Forwarded with Compliments of Free Voice of America (FVOA): Accurate
News and Interesting Commentary for America's Huddled Masses Yearning
to Breathe Free. NOTE: Thanks to Michelle Sura for the first of
these monumentally shocking reports--and to Rick Davis for the
second. -- kl, pp
AMERICA'S GULAG FOR IRAQ'S VIP PRISONERS by Gordon Thomas
Each prisoner receives six pints of dank, tepid water a day. He
uses it to wash and drink in summer noonday temperatures of 50
degrees Celsius.
He is not allowed to wash his clothes. He is provided with a small
cup of delousing powder to deal with the worst of his body infestation.
For the slightest infringement of draconian rules he is forced to
sit in painful positions. If he cries out in protest his head is
covered with a sack for lengthy periods.
This is daily life in America's shameful Gulag - Camp Cropper on
the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport.
Only the International Red Cross are allowed inside. They are
forbidden to describe what they see.
But some of its staff have broken ranks to tell Amnesty International
of the shocking conditions the 3000 Iraqi prisoners are held under.
None had been charged with any offence. They are listed as suspected
"looters" and "rioters". Or listed as "loyal to Saddam Hussein".
Every day more prisoners are crowded into the broiling, dusty
compound.
Surrounded by ten-foot-high razor wire, they live in tents that are
little protection against the blistering sun. They sleep eighty to
a tent on wafer-thin mats.
Each prisoner has a long-handled shovel to dig his own latrine.
Some are too old or weak to dig the ordered depth of three feet.
Others find they have excavated pits already used.
The over-powering stench in this hell-hole is suffocating.
"Added to sleep deprivation and physical abuse, you have highly
degrading conditions which are tantamount to torture and gross abuse
of human rights," said Curt Goering, deputy director of Amnesty
International, the London-based human rights watchdog.
He confirmed that Amnesty had received "credible reports" of detainees
who had died in custody, "mostly as a result of shooting by members
of the coalition forces".
Camp Cropper also houses a growing number of what are listed as
"special prisoners".
They include the former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, Saadiun
Hammadi, the former speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, and Ezzar
Ibrahim, the son of Saddam's second in command on the Revolutionary
Command Council.
The one woman "special" is Huda Ammash - known as "Chemical Sally",
because a key member of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons
programme.
The week before he committed suicide, Dr David Kelly, the English
scientist, had prepared a list of questions he planned to put to
her when he returned to Iraq to assist in the search for weapons
of mass destruction.
Chemical Sally sleeps in a tent with other women members of the
Baath party. Like the men, they are not allowed to wash their
underwear - and several have developed unsightly sores, according
to a Red Cross visitor.
After two months incarceration none of the "special prisoners" have
been told what charges they will face - though several, like Tariq
Aziz, then had surrendered voluntarily to the Americans.
A glimpse of his life nowadays has come from one of the few prisoners
to be released, Adnan Jassim.
"Tariq Aziz has aged very much in the past months in the camp. He
shuffles and has a stoop. This may because he has to dig his own
toilet hole. It is forbidden for anyone to help him to do this. He
is treated just like anyone else - an animal to be driven wherever
the guards want him.
"His hair has grown. It is very dirty. He gets no special treatment.
The same terrible food. Mostly he eats very little of it. It is
hard to believe he was, second to Saddam, the most powerful man in
Iraq."
Jassim was arrested the day after the war officially ended. He
insists, according to a Red Cross official, that he was stopped for
speeding.
"The Americans just fired at my car. Then they threw me into a truck
and took me to the camp. At the gate I had a badge pinned to my
shirt. It said 'presumed killer'. I have never even fired a gun,
let alone killed anyone," Jassim insisted.
Amnesty's human rights workers and Red Cross officials have gathered
statements from the few prisoners who have been released.
One is Qays al Salman, a 54-year-old guard at one of Saddam's
palaces. He claims: "One day we became so angry that all the men
in my tent began shouting, 'Freedom, freedom! The soldiers rushed
in, tied us up and forced us to lie down in the middle of the day
in the open. Some of us had bad sun stroke."
