U.S. Interrogator Recalls Mass Detentions-Quota System Upped Arrest Rates in Iraq w/o Clear Results

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U.S. Interrogator Recalls Mass Detentions
Quota System Upped Arrest Rates in Iraq Without Clear Results
By Spencer Ackerman 8/25/08 2:06 PM


When Joshua Casteel arrived at Abu Ghraib in June 2004 to interrogate detainees, he knew how notorious the Iraqi prison was. He arrived in the wake of a still-notorious scandal. Earlier that spring, CBS News and The New Yorker magazine published the infamous photographs from late 2003, showing U.S. military police torturing terrified Iraqis. With that, the American jail had been transformed into a symbol of U.S. human-rights abuses.

Yet the young Army interrogator, then age 24, never expected to discover a systemic problem just as crippling to the war effort: intelligence collection in total disarray, leading to mass detentions. This, Casteel noted, is precisely the sort of thing that creates terrorists.

Under pressure from his commanders, Casteel was ordered to interrogate detainees at length even after he was convinced they knew little or nothing about the insurgency — a diversion of resources that, he said, wasted time and energy. Worse, he was cut off from the rest of the intelligence process, lacking the ability to judge the reliability of those whose confessions and anonymous tips had led to the detentions of the men he interrogated.

In addition, he was given a quota of so-called “actionable intelligence” he had to get out of his interrogations, regardless of whether those he interrogated knew anything valuable. Then, when his interrogations ended, he was never able to learn if those arrested as the result of his interrogations were dangerous terrorists or innocent people.

The result of this disjointed process is what Casteel describes as the needless detention of untold thousands of Iraqis, something human-rights groups have protested all the way to the U.N. Security Council. “The large nets we were casting,” Casteel, now 28, said over the course of two extended telephone interviews, meant “we would be looking for four {people}, and we came back with 80.” These and other problems eventually led Casteel — who has spoken little to the press — to declare himself a conscientious objector.

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http://www.washingtonindependent.com/2849/us-interrogator-recalls-mass-detentions