say, Sir Walter Raleigh, Marquis de Sade, Henry David Thoreau, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer is to be reminded that visions articulated from behind bars may have lasting power. From St. Paul’s epistles to Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” seminal writings, often in the form of correspondence, have issued from the imprisoned; whether they are discussing faith and ethics, poetry and politics, or eros and agape, their true theme is freedom, which has different meanings at different times and places. In post-9/11 America, where the war on terror is a defining feature of the body politic, Joshua Casteel’s Letters from Abu Ghraib offers readers an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the most important word in our founding documents. What is liberty, anyway?
In the rich tradition of prison literature the writer is usually the prisoner, not the interrogator. But in Letters from Abu Ghraib it is the interrogator who speaks from a prison that has come to symbolize the moral depths to which the United States has sunk in its prosecution of the war on terror. Casteel arrived in Iraq six weeks after the revelation, in 2004, of the scandal at Abu Ghraib, where thousands of dissidents had been tortured and executed under Saddam Hussein; after the Iraqi dictator was deposed in the U.S.-led invasion, coalition forces filled the prison with suspected insurgents. But when details emerged, on the newsmagazine 60 Minutes and in a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersch, of American military police torturing and abusing prisoners, with lurid photographs documenting their cruelty, there was widespread revulsion—which hardly diminished when Arab linguists like Casteel were sent to Abu Ghraib with orders to extract information legally, in accordance with the Army Field Manual. What Casteel confronted, in his interrogations of Iraqis and of his own soul, was the power of evil; what he discovered, in prayer and readings of Scripture and theology, was the possibility of grace. His was a tortured path to the recognition that faith demands action—in his case, to apply for conscientious objector status and leave the military.
This was not how he imagined his life would turn out. Born and raised in Iowa, in an evangelical Christian household, where he was taught to equate love of God with love of country, he signed up for the army at the age of seventeen and won an appointment to West Point—only to drop out in his first term. Drifting from school to school (the University of Iowa, Colorado Christian University, the Colorado School of Mines), he studied literature and philosophy, wrote plays, and wrestled with issues like Christianity and patriotism, just war and pacifism, truth and relativity—which informed his thinking when he returned to active duty in May 2002. Despite his misgivings about the war on terror, he entered the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he excelled in Arabic studies; his free time was taken up with matters of faith. Guided by the pronouncements of Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Pope John Paul II, who condemned the invasion of Iraq, he began to articulate his opposition to the war, which in his view did not meet the definition of a just war. Nevertheless, he also became a gifted interrogator, and when he went to Abu Ghraib he was happy to employ his skills to elicit information from the Iraqis in his charge.
The interrogator and the prisoner: there is no more fraught relationship. For in this give-and-take any question, any answer, may determine an individual’s fate. What better emblem of human conscience? In these pages we learn little of what actually occurred in Abu Ghraib—the messages were subject to military censorship—but we are privy to the self-examination of a man torn between the deception integral to his work and his Christian obligation to tell the truth. He is at once driven to excel and desperate to save his soul. He seems to have the makings of a charismatic leader or a monk. And if at the moment it seems that he is drawn toward the latter, awaiting a call to the priesthood, it is not difficult to imagine that more changes lie in his future.
The writings of the German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer exerted a decisive influence on Casteel. Imprisoned by the Gestapo for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer used his time before he was hanged to compose a series of letters on the problem of becoming a Christian in our time, defining freedom in religious terms: “A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes . . . and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.” Freedom for him was thus a condition of his faith in the Risen Christ, a liberation that Casteel also experiences. The American soldier in Iraq, interrogating his own actions, recognizes, as Bonhoeffer wrote, that “cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church. Our struggle today is for costly grace.” Such is the grace that Casteel knows.
This collection of email messages, the modern equivalent of the letter, is a record, not a reckoning; presumably the reckoning will come later, in more reflective writings. (Casteel is also a playwright and a memoirist.) Raw, guileless, this is the first draft of the history of an introspective young man. In a subsequent work perhaps he will reveal more about his assertion that his interrogations resulted in combat operations. Does he have the blood of innocents on his hands? Did this help drive him out of the military? Answers to these questions must await another reckoning. For the book concludes with his conscientious objector hearing, where he made a speech that was the plea of a sinner praying for release—from the military and from the bonds of the self. “God help me,” he pleaded.
What Joshua Casteel interrogates in Letters from Abu Ghraib is the very idea of liberty. For every enduring work of literature is an epistle from the prison of silence to the possibility of freedom. These cries from the heart will echo for a long time.
—Christopher Merrill
Pre-Deployment to Iraq
202nd Military Intelligence Battalion
FORT GORDON, GA
FROM JOSHUA
SENT 05/04/2004 8:11 P.M.
TO PEARL
SUBJECT HEARING
So, I guess you’ve heard about the controversy at the prison in Iraq . . . the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. It’s been a strange past two days since I first heard. That’s the same prison I’m heading to. A wave of feelings has rushed through me. Mostly contempt, bewilderment. The photos are horrific, and that’s not what I was trained to do. I don’t exactly know how to process this. For the most part, I know what the leadership of interrogation facilities do, and I’ve also heard that the military police (which is who the six perpetrators are) are not well educated in the Law of Land Warfare, or the Geneva Conventions (of which Interrogators have to be specialists). But when I hear the prisoners being called “detainees” it troubles me. Detainees have fewer rights than prisoners of war. POWs have special status as lawful combatants, heightening their Geneva Convention provisions. Since these prisoners are being labeled other than POWs, I don’t know just how far envelopes are being pushed . . . The angry side of me wants on the first plane, and to be pinned my sergeant stripes as soon as possible so that I can have some authority and ensure that nothing of the sort happens under my watch. Then the “what the hell am I doing” side of me shows up, wondering what a blond, blue-eyed Iowa boy is doing in Iraq in the first place . . . at least with Caesar’s body armor and an M16.
always,
Joshua
The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center
Abu Ghraib Prison
BAGHDAD, IRAQ
FROM JOSHUA
SENT 06/20/2004 9:29 A.M.
TO HOME
SUBJECT RE: GLAD YOU MADE IT SAFELY
Hey, Mom. Yep, I live and work at the prison, both. The prison itself is quite huge, broken up into about eight sub-compounds, all about the size of medieval castles. There’s actually more dust than sand, and dust covers everything. Palm trees peek up over the perimeter wall, and a few minarets. My “castle” has air conditioning and trailer homes set up with showers and sinks. All onesies and twosies are done in portajohns. I work in a compound about three football fields away, and eat and attend Mass at a compound about five football fields away. No Anglican chaplains, so I’ve been given another pastoral exception to attend Catholic Mass. There is an Internet/telephone center and entertainment “shed” put on by Morale, Welfare