By Brad Parks
The facility spread out below him, row after row of neatly aligned white aluminum roofs, looking like Chiclets set against the endless beige of the desert floor.
It was called Camp Bucca. To coalition forces in Iraq, it was the primary detention facility for enemy prisoners of war. To Mitchell Gray, then 48 and serving his country for the third time, it was simply the place where the US Army had decided his skills, which included a law degree and a fluency in Arabic, were needed most.
He and the rest of his unit, the 45th Infantry Brigade of the Oklahoma National Guard, were flying helicopters in from Kuwait. It was shortly after landing that he got a first glimpse at a few of the 26,000 detainees, staring at him from the other side of the concertina wire.
“You never see hatred on the faces of Americans like you saw on the faces of these detainees,” Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. “When I say they hated us, I mean they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance. I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they would rip our heads off and drink our blood.’ ”
What Gray didn’t know — but might have expected — was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.
And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.
Camp Bucca started, as so many policy blunders do, with nothing but the best intentions. The Army simply needed a place to stick bad actors where they could not harm US troops.
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