Seeing as Iraq's jails are overflowing today, I thought I'd take a look back at the prison situation in Iraq.
Enjoy with pride, 'murkns!
"Lost Amid the Rising Tide of Detainees in Iraq" by Sabrina Tavernise New York Times November 25, 2005
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 - Early this month, Iraq Abbas received a phone call from a man she did not know.
"Your husband is still alive," Ms. Abbas recalled the man saying, as she sat in a Shiite mosque in central Baghdad. "Don't give up. Meet anyone who can help."
The stranger told her he had shared a cell with her husband in an underground bunker. It was the first that Ms. Abbas had heard of her husband, Ibrahim Fayadh Abdul Hamid al-Timimi, since police commandos came into their home and arrested him on May 26, just hours after a bombing in their neighborhood.
One week after she got the phone call, American forces raided a bunker that fit the description the man gave, uncovering 169 inmates, many of them starving and abused, and tools of torture hidden in the ceiling. Iraqi officials say that all of the men in the bunker had links to the insurgency.
As the Iraqi government begins to take over from the American military, it has stepped up its hunt for insurgents, acting on tips from hot lines and rounding up suspects in neighborhoods near bombings. But the influx of new prisoners - the population of the four American-run prisons here has doubled over the past year, and Iraqi jails are packed - has overwhelmed the Iraqi authorities, rights groups say. And while the scandal in Abu Ghraib prison ushered in new reforms in American-run jails, the mushrooming Iraqi detention facilities operate virtually unchecked.
This was over two years ago, readers?
WTF?
Either nothing has changed, or the situation has gotten WORSE!!!
And what to make of AmeriKa's MSM, readers?
Just recycling the same old stories and bullshit, aren't they?
There is so little oversight, rights groups say, it is impossible to tell how many detention centers exist. After the bunker was found last week, an Interior Ministry official declined to give the number or locations of detention centers in Baghdad. It typically takes three months to be brought before a judge, Human Rights Watch says. In the meantime, detainees are left to circulate in an archipelago of unofficial detention centers, in many cases without an arrest record or oversight by agencies other than the Interior Ministry.
"I get calls all the time from families whose relative disappeared after being arrested," said a representative of a rights group in Iraq who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. "Sometimes I meet them at the morgue because they think they may have been killed."
"There is no transparency," the representative said. "In many cases there is no recourse to the law. A climate of impunity prevails everywhere." The representative, who has done extensive research on Iraqi prisons, said there were hundreds of such cases a month.
In some ways, Ms. Abbas's story evokes comparisons with the Saddam Hussein era, when people disappeared at night and their relatives searched for them for years.
Except AmeriKa HAS KILLED MORE than Saddam did!!!
In addition to the TORTURE we brought with us!!!
Her husband was still wearing his nightclothes when, just after midnight, police commandos entered their house and snatched him and his two brothers, taking them with bags on their heads, she said. The commandos returned later for another brother.
The next five months, Ms. Abbas, pregnant and with only an eighth-grade education, said she searched tirelessly for traces of him. It took her two months to figure out that the men who took him were not ordinary city police officers, but commandos. She visited police stations, mosques and a claims office inside the Interior Ministry, and then later the commando headquarters.
Strangers seemed always to know more of Ms. Abbas's husband than she did. This summer a man called her, again without identifying himself, saying he could secure her husband's release for $700. She gave him some clothing, food and money. She never heard from him again.
"He cheated us," she said.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, Ms. Abbas, in a black robe, pulled small scraps of paper out of her black purse, showing a trail, tattered and creased, of fruitless effort. One of the scraps, was a temporary access pass to an area in the Interior Ministry where a claims department was located. She filed a claim but never heard back. An official in the ministry's intelligence unit, who identified himself as Brigadier Safaa, said on Sunday that the claims office was always open to visitors.
"I feel hopeless," Ms. Abbas said. "Where am I supposed to go?"
Ms. Abbas said she had been told she could pass information to a prisoner for $200. The ministry has denied such allegations, although many former detainees confirm them.
The man who said he had been in prison with Mr. Timimi - asking that he not be identified by name for fear of arrest for talking of his experience - said Mr. Timimi had been badly beaten on his lower back and could no longer walk. He said that when they moved from a detention center to the bunker, they carried him on a stretcher.
An American official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the news media, confirmed that Mr. Timimi had been in the bunker the Americans raided. However, a spokesman for the American military command here said he had not been found there.
