Army Puts a New Face on Interrogations

In the increasingly crowded classrooms on this weathered Army post, soldiers who have served as medics, mechanics and even Marines are taking crash courses in how to interrogate prisoners.

A nearby field recently cleared of desert brush and rattlesnakes is now lined with dozens of metal shipping containers converted into practice interrogation booths. Banks of DVD burners record every session so instructors can scrutinize their students’ false starts, and fail them if they violate the Geneva Convention.

And in the looming Huachuca Mountains, Army engineers are building a facility for field exercises -- a makeshift Muslim village where loudspeakers emit a muezzin’s call to prayer and soldiers interrogate “insurgents” amid mock mortar attacks and suicide bombings.

Here in the southeastern corner of Arizona, the Army is seeking solutions to two of its biggest problems: the need for better intelligence on the insurgency in Iraq, and the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

As home to the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School, Ft. Huachuca (pronounced: Wah-CHOO-ka) is the principal training ground for interrogators, analysts and other military intelligence troops.

Some soldiers in these specialties have been a significant source of embarrassment to the Army in the last year, implicated in one case of detainee abuse after another. But because intelligence is increasingly driving military operations in Iraq and elsewhere, troops with these skills are in acute demand. The Army is planning to add 9,000 so-called M.I. soldiers to its active duty ranks over the next five years, including 3,100 interrogators.

As it trains the new specialists, Ft. Huachuca is overhauling its approach. It wants interrogators better equipped to gather intelligence in urban warfare, more familiar with the cultural nuances of the Islamic world, and better prepared to intervene if things go wrong.

“These are more significant changes than we’ve undertaken in a very long time,” said Jerry V. Proctor, a retired Army colonel who serves as deputy commandant at the intelligence school.

The changes are designed to anticipate future conflicts, Proctor said, but they are grounded in the realities of Iraq.

Half of Ft. Huachuca’s soldiers will be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan within 45 days of finishing instruction, Proctor said. The other half are “waiting for a deployment date that won’t be much longer.” The expansion is part of a broader surge in government spending on intelligence in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. But it also reflects a fundamental shift in thinking for the Pentagon.

After the end of the Cold War, the Army ordered deep cuts in military intelligence units. And Ft. Huachuca spent much of the 1990s providing increasingly outdated training to a shrinking number of troops.

But now the Army is reversing that trend, and is drawing down the number of soldiers assigned to air defense, artillery and other units so that intelligence ranks can be rebuilt.

The fastest growing specialties at Ft. Huachuca include one that is new -- flying unmanned aerial vehicles -- and another that is as old as war itself -- interrogation. New recruits are funneled into these jobs. And reservists with less-needed skills are being sent to Ft. Huachuca to be retrained.

Among them is Spc. Phillip Seibel, a 23-year-old from Lodi who has been a telephone technician in the Army since shortly after joining the reserves six years ago. When he got a call from a sergeant in his unit this year informing him that he was being reassigned to a military intelligence battalion, he barely blinked.

“I thought I was going to be running phone support for an M.I. unit,” he said.

Instead, he was sent to Ft. Huachuca, where he has spent the last 14 weeks studying interrogation methods. The military has names for the various techniques. Seibel’s favorites so far, he said, are “emotional” approaches like “hate of comrades,” in which an interrogator tries to get a prisoner to talk by fostering resentment toward his former colleagues.

Others in his class come from an array of military backgrounds. “There are medics, MPs, mechanics,” Seibel said. “You basically have a little of everything.”

Although he didn’t volunteer to be reclassified, Seibel said he didn’t mind. He saw some similarities between his last job and this one. In interrogation as in phone work, Seibel said, “you just find out what buttons to push.”

Seibel was scheduled to finish his training Friday and said he expected to be deployed to Iraq within a few months. At the time of the interview, he was all but finished with his course work and awaiting the last big test: a field exercise designed to simulate combat conditions, and lasting several days.

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In many ways, Ft. Huachuca is the ideal setting for preparing soldiers for duty in the Middle East. Situated south of Tucson near the Mexico border, the terrain is bone-dry and summer sends daytime temperatures into the triple digits.

As recently as two years ago, a reporter observing the standard field exercise for interrogators saw soldiers -- with no guns or other gear -- tramping around a fictitious village trying to get information from role-playing townspeople in costumes. Mock interrogations, in nearby sheds, could get extremely intense. But the atmosphere sometimes bordered on that of a summer camp.

Over the last six months, the exercises have been completely overhauled. They were extended from four days to 10. Soldiers are expected to wear their helmets and flak vests and to carry weapons for the duration. They live in tents and work around the clock -- with each team having to decide when its members can afford to sleep.

The scenario is a military operation set near the Caspian Sea, which borders countries such as Iran, Turkey and Russia.

“But scratch the surface and it’s Iraq,” said Staff Sgt. Michael Handling, who oversees the exercise, and was with an M.I. unit in the 3rd Infantry Division during its assault on Baghdad two years ago.

The soldiers conduct dozens of interrogations -- mainly in English, though officials plan to introduce the use of interpreters -- and file hundreds of reports. But they also go through thousands of rounds of blank ammunition as they fend off assorted attacks. They venture from their camp into a hostile village, withstand assaults on their compound gate, and capture and question insurgents planting a roadside bomb.

