US: Iraqis jailing too many innocents

The US Army is now shifting the blame on Iraqis for arresting "too many innocents." Officers complain that it takes a "couple of weeks" to clear up mistakes and release innocent detainees caught up in these "dragnets." Those innocent detainees in Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca who wait eight months for the US to grant them hearings must not be able to laugh at the irony of this assertion.

Lt. Col. Steve Duke, leader of the U.S. military transition team of advisers for the 5th Brigade of the Iraqi army's 6th Division, cited two recent examples of this dynamic at work.

In late March, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Brigade, 10th Iraqi Army Division detained 54 men in Baghdad after an improvised explosive device attack, he said.

"If you were near the IED, or you could spell IED, you were detained," he said.

It took "a couple of weeks" before the Iraqis released any of them, he said.

"The Iraqis are not good at field interviews ... and there's a perception that subordinate commanders do not have the authority to release, but they do have the authority to detain," Duke said.

Authority to release any detainee rests with Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abud Ganbar Hashimi, who heads the Baghdad Operational Command, said Maj. Michael Philipak, a U.S. Army intelligence officer who advises the Iraqi army 6th Division.

The second reason cited by U.S. officers is that the Iraqi defense and interior ministries are drawing up lists of individuals to be detained and sending them down to brigade and even battalion levels of the Iraqi army, all based on "intelligence" that is never shared with either Iraqi commanders or their U.S. counterparts, according to American and Iraqi officers.

Iraqis "do the dirty work" (torture)

The New York Times revealed again in detail, as it has often over the past years, the ways in which the US military allows Iraqi security forces to torture and abuse detainees to gather information. In West Baghdad, Alissa Rubin quotes Iraq security forces bragging about how they whipped a detainee before his two colleagues, and after this the detainee led American forces to their safe house and IED supplies.

What is amazing in this article is the use of loaded words like "culture," "civilization," and "conscience" by both sides. To the US military abuses in Abu Ghraib were a terrible aberration and the whipping of detainees is merely "part of their culture." According to them, it's not "civilization." But then according to the Iraqi Captain, he was simply acting according to his "conscience."

The Iraqi officers beamed. What the Americans did not know and what the Iraqis had not told them was that before handing over the detainees to the Americans, the Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of them in front of the other two. The stripes on the detainee’s back, which appeared to be the product of whipping with electrical cables, were later shown briefly to a photographer, who was not allowed to take a picture.

To the Iraqi soldiers, the treatment was normal and necessary. They were proud of their technique and proud to have helped the Americans.

"I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” Capt. Bassim Hassan said through an interpreter. "We know how to make them talk. We know their back streets. We beat them. I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate." [...]

The Iraqi soldiers were ecstatic. They had delivered. They snapped photos of each other in front of the cache with the blasting cords in their mouths, grinning. The Americans were nervous. "One spark will blow this place up," said First Lt. Michael Obal as an Iraqi soldier flicked a lit cigarette butt within inches of one cache of explosives. "It’s highly unstable TNT."

Later, the Americans plotted into their computers the location of each of the Al Qaeda safe houses that [detainee] Mr. Jassam had pointed out. “He was singing like a songbird,” said First Lt. Sean Henley, 24.

After the prisoner was returned to the Iraqis, Captain Fowler was asked whether the Americans realized that the information was given only after the Iraqi Army had beaten Mr. Jassam. "They are not supposed to do that," Captain Fowler said. "What I don’t see, I don’t know, and I can’t stop. The detainees are deathly afraid of being sent to the Iraqi justice system, because this is the kind of thing they do. But this is their culture."

Lieutenant Obal, the captain’s deputy, was distraught at the thought that the detainee had been beaten. "I don’t think that’s right," he said. "We have intelligence teams, they have techniques for getting information, they don’t do things like that. It’s not civilization."

About 30 yards away, on the other side of the wall, the Iraqi soldiers suggested that the Americans were being naïve. The insurgents are playing for keeps, they say, and force must be answered with force.

"If the Americans used this way, the way we use, nobody would shoot the Americans at all," Captain Hassan said. "But they are easy with them, and they have made it easy for the terrorists."

"I didn’t beat them all, I beat Mustafa in front of the others. We tell him we’re going to string him up." He demonstrated his arms spread wide. "And, I made the others see him," he said.

Captain Hassan and his colleagues said they knew the Iraqi Army has rules against beatings, but "they tell us to do what we have to do," he said.

"For me it’s a matter of conscience, not rules," he said.

Cropper as insurgent recruitment center

The LA Times reports that islamic militants are recruiting and operating within Camp Cropper, one of two large US prison camps in Iraq. Camp Cropper's population has swelled to 18,000 with the "surge" operations of 2006-7. The Iraqi government's Human Rights Liaison to the US prisons claims he has warned the US of these growing problems for over a year now. Militants have attempted to control life in the camps, stoked tensions between Sunni and Shite detainees, and have brutally killed suspected informers in the Camp. The Times story quotes a handful of ex-prisoners, and the Iraqi government's Human Rights Liaison. From the Times' Ned Parker:

Extremists conducted regular indoctrination lectures, and in some cases destroyed televisions supplied by the Americans for use with educational videos, banned listening to music on radios, forbade smoking and stoked tensions between Sunni and Shiite detainees, they said.

