Yeah, we are making WONDERFUL progress in Iraq--they can't even guard thier own
prisons!
LOL!!!
We are going to be in there FOREVER!!!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13328484/
Militias hold sway in prisons, Iraqi says
U.S. asked to halt transfer as militants free some inmates, abuse others
BAGHDAD - Iraq's prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who
have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni
Arab inmates, the country's deputy justice minister said in an interview this
week.
"We cannot control the prisons. It's as simple as that," said the deputy
minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. "Our jails are
infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad."
As a result, Yei has asked U.S. authorities to suspend plans to transfer
prisons and detainees from American to Iraqi control. "Our ministry is
unprepared at this time to take over the facilities, especially those in areas
where Shiite militias exist," he said in a letter to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John
D. Gardner, the official in charge of American detention facilities.
Transfer plan meets resistance
U.S. officials said months ago that they planned to turn over Baghdad's Abu
Ghraib prison and three other American-run facilities to the Iraqi government,
but the handoff has been repeatedly pushed back. Gardner has said he will not
authorize the transfers until he is convinced that standards of inmate
treatment and security match those maintained in U.S.-run facilities.
"We will not transfer the facilities and legal custody of the detainees until
each respective facility and the Iraqi Corrections system have demonstrated the
ability to maintain the required standards, especially in the areas of care and
custody," Gardner said in a written response to questions. "We fully recognize
that there are significant challenges that must be overcome but believe that we
will be able to address these as we move through 2006 into 2007."
He said Abu Ghraib would be transferred to Iraqi control "in the next few
months."
Gardner said the eventual transfer of prisons to Iraqi control would proceed
gradually, preceded by several weeks of training for Iraqi guards, conducted by
U.S. corrections officers and military police. The Iraqis would then work under
the supervision of American guards for at least six months. A U.S. transition
team would then be left in place for an additional period before the prison was
handed over.
While allegations of abuse at U.S.-run prisons have waned since the 2004 Abu
Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, Iraqi facilities have drawn increased scrutiny
since a U.S. Army raid exposed torture of dozens of detainees -- most of them
Sunnis -- at a secret Interior Ministry facility in the Baghdad neighborhood of
Jadriyah.
The prison was widely alleged to have been operated by a special police unit
staffed largely by members of the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia with ties
to Iraq's largest Shiite political party. The government investigated the
facility but never announced the results.
Yei said that because of mounting concern over detention centers run by Iraq's
Interior and Defense ministries, where militias retain heavy influence, the
police and army have agreed to turn over all their prisoners to the Justice
Ministry by the end of the month.
As of early June, there were 7,426 housed in Justice Ministry facilities, Yei
said. The Interior Ministry has an additional 1,797 prisoners and the Defense
Ministry a smaller number. More than 15,000 inmates were being held in five
U.S. prisons in Iraq.
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Sunnis allege abuse
But while a U.N. human rights report issued last month stressed that the
Defense and Interior ministries have legal authority to hold inmates only a
brief time, Sunni Arabs charge that Sunnis are regularly imprisoned in the
centers for months or even more than a year.
"The police are not supposed to be holding them beyond the time it takes to
conduct an investigation," Yei said. "As long as the Interior Ministry doesn't
hide anything, they will all be handed to us this month."
Already, the transfer plan is meeting resistance. The provincial council in
Wasit province, south of Baghdad, ordered police there not to transfer
detainees to a Justice Ministry facility, according to Muhammed Hasan
al-Attabi, a provincial government spokesman.
A major general with Iraq's Interior Ministry, speaking on condition he not be
named, said the transfer was already underway and would be completed on
schedule. He denied that militias ran roughshod over the prisons. "All the
detention centers in Baghdad and southern Iraq are under our control, except
for some centers in Basra, maybe two or three there, which are run by militia
officers," he said.
