But as for the civilian contractor bit, Fair served in the Army from 1995-2001. Which means that after Basic Training and DLI, he arrived at the MI schoolhouse in 1996-1997. To be hired as an Interrogation Contractor in Iraq, you needed to show that you had completed the course and served as an Interrogator. Fair evidently was a qualified interrogator. (An informal survey of some of my friends in the biz yielded two who remembered him, by the way.) I mentioned the change in MOS in the context of violations during training, which is to say that if you screw up at the schoolhouse, you don’t get to be an interrogator, period.

One of the great shames of the scandal is the revelation that the contractors fall into a legal gray area. It’s really hard to prosecute them, because no one is exactly sure where they fall. Stefanowicz has, to my knowledge, not been tried because of that fact.

Perhaps forcing a man to stand naked and sleepless isn’t what would cause you nightmares, but it is a violation of the law. Also, it’s not just the extent to which the law was violated, but the mere fact that the interrogator de-humanized the detainee. That’s not a realization I’d like to come to grips with.

Fair was at the Fallujah DIF (Division Interogation Facility), where the detainees arrive within a week or so of capture, so your date of March or April 2004 is probably off. Also, I would be surprised if Fair gave the actual name of the detainee in question, although I wouldn’t rule that out, and January 2004 fits with the stated timeline in Fair’s piece.

Fair was named in that RICO lawsuit, but in that lawsuit only Steven Stefanowicz was named as a CACI employee engaged in racketeering. It stated that further investigation would reveal which of these persons (including Fair) also engaged in racketeering. So lumping Fair in with Stefanowicz is not exactly fair (pun intended) to Eric.

As for him getting his panties in a twist, yes, he was a willing participant in interrogation activities. All U.S. interrogators are taught that torture is not only wrong, but it’s ineffective as well. The long-standing policy of the Basic Interrogation Course is that if a student vilotes Geneva in an exercise, he fails the interrogation, and repeated violations will get you sent to another MOS. I know this policy was in place when Fair went to the school, because we evidently just missed each other.

This is not a lefty smear on the good name of America, it’s a call for accountability and acknowledgement that what happened there was real, it was wrong, and it was fundamentally un-American. There’s no grand conspiracy to make our boys in uniform look bad, but after My Lai it is important for us as a nation to recognize that bad things do happen in ou name, and to correct the wrongs.

[editor: He names the Baathist, and that man was captured in January 2004. He says that the man who haunts him was interrogated two months later.

Making a man stand naked and sleepless in a corner is hardly the stuff of nightmares.]