LIAR. Quit quoting smear campaigns. Kery is a true hero and you ought to be ashamed for trying to slanderin him with lies. If you want something real to read, take a glimpose inside the privatization of our military by Bushies staffing Abu Graib at $100,000+ per head at tax-payer expense:
"Among the individuals not qualified for sensitive interrogation positions at Abu Ghraib were many hired by CACI International, a Virginia company that provided intelligence services to the U.S. military, and Titan Corp., a San Diego company that supplied translators. According to an investigation released July 21 by the Army’s inspector general, a third of contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib "had not received formal training in military interrogation techniques, policy, and doctrine."
The problem might not have been so serious if there had been only two or three contract workers on interrogation teams. But according to the Taguba report and an inside source, all 20 of the interpreters at Abu Ghraib worked for Titan. The classified documents contain an organizational chart that indicates that on Jan. 23, 2004, nearly half of all interrogators and analysts employed at Abu Ghraib were CACI employees.
How easy was it to get a job with CACI? Torin Nelson, who was sent to Abu Ghraib in November of last year, a few weeks after the photos of abuse were taken, calls it "the strangest job interview I've ever had."
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Early last fall, a man phoned Nelson and spent a half-hour selling him on the position. A six-figure salary, great benefits. Only at the end of the call did the man get around to asking Nelson about his qualifications. That lasted a mere five minutes -- and then the 35-year-old Nelson was offered the job. He accepted. No résumé. No follow-up office interview. No fingerprints or permission to run a criminal records check. Granted, those last two items aren't required for most jobs, but this job was ... unique.
Hired as a civilian interrogator, Nelson's job was to get information out of "high-value" prisoners so that the military could hunt down militiamen who were then (as now) killing U.S. troops in Iraq.
Nelson was one of 31 interrogators hired by CACI, which held contracts with the U.S. military worth tens of millions of dollars. While CACI had snapped up the lucrative deals, it had problems, according to Nelson, finding enough qualified people to fill the positions. If the company failed to meet its quota, it faced a large fine or, worse, the prospect of being locked out of future government contracts. According to Nelson, CACI was "desperate for people."
So was Titan, according to news reports in the Washington Post and Associated Press. With contracts up to $657 million, the company couldn't find enough Arabic speakers. Titan won't say how many employees it has in Iraq, but a military spokesperson told a reporter that there are 4,700 Titan translators working for the military, most of them in and around Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nelson had 11 years' prior experience in uniform as an interrogator, serving in Kuwait, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. But most of the other contract workers at Abu Ghraib had just two to six years' experience as military interrogators. And most of them, says Nelson, had no real-world experience whatsoever.
The fact that the other half of the JIDC interrogators were active-duty military is not as reassuring as it may sound. Twelve of the 19 soldiers on interrogation teams at Abu Ghraib were at the bottom of the military ladder, specialists or privates first class. No one held a rank above sergeant. Military interrogations were conducted by inexperienced, low-ranking soldiers.
Army Spc. Luciana Spencer is a good example of the problem. A military interrogator, Spencer was cited in the Taguba report for forcing a detainee to strip and walk back to his cell naked, in an effort to humiliate him. In a still-classified sworn statement, she also admits to hearing other interrogators instructing the military police to abuse prisoners, and once witnessed Spc. Charles Graner slapping a detainee. Asked why she didn't report Graner, Spencer told investigators that she didn't know that what he had done constituted abuse.
That's not surprising given her level of experience. Spencer had graduated from "the schoolhouse," the military training ground for interrogators at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., in the summer of 2003, just months before arriving at her first assignment, Abu Ghraib.
"She didn't speak the language," says a friend of Spencer's who didn't want to be named for this article. "She didn't know the culture, didn't know the history. She didn't really know how to do the job." The friend blames the military for placing her in a situation for which she was not prepared.
Given their inexperience, Nelson says, interrogators were easily influenced about how to do their jobs. He characterizes many of them as "cowboys" who "try the tactics they see on really bad TV shows."
Even before pictures of abuse surfaced among military officials in January 2004, Nelson was concerned enough by what he saw and heard to begin compiling his own list of possible maltreatment. He included many of the same offenses found by Taguba: painful stress positions, prolonged use of weakening techniques such as limiting food and sleep, physical abuse, and blatant threats of violence against people close to the detainees.
Nelson says some interrogators may have believed their "gray zone" tactics had at least the tacit approval of the highest levels of the military and government.
"You have tough-talking people [in the Bush administration], saying 'Bring 'em on' and 'The gloves have come off,' and 'These are the worst of the worst'," says Nelson, quoting, in turn, President George W. Bush, J. Cofer Black (the administration's coordinator of counterterrorism) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Then you get people who go into theater who listen to that and they feel fully justified to abuse prisoners."
The same problems applied to the interpreters, some of whom had little or no experience working as translators in any setting, let alone in the high-stakes wartime environment of Abu Ghraib. They heard the same inflammatory rhetoric and had little supervision or accountability, according to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, in charge of all military prisons in Iraq. |
