By Bernd Debusmann
Reuters, 26 December 2006
FORT HUACHUCA, Arizona (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has stepped up its training of interrogators to get a clearer picture of Iraq, where attacks on American and Iraqi targets have been running at unprecedented levels -- almost 1,000 a week.
The number of soldiers going through a 93-day course to become Human Intelligence Collectors, the army term for interrogators, has quadrupled over the past three years -- from 265 in 2003 to 1,070 in 2006 -- and is projected to rise to just over 1,500 by 2009. The increase reflects an urgent need to plug gaps in intelligence.
"We needed to change, adapt and expand the training here," said Major General Barbara Fast, who commands the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. "We have significantly increased our humint (human intelligence) capability and will increase it even more."
According to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's December report, "our ... government still does not understand very well either the insurgency in Iraq or the role of the militias." It said there had been too little investment in intelligence gathering and analysis.
The army, by far the biggest branch of the armed forces, has about 37,000 military intelligence soldiers, about a quarter of whom are in human intelligence. That is a larger share than in the past, when the U.S. intelligence community focused on satellite imagery and monitoring communications.
"But especially since September 11," Fast said in an interview, "we know how important it is to understand that which cannot be seen or monitored."
The training at Fort Huachuca is designed to mimic Iraq as closely as possible -- complete with Arabic-speaking Americans playing the role of the Iraqis dressed in robes and keffiyehs, the checkered headdresses widely worn in the Arab world.
During an exercise toward the end of a course in December, a tall man in flowing robes argued heatedly in Arabic with soldiers at a sandbagged roadblock at the entrance to a cluster of houses and huts resembling a military base in Iraq.
In interrogation booths, soldiers tried to extract information on car bombs and mortar attacks from reluctant "detainees," their questions and answers relayed through interpreters.
The training is based on rules of interrogation laid down in a field manual on "Human Intelligence Collector Operations," a 336-page document issued in September, the first new manual since 1992.
The manual applies to all four branches of the armed forces and bans harsh interrogation techniques, including the use of dogs, placing hoods over a detainee's head and forcing detainees to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.
ABU GHRAIB
In April 2004, pictures that showed American soldiers using such techniques at
Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad shocked the world, damaged America's image and prompted contentious debates over the definition of torture.
Fast, one of the few army women to make major general, was the highest-ranking U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib scandal. An army investigation cleared her of wrongdoing and she was promoted to command the Intelligence Center in March 2005.
"There is no way you can rule out misbehavior entirely," Fast said, "but there are measures in place now, checks and balances, which make it very difficult."
The Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners and the protection of civilians are part of the curriculum at Fort Huachuca. The field manual expressly bans eight interrogation techniques that had been used at Abu Ghraib and the U.S. detention and interrogation camp at Guantanamo Bay.
During their Arizona training, future interrogators practice 19 "approaches" to detainees. Explained in detail in the field manual, these techniques range from the "emotional love approach" and the "incentive approach" to the "emotional fear-up approach."
To avoid incidents that could backfire on the interrogator -- or America's image -- the instructions carry warnings. For example: "The HUMINT collector must be extremely careful that he does not threaten or coerce a source. Conveying a threat may be a violation of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice)."
The manual lists three interrogation techniques that require specific approval from a senior officer.
These are: "Mutt and Jeff," a version of the good cop-bad cop routine used by police; "false flag," a technique to trick a detainee into believing his questioners are from a country other than the United States; and "separation" to keep detainees apart from each other. That approach requires approval from a four-star general.
In the arduous debates that led to the new manual, according to officials involved in the process, a sizable body of opinion held that making details of interrogation techniques public handed an advantage to Iraqi insurgents and other anti-U.S. forces because they would know what to expect.
But that view did not prevail and the army posted the manual on its Web site in September.
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Citation: Bernd Debusmann. "Pressed in Iraq, U.S. Army turns out interrogators," Reuters, 26 December 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061226/us_nm/bc_iraq_usa_interrogators_dc_1
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