The "Hard Site" and the Failure of "Intelligence" at Abu Ghraib

The hard site at Abu Ghraib consisted of two tiers: Tier 1A, where high security prisoners were kept, and Tier 1B, where women and children were kept. The women and children were primarily family members of prisoners or wanted people who American troops were using as bait to catch or persuade their relatives. A soldier estimated that in the hard site, six or seven guards would be guarding at least a thousand detainees. Those kinds of numbers kept the guards nervous about what would happen if the prisoners got too coordinated. The soldiers were told that the detainees they were guarding were the very worst people, people who had killed Americans. They were also told that any information they could get from them would save lives.

However, that information was not forthcoming. Soldiers estimated that 75 to 80 percent of the detainees they interviewed were not guilty of anything and had no valuable intelligence. “The interrogators I worked with at Abu Ghraib were all extremely frustrated by the lack of intelligence they were getting during interrogation and most of them attributed that to the fact that they had prisoners that didn’t have intelligence to give them,” said Tony Lagouranis, a member of military intelligence. “The interrogators I worked with spent all year in there and they were telling me that they had got nothing.” Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials were very irritated with the lack of intelligence coming out of Iraq and made plans to send in people to “Gitmo-ize” Abu Ghraib.