That's what a good "newspaper" will do, 'eh?
"U.S. Remakes Jails in Iraq, but Gains Are at Risk"
"by Alissa J. Rubin
BAGHDAD — Once a byword for torture and disgrace, the American-run detention system in Iraq has improved, even its critics say, as the military has incorporated it into a larger counterinsurgency strategy that seeks to avoid mistreatment that could create new enemies.
But these gains may soon be at risk. Thousands of detainees are to be turned over to the Iraqi government, some perhaps as early as the end of the year, a further step toward Iraqi sovereignty. Yet however tarnished America’s reputation may be for its treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the reputation of many Iraqi prisons is worse.
“The Americans are better than Ministry of Interior prisons,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, a former detainee from Falluja, the Sunni stronghold west of Baghdad. “They will torture you. Maybe you will die. With the Americans, if you enter Abu Ghraib, they will only wage psychological war on you.”
Already, Human Rights Watch has criticized the military for transferring some convicted juveniles to Iraqi custody, where they are kept in what the group said are abusive conditions.
Criticism also remains high that the American military detains too many people, deprives them of due process and holds them too long, even if innocent. Many are taken in only because they were near an insurgent attack.
While nearly all of the more than 21,000 detainees in Iraq are in American custody, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, who runs detainee operations countrywide, is proceeding with a broad experiment to restructure it. His goal is to use the system of detention centers as another front in the counterinsurgency war, trying to reduce the likelihood that they become a recruiting ground for militants.
“The extremists owned the battlefield of the mind,” said General Stone, a Marine Reserve counterinsurgency expert who took responsibility for the detention system last spring. Before he arrived, moderate and extremist detainees were usually mixed, turning the American-run detention facilities into what he called a “jihadi university.”
General Stone’s goal now is to isolate those he believes are extremists, who are a minority of detainees, and persuade the other detainees that they will have better lives if they keep away from those who preach jihad. It is part of the effort to bring detention policy here in line with American military strategy that seeks to separate insurgents from civilians, mentally and physically.
General Stone’s goal is to move detainees, particularly more moderate ones, through the system faster by instituting review boards to hear each detainee’s case. So far, these boards have released at least 8,400 people. He has also pushed to expand paid work programs, like carpentry shops, brick factories and laundries, as well as educational programs, especially for juvenile detainees and the many illiterate adults.
It is difficult to assess this drive toward improvement. Outsiders are forbidden to interview detainees. The International Committee of the Red Cross has regular access to the facilities, but the United Nations and human rights groups say they have not been permitted to enter.
Still, a reporter’s visits to Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca, the two main American detention facilities; interviews with American military officers in charge of the facilities; and conversations with former detainees and human rights advocates make clear that the system has been changed in several important ways.
These changes were seen as vital after the images of prisoner humiliation and abuse at Abu Ghraib created fury throughout the Arab world. Recidivism is down: since General Stone’s arrival last year, just 28 of those released have been jailed again. That number, less than 1 percent of the total released, reflects considerably fewer repeat detentions than before the administrative hearings and other reforms, when recapture rates ran at 5 to 10 percent, according to military lawyers.
Riots, which once regularly traumatized Camp Bucca, have tailed off. The last was in September. Violence among detainees, including beatings and killings, is down as well. The last escape attempt was in November 2007, when military police officers found an 80-foot-long tunnel with an exit outside the compound.
In interviews, former detainees praised the new hearing system, which they said allowed them for the first time to tell their side of the story.
“I would consider this committee a fair and beautiful committee,” said Sheik Riyadh, who was released in early April from Camp Bucca, near Iraq’s southern border with Kuwait, after three and a half years in detention. “If only they had formed it when I was first detained. Then the detainee was not sent to any committee. But this committee works to release people.”
But the innovations have not erased memories of the Abu Ghraib scandals, nor have they mollified the many Iraqis who continue to be arrested and who maintain their innocence.
“I had not done anything,” said Mahmoud Abu Dumour, who was detained in Falluja in November 2004 and released without explanation in July 2007, before General Stone’s administrative hearing system was in place.
“It was very nice that my daughter recognized me,” he added, his arms around his 3-year-old girl. “She was 10 days old when the Americans took me.”
