An Interrogator Speaks Out

Torin Nelson has worked in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. An expert interrogator, he was hired by the Virginia-based company CACI International Inc., to work at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at the time when prisoners there were subjected to abuse and torture.

Trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona, Nelson has spoken out against this abuse, but believes firmly that interrogation is a military necessity and can be conducted in a humane manner.

"I wanted to defend my profession because what I saw in the media was a lot of mistaken conjecture, erroneous stuff," Nelson said in a phone interview from his home in Salt Lake City, Utah. "The abuses in Abu Ghraib were anathema to mission accomplishment."

After the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many officers in Nelson's position were activated. In August 2002 he was sent to Guantanamo Bay where he spent six months. He was a sergeant working in Camp X Ray and in October of that year, he heard of government plans to use harsher techniques such as "sleep management" and "meal management" on the base's Camp Delta.

"The FBI told them it wouldn't work, but they got permission from the Secretary of Defense," says Nelson. "They created a Special Projects team drawn from different battalions, and used techniques like 20 hours of interrogation [followed by] 20 hours of sleep, and playing loud rock music." He says he thought these approaches were "a waste of time" but felt he was too low on the chain of command to speak critically about the techniques.

"Today, there are two schools of thought: the new school which believes that the ends justify the means. I believe the means justify the ends," Nelson says. "I believe that you should build up trust to the point where your subjects believe that you will go to bat for them. Whether or not higher-ups grant your requests is up to them and good interrogators should never promise what they cannot deliver. So you say you will go to bat for them, but no more."

In February 2003, he returned to the States to get ready for the Iraq war and was deployed during the March 2003 invasion. Nelson left Iraq in July and quit the military because he felt disillusioned by the way the war was developing. "Higher-ups with less experience were making piss-poor decisions instead of listening to lower-ranking, more experienced people," he says.

Soon he got a job with a private contractor, CACI, and he was posted to Abu Ghraib, which had been made into a prison, when all the other sites were overflowing. Nelson explains that half of the 30 interrogators in Abu Ghraib were civilian and the rest were military. "Perhaps a third had no formal training, some had related training — like Stephen Stephanowicz who trained as an analyst but not as an interrogator," he says.

Nelson was one of many prison officials who testified for Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's 53-page classified internal report on the conduct of civilian and military interrogators. This was later made public by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker in May 2004, creating an international uproar.

According to the Taguba report, Stephanowicz, a CACI interrogator, "made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses." Further, investigators found Stephanowicz encouraged military police to terrorize inmates, and "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."

Another report, written by the Red Cross, revealed that investigators had found naked prisoners covering themselves with packages from ready-to-eat military rations, and being subjected to "deliberate physical violence and verbal abuse." Prisoners were found to be incoherent, anxious, and even suicidal, with abnormal symptoms "provoked by the interrogation period and methods." The document stated that prison authorities "could not explain" the lack of clothing for prisoners and "could not provide clarification" about other mistreatment of prisoners.