The "Hard Site" and Failure of "Intelligence" at Abu Ghraib

The "hard site" at Abu Ghraib, as I mentioned in a previous post, was where high security prisoners were detained. It was comprised of Tier 1A and Tier 1B; 1B hosted the women and children related to the high security prisoners that were kept in Tier 1A. The women and children held in 1B were used as leverage to extract information from the captives housed in 1A.

In the hard sites, there was another imbalance of detainees and M.P.s. There were approximately six or seven M.P.s guarding at least one thousand high security prisoners in these hard sites. This was extremely dangerous, considering those six soldiers were as good as dead if the prisoners overran the hard sites.

The prisoners kept in the hard sites were considered highly dangerous and necessary informants. However, the M.P.s were unable to extract valuable information from these prisoners because the majority of them had none. The had been captured on speculation instead of tactics. This resulted, once again, from an unorganized military front to battle an unseen enemy. Innocent civilians were suffering in these prisons, having their families held against them in exchange for information about Iraq and al-Qaeda, with no idea why or how the came to be detained in this desolate prison.