WASHINGTON — A military interrogation expert, Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman, told Congress yesterday that before the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considers violations of the Geneva Conventions.

One of those interrogations was conducted by an Air Force civilian and a contractor employed by his own organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. It had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force improve its interrogations of stubborn prisoners. The team was asked to demonstrate an interrogation on an Iraqi prisoner. It was an unusual role for the organization, which trains soldiers how to resist interrogations, not conduct them.

Colonel Kleinman said his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him, and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Colonel Kleinman said.

Kleinman stopped the interrogation, which had veered from his careful plan into abuse.

“Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation,” he said.

The men, Terrence Russell and Lenny Miller, had learned the harsh techniques working with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training program for American forces, which conducts stressful mock interrogations to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive questioning in the event they are taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from the real-life experiences of American prisoners of war. The techniques include forced nakedness, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather and waterboarding, a practice that causes the sensation of drowning.