WASHINGTON — The U.S. officer who was in charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison has told a senior Army investigator that intelligence officers sometimes instructed the military police to force Iraqi detainees to strip naked, and to shackle them before they were questioned. But he said those measures were not imposed "unless there is some good reason."

The officer, Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, also told the investigator, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, that his unit had "no formal system in place" to monitor instructions they had given to military guards, who worked closely with interrogators to prepare detainees for interviews. Pappas said he "should have asked more questions, admittedly" about abuses committed or encouraged by his subordinates.

The statements by Pappas, contained in the transcript of a Feb. 11 interview that is part of Taguba's 6,000-page classified report, offer the highest-level confirmation so far that military intelligence soldiers directed military guards in preparing for interrogations. They also provide the first insights by the senior intelligence officer at the prison into the relationship between his troops and military police. Portions of Pappas' sworn statements were read to The New York Times by a government official who had read the transcript.

Testimony from guards and detainees at a preliminary hearing for a soldier accused of abuse said that orders from interrogators at Abu Ghraib stopped short of the graphic abuse seen in the photographs at the center of the prison scandal.

The interrogation techniques Pappas described were used on detainees who were protected by the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit coercive and unpleasant treatment of prisoners. Military officials said on Monday that the United States had months ago quietly abandoned an early plan to designate as unlawful combatants some of the prisoners captured by U.S. forces in Iraq. No prisoners in Iraq were classified as unlawful combatants.

That means that even foreign fighters and suspected Qaida members captured in Iraq, along with Iraqis captured as prisoners of war and insurgents, have remained protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The role of military intelligence officials and civilian contract interrogators at Abu Ghraib is still under investigation by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, the deputy chief of Army intelligence.

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