Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Abu Ghraib was an infamous prison under Saddam. Now, for Iraqis seeking relatives detained by the U.S. military, it is still a place where men disappear.
Mar 3, 2004 | Abu Ghraib prison became famous in Saddam's time as the place where men disappeared. Behind its high, ochre-colored walls and looping spans of barbed wire, prisoners faced miserable living conditions, regular torture, and (in some cases) execution. Now the U.S. military controls Abu Ghraib, calling it the Baghdad Correctional Facility (though no Iraqis I've met seem to be aware of the name change). And for many Iraqis seeking information about relatives detained by the American military, Abu Ghraib is still a place where men disappear.
Abu Ghraib now houses thousands of prisoners. The military will not release specific numbers, for security reasons, but the Associated Press reported that 12,000 people are being held there. Prisoners are pouring into the system: According to Human Rights Watch, in December and January the U.S. military said it was arresting approximately 100 Iraqis per day. Each visit requires two guards -- one to supervise the prisoner and one to escort his family members. The backlog for visitation is months long. Families have no contact with their interned relatives while waiting for that date. Many of the people at the prison that day were waiting to hear whether their relative's sequence number would be read so that they could come back in May for a visit. Others had come in November and were just now able to see their relatives. Some detainees are allowed no visits at all. And some relatives don't even know where their parents, brothers or sons are being held. The system, frankly, is a mess.
Some Iraqis who have been held as security detainees claim they were subjected to ill treatment, including beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological abuse. Most of these allegations are anecdotal and cannot be confirmed. But a variety of human rights and peace groups, including Human Rights Watch, Occupation Watch, Christian Peacemakers, Amnesty International, as well as various Iraqi NGOs, have interviewed former security detainees who have described some kind of mistreatment at the hands of the Americans -- at the time of arrest, during interrogation or during incarceration.
Last week, the U.S. military announced that 17 military personnel, including a battalion commander and a company commander, had been relieved of duty pending the results of a criminal investigation into alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. The military did not specify the nature of the abuse. But in a separate incident in January, the military discharged three soldiers who had been found guilty of beating, kicking and harassing detained Iraqis at Camp Bucca in the south of the country.
The detainees' living conditions are poor. In Abu Ghraib, most prisoners are housed in tents that offer little respite from cold, wet winter weather and scorching summer heat and provide no shelter from incoming mortar attacks. And they are in the hands of a justice procedure that is, to say the least, highly fallible.
Last Friday, I drove out to Abu Ghraib with my translator Amjad and driver Thamer. I had heard that every day, hundreds of Iraqis gather in front of the prison looking for information about relatives or trying to make visitation appointments. Fridays tend to be particularly busy because, in this predominantly Muslim country, Friday is the day off. We took the freeway west from Baghdad, passing smaller and smaller houses, then scarcely defined shacks cobbled together with bricks, scrap metal and tenting. Farmers scraped away at the chickpea-colored land while kids in ratty frocks and sweat pants chased chickens and each other around the family dwellings.
Off the highway, a small open-air souk (market) bracketed the road leading to the prison. Vendors sold produce stacked in meticulous pyramids. The colors of the oranges, eggplants, lettuce and tomatoes seemed particularly bright against the monochrome of the surrounding area. Past the souk, the road continued through an open plain where piles of dirt and large holes alternately pimpled and pockmarked the ground. We turned into an uneven dirt parking area where scores of cars and pickup trucks squeezed together in barely parallel lines. Eventually, we found a space in one corner of the lot next to a snack cart selling potato chips, candy bars and soda.
In the distance, closer to the walls ringing the prison, I could see a crowd of hundreds of people. We walked along a dirt road toward the crowd and within a few minutes we had become part of it. An Iraqi man in a wool cap and sunglasses stood on a platform (actually, it may have been a car -- the crowd blocked my view) and yelled out numbers that he read from a list he was holding. These numbers represented individual prisoners. Anyone arrested and detained in Iraq gets one of these "sequence" numbers.
Right now in Iraq there are two classifications for detainees: criminal detainees and security detainees. Criminal detainees are those accused of what the military refers to as "Iraqi on Iraqi" crime -- theft, murder, black-market peddling. While these detainees are ostensibly the responsibility of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), they are increasingly being processed through the Iraqi justice system. Their cases are heard in Iraqi courts and they are incarcerated in Iraqi-run prisons (or, at Abu Ghraib, in an Iraqi-run portion of the prison).
Security detainees, on the other hand, fall under the auspices of the American military. In the words of a military Judge Advocate FAQ sheet: "Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, coalition forces are authorized to detain and intern an individual who poses an imminent threat to the security of coalition forces or the Iraqi state. Additionally, coalition forces may detain and intern individuals who are reasonably believed to have committed crimes against coalition forces."
Frequently, security detainees are people arrested by the military during nighttime house raids. The raids usually happen because the military has received a tip that the occupant or occupants of the home work with the resistance. The military shells out money for these sorts of tips. Not surprisingly, in a country where the massive unemployment problem has left many people broke, false accusations have become commonplace as a way for people to settle feuds and make some dough in the bargain.
But there are tons of ways to get arrested in Iraq these days. As an occupying force, the military has carte blanche. A woman working in the Iraqi Assistance Center, which helps the families of detainees, told me that people often get picked up because they happened to be nearby when U.S. troops got attacked. In the ensuing chaos, the soldiers make sweep arrests, detaining anyone in the vicinity who strikes them as suspicious.
I walked into the crowd in front of the prison and Amjad asked the people around us to explain why they were there. Men of all ages made a gentle scrum around us. An elderly woman with the blue tattoos on her chin that signal she's a Bedouin clutched her abaya around her with one hand and grabbed Amjad's arm with another. A young man who had, himself, been in the prison, started telling his story. Soldiers had stormed his house in Fallujah at the beginning of December. They arrested him and his father and charged them with being part of the resistance. On Jan. 20, they released the young man but his 54-year-old father was still inside. He didn't know why. Neither he nor his father, he told me, had any connection to the resistance. As with all the stories told to me about mistreatment of detainees, I had no way to confirm the truth or falsity of his claim.
Another man started talking. "I was picked up with my brother when the Americans got attacked nearby," he said. "They let me go but my brother's still in there." And another: "My uncle died in the prison four days ago. My other uncle died 14 days ago. Both were arrested four months ago when the Americans stormed the house. They were in bad health. They died 10 days apart. My brother and cousin are still inside." A man next to him held up his wrists to show me his bruises. From being handcuffed, he said. He had recently been let out of Abu Ghraib after a month. His brother was still inside. The soldier who had interrogated the man in prison asked whether he had enemies in the neighborhood. Neighbors kept making claims, the soldier said. Another young man told me a soldier had hit him in the face with a rifle butt during a search of his house. He and five of his brothers had been arrested. Three brothers were out, three still in. It was his 10th trip to the prison to try to get information.
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