At Abu Ghraib, Soldiers Faced Pressure to Produce Intelligence
Analysts, Interrogators Say Many Were Ill-Prepared; Quotas, Unsafe Conditions
In a Tent, as the Shells Flew
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER and GREG JAFFE Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Last fall, military-intelligence interrogators at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison found themselves in a bind.
With attacks on both civilians and American troops occurring almost daily, and demands building from Washington to round up insurgents, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were under enormous pressure to produce information that could be used on the battlefield. But their sources were dubious: a collection of Iraqi prisoners who didn't seem to have much information and who frequently arrived in huge numbers without documentation showing why they had been detained or even who they were.
Interrogators began working in round-the-clock shifts. Many interrogations were held in tents, makeshift wooden structures and later in shipping containers. "There were interrogations on Christmas Day," said Sgt. First Class Steven Roberts, a reservist who screened prisoners through the last quarter of the year at Abu Ghraib and is now back home in Utah. "There was no letting up."
But despite the arrival of two teams of interrogation experts, special training by interrogators from the U.S. facility for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and a crack-the-whip command, the Abu Ghraib intelligence operation appears to have produced little useful information.
"At first I thought it was going to be really interesting," says Spc. Gabriel Teaca, who served out the fall and winter on an interrogation team at Abu Ghraib. "It was just a total waste of time."
For many of the interrogators, the unrelenting pressure to ramp up the number of interrogations and intelligence reports brought a sense of futility. "The whole ball game over there is numbers," said Sgt. First Class Roger Brokaw, one of the senior interrogators at Abu Ghraib. "How many raids did you do last week? How many prisoners were arrested? How many interrogations were conducted? How many [intelligence] reports were written? It was incredibly frustrating." Sgt. Brokaw, a 59-year-old reservist, left Iraq in January and now works as a security guard in Minneapolis, Minn. "We all knew the system was broken," he said.
Interviews with more than 20 interrogators and analysts at the prison -- most of whom haven't spoken out before -- suggest the problems at the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison were more complex than suggested by the widely distributed images of abuse. Seven guards have been accused of wrongdoing, and military and congressional investigators are looking into the case.
The interviews show an intelligence system ill-equipped to battle a largely faceless insurgency. Interrogators and analysts at Abu Ghraib, some of whom say they had little experience interrogating prisoners, knew little about the enemy they were fighting. And they were working within a military-intelligence system that was never designed to incarcerate and interrogate thousands of prisoners for months on end.
Problems were exacerbated by a corrosive relationship between soldiers and some of their superiors, who pressed interrogators to meet quotas on the number of interviews and reports they generated. The soldiers also faced unclear rules of interrogation that often seemed improvised on the fly.
The result: a confused operation, plagued by low morale and unrelenting pressure to produce under dangerous circumstances. Though none of the soldiers interviewed for this article acknowledged witnessing the alleged abuse, many said they can see how it occurred given the conditions at Abu Ghraib.
Some civilian lawyers for the seven accused military police have said their clients' actions were ordered by military-intelligence soldiers and civilian contractors to "soften up" detainees for interrogation. Two military-intelligence soldiers remain in Iraq and have been told they may face disciplinary measures, said several soldiers and a lawyer involved in the case.
In his investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba wrote that he suspects the top commander of the military intelligence soldiers at the prison, Col. Thomas Pappas, was either "directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib." He faulted him for failing to ensure soldiers understood the Geneva Conventions and for the failure to "properly supervise" soldiers who worked at the prison.
The role that military-intelligence officers may have played in the abuse is being investigated by Congress and by Army Maj. Gen. George Fay. Pending the completion of his report, a military spokesman in Baghdad said the military wouldn't comment for this article.
The pressures in Abu Ghraib began building last summer, when the insurgency in Iraq grew more deadly and sophisticated. In August, a suicide bomber blew up the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, killing top envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and driving the U.N. out of Iraq. Both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. John Abizaid, the top military commander in the Middle East, talked pointedly about the need for more and better intelligence to crush the insurgency.
In September senior commanders in Iraq decided to make the notorious Iraqi prison a central collection and interrogation point for anyone involved in attacks on coalition soldiers or Iraqi security forces. Dozens of military and private-sector interrogators, analysts, military police and linguists were shipped to the prison. Other prisons north and south of Baghdad were either closed or radically scaled back.