At some point during the 10 days, a lone figure in traditional, loose-fitting Middle Eastern garb will approach guards at the gate for an ordinary entry inspection. Then he will open his shirt to reveal a mock explosive with a taped message: “You’re all dead.”

Training of previous generations of interrogators anticipated that they would spend most of their time questioning prisoners in detention camps far from the front lines. But in Iraq, they’re being assigned to tactical teams that move through neighborhoods combing for intelligence on insurgents.

“Will our guys go in and kick doors and clear buildings? Probably not,” said Col. Thomas M. Kelley, commander of the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade at Ft. Huachuca. “But some of our soldiers will be on those platoons or companies that are doing it.”

Largely because of the changing complexion of the job, the Army has decided to call interrogators “human intelligence collectors.” The Army has also eliminated language training for interrogator trainees, who used to leave Ft. Huachuca and spend a year studying at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, Calif. Instead, the Army is relying increasingly on contract interpreters; training at the institute is reserved for soldiers who reenlist.

Within a matter of months, Ft. Huachuca plans to drop the fictional Caspian Sea backdrop and build scenarios around real intelligence reports from Iraq. When that happens, officials said, the exercises will be classified.

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When photos of soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad surfaced publicly last year -- along with allegations that the abuse was done at the behest of interrogators -- Ft. Huachuca quickly found itself swept up in the scandal.

Officials said the base imposed a “strategic pause,” a sort of time-out so officers and instructors could examine whether what they had taught -- or had failed to teach -- had somehow contributed to the abusive behavior.

The most notorious abuses -- depicted in the photos of naked male detainees in a pile, a prisoner attached to wires and another with a dog chain -- were carried out mainly by military police.

The scandal triggered broader investigations that documented abuses by military intelligence at multiple facilities.

Interrogators had forced detainees to strip, menaced them with snarling dogs, even smeared them with what was meant to look like menstrual blood. Interrogators were implicated in the abuse of two detainees who died after severe beatings in December 2002 at the U.S. military’s Bagram air base north of Kabul. This month, U.S. military investigators disclosed that interrogators at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had forced a detainee to wear a leash, perform dog tricks and wear women’s underwear on his head.

Officials at Ft. Huachuca insisted that interrogators hadn’t learned such methods at the intelligence school.

“It was very clear from the get-go that we had never, ever, taught anything of that nature,” Kelley said.

“And that was what was frustrating, because we knew what we were doing here was right.”

Asked why so many soldiers seemed to be confused about what constituted violation of the Geneva Convention and other laws, Kelley said: “I think it kind of went back to a failure of leadership. It’s like anything else -- when you don’t ever check on anything, you don’t know what’s going on.”

Kelley was referring to officers in charge at Abu Ghraib, some of whom have been reprimanded. But lawmakers and critics of the military have contended that the blame should have been shared by more senior officers, among them Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast, who was the top intelligence officer in Iraq at the time of the abuses, and who, according to one military report, was aware of problems at Abu Ghraib long before the scandal erupted.

Fast was cleared of wrongdoing by military investigators. And this year, she was named commander at Ft. Huachuca, an appointment that angered critics.

Fast’s appointment “is a reflection of the continuing failure to hold high-level commanders responsible for their failures to act when the first hint of abuse came to light,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union and lead counsel on a lawsuit accusing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other officials of dereliction of duty in connection with Abu Ghraib.

Guttentag also took issue with Ft. Huachuca officials’ position that the school’s training wasn’t flawed.

“Given the level of systemic abuse that occurred,” Guttentag said, “it’s self-evident that the training was grossly deficient.”

Public affairs officials at Ft. Huachuca said Fast was not available to comment.

Although they insist that their instruction was not flawed, officials at Ft. Huachuca say they are placing greater emphasis on teaching the Geneva Convention and other laws regarding treatment of detainees.

During a recent interrogation class, an instructor moved through a series of slides on how to gauge prisoners’ willingness to talk. He wrapped up by flipping to a slide that defined “coercion” and had skull-and-crossbones symbols in the upper corners.

“At no time make statements that may be deemed as a direct or indirect threat,” the instructor said. If “you stay within the bounds of what we talked about today, you’re going to be fine.”

Students are tested on their reactions to signs of abuse. In one practice scenario, a female “detainee” begins to disrobe and says that’s what previous interrogators forced her to do. If students don’t stop the session and report the claim, they fail.

More changes are coming. Seeking to clarify the rules, the Army is in the midst of its first overhaul of its interrogation field manual in more than a decade. A Pentagon official said the revised document would list methods that were forbidden, including the use of dogs, forcing detainees into “stress positions,” nudity and other techniques that previous manuals did not explicitly address.

Seibel, the reservist from Lodi, said he thought instructors were doing their best to emphasize the Geneva Convention, and prepare interrogators for deployment. But he said he wondered how it would compare to the reality in Iraq.

“I feel like it’s a good baseline,” he said of his training. “They can’t teach you everything. But I feel like I’ve got enough to get started and go out there and not screw things up too badly.”