Last February, a former Army contractor named Eric Fair wrote a passionate article for the Washington Post about alledged torture of detainees that he witnessed and participated in.

NPR reported this in July:
A one-time interrogator for the U.S. military in Iraq enters religious seminary at Princeton University. His experiences in the military left him scarred, he says, and led him to begin the foundation for a ministry in the Presbyterian Church.

Philadelphia Magazine October 2007
Fair grew up the son of two schoolteachers, Presbyterians of Scottish and Austrian descent. They imbued in him, he says, a strict sense of right and wrong, and respect for regimen and authority.

He did well in school, and graduated from college with a degree in history. A smart kid who loved words, thanks to his parents.

Since high school he had wanted to be a policeman, and he quickly realized that serving in the military first would help him find a top job. That’s where his life took a twist, although its full significance would only become clear later.

Fair joined the Army in 1995, and signed up for airborne training, as well as a more severe course called “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.” He took the attendant battery of tests — psychological and intelligence — and his score on one of them, the language aptitude test, caught his superiors’ attention.

“You will be a linguist,” one of them told him. “And you will speak Arabic.”

Arabic ranks among the most difficult languages in the world, and Fair spent a year and a half undergoing intense training at a language school in California. His class started with 12 students, and finished with four.

The graduating students split into two groups: strategic assignment and tactical. Strategic meant analysis, planning and theory. Tactical meant action in the field. Fair’s penchant for action — and his airborne training — landed him a tactical spot. Although that didn’t mean a lot in 1997. He spent the next three years playing war games in Kentucky, battling pretend countries with Soviet-era satellite technology. “A total waste of time,” he says.

Those exercises may seem absurd, in retrospect. But there was one odd departure, and it, in retrospect, seems critical and revealing.

In 1999, the Army’s 10th Mountain Division needed to rotate a thousand or so soldiers into Egypt — part of a standing force in the Sinai — and sent a small advance team of officers and enlisted men to prepare the way. They needed a translator, and so they plucked Fair from his war games in Kentucky. [snip]

After his honorable discharge from the Army, Fair returned to Pennsylvania, married, and took up a position with the Bethlehem police department in 2001.

He worked hard, as an officer. Too hard, sometimes. “I had a reputation for being a pain in the neck,” he says.

He hated to sit behind a desk — he preferred tactical, so to speak, not strategic — and he sometimes went out looking for criminals even if the force was short-staffed.

“What if we had to come back you up?” his commander asked.

Fair felt restless. His longtime desire for public duty had intensified after September 11th; he needed to serve the country in a more demanding role, and he felt uniquely qualified: He embodied both the cerebral, as an Arabist, and the courageous, as a paratrooper trained in stealth.

Fair applied for positions at the CIA and the DEA. Both agencies had hiring processes that lasted many months. They picked through the minutiae of Fair’s background, his character, his motivations.

Finally, only the physical examination remained. At the doctor’s office, something unusual showed up on Fair’s EKG. He had cardiomyopathy, a potentially fatal condition — an enlarged heart that leaked blood. Under stress, no matter what his physical condition, Fair could drop dead without warning. That ended his hopes of fieldwork for the DEA, the CIA, and even the Bethlehem police.

That was spring of 2003. He sat behind a desk for a while at the Bethlehem police station, literally brokenhearted, and then decided to accept his fate and sit, at least, behind a more exclusive desk. He applied to become an analyst at the National Security Agency.

The NSA put him through its own rigorous screening process: six months of background checks, interviews, and a “full scope” polygraph, which, unlike most lie-detector sessions, lasted for hours. It probed for any deception, any moral weakness, any wobbly mental hinges. Finally he gained a top-secret security clearance, and the NSA hired him in November 2003. Fair moved to Maryland, and reported to work. A week later, his phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” said the voice on the other end. “I’m with CACI.”

The Fortune 1000 company once went by the nondescript name Consolidated Analysis Center, Inc. That name didn’t give away much, but even so, the company now uses the less descriptive acronym CACI, which its operators unofficially pronounce — the least descriptive term imaginable — “khaki.” According to one sentence from the company’s website, CACI can “ … deliver the IT applications and infrastructures our federal customers use to improve communications and collaboration, secure the integrity of information systems and networks … ” and so forth.

The caller from CACI, however, was very clear and concise on the phone that day: The company needed an interrogator. [snip]

Fair and the other new CACI contractors touched down at Baghdad International Airport, and found CACI leadership waiting.

Where are the guns? And the body armor?

We’re working on that.

The leaders took the men to a small building in the compound, and into a room with a few cots. Get some sleep, the leaders said. Get your heads on straight. We’ll see you in a couple of days.

The contractors sat for two days and stared at each other, waiting for word of their fates, and their weapons. Finally, the leaders returned with an assignment. We’re going to a prison, they said. It’s called Abu Ghraib. [snip]

No one ever instructed Fair to do anything torturous or sadistic, he says. The few who performed such acts — infamously, now — were, he thinks, anomalies. But the lack of oversight, at a facility in willful disarray, made the anomalies inevitable. “What did they expect to happen?” Fair wonders now.

After he’d been at Abu Ghraib for a month or so, word of a new tactic reached Fair. He and other CACI contractors would move west to Fallujah, an insurgent stronghold.

Too many Abu Ghraib prisoners, like the old general, had sat so long in their cells that their information — when any existed — had gone stale. So a handful of interrogators was being sent upstream, to intercept and question suspects immediately after capture.

Fallujah made Abu Ghraib seem like summer camp. In Fallujah, Fair interrogated men still oozing from fresh wounds, with bullets lodged in their tissue. Young men, old men, extended families.

And still, often, he interrogated people without really knowing why: What had these people done? What were they supposed to know? [snip]

And then Fair awoke, to the sound of his own screams. He lay in bed back in Bethlehem, next to his horrified wife.

Just a dream. But he feared sleep, now.

So he forced himself to stay awake.

A few months passed, and the nightmares continued to plague Fair. He was back with the NSA. He continued grappling with his role in the Iraq war, and whether he had ceased to believe in that war entirely. He briefly returned to Iraq as an analyst for the NSA — a desk job, no interrogations — but even that didn’t suit him anymore.

People would laugh, he knew, and call him soft: What about what they — the ­enemy — did to us, or would if they could?

But Fair remembered his Christian upbringing, and particularly the portion where Jesus admonished his followers: “Love your enemies. … If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic.” Fair had drifted far from that gentle ideology, literally so, to the point of removing another man’s cloak.

Fair started writing letters to his local newspaper, and then the Philadelphia Inquirer, and finally the Washington Post. He wrote editorials both crying out for personal forgiveness and alerting America to the destruction of its collective soul.

Thousands of people wrote back. Some supportive, some not.

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This entry was posted by Chuck Simmins on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at and is filed under Commentary, Iraq, Original writing, War on Terror. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.