Iraqis swept up in security operations and held indefinitely while the Americans try to determine whether they have any links to the insurgency are susceptible to the extremists' message, former detainees said.

Their accounts of life in Camp Cropper, the main U.S. detention center at the Baghdad airport, indicate that three years after the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. is still struggling to find a balance in the way it runs its detention system.

Prisons have long served as an incubator for radicals, and mass roundups by the U.S. military after the 2003 invasion are now blamed for antagonizing Iraq's Sunni Arab population and feeding the insurgency.

[...]

U.S. military officials acknowledge that they are battling militants for the hearts and minds of detainees, but deny accusations that they have lost control inside the prisons, or that detainees are treated harshly. They say they have instituted counterinsurgency and educational programs, and are gearing up to launch a more direct effort to confront extremists next month.

Iraqi officials also struggle with a crowded system where prisoners can languish as long as two years before getting a trial. But they say the Americans have allowed militants to flourish in their facilities.

"It looks like a terrorist academy now," said Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry's liaison to U.S. and Iraqi prisons. "There's a huge number of these students. They study how they can kill in their camps. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care.

"The Americans have no solution to this problem," he said. "This has been going on for a year or two, we have been telling them."

A former detainee at Camp Cropper, where Hussein and other high-profile prisoners have been held, said he once watched Sunni militants attack a former police officer they suspected of being an informer. He said six men, their faces hidden by towels, gathered around the victim in a dormitory at 2 a.m.

Two kept a lookout for U.S. soldiers while one man swung a sock stuffed with rocks at the inmate's head, he said. The man tried to get up, but another pressed him down with a foot to the chest. The attackers pummeled his head, spattering themselves with his blood, until he lost consciousness.

Other prisoners then dragged the victim to the front of the hall, where the U.S. guards would find him.

[...]

Abu Tiba said he felt caught between the militants and the Americans.

"It was a psychological war from both the Americans and the religious extremists," he said. "It was terrifying." He said he worried about the U.S. soldiers who shouted at him, and the militants who stowed razor wire to use in fights.

The most powerful figure was a young imam known as Abu Hamza, who they said had pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. The Americans had allowed a dangerous cleric to stay in a barracks with ordinary Sunnis, they said.

"He used to give lectures in the morning and night," Abu Usama said. "Anyone who didn't attend the lectures would have a mark against him."

In his lectures, the young radical denounced the Iraqi government, U.S. soldiers, and the entire political process, he said. He also banned smoking in the hall.

"The problem was the Americans didn't know what was going on. They allowed him to preach because they believed in religious freedom," said Abu Usama, 43. The preacher's core supporters were young men who had been radicalized in the ferment after Hussein's ouster.

"Abu Hamza's followers tried to win people over by offering them money and cars when they got out of camp," he said, adding that he had used the prestige his age gives him to rebuff a recruitment effort from a younger member of his tribe, the powerful Dulaimi clan.

The radicals preyed on men who were being held indefinitely, without knowing whether they would be charged. "You'd spend three months not charged with anything and you were innocent — they could get you," Abu Usama said.

Adnan Nabi, a 42-year-old cleric loyal to radical Muqtada Sadr, presided over the Shiite side of the camp, said another of the ex-detainees, who identified himself as Abu Mustafa. He said Nabi banned listening to music on radios and forbade Shiites from talking to Sunnis.

At prayer services, he said, the cleric urged detainees to join Sadr's Al Mahdi militia, which has fought U.S. forces on several occasions. When the Americans transferred Nabi to Camp Bucca, a riot broke out and U.S. guards had to use rubber bullets and tear gas, he said.

Abu Mustafa said he and the other Shiites slept in shifts to guard each other after word spread that they had worked for a secular political party. They were forced to swear on a copy of the Koran that they had only been gardeners on the grounds of the party headquarters, he said.

"Prison is the best place to organize an army to destroy the country," Abu Usama said. "Even someone who is innocent … they will brainwash him to do whatever they want, including becoming a suicide bomber."

Two Iraqi prisons "crammed"

The New York Times reports today that two Iraqi detention centers designed together to hold just over 100 people are now holding nearly a thousand.

In one of the detention centers, in the town of Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, 705 people were packed into an area built for 75, according to Maan Zeki Khadum, an official with the monitoring group. The other center, on Muthana Air Base, held 272 people in a space designed to hold about 50, he said, and included two women and four boys who were being held in violation of regulations that require juveniles to be separated from adults and males from females.

In an interview, Mr. Khadum said a majority of the detainees at the two detention centers had been picked up while the security plan, which began in mid-February, was being put into effect.

He said the detention system had been suffering from a problem of “fast detention and very slow release, especially for those who are not guilty.” His group includes 17 lawyers and is working under a government committee run by the Shiite politician Ahmad Chalabi.

Some ironic advice for wardens in Iraq

For a rare taste of detention from the warden's side, this op-ed in the LA Times. Carlson served in the Fallouja detention center in much of 2006, and is currently pursuing a Masters in creative writing.

