to Talal al-Zahrani, father of Yasser al-Zahrani who died at Guant namo Bay, Cuba, while in US custody, June 9, 2006

I AM a patriotic American. I grew up in a row house about fifteen minutes south of downtown Baltimore, and I joined the Marine Corps as soon as I could at age eighteen. It was there that I found my place in the world. Aside from the hard training, the military offered me specialized schooling in radio communications and gave me a sense of purpose. I liked the structure, the brotherhood, and the knowledge that I was protecting the land and the people I loved. I worked hard and received high ratings for my job performance in the Marines. I was quickly promoted to a position at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, where I was assigned to a Marines unit that was attached to the National Security Agency (NSA).

When I left the Marine Corps in 1987 with an honorable discharge, I became the operations manager for one of the largest security and investigation companies in the United States. There I oversaw the operations of many commercial and government complexes in the MarylandWashington, DC, area: places like Fort Detrick, where the government conducted biochemical research. Some people claimed that a sample of every virus known to man was housed there.

In 1994 I reenlisted, this time entering the army. I was doing well in the civilian world, but I missed the camaraderie you could find only in the military. However, military life in my early thirties was not quite the same as when I was a young man, and in 1998 I once again received an honorable discharge and returned to Baltimore, where I started doing corrections work.

I became a prisoner transport officer for Baltimore and Anne Arundel County. At the same time, I received certification as a private investigator and took a position at Expert Security, Inc., which offered personal protection to corporate executives. Protecting suits paid well, but for some reasonmaybe because I grew up in and around a tough city like BaltimoreI preferred my work in corrections. I truly felt that I was helping society. I was in charge of handling dangerous felons, and I always prided myself on treating them with dignity. There were some true animals among themviolent predators with something wrong in their wiringbut many were people who came from backgrounds similar to my own. We just took different turns in life, and theirs took them to a dark place.

Eventually I grew bored protecting high-paid corporate executives and went out on my own. Some of my work was for rich people, spying on their spouses to see if they were cheating. However, most of my clients were just people scraping by who needed help: finding a missing loved one, tracking down an ex-spouse whod skipped out on child support payments, or protecting strippers who had stalker problems the police didnt think were serious enough to pursue.

The turning point for me was 9/11. When the attacks happened on September 11, 2001, I was glued to the TV. I saw the live broadcast from the Pentagon and was amazed to see Donald Rumsfeld, a sixty-nine-year-old man, in the rubble pulling out bodies. His office had just been blown up, and he was out there in a bloody, torn shirt, tending to people who were hurt, carrying them to the ambulances. I watched that and thought, Thats our secretary of defense. This man is a real American hero.

After seeing that, I couldnt continue working in the private sector. I was thirty-eight years old, and I wanted to do my part. I chose the Maryland National Guard. Six months after that grim day, I was placed in an infantry unit. The idea behind the National Guard is that its units and personnel can be integrated seamlessly into any branch of the army as necessary. The result was that I didnt often know when or where I was going on a deployment, or for how long.

I was initially assigned to an infantry squad that taught urban combat tactics to coalition forces in Germany and Japan. In 2005 I was assigned to a cavalry unit as a scout, and a member of a Reconnaissance Surveillance Target Acquisition (RSTA) team. I also successfully completed air assault school in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home of the 101st Airborne Division. Instead of deployment to Iraq, where I expected to go, I was assigned to the Maryland National Guard, 629th Military Intelligence Battalion, and told to prepare for a yearlong deployment at Guantnamo Bay prison. Finally, at forty-one, I had my chance to meet the enemy. Guarding him at Gitmo wouldnt be the same as facing him on the battlefield, but I felt that keeping terrorists locked up was an important job.

As I flew to Gitmo in 2006, I knew that because the enemy fought differently than in previous conflicts, our tactics had to change. Gitmo seemed like a legitimate solution for holding nonuniformed enemy combatants in a new kind of war. When I heard people complain about the legality of the place, or the Bush administrations actions, I thought they simply didnt understand the new, harsh realities facing America. I also believed that while the United Statess actions might not conform to the letter of the Geneva Conventions, they upheld the spirit. I trusted my government and my military to uphold basic American principles of decency.