Gitmo Training Preceeded Abuses

Rumsfeld's Get Tough Policies in Action

The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning "enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, from Fort Bragg, N.C., also played a major role in setting up the new interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib last fall. In its ranks was Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who had led an interrogation team at the Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan.

Two Afghan prisoners died in Bagram in December 2002 in what investigators have ruled were homicides, during the time Captain Wood's unit was in charge of interrogations. An Ohio-based Army Reserve unit, the 377th Military Police Company, was guarding Bagram at the time, and Army investigators are now pursuing what they have said are indications that enlisted soldiers from one or both units abused the Afghan prisoners before they died.

An Army Reserve spokesman confirmed that among the unit's duties was guarding prisoners at Bagram Collection Point. In interviews, some members of the unit acknowledged that they were interviewed by criminal investigators in the last three months, but said they had no knowledge that the prisoners who died had been abused.

But one member of the 377th Company said the fact that prisoners in Afghanistan had been labeled as "enemy combatants" not subject to the Geneva Conventions had contributed to an unhealthy attitude in the detention center.

"We were pretty much told that they were nobodies, that they were just enemy combatants," he said. "I think that giving them the distinction of soldier would have changed our attitudes toward them. A lot of it was based on racism, really. We called them hajis, and that psychology was really important."