The warden of Fallouja
Taking charge of a detention center in Iraq? Here's what you need to remember. By Mike Carlson


[ 1 ] They're not prisoners, they're "detainees."

It sounds better, as if they're merely inconvenienced rather than shoehorned into cinderblock cells, thumbing their military-issued Korans and waiting to be interrogated. One-third are innocents caught up in sweeps; one-third are jihadists who will slit your throat, and one-third are opportunists who will rat out their neighbors. You will hold them for 14 days, no more, while the interrogators try to figure out who is what. Each gets a CF, for Camp Fallouja, and a four-digit number. No names will be used, mainly because numbers fit more easily onto spreadsheets. They will be forever known as entas. "Enta" means "you" in Arabic, and that's what you call them day after day, meal after meal, port-a-potty call after port-a-potty call. "Enta, ishra mai," you say, and the enta drinks his water, and if you say, "Enta, ishra mai kulak," he drinks all of his water, every drop, and holds the bottle upside down to prove it.


[ 2 ] It's not personal.

The enta who screams "meesta!" every 10 seconds for 48 hours straight isn't doing it to infuriate you, his captor. What it boils down to is that he can't pronounce "mister," and he was carrying that 155-millimeter round in the back of his pickup, and he was going to try to blow you up, and the reason he was picked by the insurgent leaders to haul the shell is that he's soft in the head, which is why he cannot stop screaming "meesta!"

The major who watches NASCAR races on satellite TV in his air-conditioned office at the battalion headquarters while you and your Marines march entas to and from the latrines in 120-degree heat isn't doing it to antagonize you, his subordinate. Frankly, he's just over here for the retirement money, and he didn't want to be in charge of four regional detention facilities in Al Anbar province any more than you wanted to end up as the warden in Fallouja. He wants to keep his head down and forget about the fact that if one, just one, of your Marines snaps and goes Abu Ghraib on a detainee, his pension is out the window.


[ 3 ] You won't fire your weapon in anger.

You'll fire plenty of training rounds. You'll be awakened nightly by outgoing artillery shells being blasted into the ether a mere 400 meters from your tin-can hooch, where you fall asleep to the drone of your air-conditioning unit and the faint yelps from the sergeant-next-door's porn videos.

Your fingers will ache from absently squeezing the grip of your M16A4 during endless nighttime convoys, transporting detainees from Fallouja to Abu Ghraib or Camp Cropper. The only illumination in the back of the truck will come from the red-lens flashlight you pan across the entas to make sure none of them have wormed loose from their flex cuffs and hatched a plot to kill you.

Your truck will stop one night outside Abu Ghraib. You will wait for explosive ordnance techs to clear a suspicious burlap bag. Because there are so many bombs, you never know how long you'll sit exposed on the road. During the second hour, CF-4562 will ask you in perfect English if he can pee. You will escort him to the edge of the road. When he thinks you aren't looking, 4562 will slink away from you and your rifle. You will immediately see through such a feeble escape attempt, and here, outside the site of America's shame, this enta will be one sandal step away from giving you an absolutely justifiable reason to finally click your weapon's selector off of "safe."

You will raise the muzzle slowly with muscles that ache from humping 60 pounds of body armor and ammo and water and Quick-Clot coagulant, but before your thumb moves over the safety, you will automatically say "kiff," Arabic for "stop," because it's been drilled into you as part of the rules of engagement. You will want to shoot, and 4562 will hear that in your voice. He will stop. He will manage a feeble stream of urine before you shoo him back aboard the truck.


[ 4 ] You will be a constant target outside the wire.

A green beam of light will dazzle you through the Cyclops lens of your night-vision goggles as it streaks toward the armored sides of your truck. You will grit your teeth, and the rocket-propelled grenade will hit, and then, by the grace of some malfunction, it will only gouge out a divot from the big green plates, an errant golf swing's worth of metal. You will pan your rifle barrel across the garbage-strewn fields and pockmarked buildings, but you will see nothing, just a stray dog scurrying away from the tiny blast. A feeling of anticlimax will wash over you, of one beer short of the perfect buzz and a throw just wide of the catcher's mitt. You are a Marine and trained to kill, but you can never find any insurgents to shoot.


[ 5 ] You will tell yourself lies about how being shot at will change you.

You won't be able to tell your wife about the near-miss when you call home because you know she'll be worried, and when she worries, she cries, and you cannot, absolutely cannot, have her cry, mainly because it will make you cry, and you're a captain in a crowded phone center surrounded by junior Marines. Your neck will cramp up for two weeks, as if all your fears have been concentrated into a small kernel of misery somewhere north of your shoulder blade. Then, one day, the pain will be gone, and you will walk up to the side of the truck and place your fist inside the divot to remind yourself that it really happened.


[ 6 ] You will screw up.

A sergeant will push one of your female Marines too hard during physical training, and she will turn on the waterworks and accuse him of sexual harassment. You will chew out the sergeant, but later discover that she is simply angry with him for forbidding her to visit her boyfriend in another unit.