Prisoners poured into Abu Ghraib at a rate of more than 60 per day, said Chief Warrant Officer Jeffrey Hanson, who screened prisoners at the facility until February. The vast majority had virtually no intelligence value, said Chief Hanson, a reservist who in civilian life is director of the Utah State Veterans Home. "It seemed like when something bad happened the infantry would just roll up" a dozen Iraqis in the area, most of whom were not involved.
Often, once the detainees formally entered Abu Ghraib it was almost impossible for them to get out. "They were stuck for a minimum of six or seven months," Chief Hanson said.
The prison quickly turned crowded, chaotic and dangerous. An Iraqi police officer working in the facility passed a loaded gun to one of the inmates who shot and wounded one of the American military-police officers, several of the intelligence soldiers said.
Pressure to produce more intelligence led to longer and longer work hours. Spc. Teaca, a 24-year-old analyst at the facility who now lives in New York and is preparing to enter Queens College, said he dropped 40 pounds from the combination of heat and 16-hour days.
Because of its critical role, Abu Ghraib drew lots of high-level attention. Mr. Rumsfeld visited the facility in September and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, made five trips there in September and October to get briefings on how various sections of the prison were changing their procedures.
Most of the responsibility for extracting and disseminating intelligence that could generate more raids fell on Col. Pappas, who oversaw the intelligence officers at the prison from the time it was set up by U.S. forces last summer. In mid-November, Gen. Sanchez put him in charge of the entire prison facility, a job that had been held by Brig. Gen. Janice Karpinski, who commanded a brigade of military-police officers.
Col. Pappas and his team were responsible for gleaning as much information as possible about the insurgency's leaders, supply routes and structure, often from detained Iraqis. But many of them were trained to analyze data about opposing armies on an organized battlefield.
Abu Ghraib, a sprawling walled compound on the northwest edge of Baghdad, had been so thoroughly looted that only a few cellblocks were usable. For much of the late summer and fall, prisoner interrogations took place in tents. Even into December, soldiers said, interrogations took place in structures that offered little protection from nightly attacks. They came to refer to the interrogation sites by what they were made of: "Metal," for the shipping containers that were delivered in December, and "Wood," for the structures that gradually replaced the canvas tents.
A demanding taskmaster and a man of unflagging energy, Col. Pappas set about instilling his vision of discipline early on, his soldiers said. He ordered them to build him a living chamber on the back of the prison command center, so he could shower and shave within eyesight of a computer screen -- and keep up on e-mail and interrogation reports. "I am not sure when the guy slept," said Spc. David Monath, a reservist who served as an analyst at the prison and now is back home in Laurel, Md.
Col. Pappas, who recently returned to his unit's home base in Germany, declined to discuss his role at the prison, noting in an e-mail response to queries that "all aspects of intelligence activities at Abu Ghraib are currently under active investigation. Accordingly, I believe it would be inappropriate to answer media inquiries relative to activities at Abu at this time."
Col. Pappas constantly sought ways to speed up the assembly line, even instituting a quota system in late November for the five interrogation teams, said several interrogators. Depending on the workload, interrogation teams were required to conduct as many as half a dozen interrogations and file a similar number of reports each day. "If an interrogation isn't going well you might cut it short after 30 minutes, but if it is going well you might want to go eight hours," said one interrogator. "We kept having to cut interrogations short so we could meet our numbers."
Col. Pappas also imposed the round-the-clock shifts. The 24-hour schedule created a perception among some interrogators that Col. Pappas wasn't concerned about their safety. Facing mortar attacks, which almost always took place between midnight and 4 a.m., several soldiers said they felt uncomfortable conducting interviews in canvas tents during those hours.
On Sept. 20, an insurgent's mortar struck an interrogation tent in the middle of the night with deadly consequences. In a statement made to Army investigators examining prisoner abuse, one soldier, Spc. Paul Son, went out of his way to criticize Col. Pappas for the mortar incident. "Two soldiers died and 13 were injured as a direct result of obeying orders given by the chain of command to continue with night operations in tents," Spc. Son wrote on an interview sheet reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. This, he wrote, occurred "despite the known history of mortar attacks at specific hours of the night."
But even the soldiers who questioned Col. Pappas's judgment said that he brought efficiency and order to the initially chaotic prison system, and sought to keep harsh interrogation tactics in check. Throughout the early summer months inexperienced soldiers received little guidance on performing interrogations and so often improvised techniques. Spc. Teaca, like the other soldiers contacted for this article, denied using methods of interrogation that violated the Geneva Convention or rules of engagement. But Spc. Teaca says he saw interrogators force detainees to assume stress positions, such as holding their arms above their head for long periods of time in the hot sun. Occasionally, soldiers would handcuff detainees' arms above their head for a few hours, he and other soldiers said.
