The "Hard Site" & the Failure of "Intelligence" at Abu Ghraib

The prisoners at Abu Ghraib were divided according to their danger level. Tier 1A, or the "hard sites" held the prisoners believed to be harboring evidence, or the criminally insane, while the inner most protected areas, Tier 1B, held the women and children. The women and children were used as leverage against the prisoners whom the guards thought had intelligence that could help the U.S. military.

Because of the sheer lack in numbers of guards compared to the number of prisoners detained in Tier 1A, there were often 6-7 guards monitoring over 1,000 prisoners. Many of the prisoners within the hard sites were members of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorists organizations. At any time, if all of the prisoners worked together, they could have staged an upheaval that would have left the guards dead. Because of the constant influx of prisoners arriving at Abu Ghraib, the intelligence officers were overwhelmed by the high number of prisoners that needed to be interviewed. They soon found that many of the detainees brought to the prison were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had no inside intelligence regarding terrorism. 

The U.S. military, and particularly the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, began to get aggravated at the lack of intelligence being gathered from the prisoners. Late in the summer of 2003, an intelligence meeting was held at the Pentagon. Secretary Rumsfeld questioned the lack of intelligence gathered in Iraq, and ordered that General Miller, head of prison operations at Guantanamo Bay, be flown to Iraq to get a handle on the situation. 

Major General Geoffrey Miller