.It may seem hard to imagine a place where people incarcerated by the U.S. military have fewer rights than they do in Guantanamo Bay. Welcome to Iraq. It is just after 4 a.m., and hundreds of Iraqis are lining up to visit their relatives outside Camp Bucca, which in August held about 18,000 detainees. Near the Kuwaiti border, Bucca shimmers in the predawn of the southern Iraqi desert, a beacon of light in a country where electricity is on for no more than 12 hours a day. It is the U.S. military's largest detention center in Iraq. The total number of those officially in U.S. custody in Iraq has fluctuated between a low of 7,200 and a high of more than 26,000 since 2005. The three hotels in Zubair, one of the closest towns to Bucca, are always full. "We don't have tourism here," says Jabbar Mubarak, the clerk at the Tower of Babil, Zubair's largest hotel. "Everyone who comes to our hotel comes to visit their sons." The lobby swarms with families, some of whom have driven more than 10 hours. Despite major offensives in the past year against the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest Shiite militia, about 80 percent of those in custody here are Sunni and hail from the central and northern parts of the country.
One of the biggest complaints is that the vast majority of detainees have not been charged with any crime. "Why don't the U.S. forces charge him if he has done something? Then at least we would know how long he will be here," said Hadia Khalaf, whose son Qusay was arrested in September 2007. "He was our provider," she said, reflecting the plight of many families who rely on extended family and charity to survive. Since 2003, approximately 96,000 Iraqis have been officially detained by the U.S. military, with 100,000 more having been temporarily detained but never sent to a theater-level internment facility like Bucca.
The other theater-level facility currently open is Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, which serves as the system's in- and out-processing center and holds about 3,000 detainees, including roughly 300 juveniles. The legal basis for detentions stems from a single line of a 2004 UN Security Council resolution, which has been renewed every year since by agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. This resolution, which gives the legal justification for continued U.S. military occupation, allows "internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security."
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are negotiating a status of forces agreement between the two governments that they hope to reach by the end of the year, when the current UN mandate expires. A key issue at stake is detentions, part of a broader area of contention between the two governments over the rights that U.S. troops should have to operate unilaterally in Iraq. The Iraqi government has demanded that the U.S. military no longer be allowed to detain Iraqis without its approval. The State Department and White House have been largely mum about the discussions, while Maliki's office has regularly leaked parts of the agreement and says that the final sticking points are whether U.S. troops will continue to be immune from prosecution under Iraqi law and the extent to which the U.S. military will have to coordinate with and receive approval from the Iraqi government before launching operations. On the issue of detentions, Joseph Logan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa section, thinks an amnesty might be the answer. "If you don't have the evidence to transfer someone to the Iraqi system, it's probably the case that their outright release should be considered," Logan said. "It does seem they've been expediting the process of clearing some people out, and that's praiseworthy.
But that doesn't deal with the underlying legal problem -- that these people can't challenge their detention and don't have counsel."
What constitutes an "imperative" security threat is left up to those in charge of reviewing detainee cases. "The idea is not to tie the hands of the ground troops," said Capt. Dylan Imperato, a military lawyer at Cropper. Logan thinks this is left purposely vague. "The U.S. is on the one hand claiming broad powers of detention, and at the same time is claiming the conflict is not a war or occupation," he said. "You can't have it both ways. If you want these completely unchecked powers of detention, you have to occupy the country again" -- that is, revert to the legal status the United States held before the 2004 UN resolution. Detainees receive an initial review of their case before being sent to Cropper, but they are not allowed to attend it. The reviews are conducted by a panel of three U.S. military officers. Detainees are allowed to attend later reviews, but at no point are they given access to a lawyer. "The level to convict at a criminal court would be a higher level to reach than to determine whether or not they're an imperative security threat," said Imperato. "We don't limit (the review boards) in any major way. We give them broad discretion to make that determination." Imperato said there are many considerations for determining whether a detainee will be held for another six months or recommended for release. "You're not determining guilt or innocence, and you're not strictly looking at the conduct that got them into (detention) in the first place. You're looking at what their plans are when they get out," Imperato said. "Does he have something to go back to? A family, a job? Something that would make him less susceptible to al Qaeda or any other group?"
