Chapter One The Panopticon I n the summer of 2012, a group of young men, who at the time were American soldiers, found themselves in one of the most dangerous and treacherous places in the world. Thinking they were on one kind of mission, they really were unwittingly part of something much bigger and, perhaps, even nefarious. It was June 4, 2012, and there, on the northern slope of the Arghandab River in Zhari District, Afghanistan, in the village of Payenzai, the soldiers from First Platoon, Charlie Troop, 4/73rd Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, were getting ready to head into battle, as millions of soldiers had before them, in countless wars across thousands of years. Private 1st Class Samuel Walley remembers the day indelibly, because it was his birthday, and only once in a per son''s lifetime do you turn twenty years old. "We captured the number two most wanted Taliban in [the] South," Walley recalled. And though time and priority have diluted the significance of this mostwanted catch, it was important for a number of reasons. "We captured him," said Walley, "by getting his fingerprints." Private Walley grew up in Georgia on four acres of land, climbing trees and jumping in rivers.
His family was military stock. He was raised to be rugged. Turn problems into solutions. In the second grade, he developed a lisp and other kids made fun of him. He willed what was wrong with him away by speaking with a British accent, like James Bond. Now he was twenty years old, six foot, one inch tall. He had green eyes, sandybrown hair, and weighed 185 pounds. He was fit; he ran a sixminute mile and benchpressed 240 pounds.
Situps were his weakness. He had two atomic bombs tattooed on his left arm with the word "Chaos" written beside them, a nickname from what felt like forever ago but was only last year: high school. His platoon, First Platoon, had been in southern Afghanistan for a little more than three months. Today, Walley carried the biggest weapon on first squad, the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a beltfed killing machine capable of firing 900 rounds per minute. He checked and rechecked his gear. Everyone was ready. It was time to go. The soldiers lined up in a staggered file formation, originally designed for road marches but adapted for goat paths and grape rows in southern Afghanistan.
It was baking hot. Already more than 100 degrees. One of the Afghan National Army soldiers opened Strong Point Payenzai''s plywood gate and out the American soldiers went, one after the other, leaving the zigzagged entry control point spaced ten feet apart. The soldiers headed east, then north, into Sarenzai Village, a community of mudbrick buildings and labyrinthine walls located roughly two football fields from the strongpoint. They knew the village well. They patrolled the terrain here two times every day, five or more hours at a time, or until something went wrong. "Payenzai and everything around it was a hellhole," Walley remembered. Life here resembled existence after an apocalypse.
Decades of war had left Zhari District in a state of collapse. Anarchy and terror had long since vanquished the rule of law. The villagers here had no electricity, no running water, no shops or food stores of any kind. "Mudbrick buildings bombedout and long abandoned," remembered company commander Captain Patrick Swanson. "No fertile fields, no marketplace, no schools." "Our minds are dark--we don''t know anything, and our children can''t even write their names," district governor Niyaz Mohammed Sarhadi told the State Department''s Jonathan Addleton in 2012. At the Pentagon, war strategists called life here "simple and Hobbesian--nasty, brutish and short." State Department estimates put the villagers'' life expectancy at fortyfour.
It was understood by everyone in the American chain of command that the area around Strong Point Payenzai was ruled by a network of Taliban insurgents and that improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were sewn into the terrain--into the roads and pathways and farmers'' fields. Insurgents stockpiled homemade explosives in the abandoned compounds across this area of operations (AO) and recruited new members from among local villagers. Assassinations and murders were commonplace. In 2012, bomb production was on the rise. The Taliban ran IED assembly and distribution across the terrain. The buildings reduced to rubble around here served as beddown locations for fighters coming in from Pakistan, trafficking weapons and materiel to make more bombs. After more than a decade of losing this war, in more ways than it could count, the Defense Department believed it had found a technologybased solution to the human problem of insurgency. All across Afghanistan, U.
