Officers Say U.S. Colonel at Abu Ghraib Prison Felt Intense Pressure to Get Inmates to Talk
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: May 19, 2004
ASHINGTON, May 18 — As he took charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison last September, Col. Thomas M. Pappas was under enormous pressure from his superiors to extract more information from prisoners there, according to senior Army officers.
"He likened it to a root canal without novocaine," a senior officer who knows Colonel Pappas said of his meetings with his superiors in Baghdad. Often, the officer said, Colonel Pappas would emerge from discussions with two of them, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, without a word, but "clutching his face as if in pain." Colonel Pappas, commander of the 205th Intelligence Brigade, relocated his headquarters from Camp Victory, near the Baghdad airport, to Abu Ghraib just days after a visit to Iraq last fall by another high-ranking Army officer, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller. General Miller encouraged the Army colonel to have his unit work more closely with military police to set the conditions for interrogations.
By the end of September, Colonel Pappas had asserted control of Tier 1 of the prison's "hard site," used for interrogation of Iraqi prisoners, which he maintained until February, when he and his brigade were transferred to Germany at the end of their yearlong tour. After Nov. 19, by order of General Sanchez, Colonel Pappas and his brigade took command of all of Abu Ghraib prison, taking over authority from the 800th Military Police Brigade.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/19/politics/19PAPP.html