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Summary
Summary
The revelatory eyewitness account about Guantánamo Bay--detainees murdered, a secret CIA facility for torture, and the US government cover up--by the Staff Sergeant who felt honor-bound to uncover it.
Staff Sergeant Joe Hickman was a loyal member of the armed forces and a proud American patriot. For twenty years, he worked as a prison guard, a private investigator, and in the military, earning more than twenty commendations and awards. When he re-enlisted after 9/11, he served as a team leader and Sergeant of the Guard in Guantánamo Naval Base. From the moment he arrived at Camp Delta, something was amiss. The prisons were chaotic, detainees were abused, and Hickman uncovered by accident a secret facility he labeled "Camp No." On June 9, 2006, the night Hickman was on duty, three prisoners died, supposed suicides, and Hickman knew something was seriously wrong. So began his epic search for the truth, an odyssey that would lead him to conclude that the US government was using Guantánamo not just as a prison, but as a training ground for interrogators to test advanced torture techniques.
For the first time, Hickman details the inner workings of Camp Delta: the events surrounding the death of three prisoners, the orchestrated the cover-up, and the secret facility at the heart of it all. From his own eyewitness account, and a careful review of thousands of documents, he deconstructs the government's account of what happened and proves that the military not only tortured prisoners, but lied about their deaths. By revealing Guantánamo's true nature, Sergeant Hickman shows us why the prison has been so difficult to close. This book opens an important window onto government overreach, secrecy, and one man's principled search for the truth.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Hickman raises more questions than answers in this disturbing eyewitness account of the mysterious deaths of three Arab prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. A proud soldier who re-enlisted with the Maryland National Guard after 9/11, Hickman was on duty the night two Saudis and a Yemeni committed suicide in their cells, according to the official story told by the U.S. military and reported by the international press. But Hickman alleges that the suicides were a cover-up by the U.S. government, and he suspects the men were killed by experimental torture methods being deployed at the site. After his Gitmo tour of duty ended in late 2008, the author took his story to Mark Denbeaux, a professor of law and director of Seton Hall University Law School's Center for Policy and Research, which had published a detailed profile of Guantanamo detainees in early 2006. With the aid of Denbeaux's students and Hickman's own lawyer son, Josh, Hickman dissected thousands of documents to prove his theories, which major media outlets and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service mostly ignored. In response, he wrote this book, in which he makes his case with compelling clarity and strength of character. Unnervingly, we may never know if he's right. Agent: Stuart Miller, Stuart M. Miller Co. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Disturbing account of abuse and secrecy at the Guantnamo Bay military prison, tied to the deaths of three detainees.Proud of his long career in the Marines, Army and corrections, Hickman re-enlisted after 9/11. He joined the Maryland National Guard and was ultimately sent on a yearlong deployment to Gitmo. Although the author had worked in violent prisons in the past, he was shocked by the chaotic atmosphere in the detention units, noting that interrogation personnel were exempted from standard security oversight and that there was a fraught atmosphere of racial tension and mistrust between the Guardsmen and the Navy personnel administering the prison. Although Hickman suspected that many detainees were potentially dangerous jihadi, he was disturbed by the unprovoked harassment and abuse handed out by the guards. His unease climaxed in June 2006, when, on his supervisory watch, three inmates died mysteriously. Hickman was first informed they'd had rags stuffed in their mouths, but the media received an implausible account of a coordinated suicide, which an inscrutable report later supported. Though he was never contacted by investigators, the author remained sufficiently haunted by his experience to contact a Guantnamo-focused think tank at Seton Hall Law School, setting in motion a six-year investigation. They meticulously deconstructed the report and other evidence, determining the deaths may have stemmed from deliberate overdoses of anti-malarial drugs with psychoactive side effects, administered "to break down detainees." Chillingly, Hickman concludes that commanders as highly ranked as Donald Rumsfeld had decided to use Gitmo as "America's battle lab," testing unproven interrogation techniques on its alleged enemy combatants: "I believed we were guards protecting America from the worst of the worst," writes the author, "[but] the authorities behind it aimed to create controlled chaos.' " A plainly told, unsettling corrective to the many jingoistic accounts of post-9/11 military action. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Hickman, a former corrections officer and decorated soldier and marine, served in a Maryland National Guard unit at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. While there, he was appalled by general racism, disorder, and prisoner mistreatment. On the night of June 9, 2006, three Arab prisoners supposedly committed suicide, but Hickman writes that he saw and heard things that caused him to doubt this. Was it just a mistake or were private contractors outside the command structure involved? When he returned to the United States, he contacted Seton Hall University professor Mark. P. Denbeaux, who looked into this incident with his students-they dissected the voluminous Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) report and found many discrepancies. Meanwhile, the government announced that they could not corroborate Hickman's story. The author, angry about these injustices, believes the alleged actions harmed the country and were not representative of most of the people he met in the armed services. There is a useful map of the camp but no photographs, acronym list, organizational charts, or bibliography, which is a big gap. VERDICT Some readers will see this book as a traitorous attack on patriots protecting the United States from fanatics by any means, while others will view it as confirmation from a veteran that an out-of-control government and individuals went way beyond the law-and gained nothing but trouble from it. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]-Daniel Blewett, Coll. of DuPage Lib., Glen Ellyn, IL (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Murder at Camp Delta CHAPTER 1 No Sleep Till Gitmo March 10, 2006 THE flight to Gitmo from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, should have taken an hour. It was about four hundred miles away as the crow flies. But because of the long-standing hatred between America and Fidel Castro's communist regime, American planes were required to fly the long way around Cuban airspace to prevent an international incident, adding another two hours to the flight. My unit, the roughly 120 men of Company E from the 629th Military Intelligence Battalion, had flown overnight to Fort Lauderdale from Fort Lewis, Washington. None of us slept on the way into Fort Lauderdale. We'd been occupied the day before dealing with our gear, and spent the dark hours at the airport waiting for the four-in-the-morning flight to Gitmo. I'd been up for more than twenty-four hours when I climbed aboard the Boeing 727. It should have been a miserable flight, but I was so excited that I couldn't sleep. Very few of the guys on the plane to Gitmo were able to sleep, either. The sun came up about an hour into our flight, and I could hear the younger men in the unit laughing in the adjacent seats. "So what do you think the place will really be like?" I heard a voice behind me ask. "Absolutely nothing like what we've been told," came the reply. "There's a small seed of wisdom in that," I thought. As a team leader in my platoon, I was worried about what we'd face when we landed. Mine wasn't a top command position, but one thing I learned in the military was a sense of responsibility for the men under me. It's a responsibility I took to heart. As our plane drew closer to the landing field at Gitmo, my heart was not completely at ease. We had all become close during our eight-week training, and I had no worries about any man on my squad not doing his job. We had been briefed repeatedly that we were being given a potentially tough mission, and we were ready for the challenges ahead. We were told constantly in our training that the detainees would take any chance they could to kill us, and that they were highly motivated fanatics. My worry wasn't that any guy on the team would flinch but that someone might get hurt. Company E was divided into three platoons, with each platoon divided into four ten-man squads, and each squad broken into two five-man teams. I was in First Platoon, second squad, and team leader of its five-man Bravo Team. Everyone from my squad sat together on the plane. Most of them were good soldiers, as far as I was concerned. The guys in my squad covered an extreme range of ages and experiences. I Phillip Bradley, who was fifty-one years old, was a former Army Ranger, but that was decades ago. He'd spent most of his working life with the coroner's office in Baltimore, picking up and delivering bodies from autopsies and crime scenes. "We tag 'em and bag 'em," he'd say of his civilian duties. The youngest in our squad was eighteen-year-old Specialist Jamal Stewart, whom we all called "Young'n." One of the guys I was closest to was Private First Class José Vasquez, thirty-eight years old. Vasquez was from DC, where he worked as a private investigator. I'd met him a year earlier in Japan, when he'd deployed there with my unit on a training mission. Everything that came out of his mouth was a joke. Sometimes I had to watch it with Vasquez, because he tended to speak his mind to officers. Even if my guy might be in the right, a blunt-speaking enlisted man could get the whole squad in trouble. The one person we all had faith in was our squad leader, Staff Sergeant Michael Hayes. When not on guard duty, Hayes was a cop at Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore. Before that he was a marine, and in my experience, former marines tended to be among the best leaders. He was six years younger than me, and though he stood, at most, five feet ten inches, Hayes carried himself like a giant. In my military career, he taught me more than any other leader I ever served under. With him leading our squad, I had as much confidence as possible. Our squad was predominantly African American. In fact, after two white guys were pulled from the platoon--one because he was needed for another mission, and the other because he couldn't get along with black people--I was the only Caucasian left. Vasquez was light skinned but a proud Mexican. Like most people in the military, race and ethnicity didn't concern me. Soldiers were soldiers. But everybody else in our platoon was white, and that bothered all of us. They had segregated all the black guys and the Mexican into one squad. I guess they figured I belonged because I was from Baltimore. It was wrong, and all of my guys knew it. The military has spent decades integrating its units. For commanders to segregate a unit was almost unheard of in 2006. Worse, it made us very uneasy about the overall wisdom of our company's officers. Despite my positive impression of Staff Sergeant Hayes, the leadership of our company was the biggest concern on my mind. Our training experience at Fort Lewis with our commanders had been, in a word, awful. I . I have changed the names of the personnel at Guantánamo with the exception of the command officers whose names have been widely reported. Excerpted from Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant's Pursuit of the Truth about Guantanamo Bay by Joseph Hickman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Part I The Island | |
Preface Call to Duty | p. 3 |
Chapter 1 No Sleep Till Gitmo | p. 7 |
Chapter 2 Training Days | p. 10 |
Chapter 3 Welcome to Guantanaino Bay | p. 16 |
Chapter 4 Priorities | p. 27 |
Chapter 5 Camp No | p. 36 |
Chapter 6 By the Dawn's Early Light | p. 50 |
Chapter 7 "Disturbance in Camp 4!" | p. 57 |
Chapter 8 Unacceptable Behavior | p. 69 |
Chapter 9 All Spin Zone | p. 78 |
Chapter 10 June 9, 2006 | p. 85 |
Chapter 11 Lies | p. 93 |
Chapter 12 Ten Days in the Real World | p. 98 |
Chapter 13 Return to Gitmo | p. 105 |
Chapter 14 Stress Dreams | p. 115 |
Chapter 15 NCIS | p. 120 |
Chapter 16 Seton Hall | p. 130 |
Part II Discovery | |
Chapter 17 Meet the Denbeauxs | p. 141 |
Chapter 18 Discoveries | p. 147 |
Chapter 19 Feds | p. 156 |
Chapter 20 Going to the Media | p. 162 |
Chapter 21 "All Accounted For" | p. 174 |
Chapter 22 Admiral's Memo | p. 179 |
Chapter 23 Missing Pages | p. 185 |
Chapter 24 What's the Motive Joe? | p. 189 |
Chapter 25 The Mefloquine Motive | p. 197 |
Chapter 26 America's Secret "Battle Lab" | p. 208 |
Afterword | p. 223 |
Acknowledgments | p. 233 |
Index | p. 235 |