S. military forces were capturing biometric data: electronic fingerprints, iris scans, facial images, and where possible, cell swabs of DNA. The Pentagon believed that through mass biometric collection, it could bring the rule of law to this land where insurgents reigned. The effort was called Identity Dominance. The product was biometricsenabled intelligence. The battlefield component of this datadriven mission fell to combat infantry soldiers in the field. One member of the platoon, the Company Intelligence Support Team member, the COIST, handled technical collection. The rest of the platoon supported the COIST''s efforts with varying degrees of military presence and force.
It was still early in the morning on June 4 as the platoon entered the village of Sarenzai. The temperature had already hit 102 degrees. First Platoon set up a security perimeter. Some soldiers took off their helmets. Others sat down. "We had the biometrics on maybe one hundred of the militaryage villagers in the area," said Captain Swanson, years later in 2019. "Some of them . they had been biometrically enrolled by me on more than one occasion.
They were usually working the fields around the area," Private 1st Class James Skelton, the COIST, would later tell a military judge. Private Walley spotted a man nobody recognized. "He had a white beard, a dark turban, and was maybe forty or fifty years old." "He looked tired," remembered Specialist Anthony Reynoso. "I didn''t notice him at first," Specialist Dallas Haggard said. Walley made eye contact with the man. "He was walking in one direction, then after he saw me, he kind of veered off and pretended he was going to the water pump." Walley gave 1st Lieutenant Dominic Latino a nod.
"The lieutenant saw him too." As platoon leader, Latino was the highestranking soldier on the patrol. Off Walley''s look, Latino called for an Afghan interpreter, who ordered the man to stop. Lieutenant Latino began asking the man questions according to protocol. Did he live here in the village? Was he just visiting? If so, for what reason? The man''s answers were suspicious. Private Skelton would now use the army''s newest biometric collection device, the Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, the SEEK, to capture the man''s biometrics. Skelton set down his backpack and pulled out the SEEK, a portable piece of military hardware the size of a small shoebox used to electronically capture fingerprints, iris scans, and facial images from civilian villagers and suspected insurgents alike, all across Afghanistan. Fingerprint matching is a precise science.
In order to capture clear, nonsmudged friction ridges from a human fingertip, the fingers must be clean. "Most of the farmers'' hands were very dirty, and it would sometimes take a package of baby wipes to get a good scan," remembered 2nd Lieutenant Jared Meyer. Scanning each fingertip was an art. The COIST needed to apply slight but consistent pressure for each fingerprint rolled. Thumbs needed to be rolled toward the subject''s body, from one end of the nail to the other, but fingers needed to be rolled away from the subject''s body, with the knuckle going in, up, and out from the device. The SEEK''s collection screen, called a silicone platen, had to be entirely free of smears, dirt, grease, or dryness before each fingerprint scan; the COIST was re quired to take prints of all ten digits. Uncooperative detainees could be flexcuffed with their hands behind their backs and fingerprinted that way, but the COIST needed to remember there were different protocols involved when using the SEEK upside down. Scanning the irises with the SEEK came with its own list of dos and don''ts.
Eyelids had to be up, not down. Iris and pupil had to be imaged together with no glare. Direct sunlight rendered the image obsolete. If the person was dead, iris capture needed to happen "within thirty minutes postmortem," or problems could arise. Capturing facial images had its own set of technical requirements. A neutral background was necessary, "showing no additional personnel or maps, equipment, vehicles, [or] vessels." Criminal enrollment photos needed to include images of the person from front, right and left profiles, and right and left 45degreeangled images. "Capture subject''s face expressionless and with the mouth closed and eyes open," COIST members were told.
And the camera lens needed to be held at the subject''s nose height to prevent distortion. There, in this dystopian environment that made Afghanistan one of the poorest, most corrupt, most dangerous and ungovernable nations on Earth, nearly two dozen soldiers of an approximately thirtyman platoon stood in the hot su.