US has left Iraqi cities, but retains prison control
Agence France-Presse | 07/06/2009 10:44 AM
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CAMP CROPPER - US combat troops may have left Iraq's towns and cities but the yellow jumpsuit-clad inmates currently behind bars will remain in American-run prisons for months to come.
At Camp Cropper on the outskirts of Baghdad, where 3,500 detainees are held, American commanders acknowledge there is much work to be done when it comes to training Iraqis to operate their own prison system.
"We're probably about half of the way along," said Brigadier General David Quantock, who oversees US detainee operations in Iraq, noting that the numbers held had fallen from a high of around 26,000 to between 10,000 and 11,000.
"It's easy to train a guard, it's something else to train the mid-level supervisors, logisticians, wardens, on how to run a facility, and that's where we're moving our Iraqi corrections training," he said.
With the aim of speeding up the process, US forces plan to open a Correctional Training Centre within weeks.
Currently, Cropper has about 800 Iraqi correctional officers -- ICOs in US military speak -- alongside 900 American personnel, with local staff often undergoing training in tandem with their day-to-day responsibilities.
"We're working with ICOs... getting them in there and learning by doing," said First Lieutenant Josh Porter, standing outside a computer class he said was the most popular among detainees, who are mostly in their late 30s or early 40s.
"We're getting them out in front as much as possible."
First Lieutenant Michael Horab said detainees housed in Cropper are divided between moderates and extremists, with Iraqi "catwalk guards" watching over the former because they are not yet authorised to use lethal force.
Iraqi guards are equipped with what Horab described as "a paintball gun on steroids" to pinpoint troublemakers, while Quantock added that only Americans would be authorised to use deadly weapons in US-run camps.
Cropper is the second largest of the US's three detention facilities in Iraq. Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Basra houses around 4,000 inmates, while Camp Taji, north of Baghdad, holds approximately 3,000.
Those in custody in the three camps are being handed over at a rate of 750 a month to the Iraqi authorities, who then decide whether to release them or keep them behind bars.
As part of a plan put to the Iraqi government in December, US authorities aim to close Bucca in September, after the overall detainee population drops below 8,000.
Taji is due to be handed over to local control in early 2010, and Cropper is set to follow in August the same year.
The Iraqis being transferred are all sent to prisons that are regularly inspected by American authorities.
Senior US officers at Cropper were at pains to point this out, five years after pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib -- now renamed Central Baghdad Prison -- created a propaganda coup for insurgents in the wake of the 2003 US-led invasion.
"We had to fix a lot of problems that we had with detainee operations," said Quantock, a 30-year specialist veteran whose career has included working on detainee operation programmes in Haiti and being Commandant of the US army's military police school in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
"If you look at Abu Ghraib, I think one of the base problems was that there was no oversight... and that was a lack of leadership."
Quantock said the United States had increased oversight, and now invites "anybody who wants to come and see how we do detainee operations to come to our facilities."
All of the prisons inspected and approved by US teams are run by the justice ministry -- Iraq's fractured prison system means the ministries of justice, defence and interior all operate their own facilities.
Interior ministry prisons, however, have suffered accusations of detainee abuse. Falah Shanshel, an MP in a bloc loyal to radical Shiite and anti-US cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, said last month that at least 11 prisoners had been victims of torture and sexual abuse in one such facility.
However, in the wake of the June 30 pullback from Iraqi towns and cities, Quantock emphasised he did not want progress made in detainee operations to be lost when the US military leaves the country for good at the end of 2011.
"I want to make sure that what we leave can be maintained, and continue to be improved upon," he said.
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