The day after the prison was transferred to the military intelligence command, they had an entire battalion - 1,200, 1,500 soldiers - arrive at Abu Ghraib just for force protection alone.
At that time, about July 5, we had no Iraqi corrections officers working for us. It was a responsibility of the CPA, with contractors, to set up a training program.
After they killed Uday and Qusay, the focus centered on Saddam: Find him, kill him, capture him, whatever it takes. To me, it was a false sense of security: If we get Saddam, we're going to win this war.
If they conducted a raid in this room, you'd all be policed up. They'd take all of you to Abu Ghraib and turn you over to the soldiers. Maybe there's only one or two of you in this group who was a known associate or had any piece of information that they are trying to exploit.
The vast majority of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, even after interrogation, had no further intel value whatsoever.
In November, they transferred control of Abu Ghraib to the military intelligence command completely; it was, after all, the center for interrogations for Iraq.
I was ordered not to go out to Abu Ghraib after dark early on, because Abu Ghraib was extremely dangerous.
Military intelligence interrogators, however, their goal is to get information, to save lives, to stop the war, to find Saddam - whatever the information is going to be used for, at whatever cost.
The war was declared over - the end of major combat operations - in May 2003. Release procedures got under way immediately; reducing the population from 8,000 to just over 300, of course, requires fewer military police soldiers.
There was a military police brigade with over 3,400 soldiers getting ready to go home because their mission - prisoner-of-war operations - was finished.
That policy was abandoned very quickly, and the military police were tagged with the responsibility of conducting training, which they did. We were not equipped or set up with personnel to recruit new Iraqi guards.
Military police know what to do, they know the Geneva Conventions, and their objective is to provide a safe, secure, fair environment for prisoners under their control.