An Interior Ministry official confirmed that Mr. Timimi and his brothers had been in the bunker but said they had been transferred to Abu Ghraib, but an American spokesman for the prison said none of the Iraqis in the bunker had been transferred there. Neither Mr. Timimi's condition nor his whereabouts could be independently established.
Iraqi officials say that, even if abused, the prisoners were not necessarily innocent, adding that all the men in the bunker had links to the insurgency. His fellow inmate said Mr. Timimi had confessed to setting up a homemade bomb, but had done so under torture.
In the fog of war, it may never be clear what happened to Mr. Timimi.
And rest assured, the New York Times won't go looking, either!
That has not stopped Ms. Abbas from searching. On Sunday morning, she went to the bunker seeking answers but a guard shooed her away. She made dozens of calls to officials without result. One told her to come by a week later, but she has little hope.
"I turned my face to God," she said. "I told him, 'You are my last chance.'"
That's Bush's liberation, huh?
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!
"Hundreds of Iraqi Detainees Get First Taste of Freedom" by Dexter Filkins New York Times June 8, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 7 — The first of 2,500 Iraqi prisoners set for release stepped off a bus to freedom on Wednesday morning at Baghdad's central bus station, with many dropping to their knees and pressing their foreheads to the scalding pavement to offer thanks.
The roughly 100 male detainees, ordered to be set free in a good-will gesture on Tuesday by the new Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, walked to an awning to take shelter from the fierce sun. They each collected a $200 gift from a local Sunni political party, listened to a speech by one of its members and then wandered into the city where they had been taken prisoner by American soldiers months ago.
"The Americans were accusing me of being a terrorist, but even their own investigators did not believe it," said Khairallah Ibrahim Muhammad, a 37-year-old man released Wednesday. He said he was taken by American soldiers from his home, in the Saydiya neighborhood of Baghdad, on Dec. 11, 2004.
"I think they arrested me because I go to dawn prayers at the mosque every morning," Mr. Muhammad said.
He was among about 500 Iraqis released at various points across the country on Wednesday, after Mr. Maliki made his announcement as an effort to calm tensions between Iraq's main sectarian groups, who have been killing each other at a high pitch for the past few months. The government here is dominated by Shiites like Mr. Maliki; most detainees are Sunni Arabs.
The 2,500 detainees whom Mr. Maliki said he intended to release represent about 10 percent of the prisoners in Iraq, many of them jailed on suspicion of ties to the guerrilla insurgency.
In addition to the 100 released at the Baghdad bus station, about 200 were let go Wednesday in Anbar Province, west of Baghdad, and another 200 in Mosul, in northern Iraq, said Col. Wes Martin, an American officer at the scene in Baghdad.
None of the men released had been convicted of a serious crime, including aiding the insurgency, American officers said. Even so, some of them had spent more than a year in prison. The terms of their release included a pledge to renounce violence and to be good citizens of Iraq.
According to Mr. Muhammad and the others, many of the Iraqis taken prisoner were scooped up in sweeps of Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods, with little regard given to their individual identities. Most of the 100 men released at the bus station on Wednesday were Sunni Arabs, and many said they were from Saydiya, a predominantly Sunni neighborhood in southern Baghdad.
One of them was Muhammad Jassim, a 62-year-old former official in the Iraqi Ministry of Trade. He said American troops took him captive on the same day as Mr. Muhammad, and he, too, recalled being led away in handcuffs and a blindfold. Mr. Jassim said he was accused of being in a kidnapping ring.
"Do you think someone my age would be involved in kidnapping?" Mr. Jassim asked. "The Americans detained about 50 people from my neighborhood that night."
Mr. Jassim, an owlish-looking man with large eyeglasses, wore a pressed white shirt and khaki pants, both given to him the night before his release from Camp Bucca, a large American-run prison in southern Iraq. Mr. Jassim described his treatment at Camp Bucca as "not bad," though he had nothing nice to say about the food there.
The meals, he said, usually consisted of beans: "The first night it was French beans. The second night, broad beans.
"The third night, it was lentils," Mr. Jassim added, pursing his lips. "Those were the worst."
None of the Iraqis emerging from the buses on Wednesday complained of mistreatment. Indeed, the larger concern among Sunni leaders is not the American-run prisons like Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib, which house about 14,500 prisoners, but with the prisons run by the Interior Ministry without American oversight. They are thought to hold a nearly equal number of detainees.
Some prisoners found in Interior Ministry prisons have shown obvious signs of torture and beatings; other Sunnis have been taken away by men in Iraqi police uniforms, only to be found dead later.
