The actions of the Central Intel-ligence Agency in keeping inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq off official rosters appeared to have been intended to speed their transfer to sites outside Iraq, where they would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the former commander of the joint interrogation center at the prison has told Army investigators.
The allegation by Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan in testimony in February was included in hundreds of pages of secret documents released on Friday by the Center for Public Integrity. Jordan said the approach had been authorized under an unwritten agreement between the CIA and Colonel Thomas Pappas, the top US military intelligence officer at the prison. The center said it had obtained the documents from a journalist, Osha Gray Davidson.
Two Army generals told Con-gress last month that at the CIA's request, Army jailers had failed to register dozens of detainees at Abu Ghraib in order to hide them from Red Cross inspectors. But Jordan said that the CIA's purpose had been to avoid anything that might have slowed moving them.
"They would not put them in the regular detainee process where you get fingerprinted, cause once a detainee did that, you're kinda in there three to six to eight months," Jordan said in his testimony at Camp Doha, Kuwait, on Feb. 21.
He went on to use an abbreviation for "other government agency," a term used in military circles to refer to the CIA: "The OGA folks wanted to be able to pull somebody in 24, 48, 72 hours if they had to get 'em to Gitmo, do what have you."
In the past, US officials have insisted that no prisoners from Iraq were ever transferred to the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which is known as Gitmo. They have acknowledged two cases in which prisoners captured were transferred out of Iraq and then returned, but they have declined to comment on whether there might have been others.
The US has said all prisoners captured in Iraq were covered under the Geneva Conventions. Yet prisoners held by the US in Guantanamo and some other lockups, including those in Afghanistan and secret locations have not been granted the same protection.
A CIA spokesman and Jordan's lawyer declined comment on Jordan's remarks. Jordan, an Army reservist, is among the military intelligence officers identified by Army investigators as sharing in responsibility for abuses at Abu Ghraib.
An Army report by General Paul Kern and others criticized Pappas in particular for failing to challenge the CIA practice of keeping detainees off the books.
The documents made public by the Center for Public Integrity on Friday also included a classified memorandum written by an Army general in September 2003 recommending that guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq be put under the authority of a senior military intelligence officer.
The document provides the clearest indication to date that the military police at Abu Ghraib were made subordinate to the new Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center under Jordan. Both military police and military intelligence personnel have been accused of wrongdoing in connection with abuses at Abu Ghraib, which allegedly began shortly the new interrogation center was established.
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