Guards 'taught to interrogate'

2004-05-18 20:05

Washington - The officer in charge of interrogations at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison said intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police on pre-interrogation techniques, The New York Times said on Tuesday.

The techniques, which included forcing prisoners to strip naked and shackling them before questioning were used on prisoners protected by the Geneva Convention that prohibits inhuman treatment of prisoners of war, the daily said.

The disclosure, included in a classified, 6 000-page report by General Antonio Taguba on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, is the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence officers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations, said the daily.

Several US soldiers are awaiting courts-martial for alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, but so far none of their superior commanding officers or intelligence officers assigned to the prison have been charged in the scandal.

Guards understood limits of instructions

Investigators are still trying to determine if the soldiers acted alone or on instructions from their superiors in the extensively photographed and videotaped abuses.

Taguba's report includes a February 11 interview with Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

According to portions of Pappas' sworn statements read to the New York Times by a government official familiar with the transcript, Pappas told Taguba that intelligence officers sometimes instructed military police at the prison to use forceful interrogation techniques.

"To my knowledge, instructions given to the MPs, other than what I have mentioned, such as shackling, making detainees strip down or other measures used on detainees before interrogations, are not typically made unless there is some good reason."

Pappas also told Taguba that commanding officers could ensure that the military guards understood the limits of their instructions or whether the instructions were legal.

"There would be no way for us to actually monitor whether that happened," Colonel Pappas said. "We had no formal system in place to do that."

- AFP