You will apologize to the sergeant, but the incident will have cost you some of the platoon's trust, and you will find yourself hating her. She will hate you too, until she goes home early, knocked up by the very same boyfriend she was forbidden to see. You will feel a quick self-righteous high, followed by a prolonged low; your neglect of your own rule — don't take it personally — means you failed her as a leader.


[ 7 ] You will drink water until your urine is clear.

You will drink and drink and keep drinking until you've drained more than 800 bottles of water during your stay in the Iraqi desert.


[ 8 ] Your interpreter will be your greatest hidden ally.

Ali is rotund, aged and bearded, a prototypical Islamic authority figure. He reads the facility rules to all new detainees, his face hidden behind dark glasses and a ball cap. Your understanding of Arabic progresses to the point where you know he's adding regulations. You take him aside, and he explains that he tells the new arrivals that there are snipers in every tower, that trapdoors lurk beyond the borders of each gravel path and that attacking a Marine in the facility would result in a coward's death, voiding the promise of 72 virgins. You allow him to continue.


[ 9 ] You won't abuse any detainees.

Your property room will hold a sniper rifle that killed a Marine and bears the fingerprints of the man inside Cell 4A. Evidence photos will show a bomb crater and bloody boots with shinbones still laced inside, and wires that lead from the crater to the home of CF-7634. As you perform your daily cell checks, you will occasionally want to smash and kick and eye gouge and palm-heel strike. But you won't. You will need to look in the mirror tomorrow when you shave.


[ 10 ] You will get by with 20 words of Arabic.

When your prisoner-release convoy is waved into a field strewn with basketball-sized boulders by an Army lieutenant too new to speak Arabic, that will be just enough to get the entas to stop washing their feet and shouting blessings to Allah and to herd them into the civil affairs compound. Later, an 18-year-old lance corporal will fall asleep at the wheel and swerve off the Fallouja cloverleaf. As the 7-ton rumbles down the embankment, the entas will fling themselves off the truck. One enta will break his arm, and, again, your 20 words will coax him into medical treatment. Through it all — the bungled release, the accident, the medevac — you will not be attacked. Two days later, a similar convoy traveling the exact same route will be blown up by an IED, and the ache in your neck will return for another two weeks.


[ 11 ] After seven months, you will fly home.

On the way back to the U.S., your Marines will be told by Maj. NASCAR that they can drink, and they will — to excess. You will resign yourself to breaking up the inevitable fights, and as you step between two Marines about to swing, you will realize that this has been your purpose. You set limits.


[ 12 ] You will return to civilian life.

You will be jumpy and vaguely unsatisfied, disconnected from the civilians around you who care only about text messages and gas prices and catty e-mails. Navy doctors will find Iraqi sand trapped in the innermost pathways of your ear canals. Your wife now snores, and all her unfamiliar noises combine to drive you from your bed.

On one such night, you will turn on the television news and see that Anna Nicole Smith's death has trumped the coverage of America's 3,118th fatality, 31-year-old Petty Officer 1st Class Gilbert Minjares Jr. You will note that, at 39, Smith was younger than most of the helicopters flying in Iraq. You will turn off the TV and sit in the dark and feel your eyes water as you think about how you took 55 Marines and sailors into a combat zone and brought all 55 back home, and that no one in America besides you and those 55 really cares or understands what you went through.

You processed 1,230 detainees, without a single incident of abuse, while America sat on the couch and watched girls go wild. As far as you know, you killed no one. This used to bother you, because killing is what Marines are trained to do. But now, after viewing documentaries and reports that paint American forces as Redcoat invaders, you take some comfort in the fact that you never pulled the trigger.

Those numbers — 55, 1,230 and 0 — will allow you to sleep tonight, and the next night, and the next. But each night you will insert a mouth guard made of silicone before you go to sleep, because your dentist informs you that you are always, always, always unconsciously grinding your teeth.

Blunder #3: Prisons and prisoners

From the Talking Points Memo Cafe (a progressive forum for debate), by Marshall Adame, the former director of the Basra airport, "Six Blunders we made in Iraq we can still fix":

3. Prisoners and Prisons

Problem: From 2003 until today our coalition forces have captured or killed some of the most dangerous people in the world. These people will never have the opportunity to hurt anyone else in Iraq or anywhere. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in the process of combing Iraq for bad guys, field commanders, for one reason or another, and at times indiscriminately, have confined many men and women without any specific charges or reasons that can be remembered or recorded. We have, in essence, deprived many people of their liberty with out any real reason or purpose. As a result the coalition now faces the problem of building more prisons even with the knowledge that a very large percentage of the detainees are most likely not ever going to be charged with a crime and may in fact be not guilty of any crime other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time or having the wrong friend or relative. The possibility here is that we may have separated innocent fathers from their wives and children, sons from their families, daughters from their only source of protection and support and in the process created many more enemies. Consequently the coalition has, without charge or specific reason, confined many innocent people and deprived them, without cause, of the very liberties we came here to preserve. Even in war, the principles of due process, within reason, must be upheld.

The most viable fix: The New Iraqi Prime Minister should announce an immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners that fall into certain categories (not including those captured in hostilities or known to be involved in hostile activities).