Detention can be extended indefinitely. According to a military spokeswoman, about 10 percent of those held have been in detention since 2005 or earlier, 20 percent since 2006 and 50 percent since 2007; 20 percent were detained this year. The numbers are dropping, with an average of 45 detainees being released and 30 being entered into the system each day. Detention operations have been a rocky road. Torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004 received the most coverage, but thousands of prisoners living in leaky tents outside the prison's "hard site" complained of lack of medical care, indifferent and at times hostile treatment from guards, inedible food and extreme weather, including flooding. American troops even admitted at the time that they believed more than 80 percent of those detained were innocent of wrongdoing. Recently released Iraqis, as well as Iraqi officials, say this statistic is probably still true. Torture also certainly continued past 2004. On a visit to Abu Ghraib in March 2005 (it has since been closed), I saw a detainee who had been strapped to a chair and left in the pouring rain. Only after reading former interrogator Tony Lagouranis' book Fear Up Harsh did I learn this was a tactic used to induce hypothermia. At the time, the guards told me the prisoner had been restrained because he refused to stop throwing feces at his captors.
The system has come a long way. In general, the released detainees I spoke with said the food was good and that treatment was far better than what one could expect in Iraqi government-run prisons. None of the prisoners I interviewed spoke of the vocational programs as highly as U.S. spokespersons did, but they did say that some were available. None complained of abuse during detentions or interrogations once in Cropper or Bucca, though some said they had been beaten and roughly interrogated before being put into the theater-level system.
"The first three days they didn't give me any food," said Samir Mohamed, who was arrested in 2007 while driving between Damascus and Baghdad. He said he was blindfolded for three days while he was interrogated and beaten. "They put cigarettes out on me," he said. One U.S. soldier I spoke to who requested anonymity said the CIA maintained an off-the-books "black site" at Camp Anaconda near Balad as recently as mid-2007. I have not been able to confirm this independently. Some detainees, including one who believed he had been arrested by U.S. Special Forces, said they waited more than two weeks before being entered into the theater-level system, a violation of the military's rules. And Mohamed, the detainee who said he was beaten, said he went eight months without a hearing before suddenly being released. But if the treatment once incarcerated is generally better than in the past, the intelligence that puts Iraqis there does not seem to be. "I was working as a guard at a gas station," said Jassim, who was arrested in August 2007, during the surge in Baghdad. "There were eight of us working as guards, and they lined us up and said, 'We'll take the first four.'" The U.S. military has admitted that the surge led to a surge in detainees as well, as a result of increased raids, which strained an already overcrowded system and elicited fresh reports of arbitrary detentions.
The number of troops and contractors tasked to detention operations has grown considerably and now totals approximately 10,000, according to one spokesman. The increased manpower has allowed cases to be reviewed every six months, and the military says 330 days is the average length of detention. Nonetheless, inmates said the situation inside the prisons, which U.S. officials recently admitted had included incarcerated insurgents running their own courts, can range from boring to dangerous, although the U.S. military claims insurgents are no longer meting out their own justice.
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"I don't think that there is a law that covers what we're trying to do -- that is, to detain people indefinitely. There have been terrorist acts throughout history, so this war is never going to end," said retired Adm. John Hutson, a military law expert. "The 250 guys at Guantanamo can have habeas corpus, but the thousands of detainees elsewhere don't have any rights. I think we have focused like lasers on Guantanamo because it's iconic and it's 90 miles off our shore. But you can't make legal, diplomatic or moral distinctions based on the locale of the detainee. We've worried about Guantanamo, but there are more detainees elsewhere. Whatever rules we come up with have to apply across the board." But a discussion with retired Col. Janis Karpinski, who was first tasked with detention operations in Iraq, indicates that the system has in many ways stayed mostly the same since 2003. (It was Karpinski, then a brigadier general, who was in charge of the military police brigade that ran Abu Ghraib when the torture photos were released in 2004. She was charged with dereliction of duty and demoted to colonel; Karpinski claims the abuses that took place under her nominal command were carried out under orders from officers reporting to a different chain of command.) The military is still trying to reconcile international law with a conflict that the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge is either a war or an occupation.
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Artigo inteiro: [http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/att…ampbucca.htm]