7.03.2004

Israeli Interrogators at Abu Ghrab?

It's unclear what this will mean, if anything. I would not think the presence of Israel investigators is necessarily wise (that whole "US, Israeli unholy anti-Arab alliance" sorta thing, you know), but it's not necessarily surprising that companies contracting for interrogators (and outsourced interrogation seems like a bad thing itself) would hire Israelis, who have been involved in anti-terrorism work for decades.

The former military commander of Abu Ghraib prison claimed Saturday that she met an Israeli interrogator who was working at a secret facility in Iraq.

Although Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski told the BBC in an interview that no Israelis were working at Abu Ghraib, she claimed that she met an Israeli interrogator at an undisclosed facility while she was escorting a retiring four-star general through Iraq last year.

"He was clearly from the Middle East and he said, 'well I do some of the interrogation here, and of course, I speak Arabic but I'm not an Arab, I'm from Israel," Karpinski said in an interview with the Today program on BBC Radio 4.