Categories: All Handicapped * All prisoners over 50 years old *

All only sons * All women not specifically charged but have been confined for over 60 days * All confined persons under the age of 16 * All detainees in any juvenile facility in Iraq * All females under the age of 18 not specifically charged with a violent crime against Iraqi or Coalition forces.(Not to include the charge of “throwing rocks”) *

All Imams, Sunni and Shia, not specifically charged with a violent crime, conspiracy to commit a violent crime, or aiding and abetting the enemy * All persons confined for misdemeanors or petty theft or confined for the reason of failure to pay a debt.

(The June 2006 announcement by PM Maliki of the planned release of 2,500 detainees in Iraqi and Coalition prison facilities was a great start and better late than never, but the numbers of prisoners remaining is staggering, many of whom still having not been told why they were detained. The Coalition, being responsible for the vast majority of the detainments, should be concentrating on a means to provide the process by which the rest can be either charged and held, or simply released and compensated for having their liberties violated without cause. The planning effort should not be on building new prisons to hold people who will ultimately be released with out charge. This equates to simply leaving the problem to the new government). Any release schedules should not be conditioned on political timing as those recently announced. Depriving anyone of his or her liberty, even for a short time for a political advantage, should be unconscionable to those of us who enjoy protections from that very thing.

Every person in these release categories and never charged should be released with a letter of assurance that they are not considered criminal or enemies of Iraq, $500US or $15US per everyday of confinement (which ever is greater) and assured transportation home. They should not necessarily be required to sign any renouncement of violence since the only violence having occurred may have been our violence against them in the process of arrest and detainment. They should be asked to sign an acknowledgement that they may have been detained wrongly due to unpredictable circumstances brought on by the hostilities occurring in Iraq and that they understand that the county if Iraq does not classify them as having a criminal record of any kind as a result of their arrest and confinement.

(Two of my soldier sons came to Iraq and one was wounded during a battle in Baqubah. I would like them to believe we all serve for the preservation of very specific principles and rules of behavior regarding other human beings, even during war. We do not herald our principles of liberty because we are strong, rather we are strong because of our belief and respect for these principles. If we sacrifice the very principles of inalienable rights that define who we are, then we sacrifice our right to defend the helpless. We will have surrendered our banner of hope and liberty).

Video: US indifferent to Iraqi detainee beatings

British public channel 4 aired a video which reveals deplorable but not surprising behavior by US Army trainers on patrol with Iraqi military. In a Sunni neighborhood the largely Sh'ia unit beats and roughly abuses detainees in broad dailylight, cramming them into the truck of a Humvee. The US trainers hang back and do not intervene. One shudders to think what happens in Iraqi detention facilities.



The Army claims the unit involved has since been disciplined. Needless to say this and other hard-hitting reporting from Iraq does not make it US TV screens.

Iraqi prison troubles from North to South

Two rather disturbing stories flew under the global radar in the past couple of days.

First, the story by the New York Times' C. J. Chivers, alleging that hundreds of detainees under the Kurdish government's authority are living in a legal black hole conceivably worse than Guantanamo. HRW claims that up to 2,500 people are being held by the security services of two ruling parties in the region.

The Kurdish prison population has swelled to include at least several hundred suspected insurgents, and yet there is no legal system to sort out their fates. So the inmates wait, a population for which there is no plan.

The Kurdish government that holds the prisoners says they are dangerous, and points out that the population includes men who have attended terrorist or guerrilla training in Iraq or Afghanistan. But it also concedes to being stymied, with a small budget, limited prison space and little legal precedent to look back on.

“We have not had trials for them,” said Brig. Sarkawt Hassan Jalal, the director of security in the Sulaimaniya region. “We have no counterterrorism law, and any law we would pass would not affect them because it would not be retroactive.”

The four visible cells here, spaces of about 7 yards by 8 yards, each were packed with 30 men. The men shared a toilet on the floor outside the cells, in a hall. The group seethes. One inmate shouted at two journalists through the bars. “Stop your hatred toward Islam!” he said. “Otherwise we will kill you!”

Speaking from a law enforcement perspective, Mr. Jalal said the close quarters and evident anger had made many of the inmates more radical, and that the prison serves as an insurgents’ nest.

Secondly, the UK's destruction of an Iraqi police station and jail in Basra, based on supposed intelligence that rogue police were torturing detainees and that some were likely to be unlawfully executed. BBC's footage was quite powerful indeed. The move by the British started with a midnight raid of the facility and evacuation of the facility. And by daylight, it was demolished. These moves were taken, according to British military spokesmen, at the orders of the Iraqi Prime Minister. Members of the Basra Provincial Council say that they will cease cooperation with the British forces.

Ex-minister walks out of prison

While 13,000 people remain in detention by the American military in Iraq, the vast majority waiting to be processed and tried for crimes, it seems that influential Iraqis held in the Iraqi system can escape prison quite easily.

An ex-minister (also a US citizen) convicted of corruption in October, fled his detention facility this past week, by simply walking out the door arm-in-arm with "foreign" (read: Iranian) security agents. Even more outrageous is that he is currently in touch with US Consular officials. Earlier this year, Saddam's nephew, convicted of bomb-making also walked out of prison aided by a police officer.