Suhaila Jabbar, sweltering beneath a black abaya, stood at the bus station waiting for her 17-year-old son, Walid, who never arrived. Ms. Jabbar said she had recently been notified that he would be released Wednesday after nine months, but he never emerged. Ms. Jabbar even carried his prison number: 81304.
This woman's story starts the waterworks, folks!
Walid aside, her greater worry, Ms. Jabbar said, was her 14-year-old son, for whom she was so afraid that she asked that his name not be printed. Her younger son, she said, was taken away by Interior Ministry officers three months ago. While she knows that Walid is alive and in Camp Bucca, Ms. Jabbar said, she still has no word at all about the other boy.
"I have no idea where he is being held," Ms. Jabbar said.
After a time, Ms. Jabbar, with her 5-year-old son, Muhammad, in tow, turned and left the station."
Oh, reader, WHERE are this woman's sons?
Have they been found or released in the last 18 months?
What happened to them?
And have you ever seen a cuter little girl, readers?
So why was her father taken away for two years and abused?
(Article updated: Originally posted February 18, 2007)
"Jailed 2 Years, Iraqi Tells of Abuse by Americans" by Michael Moss and Souad Mekhennet
DAMASCUS, Syria — In the early hours of Jan. 6, Laith al-Ani stood in a jail near the Baghdad airport waiting to be released by the American military after two years and three months in captivity.
He struggled to quell his hope. Other prisoners had gotten as far as the gate only to be brought back inside, he said, and he feared that would happen to him as punishment for letting his family discuss his case with a reporter.
But as the morning light grew, the American guards moved Mr. Ani, a 31-year-old father of two young children, methodically toward freedom. They swapped his yellow prison suit for street clothes, he said. They snipped off his white plastic identification bracelet. They scanned his irises into their database.
Anti-Christ!!
Then, shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Ani said, he was brought to a table for one last step. He was handed a form and asked to place a check mark next to the sentence that best described how he had been treated:
“I didn’t go through any abuse during detention,” read the first option, in Arabic.
“I have gone through abuse during detention,” read the second.
In the room, he said, stood three American guards carrying the type of electric stun devices that Mr. Ani and other detainees said had been used on them for infractions as minor as speaking out of turn.
“Even the translator told me to sign the first answer,” said Mr. Ani, who gave a copy of his form to The New York Times. “I asked him what happens if I sign the second one, and he raised his hands,” as if to say, Who knows?
“I thought if I don’t sign the first one I am not going to get out of this place.”
Shoving the memories of his detention aside, he checked the first box and minutes later was running through a cold rain to his waiting parents. “My heart was beating so hard,” he said. “You can’t believe how I cried.”
His mother, Intisar al-Ani, raised her arms in the air, palms up, praising God. “It was like my soul going out, from my happiness,” she recalled. “I hugged him hard, afraid the Americans would take him away again.”
Just three weeks earlier, his last letter home — with its poetic yearnings and a sketch of a caged pink heart — appeared in The Times in one of a series of articles on Iraq’s troubled detention and justice system.
After his release from the American-run jail, Camp Bucca, Mr. Ani and other former detainees described the sprawling complex of barracks in the southern desert near Kuwait as a bleak place where guards casually used their stun guns and exposed prisoners to long periods of extreme heat and cold; where prisoners fought among themselves and extremist elements tried to radicalize others; and where detainees often responded to the harsh conditions with hunger strikes and, at times, violent protests.
Through it all, Mr. Ani was never actually charged with a crime; he said he was questioned only once during his more than two years at the camp.
The "War on Terror" is a COMPLETE LIE!
American detention officials acknowledged that guards used electric devices called Tasers to control detainees, but they said they did so rarely and only when the guards were physically threatened. The officials said that detainees had several ways to report abuse without repercussions, and that all claims were investigated.
So the Iraqis get the same dissident treatment Americans get -- zzzzzzzzzzzttttt!
Officials declined to give specific details about why they had detained Mr. Ani or why they had freed him.
“He was released because the board that reviewed his case didn’t believe he any longer posed a threat,” said First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, a spokeswoman for detention operations, in a written answer to questions. “He was originally detained as a security threat. I don’t have anything more.”
The Detention System
The American detention camps in Iraq now hold 15,500 prisoners, more than at any time since the war began.
Now we have 24,000 in our jails in Iraq.
The surge success and liberation of Iraq continues!!!
