Officer in Charge of Questioning Iraqi Inmates...No Interrogation Training

[Khephra]

Officer in Charge of Questioning Iraqi Inmates Had No Interrogation Training


The former head of the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib prison told a senior Army investigator in February that before he took the job, he had no experience in interrogating prisoners, and that he had asked military intelligence soldiers to let him sit in on their questioning to understand what they did.

The officer, Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the former head of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that he was a civil affairs officer by training and that his assignment was to set up a database at the interrogation center for tracking information gleaned from the prisoners.

"I've no training on the military side of what constitutes interrogation operations," Colonel Jordan, an Army reservist, told General Taguba.

The statements by Colonel Jordan, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 21 interview that is part of General Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the startling insight that the officer nominally in charge of the interrogation center where some of the worst prisoner abuses occurred last fall had no background in what he supposed to be supervising.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ABUS.html