Yet more proof that the Iraqi government and security services are so compromised at this point, it is hard to see how any form of "fair" government or minimal democracy can emerge.

Militants hanged; Abu Ghraib to close

The world media reported yesterday what had been rumored for quite a while -- that the US will definitively close Abu Ghraib prison. The transfer of thousands of prisoners to Camp Cropper detention facilities at the airport in Baghdad will occur when construction of the larger facility there is finished. Currently Saddam Hussein and other "high value" detainees are being held there.

In related news from Iraq, it was also reported yesterday that 13 confessed militants were hanged yesterday by the Iraqi government. It is only the second (judicial) application of the death penalty since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, its application was suspended during the US occupation. The Iraqi government can legally execute people convicted of murder, "endangering national security" and drug distribution. Only one of the hanged was indentified by name. (The first hangings in September 2005 were of "common criminals.") Interestingly, Prime Minister Jalal Talabani is against the death penalty, but allowed his deputies to sign the death warrants.

Abuse by secret special ops group

The ACLU released some documents yesterday (fruit of its ongoing FOIA requests) that shed more light on the behavior of a secretive special forces group called "Task Force 6-26." This group is known to have been used to secretly detain and interrogate "high level" members of the Iraqi resistance.

In July 2004, after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, a document was leaked alluding to TF-6-26, and abuses observed by Defense Intelligence Agency officials.

The documents released yesterday by the ACLU are the first "publicly" available documents confirming the existence of this group. ACLU Attorney Amrit Singh is quoted as saying, "These documents confirm that the torture of detainees and its subsequent cover-up was part of a larger clandestine operation, in all likelihood, authorized by senior government officials."

A memorandum included in the report states that “fake names were used by the 6-26 members” and that the unit claimed to have a computer malfunction which resulted in the loss of 70 percent of their files. The memorandum concludes, “Hell, even if we reopened [the investigation] we wouldn’t get any more information than we already have.”

Training of Iraqi forces object of scrutiny

During the past months, various news sources have attempted to portray more fully the difficulties of training Iraqi police and army units. Given the recent statements by US Generals relating to Iraqi-run prison systems, there is still a huge amount of catch-up to be done, even within the least-risky, most sedentary area of the legal-security apparatus. The best coverage has come from The Atlantic's James Fallows, and a recent discussion on PBS' Newshour. Fallows claims that the US did little or nothing effective in the first couple of years of occupation, and only in the past year has training become a priority.

Bloodbath in Iraqi-run prison

A tragic incident today at an Iraqi-run prison in the outskirts of Baghdad, resulting in the death of at least 8 people, will undoubtedly reinforce the US military's opinion that Iraqis are not ready to take control of the over 14,000 detainees in US custody.



Even Iraqi Interior Ministry officials were admitting after the violence today that they are under-trained and under-equipped to run an effective prison system.

Detainees at Kadhimiya Base were being transfered to another holding facility when as many as 16 broke free and stormed the armory of the prison. It seems there was a concerted effort to seize weapons and escape.

Four wardens and an interpreter were killed presumably by the detainee gunmen who were able to reach the armory. During the firefight, wardens and US soldiers fired on the crowd of inmates, killing four detainees and wounding many more.

Horror in Iraq: who is mimicking who?

Two Iraqi businessmen report, as a part of their lawsuit in US court, that they were thrown into the lion cage in one of Saddam's palaces, shortly after the invasion of their country, by US troops. They were beaten repeatedly and asked where Saddam was and about weapons of mass destruction, and experienced numerous "mock executions."

And this same week US troops burst into the putrid basement of a building of the Ministry of the Interior in a Baghdad suburb, to discover 173 undocumented, tormented, tortured prisoners. There were teenagers in the group, and according to some, the vast majority were Sunni Arabs. (This discovery did not surprise many Iraqis, especially Sunni.)

The Deputy Ministry of the Interior, Hussein Kamal, after inspecting the prisoners, which he claims he was totally unaware were in the Ministry's custody, said to CNN, "I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

In the past year numerous reports, by Sunnis, Iraqi human rights groups, Western human rights groups, and major western media have detailed the brutal free reign of certain elements Iraqi defense forces.

The building in question was reportedly run by "police commandos" and the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior has vehemently denied their connection to a group with links to Iran called the Supreme Council for Iraqi Revolution.

The Iraqi government consented to these raids after meetings with the American ambassador and military commanders, according to American officials.

In a rather ironic twist, after Abu Ghraib and last week's allegations of secret CIA detention facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, Brigadier General Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division, the commander of the raid, stated to the LA Times that he would "hit every last one" of the secret detention facilities.

It seems clear that any investigation into this discovery will prove that the combination of torture and impunity that the Bush administration has cultivated during the occupation has indeed provided fertile ground for the Iraqi version to flourish.

Mass arrest relies on masked informants

This amazing piece from Washington Post correspondent Jonathan Finer illustrates how the Iraqi-US "justice system" operates in a conflict situation, picking detainees by doubtful methods.