Other detainees, like Suheil Laibbi Mohammed, who used to work as
a mechanic, repairing Saddam's fleet of cars, said he had seen
prisoners repeatedly hit with rifle butts.
Detainees described being given food as inedible to Muslims. Most
of the meat was pork. "But it was either eat it or starve," said
Rafed Adel Mehdi.
Tariq Aziz's wife, Zureida, and his two sons fled to Jordan when
the war ended.
In London their family lawyer, Dr Abdul Haq al-Ani, wants to serve
a writ of habeas corpus on Britain's embattled Defence Secretary,
Geoff Hoon, arguing that his client is being held in contravention
of the Geneva Convention and the Human Rights Act.
"I spent a week in Baghdad but I was not allowed to see my client.
I know the conditions he is being held under from those who have
been released. It is outrageous what is happening," he said.
Chemical Sally's family are also planning legal moves to have her
freed.
They have submitted evidence to the Americans that she has breast
cancer and requires to continue with her medical treatment.
Her mother, Kasmah Ammash, a frail 70-year-old said: "My daughter
was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late Eighties. She went to
Pittsburgh for chemotherapy and underwent a mastectomy. Before she
was arrested she was undergoing further follow-up treatment. How
can they be so cruel?"
Amnesty International said it had urged the coalition forces to
look into such allegations - and to bring to justice those found
guilty of offences.
"The Americans have acknowledged there are some serious problems.
But there is a difference of opinion on what laws apply," said Mr
Goering.
Nada Doumani, the International Red Cross spokesman in Baghdad,
said "We never comment on the conditions at the detention centers.
"The Geneva Convention is clear about the obligations that exist
for legal advice and visits. If someone is being held as a POW,
then there is a legal obligation to allow them access to legal
advice. But if they are held as a civilian detainee, that does not
apply. A tribunal has been set up to decide which category each
person in the camp fits into. Until their work is complete we can
say no more."
A spokesman for Lt-General Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition forces
commander in Iraq, said he could not give a time frame when the
tribunal's work will be completed.
ends
subscribe at www.globe-intel.net <http://www.globe-intel.net> email
Gordon Thomas at gthomas@indigo.ie
=============================================================================
===
'It Was Punishment Without Trial'
Hundreds of Iraqi civilians are being held in makeshift jails run
by US troops - many without being charged or even questioned. And
in these prisons are children whose parents have no way of locating
them. Jonathan Steele reveals the grim reality of coalition justice
in Baghdad
Friday August 15, 2003 The Guardian
It was a warm spring evening in a Baghdad suburb when American
troops stopped the car in which 11-year-old Sufian Abd al-Ghani was
riding close to his home with his uncle and a neighbour. They were
ordered out and told to lie face down on the road. Sufian's father
heard the commotion and rushed out to find the soldiers pointing
their rifles at his son and the others. Claiming the uncle had fired
at them, they started beating the three captives with their rifle
butts, according to the father.
A neighbour confirms that a shot had been fired, but it was part
of a row between the Ghanis and another family. "In Iraq this is
normal.
Almost every household in Baghdad owns a weapon. One man was drunk.
The Americans must have heard the shot as they were passing. It was
not directed at them," says the neighbour, who prefers not to be
named.
The American soldiers searched the Ghanis' house, but found nothing.
For three hours Sufian was kept on the ground with the two adults.
Then the Americans put hoods over their heads, tied their hands
with tight plastic bracelets, and drove them away. "Why are you
taking my son?" a desperate Abdullah Ghani pleaded. "Don't worry.
As he's a child, we'll send him back in a couple of days," a Sergeant
Stark assured him.
The three were driven off to Baghdad airport, where US forces have
set up a makeshift prison in large tents. Around 500 Iraqis are
held in miserable conditions, sleeping on the ground, with inadequate
water rations and not enough blankets to go round, according to
former detainees.