Human rights advocates familiar with the new system say they believe conditions have improved considerably since Abu Ghraib. But they contend that those gains do not change the underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees.
Suspects are often brought in, with little or no physical evidence, because they were near an attack on American or Iraqi troops or based on statements by informants, who often have their own reasons for lying. Detainees have no right to a lawyer nor can they challenge the grounds for their detention.
Of the total detainee population, which peaked at 25,600 last October and which was reported on Sunday to be at 21,680, only 10 to 15 percent will ever stand trial, military lawyers said. The average detainee is interned for 333 days, and as of March, about 1,500, or 5 percent, had been in detention for more than three years, said Lt. Col. Rodney Faulk, of the 300th Military Police Brigade, who runs Camp Bucca day to day.
No one knows how many of those detained are innocent of any crime, but General Stone said he believed that only about 8,000 detainees as of March were extremists who posed a continuing security risk. “One-third are genuinely continuing and imperative security risks,” General Stone said then. “But that means two-thirds are not, or at least remain a question mark.”
Although the American military has the legal right to detain suspects in Iraq under a United Nations resolution, human rights advocates say the Americans have interpreted the resolution far more broadly than was ever intended.
“Security detention is an emergency measure, and emergency measures you should try to use temporarily,” said John Sifton, executive director of One World Research, a human rights organization based in Los Angeles.
“These things have a way of becoming addictive,” he said. “It’s great the U.S. is trying to improve things. But remember, insurgency is a crime, and you should prosecute it.”
The Detention Centers
Eager to erase the stain of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the United States emptied that complex, which had a notorious reputation under Saddam Hussein, too, and turned it over to the Iraqi government in 2006.
Of the two major American-run facilities, Camp Bucca, the larger, holds 18,580 detainees. Camp Cropper has 3,100, and that includes all the juveniles in the system as well as so-called high-value detainees — Mr. Hussein was kept there before his execution in 2006 — and about 15 women, according to figures released on Sunday. About 80 percent are Sunni and 20 percent are Shiite. Just 221 of the detainees in Bucca and Cropper combined are from outside Iraq, a tiny percentage of the total number that the military views as extremists.
Recent visits to both detention centers, along with interviews of former detainees, depicted a system whose conditions increasingly resemble those of the American civilian model, in general treatment if not in rights.
On a late winter day at Camp Bucca, the detainees whom a reporter could see appeared to be in good health and at ease. Some played volleyball or table tennis. Others sat in the sun reading the Koran. One man tended a bottle of milk that he was fermenting into homemade yogurt.
Former inmates at Bucca, however, have complained in interviews about the food there, which they described as scant and sometimes nauseating.
When detainees arrive at Bucca, they are quickly profiled to separate those identified as moderates from those thought to be extremists. The procedure, which was under way before General Stone arrived, has been expanded so the military obtains a rough psychological assessment of each detainee. Former detainees say the change has made them feel safer.
“When the prisoner entered, he was terrified, and he found takferis surrounded him and taught him takferi ways,” said Abu Yahya, a former detainee who now lives on Falluja’s outskirts, using the Arabic word for Sunni Muslim fanatics. He said he spent more than three years in detention and was beaten several times by extremist detainees. “If anyone objected, he would be beaten and attacked, and sometimes he would die.”
A more recent innovation, popular with families living far away, is videoconferencing. Now, families who cannot travel from Baghdad to Bucca to see an interned relative can go to Camp Cropper and be linked by video.
The Release Boards
Detainees say the most important change has been the creation of administrative boards to determine whether an individual remains an “imperative security risk” — the legal term used in the United Nations approval for American forces to detain Iraqis. If a detainee is no longer deemed to be a risk, he can be released.
Detainees appear before a three-person panel, with no lawyer. In almost all the hearings, the detainees deny any wrongdoing, military lawyers say. They often change their accounts to try to say the right thing to obtain release.
It took months, the lawyers said, for the Americans to conclude that the Iraqi denials were a reflexive survival strategy inculcated under Mr. Hussein, not simply an effort to obfuscate. During Mr. Hussein’s rule, people were often tortured until they confessed; then the confession was used against them. So there is a deep reluctance to admit any shade of guilt, even if the cost is an inconsistency in the detainee’s testimony that can trouble American hearing officers.
