Inside look at Abu Ghraib

WASHINGTON -- The diary of a civilian interrogator says the head of US intelligence in Iraq barred officials from the Central Intelligence Agency from freely entering the Abu Ghraib prison at one point because of misconduct.

The diary also states that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice sent a message in March praising interrogators' work and informing them that the information they were eliciting from prisoners was reaching President Bush.

The assertions were made by Joe Ryan, a civilian contractor working at Abu Ghraib for CACI International, in messages he sent daily to friends and that were published for a time in diary format on the website of a radio station in Minneapolis. The diary was removed when the prison scandal broke, but some of Ryan's e-mailed entries were obtained by the Globe. The radio station, KSTP, confirmed it is authentic.

These newly available entries provide new insight into the attitudes of interrogators at Abu Ghraib as the military investigates the conduct of civilian contractors and CIA agents working at the prison and as the White House faces scrutiny for its policies toward prisoners.

Ryan had written in an entry on March 30 that the ''big news at work" was a message from Rice ''thanking us for the intelligence that has come out of our shop and noting that our work is being briefed to President Bush on a regular basis."

Rice was put in charge of coordinating Iraq policy at the prisons in October. A spokesman for Rice said he could find no record of any such communication.

However, Barry Johnson, a US spokesman in Baghdad for Abu Ghraib, confirmed that interrogators had received a verbal message to that effect from their company commander that was attributed to Rice.

''Comments by Ms. Rice to the effect of, 'JIDC, you are doing good work that is being seen at the national level,' were passed on to the personnel working there," Johnson said in an e-mail asking for comment on Ryan's claim. JIDC refers to the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib.

When asked how the company commander received the message, Johnson said: ''It's my understanding from others familiar with this that it was passed down to him verbally by his chain of command."

Johnson said the message was clearly meant to be ''motivational."

Ryan did not respond to several e-mail requests for comment. He apparently is still in Iraq.

In the same March 30 diary entry, Ryan said that Major General Barbara Fast, head of the coalition's intelligence operations in Iraq, barred the CIA from freely entering the prison because of an unspecified incident there that earned Fast's ''ire."

''Clowns International, the CIA, has proven once again that they are incompetent boobs," he wrote on March 30, adding that he could not go into detail about the incident that had upset Fast. ''They cannot set foot on Abu Ghraib without her expressed permission (which will not happen anytime soon) after their latest stunt."

Fast's office in Baghdad declined to comment on Ryan's claim, citing an ongoing investigation of the CIA and civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib currently being led by Major General George R. Fay. A spokesman for the CIA in Washington also declined to comment.

In a chatty narrative style, Ryan says another interrogator on his team asked him to frighten the detainee into talking because the colleague recognized he wasn't able to do it himself.

''He asked me to help out in the booth tonight with a good fear-up harsh [approach]," he wrote, referring to the practice of instilling fear in a prisoner to soften him up during interrogation. ''I was like a peacock strutting around when we were done because I scared the guy so much he wet himself. That will get talked about for weeks I'm sure."

Ryan, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, did not detail the methods he used.

Ryan also described the prison as a font of useful information about the insurgency and violence against US soldiers in Iraq. In one instance, an interrogator discovered a ''high-value" target in the prison who had been processed under an assumed name. In another instance, a detainee simply sat down and admitted to firing a missile at an American plane, Ryan wrote.

''All of the CACI interrogators have a little competition as to who gets the most high-value evaluations back on reports and this source may put me in the lead after this week," he wrote.

A spokesman for CACI, a private firm based in Arlington, Va., that provides civilian interrogators in Iraq under a contract awarded by the Department of Defense, confirmed that Ryan is still an employee but said the company ''does not approve of the publication of company or customer-sensitive information on the Internet."

''Joe Ryan has informed us that he never intended that his diaries be published on the Internet, and that he regrets that it occurred," Jody Brown said.

Joe O'Brien, program director for the KSTP, said that the diary was published with Ryan's permission.

Ryan also states that the International Committee for the Red Cross, or ICRC -- prison monitors which he described as an ''anti-American fascist organization" -- were asked to leave Abu Ghraib.

''They caused quite a stir when they started handing out these magazine-type booklets to the detainees," he wrote on March 18. ''In the booklet, it was all in Arabic and when one of the linguists started translating it, we found that it was anti-American propaganda. There was even a picture of a plane dropping a bomb on a child flying a kite. Needless to say, once this was discovered, the colonel had the entire crew sent out of the front gate. They were supposed to be here a week, but he told them that until they account for their actions with Paul Bremer, they are not setting foot back inside our walls."

Antonella Notari, a spokesman for the Red Cross, said she had no record of the organization's representatives being asked to leave Abu Ghraib. She reiterated the organization's policy not to disclose details of its interactions with prisoners or governments, but added, ''The ICRC would never pass out any political literature of any kind."

Farah Stockman can be reached at fstockman@globe.com.