Ex-Iraq Interrogator Says Many Prisoners Innocent
"I've read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, 'the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him'," Nelson said.
Nelson, who served as a contractor at Abu Ghraib last year, said abuses were partly a result of an over-reliance on private firms so eager to meet demand for their services that they sent staff ill-prepared to deal with intelligence work.
"They're under so much pressure to fill slots quickly... if you're in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work," Nelson told the paper.
The innocence of some detainees made them more likely to be abused because interrogators refused to believe they had been rounded up arbitrarily and regarded them as "tough targets" to be broken, he said.
Nelson, who resigned from his job in February, is listed as a witness in the official military report into the abuse scandal at the prison, the Guardian said.
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