Detainee in Photo With Dog Was 'High-Value' Suspect

Pappas told investigators in January that generals urged him to use aggressive tactics on the detainees and that he approved the use of dogs in at least three cases.

"I thought I had the authority to approve the use of the dogs," he said, according to a 25-page unclassified transcript obtained by The Post. "In my view, it was to establish control."

Pappas said he forwarded 20 to 30 requests for use of severe tactics to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, then commander of U.S. troops in Iraq.

"Now he did express some concerns to me about the intelligence we were obtaining and not using the full spectrum of tools and authority to obtain good intelligence," Pappas said of Sanchez, "but never did he say use dogs on any particular person or time."

Navy personnel arrested Ahsy on Dec. 9, 2003, aboard the merchant vessel Manar as it approached southern Iraq after sailing from a port in the United Arab Emirates, according to military documents.

Ahsy, then 23, told interrogators he was a Sunni Muslim originally from the al-Sowara neighborhood in Baghdad. He was a former soldier in the Iraqi military who had been living in the UAE, working as a driver for a sultan. He was captured with cars he said he was going to sell in Iraq. U.S. military officials said last week that some records showed he was Iraqi, while others listed him as Syrian.

John B. Israel, a civilian contract linguist at Abu Ghraib, told military investigators that he and others left the prison in December to pick up Ahsy on a ship south of Basrah. Upon return, Ahsy was immediately dubbed "Project #2," according to Israel's statement, which noted Ahsy was the prisoner in the photograph.

Ahsy first appears in military police logs for Tier 1A, the area of the prison where high-value detainees were held, on Christmas Eve 2003, when he is listed as being in Cell 10. At 8:15 a.m., he was "in stairwell with OGA," denoting that he was being interrogated there.

Over the next three weeks, according to the logs, doctors evaluated Ahsy twice and each time recommended him for medical care, once for severe swelling in his feet. A soldier who worked at the prison said Ahsy's feet swelled because he was made to stand in "stress positions" for hours.

"People were always making a big deal about him, and I don't know why," said Sgt. Hydrue Joyner, who ran the day shift on Tier 1A. "Whenever we took him out of the cell, they made it seem like we had Hannibal Lecter with us. They thought he was important, and OGA and MI were paying a lot of attention to him."

Interrogation summaries show that Ahsy was questioned regularly -- 63 times through April 12, 2004 -- and interrogators were frustrated by his lack of cooperation. He was threatened with being sent to a Saudi or Israeli prison, and interrogators tried to scare him with the possibility of sending him to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"The interrogation team was presented with the opportunity to use two Black Hawks as props in an attempt to convince the detainee he was going to be transported to GITMO, Cuba," interrogators wrote on Feb. 13, 2004. "The detainee was taken thru a complete set of preplanned circumstances up to taking him out to a waiting aircraft. The detainee was then returned to his cell. . . . The detainee was uncertain and very worried."

Six days later, in interrogation No. 43, they wrote: "The team has moved closer to getting the detainee on the edge of breaking."

Ahsy was referred to by the nicknames "al-Qaeda" and "Ashy," and was "considered a big fish for a while," according to Pappas's statement. Pappas said he received "several briefings on this particular detainee." He also said that during a briefing for Pentagon intelligence generals, an interrogator "stated he was in a rapport-building process with Ashy," although there was no mention of using dogs.

Military officials in Baghdad said Ahsy was released from custody in October 2004 -- 10 months after his capture -- but declined to elaborate.