The camps are filled with people like Mr. Ani who are being held without charge and without access to tribunals where their cases are reviewed, the Times examination published last December found.
Is this Gitmo or Iraq?
Whadda ya mean there is no difference?
Mr. Ani, a women’s clothing merchant, said he was detained in 2004 after American soldiers who were searching for weapons in his six-family apartment building found an Iraqi military uniform in the basement. His joy upon being released in January was short-lived. Days later, he said, a Shiite militia ransacked his home in Baghdad, looking to kill him. He hid, going from house to house, until he could move his family out of Iraq.
Now he is among the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who have taken refuge in neighboring Syria and Jordan, where sectarian rifts are springing up.
There are more refugees after a year of surge, too!
WTF?!?!
Did the AmeriKan MSM lie about surge success, readers?
They wouldn't do that, would they?
In one area of Damascus, Shiite refugees from Iraq have established a mini version of Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood. Sunni refugees, in turn, are forming their own enclaves. In interviews, former detainees seethed with rage at the United States.
That was certainly to be expected!
One, a 43-year-old man from Samarra, Iraq, said he was released last year despite having fought American troops.
“I wish to go back to Iraq and fight against the Americans, God willing,” vowed the man, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his nom de guerre, Abu Abdulla, for fear of reprisal.
Mr. Ani has other priorities, still exhausted from his detention and preoccupied with finding a permanent home. But he regularly turns his television to a new station called Al Zawra, transfixed by its running montage of videotaped attacks on American troops.
The station is owned by a Sunni, Meshaan al-Juburi, a former Iraqi politician who was indicted last year on charges of embezzling millions of American dollars; he denied the charges and returned to Syria, where he lived before the war. The station has become an information center for the Sunni insurgency and in the process has exasperated American and Iraqi forces. In an interview at his office here, Mr. Juburi said that he opposed Al Qaeda’s use of suicide bombers to kill Iraqi civilians but was soliciting support for Iraqis intent on killing American troops. When the image of a roadside bomb blowing up an American Humvee appears on the large flat screen on his office wall, his eyebrows rise and he urges his visitors to watch, “This is a good one.”
Of course, these guys are now our Awakening friends now, right?
Paying them off so they don't fight us?
Tell me why we invaded Iraq again?
A Nightmare Begins
Mr. Ani’s ordeal began on Oct. 14, 2004, when soldiers brought him in for what he described as desultory questioning.
“ ‘Are you married? How many children? Sunni or Shiite? Which mosque do you pray in?’ ” Mr. Ani said he was asked. “I said I didn’t pray, and they said, ‘Are you not Muslim,’ and I said, ‘Yes, but I’m not praying and going to mosques.’ ”
“They never asked me about terrorism,” he said. “I’m a normal person, just a usual man, and don’t have anything to do with anyone who was fighting against the Americans.”
Mr. Ani spent a total of 44 days at two other American facilities before being sent to Camp Bucca. In all, he said, he was questioned just once at each site.
Mr. Ani said the electric prods were first used on him on the way to Camp Bucca. “I was talking to someone next to me and they used it,” he said, describing the device as black plastic with a yellow tip and two iron prongs. He said the prods were commonly used on him and other detainees as punishment.
We ELECTRICALLY SHOCKED these guys?
I'm HORRIFIED, readers!
“The whole body starts to shake and hurt,” he said. “And you lose consciousness for a couple of seconds. One time they used it on my tongue. One guard held me from the left and another on my back and another used it against my tongue and for four or five days I couldn’t eat.”
This is Bush's liberation?
TORTURE?
In a separate interview, the insurgent from Samarra said such a device had been used on him for speaking out of turn. Ahmed Majid al-Ghanem, 50, a former Baath Party official who was also freed from Camp Bucca and is now living in Syria, said in a separate interview that he witnessed the electric prods being used as punishment on other detainees.
The Times interviewed Mr. Ani at his apartment in Damascus, the Syrian capital, where he sat on a couch with his parents, wife and children. When he demonstrated how he had been held for the electric prod, his 4-year-old daughter, Al Budur, mimicked his actions.
Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a detention system spokesman, said: “Every use of less than lethal force, to include use of Tasers, is formally reported by facility leadership, ensuring soldiers are in accordance with proper use. Touching a Taser to someone’s tongue is not one of the approved uses.”
Mr. Ani said guards treated him kindly when he arrived at the jail on Nov. 20, 2004. He recalls being given soap, and, when his hands cracked from the cold, a soldier bringing him lotion and socks.