TALL AFAR, Iraq, Sept. 12 -- A masked teenager in an Iraqi army uniform walked slowly through a crowd of 400 detainees captured Monday, studying each face and rendering his verdict with a simple hand gesture, like a Roman emperor deciding the fate of gladiators.

A thumb pointed down meant the suspect was not thought to be an insurgent and would be released by U.S. soldiers. A thumb pointed up meant a man would be removed from the concertina wire-encased pen, handcuffed with tape or plastic ties and taken by truck to a military base to be interrogated.

"Another bad guy right here," an American interpreter shouted when the masked Iraqi singled out a man in a yellow dishdasha , or traditional gown, who shook his head and protested in Turkish. A captive who was spared exhaled with relief and placed his hand on his heart.

This is how the 10-day-old invasion of Tall Afar unfolded Monday. After two days of relatively uneventful patrols in the abandoned neighborhood of Sarai, where commanders had expected insurgents to be massed for a fight, U.S. and Iraqi forces turned north in the morning, to neighborhoods they had already cleared, and found hundreds of men who appeared to be of military age and fighters believed to have slipped through their cordons. [...]

Just after 7 a.m., they streamed into the adjoining neighborhoods of Hassan Koy and Uruba, taking every military-age man into custody at a makeshift pen established by U.S. forces along a main road. The U.S. soldiers uncoiled enough concertina wire to hold an expected 50 or so men. But as detainees streamed out from the neighborhoods, the pens were expanded with more coils of wire until the holding area stretched an entire block. [...]

By 8 a.m., nearly 400 people were assembled, squatting or seated in the dirt beside the road. Two of the men had bloodied faces and spots of red soaking through their green dishdashas.

"They tried to grab my father, and I said, 'He is old, you don't need to take him,' " said one of the men, whose upper lip and right ear were swollen and bleeding. "They hit us with their fists and their rifles."

Many of the men's hands were bound so tightly with plastic cuffs that their circulation was cut off, so U.S. soldiers cut the bindings and instead wrapped their hands with thick green tape. [...]

After about two hours, the informant arrived. Wearing tan camouflage fatigues, a flak jacket, a green ski mask and green helmet, the informant said he was from the neighborhood and was under 20 years old.

"I am doing this because I want to see the fear and violence leave Tall Afar," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

With a U.S. interpreter, he perused the crowd, pausing for less than two seconds to consider each man's fate. He never spoke a word aloud, only whispering occasionally to the interpreter.

After drawing out 52 suspects from the group, he spent longer assessing each of them in depth and providing more detailed information about their activities. He identified a man with a split lip and wearing a purple shirt and filthy white pants as "a beheader," saying he had killed at least 10 people.

"Cuts heads," Capt. Noah Hanners, leader of Blue Platoon in the 3rd ACR's Eagle Troop, wrote in blue marker on the man's forearm.

"You get treated special, buddy. Congratulations," Hanners said.

After conferring with the informant, the interpreter wrote on the white T-shirt of a man who had no identification papers: "His name is Nafe, but he is giving a different name."

Four others were identified as local insurgent cell leaders known as emirs, and "emir" was written on their arms. Several men had eagle tattoos on their arms, which the informant said indicated they were former members of the Fedayeen Saddam, a reputedly brutal militia run by Hussein's son, Uday. The informant slapped one man's tattoo, and when the man protested, an Iraqi soldier smacked him across the face with the back of his hand.

"Don't be slapping them," Hanners warned. "That's not how we do this."

Some of the American soldiers taunted the detainees by asking them, "Can you say Abu Ghraib?" referring to the prison west of Baghdad from which photographs of prisoner abuse emerged last year.

"No, Guantanamo," one smiling captive responded, referring to the U.S. military prison in Cuba where suspected terrorists are held. "I just don't want to go to the Iraqi army or police."

"Your source is not good, these are all innocent men," said a detainee wearing a gray dishdasha, who said he was a student in the city of Mosul, 40 miles to the east. "We are all Sunnis. That is why he chose us. He is Shia," he said, referring to the informant. Hanners said the quality of the informants has varied widely. "Some seem to say what they think you want to hear," he said. "Others give us information that pans out."

Another soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he would be punished by commanders for his criticism, had a more negative view of the sources' performance. "We almost never get anything good from them," he said. "I think they just pick people from another tribe or people who owe them money or something."

Before boarding trucks and returning to their base, the Kurdish soldiers lined up behind the detainees and posed for digital pictures. They threw packages of food and bottles of water to a large group of children assembled across the road, many of whose fathers had been detained.

Some children picked up the gifts, but several grabbed them and threw them at the departing army vehicles. One truck quickly stopped and a soldier got out and pointed his pistol at the children, causing them to scatter briefly, before he drove away.

Soldiers and some neighborhood children gave the detainees food and water as they waited in the 100-degree heat for trucks to arrive to transport them to Camp Sykes. A woman in a long purple dress and white head scarf shouted at the remaining soldiers in Turkish, and others began to gather behind her.

