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| Iraq-Jordan |
| Abu Ghraib Interrogation Unit Almost Doubled Size During Oct-Dec |
| 2004-05-28 |
| From The New York Times The interrogation effort at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq took on such urgency last fall that untrained personnel were pressed into service as analysts and even interrogators, according to accounts spelled out in documents and interviews. The pace accelerated last December, after the capture of Saddam Hussein, which led to a near-doubling of the number of two-person "Tiger Teams" assigned to an interrogation center at the prison, which operated under the control of Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez’s top deputy for intelligence. The accounts depict a high-pressure environment at the prison, particularly within the interrogation center, where military intelligence personnel exerted substantial influence over a cellblock where most of the notorious abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently took place. In interviews, some soldiers who served in military intelligence units at the prison said the sense of urgency contributed to the loosened standards and the abuses that followed. .... The accounts ... were given in interviews .... obtained ... by people who served under the overall command of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a unit based in Germany under Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the highest-ranking active-duty officer known to be under scrutiny in Army investigations into the abuses. .... Most of the publicized photographs of abuses appear to have been taken in October or November, but the one Army report to have been made public says abuses continued through December. "By early January, the number of interrogation teams at the center had gone from about 16 to 30, all to help run down leads about the opposition," said a senior Army officer who served in Iraq. These Tiger Teams consisted of an interrogator and an intelligence analyst, who would usually be accompanied by a translator during interrogations. .... During its service in Iraq, the 205th Brigade was unusually large, made up of eight battalions and an additional company, more than double its normal three-battalion complement. .... Most of the intelligence officers who worked in the interrogation center said they had been assigned to their posts in October or November, the period when the worst abuses are believed to have taken place, according to the documents and interviews. .... In written answers to questions posed by Army investigators this year, after the abuses first became the subject of a criminal investigation, nearly all among at least three dozen soldiers and civilian translators assigned to the interrogation said they had never witnessed any acts of abuse or mistreatment while working at Abu Ghraib. The answers, included in the documents obtained by The Times, include denials of any knowledge from Stephen Stefanowicz and John B. Israel, civilian contractors who were identified in an Army report as among four people who may have been "directly or indirectly" responsible for the abuses. The Taguba report said that denials by Mr. Stefanowicz and Mr. Israel had been contradicted by other witness statements. But in other answers, some soldiers acknowledged having witnessed acts of abuse or maltreatment. In an interview, the military intelligence analyst said he had seen Iraqi prisoners stripped naked, by military police officers, who served as the guards in the cellblock, and by military intelligence personnel who oversaw the unit and served as interrogators. A civilian linguist, identified as Bakeer Naseef, a Jordanian-American who was working as a security guard in Austin, Tex., before he began work as a translator in Iraq, says in one written statement that he witnessed "nudity, sexual approach, excessive language" among what he regarded as acts of abuse or maltreatment. At least two soldiers, including one officer, Capt. Brent Fitch of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, described an incident of sexually tinged abuse against an Iraqi woman by three enlisted members of the battalion, in which the woman was kissed and threatened with being left alone with a naked male prisoner. Those soldiers, who have not publicly been identified, were fined and demoted, the military has said. ... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |