Major General Geoffrey Miller, commandant at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was sent to Iraq last year to teach American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq "his best psychological and physical techniques for squeezing information out of detainees," a news report said Sunday.

Late in the summer of 2003, US military intelligence officers in Iraq were under pressure from their superiors to get information regarding Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction and the rebels who were attacking American troops, said the report,which will be published in Newsweek's May 17 issue that is to be on newsstand on Monday.

"There was extraordinary pressure being put on MI (military intelligence) from every angle to get better info," Janis Karpinski was quoted as saying.

Karpinski was the former 800th MP Brigade commander, who at the time was responsible for Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons.

Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition commander in Iraq, and Barbara Fast, his top intelligence officer, asked for a fixer and got Miller, commandant at Guantanamo Bay, where the US military had held more than 600 detainees for more than two years without charges, the report said.

Quoting a subsequent inquiry by Major General Antonio Taguba, the report said Miller's task was "to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence."

Deputy Central Command commander Lance Smith insisted that Miller's changes at Abu Ghraib in 2003 "didn't have anything to dowith the methods of interrogating," but Taguba's report clearly outlines Miller's attempt to turn Abu Ghraib guards into "enablers" for interrogation, the report said.

"This is not a few bad apples. This is a system failure, a massive failure," Senate Armed Services Committee member Lindsay Graham, a conservative Republican, was quoted as saying.

Source: Xinhua