Now, roughly 45 to 50 percent of those who have hearings are recommended for release.
Although the goal is for each detention to be reviewed every four to six months, interviews with detainees suggest the process is more haphazard.
Sadiq Jaber Hashim, 43, a Shiite merchant in Baghdad, was recommended for release after his first appearance before a hearing panel. A speaker of English and Turkish and a paramedic by training, Mr. Hashim tried to persuade his captors from the moment of detention that he had done nothing wrong. But only at his first hearing — eight months later — did anyone listen.
“The accusation was not that I was a terrorist, but that I knew some terrorists,” Mr. Hashim said. Because he was Shiite, he said, he was thought to have ties to the Mahdi Army militia of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
“I said, ‘I hate the Mahdi Army; they tried to kidnap me in 2006.’ But they did not listen,” he said.
While the hearings have succeeded in reducing the detainee population, to a visiting journalist they were difficult to follow, and the detainees often seemed to have little understanding of the process. The reasons for detention are frequently a jumble of allegations by soldiers and informers contained in documents available only to the hearing board.
The complications of the process were on display at a hearing in March, when a detainee in Bucca who had been accused of taking part in displacing families and planting bombs in the troubled Dora district of Baghdad, made his case.
“You were captured as a suspected Al Qaeda member,” said Maj. Charles Leonard, chairman of the administrative board and an acquisition officer from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts.
“I am innocent,” the detainee said.
“We have evidence that you were a target because of information we gathered.”
“No, no, I was in my house.”
“We have evidence that you were involved in displacing and killing Sunnis and Christians in your local area.”
“I was an employee in the Ministry of Education.”
“Did you serve as a guard?”
“Yes.”
“What will you do if you get released?”
“I’ll go back to the same job, and I have a shop with my brother.”
The detainee left, and Major Leonard sighed as he looked down at the file. “This is one of the tougher ones,” he said. “There are two allegations against him, but no physical evidence. There’s been no problems with him whatsoever in detention.”
His fellow hearing officers nodded. All three voted for release.
Evaluating the System
Looming on the horizon is the end of the United Nations authorization of the American involvement in Iraq, including the detention system. The authorization expires Dec. 31 and the United Nations is not expected to take up the issue again, leaving it to negotiations between the United States and Iraq. But the outlook for such a deal, which involves sweeping issues of troop withdrawal, as well as detention and other aspects of an American presence in Iraq, is in doubt.
On Sunday, for instance, the Iraqi government said it would not accept an American draft proposal on the issues.
The detention issues at play cover difficult legal and ethical ground, so much so that no American official interviewed for this article was willing to speak on the record about the discussions.
At the heart of the problem are all the so-called security detainees, who make up an overwhelming majority of the 21,000 people in American custody. They are the people who have been arrested because, in the judgment of the United States military, they could present some threat, even if they are not accused of extremist activity.
It is expected that Iraqi officials, who are now completing new prisons, will seek to take more control of detention operations, including taking custody of at least some of the current Iraqi detainees. That prompts the question characterized by one American military lawyer as “What do we do with the red population?” or those detainees the Americans consider to be extremists — the 8,000 detainees that General Stone referred to as a continuing threat.
Even as the Americans try to overcome their reputation for past mistreatment, serious allegations of torture and substandard conditions in some Iraqi prisons persist. Iraq’s Interior Ministry detention centers, which hold the largest numbers of pretrial detainees, have been run primarily by Shiites and have a record of overcrowding and abuse against the predominantly Sunni detainee population.
There have also been many allegations of torture. In cases in 2005 and 2006, it was American and British soldiers who rescued beaten and starved prisoners.
“If the coalition is going to turn over detainees, there are real Convention Against Torture issues,” said Kevin Lanigan, a former Army Reserve judge advocate in Iraq who is director of the law and security program at Human Rights First, a rights organization.
He was referring to the international Convention Against Torture, which among other things prohibits nations that have signed it from turning detainees over to countries where there are “substantial grounds” to believe that they would be tortured. Iraq has also signed the convention.