In the fall, Col. Pappas and his command cracked down, distributing several sets of rules throughout September and October. Soldiers said the rules got more restrictive with each draft.
"The Geneva Convention and the field manual were always at hand," said First Sgt. Kenneth Sizemore, an interrogator with 20 years of experience. He said he was asked twice to sign a document listing the rules of engagement with prisoners. And for anyone who missed the message, a large mock-up of the rules was tacked to the wall in the command office.
Col. Pappas also broke soldiers down into teams and gave them specialties. Some interrogation teams focused on religious extremists, building up a body of knowledge about those groups. Others concentrated on former Baathists or foreign fighters.
Still, Col. Pappas's system wasn't yielding much good intelligence. A big part of the problem was the intelligence system itself. Many interrogators and analysts showed up at Abu Ghraib with almost no knowledge of Iraqi culture. "I learned about everything I know about Islam after I deployed," Spc. Monath said.
In addition, though many of the interrogators had put in years of training in the U.S., an equal number knew practically nothing about their assignment. "We hardly got any training in interrogation before we went over," said Spc. Teaca. "It was really surprising because the job is so crucial."
Meanwhile, the lack of information about many of the new prisoners pouring into the facilities made it difficult for interrogators to do their work, several said.
Despite the endless interrogation sessions the insurgency seemed to be growing more and more deadly. In November, 82 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq, almost twice the 44 killed a month earlier.
This only added to the pressure on the interrogators to produce. Interrogators complained that the need for more and better intelligence drove them to disseminate intelligence reports to field units that were half-baked and of dubious worth. "We'd get information that wasn't corroborated or that we thought probably wasn't true. But [Col. Pappas] was so desperate for numbers that we sent out the report anyway," says Spc. Monath, an intelligence analyst who was responsible for drafting the final reports.
The bad intelligence gave way to raids on innocent people, he said. In one case, he said, an entire Iraqi family was arrested while eating dinner because an interrogator's raw notes containing bad coordinates were sent to a field unit.
Col. Pappas, who had been in charge of the intelligence analysts at Abu Ghraib, on Nov. 19 was given the job of running the entire prison. Soldiers remember him scaling watch towers day and night and spending hours at the front gate in an effort to make sure a car or truck bomb couldn't sneak through the gates.
"He was handed a tiger by the tail," said Chief Hanson. "That entire detention system was broken from the start."
In early December, Col. Pappas pushed to loosen the rules of interrogation that he had made more restrictive in October, said several interrogators. Soldiers were told they could use sleep deprivation to coerce information from detainees that they thought had played prominent roles in the insurgency. There were long debates about whether dogs could be used to coerce information from prisoners and what kinds of stress positions were permissible, several interrogators said.
Ultimately, it was scandal that did in Col. Pappas's system. Spc. Monath said he arrived at his office one day in January to find criminal investigators looking at photographs stored on compact discs that either had been turned in by a whistleblower or confiscated from military police involved in the abuse.
"They wouldn't let me get near my computer," he says. A few days later everyone in his unit had to "have a sit-down interview" with the Army investigators, he says.
Despite his dislike for Col. Pappas, Spc. Monath says he doesn't think the colonel was to blame for the abuses. "I've been thinking a lot about how the abuses could go on so long without anyone knowing," he says. "A general lack of maturity combined with a lack of oversight was responsible for what occurred."
Like many of the soldiers in his area he said he had not seen any abuse until he got back to the states and watched TV.
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TROUBLED PRISON
* Aug. 19, 2003: Truck bomb hits U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, increasing demand for intelligence about insurgents.
* September: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visits Abu Ghraib. Later, a mortar strikes the prison, killing two soldiers and wounding 13.
* Oct. 12: New rules governing interrogations disseminated at Abu Ghraib.
* Nov. 6: Red Cross sends report to U.S. military detailing prison abuses.
* Nov. 19: Col. Thomas Pappas, who had been overseeing military intelligence at prison, given control of entire facility.
* Jan. 13, 2004: Soldier at Abu Ghraib turns over pictures of other soldiers abusing inmates to superiors. The next day Army opens investigation.
* April: Army opens investigation into the role of military intelligence in abuses.
Source: WSJ research