Inside Outt

you’d think all the people we picked up in the war on terror were innocent. Because once the Supreme Court decided terror detainees had the right to petition for habeas corpus, we had to start letting a lot of them go.”
    Ben thought of the Manila city jail. “Well, if you couldn’t prove they’d done anything—”
    “Just because we couldn’t prove it in a court of law didn’t mean it wasn’t so. And look, okay, maybe some of them were innocent. Unfortunate, but unavoidable. But now they have a grudge. Meaning, even if they weren’t dangerous before, they are now. You want to be the one who lets one of these guys go and then have him slaughter more Americans? You’re JSOC, not the ACLU, I thought you’d get this. It’s why I’m telling you.”
    Ben didn’t answer. Not so much earlier, he would have gotten it. But now, hearing it out loud, he wasn’t sure.
    “So you captured these ghosts. What’s the problem?”
    “The problem is, the way they were interrogated might have offended the sensibilities of the armchair quarterbacks who’ve already forgotten 9/11.”
    “You waterboarded them?”
    Ulrich tugged on his beard. “At first.”
    Ben had been waterboarded during his SERE—survival, evasion, resistance, escape—training. He’d consented to it, the people who’d done it had been his own instructors, he’d been provided with a safe word and a tennis ball he could just drop at any time to stop the whole thing, and it had only been once—and still it was one of the most unpleasant things that had ever been done to him, instantly stripping away his will and replacing it with paralyzing, childlike terror. He’d held out for fourteen seconds, which made him practically the class champion. And the Caspers had gotten the real thing, and who knows how many times.
    “What do you mean, ‘at first’?”
    “Let’s just say that, by the end, they
wished
they were just being waterboarded.”
    Ben looked at him, trying to imagine what you would have to do to a man to make him long to be waterboarded, instead. He couldn’t come up with anything. He said, “And the CIA videotaped it.”
    “You got it. There’s no genius like a CIA genius. Fundamentally, they created a whole line of government snuff films.”
    Ben imagined a bunch of guys watching God knows what through a viewfinder, recording it, watching it again later on a screen in a dark room. Rewinding it. Pausing. He thought of what Hort had said, about how torture is always about something else. He felt sick.
    “And you’re worried that if the public ever sees the videos, they’re not just going to go after the people who filmed and starred in them, they’re going to go after the producers, too.”
    Ulrich looked at him. “If I were you, I’d be a little more concerned about Muslim audiences on this than I would be with domestic ones.”
    “Yeah, I get that. But you’re not me.”
    Ulrich didn’t answer.
    Something was tickling at Ben’s mind. There were a lot of things you knew when you were in the unit, or at least that you’d hear about. But the Caspers… not a word. How had they covered it up so completely?
    “What did you do with them?” he said. “The Caspers. When you were done with them. Done filming.”
    Ulrich didn’t answer.
    Ben said, “Tell me you didn’t.”
    “Look, these were genuinely dangerous men—”
    “Oh, man—”
    “—who couldn’t just be released. But they couldn’t be tried, either, or they would have gone public with tales of torture. And besides, they’d go free in the end anyway because people would say their confessions had been coerced.”
    “What did you do with them?”
    “They were disposed of.”
    “You mean, the CIA just executed them? Prisoners?”
    “Not the CIA. JSOC. Your commander. Horton.”
    Ben blinked despite himself. “What? Why?”
    “JSOC was being run out of the Office of the Vice President. The Caspers were just one of the operations your people were involved in. They were ghosts anyway—no records of their capture, movement, detention, or imprisonment. It was as though they hadn’t existed. We just had to make de jure what was de facto. And now it is. They don’t exist. They never did.”
    “Except for the tapes.”
    “Yes. That’s why we wanted those tapes back. You ought to get a medal for recovering them.”
    For some reason, the thought of this guy proposing a medal, and for this, made Ben want to hit him again.
    “What was Ecologia,