"I give this 30 minutes before it gets out of hand," said Sgt. 1st Class Herbet Gadsden, surveying the scene. "We have to get these people out of here before their families go nuts."

At noon, two trucks arrived. Soldiers lined up the detainees, photographed each one with a digital camera and loaded them aboard. The crowd of family members faded back into their homes.

Ten prisoners suffocate in Iraqi custody

There is outrage in the Sunni section of Iraq today in response to the death of ten prisoners held in a small metal container for over 9 hours in over 100 degree Fahrenheit (40 degree celcius) heat. Eleven Sunni men had reportedly been near a construction site in Amariya, which had been the scene of a firefight between US troops and insurgents. They were detained after going to a hospital in the Abu Ghraib section of Baghdad, where "identified" by commandos as the same men "involved" in the firefight. According to the commandos, the proof of their guilt was their clothes, which they "recognized" and the fact that the men came from two Sunni tribes associated with the insurgency. After being chased and dragged out of the hospital, they were interrogated (allegedly tortured) and placed in the scorching metal container. The one survivor was able to reach his family via mobile phone.

The commandos who took the men prisoner are from the feared "First Brigade" of anti-terrorist forces, many who worked in the same capacity under Saddam Hussein. For an amazing report on the Iraqi counterinsurgency forces and the US support for them, read this Peter Maass story for the New York Times Magazine.

The New York Times also offers the most complete report of the deaths of the ten Sunni prisoners:

All accounts agreed that after the shooting, the minivan drove about seven miles back across northwestern Baghdad to Noor Hospital in Shuala, a mainly Shiite district that is close to Abu Ghraib. General Flaieh said men from the Special Security Unit, with casualties of their own from the Amariya shooting, arrived soon after and were told by hospital guards that there were wounded insurgents being treated in the emergency ward.

"When the commanders entered the ward with their injured men, they recognized the faces and the clothes of some of the other men there and said that they were the ones who had attacked them," said Dr. Khudair Abbas Muhammad, the hospital director.

"At that point, some of the men from Abu Ghraib began to run off," he said, "but the commandos set off after them, and there was chaos. Eventually, the commandos captured them all, including the injured men, and took them away. That was all we knew until we heard that the dead bodies of most of the men were delivered on Monday to the Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad."

An officer in a police unit attached to Yarmouk Hospital who requested anonymity because he feared reprisal said that an officer with the police commandos' First Brigade, Col. Muhammad Hmood, arrived at the hospital late on Sunday night, about 14 hours after the arrests at Noor Hospital. The officer said Colonel Hmood led attendants to four closed Chevrolet pick-ups carrying eight bodies and four men who were unconscious, two of whom subsequently died. "The colonel said the men were terrorists who had attacked an American convoy, and that they had accidentally suffocated," the police officer said.

The officer said that one of the men who arrived at Yarmouk hospital unconscious but later recovered was Mr. Saleh, the survivor quoted by the Muslim Clerics' Association. "Diya Saleh told us, 'The Interior Ministry commandos who arrested us at Noor Hospital put us in a van, and then took us out and tortured us,' " the officer said. "We called for doctors to look after the men still breathing, and then a pathologist came and looked at the bodies. He said that they had been tortured, with injuries caused by electric shocks."

Before dawn on Monday, the police officer said, four other police commandos arrived in a black Daewoo sedan, three of them wearing the commandos' black uniforms and a fourth in civilian clothes. The officer said that when the commandos demanded to know where Mr. Saleh was, the men assigned to the hospital police unit assumed they had come to kill him, to eliminate him as a witness. "So we called the officers at Mahmoun," the officer said, naming a local police station, "and asked them to help us. When they heard that, the commandos disappeared."

The police officer added, "What happened to those men from Abu Ghraib was a crime against the Iraqi people. When their relatives arrived to claim the bodies, I heard them saying many bad things about the police. With crimes like this, it's not hard to see why the insurgents keep on attacking the police. Those in authority should do something to stop it."

Iraq detention facilities "near capacity"

With the rise in insurgent activity preceding the election and the attack on Fallujah in November, the number of detainees has reached a high in Iraq, according to the Seattle Times. The question raised by this article seems to be, how will the Coalition deal with detentions if insurgent activity continues at the same level after the election? What are the implications for detainees and US military police if prisons begin to push capacity limits?

Major U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq are nearing capacity, with the number of suspected insurgents in custody yesterday at the highest level since March, according to detention officials.

The U.S. military has about 7,900 so-called security detainees [...]

Military officials said the surge in detainees reflects the expansion of the insurgency campaign aimed at disrupting Iraq's first democratic elections in nearly half a century.

Prison statistics from Iraq HR Minister

Iraq's Human Rights Minister has announced the number of prisoners held in the country is near 10,000. The US military has stated that 353 of those held are "foreign terrorists." The US military stated that the announcement by the Iraqi transitional goverment was "generally correct," but refused to comment further. The US controls the Iraqi prison system and shares information with the transitional government as it sees appropriate.

But the ranks of prisoners may have shot up again after hundreds were detained during major operations against insurgents south of the capital, in Samarra and Mosul, north of Baghdad and the massive assault on the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad.