Interrogator reveals the TRUTH. Proof of Systemic WAR CRIMES !

’Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators’

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

Julian Borger in Washington
Friday May 7, 2004
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1211374,00.html

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.

"Military intelligence operations need to drastically change in order for something like this not to happen again," Mr Nelson told the Guardian.

He claimed many of the detainees are "innocent of any acts against the coalition".

"One case in point is a detainee whom I recommended for release and months later was still sitting in the same tent with no change in his status."

Mr Nelson said that the same systemic problems were also responsible for large numbers of Afghans being mistakenly swept into Guantánamo Bay. He estimated that a third or more of the inmates at the controversial prison camp had no connection to terrorism.

"There are people who should never have been sent over there. I was involved in the process of reviewing people for possible release and I can say definitely that they should have been released and released a lot sooner," he said.

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.

Mr Nelson denies any involvement in the physical and sexual abuse of Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib, and is listed in the official military report into the scandal as a witness rather than a suspect. He says he resigned from his job in February in fear of his life, because Abu Ghraib was coming under increasing attack by Iraqi insurgents, and because of his disillusion in the military leadership there. He is now working for a private contractor - not as an interrogator - in another country that is part of the US "global war on terrorism". He did not want his whereabouts published.

Mr Nelson said he had come forward to speak now because he believed that military intelligence was seeking to blame the Abu Ghraib scandal on a handful of soldiers to divert attention away from ingrained problems in the military detention and interrogation system.

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.
According to Mr Nelson’s account, the victims’ very innocence made them more likely to be abused, because the interrogators refused to believe they could have been picked up on such arbitrary grounds. Interrogators "weren’t interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in ’breaking’ tough targets", he said.

Much of the problem lay in the quality of the interrogators, Mr Nelson said; only the youngest and least experienced intelligence officers actually question detainees.

As the number of suspects sucked into the system exploded, the Pentagon came to rely increasingly on interrogators from private contractors to question them. Mr Nelson was one of a roughly 30-strong team in Abu Ghraib employed by a Virginia-based firm, CACI International. He believes his decade of experience in military intelligence made him well qualified to do the job, but he had growing doubts about his colleagues.

"I’d say about of the contractors that it’s kind of a hit or miss. They’re under so much pressure to fill slots quickly ... They penalise contracting companies if they can’t fill slots on time and it looks bad on companies’ records," Mr Nelson said.

"If you’re in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work."

CACI International did not respond to a request for comment on Mr Nelson’s account. The firm has told other reporters that it has not been contacted by military investigators about the work of its employees at Abu Ghraib.

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.

"Mistakes were made and people who should never have been sent there ended up there, and it’s taken this amount of time to get people to take the decision to get these people out of there," he told the Guardian.