Sufian spent eight days in a tent with around 20 adults. They were
given yellow packets of ready-to-eat meals, the standard US army
fare, but no change of clothes. Then the hood went back on and
Sufian was taken to the Salhiyeh detention centre for women and
juveniles - a holding facility in a police station just outside
Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace, which has become the headquarters
of the coalition authority.
A woman prisoner spotted Sufian and realised he was much younger
than the other inmates. On her release she went to see the Ghanis,
who had been searching frantically for their son. It was now June
17, almost three weeks after his arrest on May 28.
They brought the boy food and clean clothes, and four days later
obtained an order from Mohammed Latif al-Duleimi, a US-approved
investigating judge, for Sufian's immediate release. Sufian's father
took it to the US military police who run the detention centre. But
they told him that orders by Iraqi judges had no legal authority.
Ghani turned for help to the new US-founded police academy. He met
a Captain Crusoe, who took up the case and rang a US army lawyer
at the airport. The lawyer ordered the boy's release on June 21 -
but still the military police refused to act.
Ghani went back to Crusoe, who made more phone calls, to no avail.
Finally Crusoe went to the detention centre with Ghani, and brought
Sufian out himself. "Take your son," he said.
After 24 days the boy's ordeal was over, but he regularly has
nightmares. However, his case is not the worst in the four months
since the Americans occupied Iraq. Several children have been shot
dead, some as passengers in cars which fell foul of American
checkpoints, some mistaken at night for adults. But if those deaths
were the result of accidents, how is it that an 11-year-old could
be held for over three weeks without anyone in authority asking
questions?
The answer is: easily. Sufian's detention highlights the problems
faced by hundreds of Iraqis: arrests followed by incompetent
interrogation, or none at all; the lack of an efficient trial-or-release
system; shocking prison conditions; constant buck-passing; and
sloppy paperwork by the coalition authorities. The result is that
in almost every case families take weeks or months to find out where
their loved ones are being detained.
Ahmed Suhail, a final-year high-school student, was with his father,
a well-known Baghdad vet, when they were stopped at a checkpoint
on May 15. His father had a pistol (the coalition banned the carrying
of weapons outside the home from June 14, but at the time it was
not an offence). Both were hooded and taken to Baghdad airport. "We
were in a tent for 150 people. We only got 25 litres of water a day
for everyone, which means about a cupful per person, in temperatures
of over 40C," Ahmed recalls. "There was a small ditch in the open
for a toilet, which meant you were naked in front of everybody.
There was no shower. We slept on the sand. My father could speak
some English and two soldiers gave us overalls as a change of
clothes."
After three weeks, for no apparent reason, Dr Suhail was taken to
Abu Ghraib, Saddam's notorious Baghdad prison, which has been pressed
back into service by the Americans. A week later he was released,
but Ahmed remained at the airport. "Then I was told I was being
taken to a prison camp at Umm Qasr. No reason was given."
Umm Qasr is close to the Kuwaiti border, about 400 miles from
Baghdad, and Ahmed said he was taken with 21 other men, lying on
the floor of an American army lorry for 11 hours, with a stop for
the night in Nassiriyah. Conditions in the camp in Umm Qasr were
much better than at Baghdad airport, and the prisoners had regular
access to showers.
After 33 days there, and 66 of detention in all, Ahmed was brought
back to Baghdad and released. "At no time was I questioned or
interrogated, or charged. It was just punishment without trial.
When the Americans first came to Baghdad I was happy, but I don't
want to speak about my feelings towards them now," he says.
One reason for Iraqi suspects' lengthy stays in the tented camps
at Baghdad airport and Abu Ghraib is the coalition authority's
decision to award itself 90 days before a detainee needs to be
brought before a magistrate or judge. Amnesty International, which
has produced a detailed memorandum of concern about the coalition's
handling of law and order, points out a bizarre double standard:
suspects held by the Iraqi police have to have their case reviewed
by a magistrate within 24 hours.