Signs of mistreatment
In an interview this week, Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zobaie, the top Sunni
Arab in Iraq's new government, showed photographs taken from one recent
inspection of an Interior Ministry detention center. An inmate in one of the
photos held out his misshapen, limp hands for the camera. The man's hands had
been broken in a beating, Zobaie said. Other inmates showed massive, dark
bruises on their skin; one bore a large, open infected sore.
Inmates in another photo clustered around chains hung from the middle of one of
the crowded cells. The chains were used to hoist prisoners by their bound
hands, Zobaie said. The practice, noted frequently in inspection reports of
Interior Ministry detention centers, often results in the dislocation of
prisoners' shoulders.
CONTINUED
Militias seen pulling the strings
Ninety percent of the men crowded into Interior Ministry detention centers are
Sunni Arabs, Zobaie said. He called treatment in the Interior Ministry prisons
"inhumane" and indicated it still was less than certain whether the Defense and
Interior ministries would follow through on their agreement to turn over the
inmates to the Justice Ministry. "Hopefully, they will," he said.
Yei gave several detailed accounts of abuses by militias, the names of which he
declined to provide, saying only that "there are two, everyone knows them."
U.S. officials recently said they consider the militias to be as grave a threat
to Iraq's security as the Sunni-led insurgency.
On Aug. 13, 2004, he said, militia members freed 552 prisoners in the southern
city of Hilla during a militia-led attack. A week later, 122 escaped from the
main prison in Amarah, also in the south, with the help of guards who were also
militia members.
On Jan. 13, 2005, he said, 38 prisoners escaped during an attack on a convoy
carrying them to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib. Eight were eventually rearrested. A
month later, seven prisoners escaped while being transferred to the Badoush
prison in the northern city of Mosul.
On June 14, 2005, seven prisoners escaped from Abu Ghraib in an incident still
under investigation.
Revolving-door policy
Last December, militia members entered the maximum-security prison in the
Kadhimiyah section of Baghdad, a mostly Shiite neighborhood, freeing one
militia member on death row and four others serving life sentences. At the same
prison, on Feb. 28, guards and militia members freed two men who were to be
executed that week.
And in the once-tranquil southern city of Basra, where militia violence has
surged in recent months to the point that the Iraqi government declared a state
of emergency in late May, militia members in early March took 12 foreign-born
prisoners -- Egyptian, Saudi and Sudanese -- from their cells and shot them
dead them by the facilities' main gate.
Yei's account adds to a growing list of alleged abuse in Iraq's overburdened
prison system, long criticized by Sunni leaders who say Sunni prisoners are
commonly mistreated.
Visits to detention centers in southern Iraq in recent months indicated they
are often badly overcrowded and unsanitary. At the Tesfirat prison in Najaf
last October, 122 prisoners were packed into cells designed for a maximum of
60, according to Lt. Jassim Juwad , the prison officer in charge. A prison
maintained by police commandos in Hilla and designed for 150 inmates housed 400
as recently as April. Inmates at both locations had been incarcerated for up to
18 months without trial.
‘They are the government’
On Saturday, a group of parliament members paid a surprise visit to a detention
facility, run by the Interior Ministry in Baqubah, north of Baghdad. "We have
found terrible violations of the law," said Muhammed al-Dayni, a Sunni
parliament member who said as many as 120 detainees were packed into a
35-by-20-foot cell. "They told us that they've been raped," Dayni said. "Their
families were called in and tortured to force the detainees to testify against
other people."
"The detention facilities of the ministries of Defense and Interior are places
for the most brutal human rights abuse," he added.
But amid broad U.S. efforts to encourage the Iraqi government to improve
conditions in prisons, the problem of militia control could prove particularly
intractable. Shiite militias such as the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army,
loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, are backed by dozens of members of parliament
whose political parties run the armed groups.
"You can't even talk to the militias, because they are the government," Yei
said. "They have ministers on their side."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of
the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to
drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have
to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for
lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
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