In the end, there is some speculation that a compromise will be reached that allows the American military to continue to detain and hold at least some of the people it deems security risks. In the meantime, the American military is pushing to review as many detention cases as possible with an eye toward quickly shrinking the overall detainee population.
Whatever the result, it is unlikely to meet American standards of justice or satisfy human rights groups.
Sheik Riyadh, for example, was released because of the new hearing panel at Camp Bucca. Still, he found little justice in the three and a half years he spent in detention.
“I like the idea of democracy in America,” he said. “But I have not touched it yet.”
And now the critique:
by Tom Hayden (published on Tuesday, June 3, 2008 by The Huffington Post)
The New York Times today failed to accurately describe the Iraqi prison and judiciary systems while reporting that “the American-run detention system in Iraq has improved, even its critics say.”
The Times‘ story is based on a guided tour provided to one of its reporters, Alyssa Rubin, who marveled at detainees sitting in the sunshine reading the Koran, playing volleyball and making yogurt. But these scenes appear to be Pentagon window-dressing for a system which is deeply flawed.
It is unclear who Rubin’s unnamed “human rights critics” are, but they become part of the window-dressing, and are sure to be cited by the Pentagon again. Yet her rosy picture is contradicted by the same unnamed advocates who point out to Rubin that there are “underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees.”
In these “improved” US-run facilities, the vast majority of detainees are rounded up on little or no evidence, have no rights to lawyers nor any basis to challenge their detention. These are the same policies followed by the British in Malaysia and Kenya, by the French in Algeria, by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and by the US in South Vietnam and Central America. On a larger scale, they are consistent with the inner city policing strategies that result in America now holding twenty percent of the world’s inmates, most of them young, black and brown.
In these “improved” conditions, the Times goes on: 85-90 percent of the detainees will never stand trial, their internment will last 333 days on average, 80 percent of them are Sunni youth, and all are sent through “psychological assessments,” described by one former detainee as waging “psychological war on you.” Fully two-thirds are not considered by their captors as “imperative security risks,” the United Nations criterion for internment without trial.
Those are the “improved” facilities, a public relations response to the Abu Ghraib scandal of three years ago. In the facilities controlled by the Interior Ministry, some 25,000 other detainees face severe and secret daily abuses. Human rights groups are reduced to lobbying the Americans not to send any more detainees to the Iraqi facilities.
The major flaw in this model is the sharp distinction drawn between American detention facilities, like Camp Bucca, and Iraqi prisons which are widely known to be more abusive and violent. The two systems, however, operate on a spectrum of treatment, and both are funded and advised by the Americans.
Between $22-25 billion in US tax dollars have been spent on the overall Iraqi prison system, including American advisers and trainers within Baghdad’s Interior Ministry. In 2007, there were 90 US advisers assigned to the Interior Ministry. Some of the training is outsourced to private contractors like DynCorp. The Baker-Hamilton Study Group reported last year that Iraqi police “routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians.” Even the White House has acknowledged de facto death squad “target lists” bypassing the normal chain of Iraqi command.
Not all US officials accept the brutality that goes with the counterinsurgency model. At the Amman airport a couple of years ago, I met an American contractor who was sickened by the numerous bodies of Sunnis he had seen executed with shots to the head, their faces covered with lye.
But there is a strategic hand behind these delegated, shadowy, “off the books” policies of terror and suppression. A top counterinsurgency specialist, Dr. David Kilkullen, advocated a “global Phoenix program” in 2004, referring to the US-sponsored operation in South Vietnam. Not long after, Kilkullen replaced the loaded term “Phoenix” from his vocabulary, and began referring to South Vietnam’s “revolutionary development” program instead. Kilkullen was the “chief adviser” to Gen. David Petraeus on counterinsurgency strategy, according to Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post.
In a bolder moment, Kilkullen once described the psychological assessment techniques employed by the Pentagon on detainees as “armed social science”, using anthropologists to design strategies to “exploit the physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees.”
The election-year illusion is that American troops must slog on in Iraq while training, advising and supporting Iraqis who are “standing up.” The truth is that US policies have contracted out to, sheltered, or turned a blind eye, to the malignant growth of a sectarian gulag.
Tom Hayden is a former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His books include The Port Huron Statement [new edition], Street Wars and The Zapatista Reader.
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