Amnesty also reported that the coalition's rules require that
suspects should be allowed to consult a lawyer within 72 hours of
"induction" into a detention camp. In practice, there is no deadline
for induction and "detainees appear to be invariably denied access
to lawyers, sometimes for weeks," it said.
Another reason for the chaos is the coalition's failure to keep an
accurate central list of detainees, with names in Arabic, to which
searching families can refer.
In her home in al-Mansour, a suburb of Baghdad, Eftekhar Medhat
relates the arrest of her husband, Zakariya Zakher Sa'ad. He is a
gardener and nightwatchman at the home of the Russian consul. The
consul had left during the American bombing and the house remained
an obvious target for looters and burglars long after the first
turbulent days of the occupation.
Alerted one night by a neighbour, Sa'ad went out with a Kalashnikov.
He ran into an American patrol and was thrown to the ground and
arrested. The neighbour tried in vain to tell the soldiers he was
not a thief. "At first we went to Abu Ghraib," says Medhatas, her
19-year-old daughter, Huda, sitting nervously beside her. "The
Americans told us to go to the airport. At the airport they told
us to go to the International Committee of the Red Cross. We went
to the ICRC but got no help."
They then turned to the 101st Airborne's civil military operations
centre, located in a disused supermarket. Here they found two
unusually sympathetic officers, Major Hector Flores and his sergeant,
Paul Holding. Their work was in sharp contrast to the behaviour of
most US troops, who patrol in vehicles in conditions of increasing
tension as attacks on convoys show no let-up.
Flores and Holding present a different face: "I'm the happiest man
in the US army. We are in contact with ordinary Iraqis and we can
really help them. We call them customers," says Holding. Their job
includes processing claims by Iraqis for damage when American troops
shoot at vehicles or homes, or when Iraqis are wounded by unexploded
bombs.
Trawling through lists of thousands of badly transliterated Arabic
names, Flores finally found a reference to an "Ahmed Mahjoub Zakariya,
born in 1948". "I think it is your husband," he told Medhat. "I'm
going to fax a photo of him to Camp Bucca, and I hope they will
then let him out."
A system which requires an individual act of kindness by an American
officer to locate a detainee, or in Sufian's case to insist on
implementing a release order made by an Iraqi judge, is clearly
inadequate.
The coalition authorities are aware of the problems. In addition
to Amnesty, the coalition has also come under pressure from the UN
and the ICRC. Sergio Vieira de Mello, the secretary-general's special
representative in Iraq, recently reported that he had told the US
administrator, Paul Bremer, and his British counterpart, John Sawers,
about his anxiety over "searches, arrests, the treatment of detainees,
duration of preventive detention, access by family members and
lawyers, and the establishment of a central prison database". He
said he found them "receptive", and they had explained what was
being done to address the problems.
The ICRC is also alarmed by the lack of a proper database. "The
lists provided by the coalition are not comprehensive and far from
complete. The process needs to be improved. They are willing to
improve it and are really trying to help", says ICRC spokesperson
Nada Doumani.
In their defence, coalition spokespeople point to the appalling
legacy of the Saddam regime. "In his time people had to scrawl their
names on cell walls to get remembered. There was no list of any
kind," says Charles Heatly, a spokesperson seconded from the Foreign
Office.
Work was almost complete on repairing cell-blocks at Abu Ghraib so
that medium-security prisoners could move from tents into proper
buildings "comparable to UK prisons," he adds. A large prefabricated
building for several hundred other detainees should be ready at Abu
Ghraib in a week's time. The tents at Baghdad airport would then
be emptied and its 500 prisoners transferred.
Mobile teams of magistrates were being trained to handle cases
faster. He acknowledges that US military lawyers sometimes overruled
Iraqi judges' release orders. "That's probably true. It shows the
difficulties in getting systems to match," he says.
The message is that things are getting better. But the occupation
forces' shocking handling of civilian prisoners will not be forgotten
quickly by the victims. They are one more example of how badly those
who planned the war on Iraq failed to plan the peace.
Guardian Unlimited ) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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