WASHINGTON, May 28 - Interrogation experts from the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were sent to Iraq last fall and played a major role in training American military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib prison there, senior military officials said Friday.
The teams from Guantánamo Bay, which had operated there under directives allowing broad latitude in questioning "enemy combatants," played a central role at Abu Ghraib through December, the officials said, a time when the worst abuses of prisoners were taking place. Prisoners captured in Iraq, unlike those sent from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions.
The teams were sent to Iraq for 90-day tours at the urging of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo. General Miller was sent to Iraq last summer to recommend improvements in the intelligence gathering and detention operations there, a defense official said.
The involvement of the Guantánamo teams has not previously been disclosed, and military officials said it would be addressed in a major report on suspected abuses by military intelligence specialists that is being completed by Maj. Gen. George W. Fay.
The report by General Fay will be the second major chapter in the Army's examination of the prisoner abuses in Iraq. Military officials said he would determine whether tactics used by military interrogators at Guantánamo and in Afghanistan were wrongly applied in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib.
Over the last month, General Fay and his 29-member team have conducted scores of interviews in Iraq, Europe and the United States, and the general is now expected to brief Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, on his findings sometime in the next week, a senior Army official said.
The involvement of the Guantánamo teams in Iraq marks the second major instance in which interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib appear to have been modeled on those in place earlier in Guantánamo or in Afghanistan, at facilities where the United States had declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply.
In Iraq, Bush administration officials have insisted that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" to all prisoners, whether they were prisoners of war or civilians waging an insurgency against the United States. But since the abuses at Abu Ghraib have become public, some American officers have acknowledged that there may have been confusion there about whether certain tactics used on prisoners - including hooding, chaining, isolation and sleep deprivation - required approval from the American command in Baghdad.
Confirming an account from military intelligence soldiers who served in Iraq, a senior military official in Iraq said Friday that five interrogation teams, or about 15 interrogators, analysts and other specialists, were sent in October from Guantánamo Bay to the American command in Iraq "for use in the interrogation effort" at Abu Ghraib. A defense official in Washington said that only three teams had been sent, but there was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.
General Miller, who is now in command of all detention sites in Iraq, played a central role in recommending an overhaul of interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib, including changes to bring about closer coordination between guards and interrogators. But the general's report on that issue remains classified, and it is not clear whether either his report or the Guantánamo teams explicitly recommended a toughening of interrogation procedures at Abu Ghraib.
To date, there have been no accusations of serious prisoner abuse in connection with interrogations at Guantánamo. Most of the criticisms have generally focused on the lack of legal rights and due process and the indefinite nature of the detentions.