But soon new guards came “who had had special thoughts,” he said. “They were not allowing us to talk. They cut off the salt, gave us food that was not fit for dogs. One guard named David sometimes brought us outside to stay in the sun, or when it was cold. He also didn’t respect our faith, telling us not to pray here, and when we moved not to pray there.”
Yeah, that really wins over the hearts and minds of Muslims, insulting and disrespecting their religion.
No wonder we are in such bad shape in Iraq.
The detainees also began fighting among themselves. Those who spoke to the American guards were ostracized. Long toilet lines further raised tensions.
One day the guards searched a makeshift prayer area, Mr. Ani said, “and they started to step on the Korans, which fell down.”
BLASPHEMERS!!!!!
I'm appalled at this insulting and disrespecting behavior by U.S. troops.
What an outrage!
“A fight started,” he continued. “There was a huge demonstration. The prisoners started to throw their shoes at the guards, and we started to beat them with empty plastic bottles. The guards shot at us with rubber bullets, but then prisoners were killed and others were injured.”
A Pentagon statement at the time described such an incident in January 2005, saying that four detainees were killed when guards were compelled to use deadly force to quell the riot and that it was set off by a search for contraband. Colonel Curry said an investigation concluded that a detainee leader had fabricated the Koran allegations to instigate violence.
Mr. Ani and other former detainees said there were frequent demonstrations to protest various grievances. Mr. Ghanem said he was released in late 2003 after hunger strikes forced camp officials to review his case and those of others.
Detention officials said they were also fighting radicalization at the camps and were trying to identify and isolate extremists. Former detainees said in interviews that the influence of Islamic extremists was still growing. At Camp Bucca, they said, hundreds of men formed a group called the Brothers. Members shaved their beards and otherwise masked their ideology so they would be placed with other detainees.
Mr. Ani generally slept in a wooden barrackslike structure, with a mattress on the ground and a nail on the wall for hanging clothes. Once, when the guards found an improvised needle that he said was used to repair clothes, he was taken to an isolated cell, where he was kept for 24 days.
“You cannot see the difference between day and night,” he said. “There was no opening, not even in the door.”
Colonel Curry said it was standard to discipline detainees when they did not follow procedure.
Mr. Ani despaired of ever being released. His letter that was printed in The Times ended with, “I hope I can be dust in the storms of Bucca so that I can reach you.”
Dangers Beyond Jail
“I didn’t see any kind of solution for me,” Mr. Ani said after his release. “The only solution was to die,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “I was hoping to die.”
This is the hope and bright future Bush has brought to the Iraqis?
This type of stuff is shattering my heart!
In releasing Mr. Ani, the American military transferred him to Camp Cropper in Baghdad and gave him $25, which he and his parents used to hire a taxi. Along the way home, they had to dodge Shiite-controlled checkpoints, and just days later, he said, he narrowly escaped capture by a Shiite militia. Mr. Ani and other Iraqis say they believe these militias have found a way to learn when Sunni men are released from jail and then hunt and kill them.
Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commander of American detainee operations, said that he had heard such concerns and that he was trying to alter the process of releasing detainees to improve their safety.
Mr. Ani said that for him there was only one way to stay alive: flee Iraq.
He said he was scared and puzzled about his next step. He said he felt that he could not stay in Syria, if only because work was scarce. But he must compete with other refugees for the attention of another host country.
“Until now, I can’t sleep, really,” he said. “Whenever I hear something noisy I stand up. I’m in a very bad psychological situation. I can’t stop thinking of what we should do. I don’t have a future here. How should we live?”
When his uncle put on Al Zawra, the satellite television station, Mr. Ani turned to look at the scenes of Sunni children who had been killed and the attacks on American soldiers.
“I am an Iraqi,” he said. “I love my country. Of course, everyone who is an Iraqi at the moment, we are thinking how can we support our country.”
“The United States through its actions made people hate the Americans much more than before.”
How about that last quote from Mr. Ani?
George W. Bush -- the Third Anti-Christ -- "through [HIS] actions made people hate the Americans much more than before."
What a FUCKING SHIT-SPEWING, FART-MISTING, FECES-GOBBLING, SHIT-SLURPING, FUCKING FAILING PIECE OF DIARRHEA FLAKES is the LITTLE ANTI-CHRIST SHITLET!!!
A FUCKING MISERABLE SHITSTINKING FAILURE! Wow, my language has actually improved from last year!
Not that it should have!
