At Abu Ghraib, US seeks to make things right
by Thanassis Cambanis, The Boston Globe
June 12th, 2004
ABU GHRAIB, Iraq -- Every day at Abu Ghraib prison, about 200 smiling detainees receive visitors and pose -- with no apparent sense of irony -- for US soldiers taking digital photographs. Printouts of the photographs are given to the detainee and the visitor.
Even now, the prison's 3,100 detainees live in sand-blown tents with no cots and only sporadic access to running water. They have little protection from the hot summer winds that make the 120-degree days particularly dehydrating.
Fifteen months after the invasion, and just over a month after the prison abuse images shook the reputation of the US-led occupation in Iraq, military officials are eager to move past the scandal.
They've opened the prison facility to some Iraqi political leaders and recently allowed a Globe reporter a glimpse of reforms enacted at Abu Ghraib designed to improve quality of life and prevent repeat instances of abuse. Still, even the military commanders here admit that they haven't yet solved all the accumulated problems.
This week, some detainees started receiving a letter in Arabic explaining why they were being held, and whether they were slated for release or not. By the end of June, all 6,000 detainees held as threats to occupation soldiers will receive a status letter.
By then, officials hope to reduce the population at Abu Ghraib to 2,000 from its peak of as many as 10,000 late last year. Another 2,000, they estimate, will be kept at the occupation forces' other major prison facility, Camp Bucca, in southern Iraq near the Kuwait border, which currently holds about 2,700 inmates.
Living conditions in Abu Ghraib, which is just outside of Baghdad, should improve dramatically, said Colonel Craig Essick, the military police commander in charge of detention operations at the prison.
Camp officials plan to install air conditioners in the tents by June 30. Already, noontime temperatures are pushing 110. They'll also lay gravel to keep down the choking dust.
Many inmates have been moved to a new outdoor facility, called Camp Redemption, so named at the suggestion of an Iraqi Governing Council member who toured the prison in May.
Nearby Camp Ganci (named for a New York firefighter who died on Sept. 11, like most other US detention facilities in Iraq) houses more than 1,000 detainees and is rimmed by a loose jumble of concertina wire; there, detainees sleep on the ground, unprotected by sandbags.
''How long do I have to stay here?" one of the detainees, speaking in fluent English, shouted at Essick as he showed a visitor around the Ganci camp.
''Until we decide what's happening with the new government," Essick answered.
Turning to the visitor, he said: ''A big problem is these detainees don't know what's going on."
Since January, there has been a 100 percent turnover in the military staff at Abu Ghraib; none of the MPs and officers at the prison were around during the abuses that took place last fall. Currently, 1,600 soldiers, MPs and Marines are stationed there, or one for every two detainees.
By the middle of last month, prison officials had shut down the indoor prison wing where the photographs were taken.
But the infamy stemming from the abuse scandal is never far from the minds of the soldiers and Marines stationed at Abu Ghraib.
''We're about restoring the confidence of the Iraqi people that the coalition is operating humane detention," said Major General Geoffrey Miller, the officer who moved from the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in April to reform the US prison system in Iraq.
''It takes a while to restore the trust that was lost," Miller said. ''We're all embarrassed and ashamed by the actions of a few leaders who committed apparently illegal acts. I can assure there are no longer abuses going on."
Military police stationed at Abu Ghraib complained that atrocities committed by their predecessors have further complicated an already difficult posting.
''I know it's going to be hard for me to go home and say proudly I served at Abu Ghraib, even though I know I've done a good job," said Sergeant Emily King, 28, a reservist from Virginia. Back home, she is a State Department diplomat; here she guards the facility's three remaining female detainees.
Added Sergeant First Class Paul Helton, 35: ''I liked it a lot better when my family didn't know where this place was. In light of all that's happened and the negative publicity, everyone's forgotten about the troops that are here and they're doing a hell of a job."
Essick answered questions for his hometown suburban paper by e-mail before the scandal; when prison abuse became international news, the paper ran a story on the front page headlined ''Local Man Runs Abu Ghraib."
The prison itself has been subject to frequent insurgent attacks. Dozens of detainees have died in mortar attacks over the last year, with shells landing in the sea of tents just over the prison walls. A ferocious attack in April killed 21 detainees and wounded 91, overwhelming the small prison hospital. Doctors at Abu Ghraib are still treating detainees who lost limbs or suffered severe shrapnel wounds in the attack.
Colonel Robert F. Thomas, the garrison commander responsible for protecting Abu Ghraib from outside attacks, said that shelling incident prompted him to install more ''U-bunkers," above-ground concrete bomb shelters, and to place sandbags around inmates' tents to provide some protection from shrapnel during attacks.
''When we got here in April this place was a disaster," said Thomas, a reservist from Mississippi who is a sheriff's deputy at home. He carries a copy of the Geneva Conventions in his back pocket, and takes personally the abuses that were committed here.
''Those of us who are here now have worked extremely hard to make this a place we can be proud of when we leave," he said. ''Everything we do is a strategic initiative to turn around the black mark that is on America."
While Essick and Thomas work to improve the physical conditions at Abu Ghraib, another group back at air-conditioned offices in Camp Victory, near Baghdad International Airport, is struggling to bring order to the military legal system that governs the detainees.
The Americans in charge acknowledge that about half of all detainees are still set free for lack of evidence once the United States gets around to looking at their paperwork, and 15 percent of cases aren't even reviewed before the six-month deadline required under the Geneva Conventions.
At Abu Ghraib, the US military holds only ''security detainees," Iraqis and some foreigners considered threats to occupation forces.
In February, a full-time committee of officers led by a senior military lawyer, Colonel Steve Day, began reviewing the case files of the detainees in Abu Ghraib and has ordered about 4,000 released so far, either because they no longer pose a threat to occupation soldiers or because there was insufficient evidence against them.
Another 800 have been referred to the Iraqi justice system and transferred to Iraqi custody. Iraqi correctional services have taken charge of the original prison building at Abu Ghraib and are using it to hold criminals.
With Iraq's insurgency continuing, about 200 new detainees enter the military system every week.
''We had a big backlog," Day said. They've almost caught up."
In nearly 5 percent of cases, files have been lost. ''We just released them," Day said of those cases.
Miller, who took charge of detention and interrogation operations in Iraq in April, has worked to reimpose military discipline at Abu Ghraib, said he believes that interrogations at the prison will continue to provide useful intelligence for occupation forces, without any violations of the law. Under his command, the military has made it possible for family members to track down a detainee and schedule regular visits.
''We've laid out the standards, and the chain of command is involved," he said. ''That's why I'm confident abuses will not happen."
Miller's officers make unannounced inspections throughout the prison, he said, and some aggressive interrogation tactics, such as sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, and stress positions, have been banned.
Back at Camp Redemption in Abu Ghraib, Essick surveyed the hundreds of men surging toward a chain-link fence to shout complaints at a pair of lawyers from the Iraqi Ministry of Justice on an inspection tour.
He pointed to a half-dozen concrete shower stalls, a row of portable toilets, the U-bunker, and sandbags -- all evidence that life at Abu Ghraib would be better for the 2,000 or so detainees who will remain here in American custody after June 30, when sovereignty technically reverts to Iraq.
''We'll give them every privilege we have," he said. ''It's not the greatest, but some of them probably deserve to be here."
