'Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators'

Witness: Private contractor lifts the lid on systematic failures at Abu Ghraib jail

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday May 7, 2004
The Guardian

Many of the prisoners abused at the Abu Ghraib prison were innocent Iraqis, picked up at random by US troops and incarcerated by underqualified intelligence officers, a former US interrogator from the jail told the Guardian.

Torin Nelson, who served as a military intelligence officer at Guantánamo Bay before moving to Abu Ghraib as a private contractor last year, blamed the abuses on a failure of command in US military intelligence and an over-reliance on private firms. He alleged those companies were so anxious to meet the demand for their services, they sent "cooks and truck drivers" to work as interrogators.

...
The former commander of the Guantánamo Bay Camp, Major General Geoffrey Miller, was transferred to Iraq a month ago to overhaul the prison system there, although he has been criticised for his recommendations last year that US prison guards in Iraq help "set the conditions" for interrogations by softening up detainees.

Such allegations have been made before by victims' families and human rights groups, but Mr Nelson's story represents the first insider's account by a US interrogator. It amounts to an indictment of a system gone awry, and contradicts claims by the White House and the Pentagon that Abu Ghraib does not represent a systemic problem.

more ...http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211374,00.html

snip>

As a witness in an ongoing investigation, Mr Nelson said he could not talk about the abuses of specific prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but he said the nature of the detention system makes the imprisonment and abuse of innocent people all but inevitable.

"A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job," Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. "The troops are under a lot of stress and they don't know one guy from the next. They're not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.

"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," he said.

snip>

Mr Nelson worked at Guantánamo Bay as a senior interrogator attached to the Utah national guard. He said that most of the interrogators there were military professionals, but by the time he left in early 2003, private contractors had begun to arrive.

There is no evidence of abuses on the scale of Abu Ghraib at Guantánamo Bay, but Mr Nelson said that like the Iraqi jail, it was packed with innocent people.

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This reality that we have international jails holding INNOCENT people is even more dangerous than the torture. More and more the "gulag" analogy seems to hold true. What a monster we have growing here.

which ran on Frontline a couple weeks ago, the point was made that most of the prisoners at Guantanamo are innocent. Because the US was offering reward money, Afghans simply rounded up anyone they could find and handed them over. One guy even handed in his dad, whom he had tricked into "taking a ride" with him. So lots of the people there may simply be victims of internal family disputes. And aren't there still children being held?

We have a lot to answer for.

I would think cooks and drivers are bit more then just underqualified to be interrogators.