Should privatecompanies whichanswer to no oneinterrogateAmerica’sdetainees?
Army Outsources Interrogator DutiesBy Cliff MontgomerySince the start of the second Iraq war, the U.S. Army has quadrupled its yearly output of soldiers trained to be detainee interrogators, according to Army officials involved in the program.Next year, 1,200 interrogators are set to be trained at the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, AZ; the number was a mere 300 in 2003.”The number being trained is based on the current need of interrogators in theater,” said Angela Moncur, deputy public affairs officer at the Army center.The greatest single-year expansion of the Army’s interrogation program–from 500 to 1,000 trainees–took place in 2005, the year after public disclosure of prisoner abuse by Army intelligence personnel at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.Today, with the Army introducing a new interrogation manual and Congress wrestling with legislation sought by the White House that would “legalize” some of the CIA‘s more questionable techniques, the number of people trained to be interrogators is set to rise again.The Army is in part solving this need by hiring private companies to handle interrogation training. Last month, the service awarded contracts to three private firms that could grow to more than $50 million in the next five years. The companies will provide additional instructors to the 18-week basic course in human intelligence (HUMINT) interrogation at Fort Huachuca.”If you are qualified as interrogator, you now are either in Iraq or teaching others how to do it when they go there,” Pat Gromek, who spent 23 years as an Army intelligence officer and now handles business development for Integrated Systems Improvement Services Inc. (ISIS) in Sierra Vista, AZ, told The Washington Post. ISIS is one of the firms contracted to supply interrogation instructors.The contracts call for the firms to provide outside instructors who would train “selected enlisted soldiers in the skills and knowledge required to perform…tactical human intelligence collection,” said a September government notice. Subjects to be discussed include how to interrogate and debrief enemy personnel, warrior skills, intelligence analysis, potential threat forces, and military justice and intelligence law, according to a statement supplied by the center.And in case you’re wondering, “the laws of land warfare and the Geneva Convention” are specifically listed in an article on the course in Military Intelligence, an Army publication.The Army has estimated the annual cost for an outside instructor at $100,000, said Moncur. That’s at least $20,000 above the pay a similar expert in the service would normally receive, making the outside contractor in this case appear more expensive to taxpayers.Moncur told The Washington Post that future instructor levels would depend on the situation in Iraq. “The need may change if we bring some troops home,” she said. Moncur added that the intelligence center did not know whether the Army would continue to add instructors at the same or a greater rate.One little-publicized problem in Iraq has been the lack of intelligence for the day-to-day activities on the ground, and the lack of trained Army personnel to fill this need.According to the Post, “CIA officials have said privately that they have been forced to strip stations in Europe and elsewhere to provide case officers for tours in Iraq.”The Post added, “The CIA officials want to see the military take up tactical intelligence so CIA officers and analysts can concentrate on broader, strategic targets.”But the Rumsfeld Pentagon may have another reason for turning to outside contractors: if further abuses like those discovered at Abu Ghraib are uncovered, it may allow the government to deny final responsibility for the abuses.In a January 25th, 2002, memo, White House counsel–and current head of the Justice Department—Alberto Gonzales advised Bush to declare that the war on terrorism “renders obsolete [the Geneva Conventions‘] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners.”It is true that since then, administration officials have often claimed that U.S. personnel are not officially allowed to torture prisoners. But private contractors are technically not U.S. personnel.When it was discovered that some of those responsible for abuses at Abu Ghraib were interrogators working for private firms, several members of the administration asserted it was unclear who–if anyone–might prosecute contractors or their employees for their role in those abuses, since the Geneva Conventions and even American laws appear to cover only government interrogators. In May 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote a member of Congress that “disciplining contractor personnel is the contractor’s responsibility.”A May 2004 story in The New York Times quoted Justice Department officials as saying that “they had not decided even whether they had jurisdiction to prosecute contractors who worked at Abu Ghraib.”If another Abu Ghraib is uncovered, it’s true such sophisms will not protect Army personnel trained by contractors. But it may allow administration officials to claim that final responsibility for the methods are in the hands of private companies, not the Bush Administration.
