Training Tomorrow's Terrorists

By Scott Horton

One year ago today, I paid a visit to Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. I was there on a happy mission: to take custody of a CBS cameraman who had been acquitted after trial on trumped up-charges of complicity with terrorists, and who was about to go back to his family. I was astonished by the enormity and the seeming lack of order in what must have then been one of the world's largest prison camps. At that point, the United States had over 14,000 Iraqis in detention—the great majority of them people taken up in sweeps through neighborhoods, and held for months thereafter. One of the senior officers in charge subsequently told me that there was broad agreement within the Baghdad command that the prisons in general, and Abu Ghraib in particular, were a disaster—not because of the horrible PR fallout that comes to everyone's mind when the words “Abu Ghraib” are uttered to an English-speaker, but because there was so little control in these facilities that they had become a breeding grounds for the insurgency. “They may come in as innocent civilians,” said my interlocutor, “but by the time they leave, they're probably part of the insurgency. Which creates our dilemma. We can't let them go.”

Today, of course, the prison at Abu Ghraib has been shut down, and a large part of its detainees transferred to Camp Cropper, a high-security facility located out in the direction of Baghdad International Airport. Did that solve the problem?

Hardly. Today's Times (of London) looks at the situation at Camp Cropper and paints a very grim portrait:

America's high-security prisons in Iraq have become “terrorist academies” for the most dangerous militant groups, according to former inmates and Iraqi government officials.

Inmates are left largely to run their blocks, which are segregated on sectarian lines. The policy has created a closed world run by Iraq's worst terrorists and militias, into which detainees with no links to insurgent groups are often thrown.

Inmates from Camp Cropper, the US prison at Baghdad airport, described to The Times seeing Al Qaeda terrorists club to death a man suspected of being an informer. Others dished out retribution with razor wire stolen from the fences.

Captain Phillip Valenti, a US officer responsible for prisons, said he knew of at least three cases of prisoners being murdered by inmates. “We are very concerned about insurgent efforts to recruit and convert detainees,” he said.

US officials said yesterday that they were investigating the suspicious death of another Camp Cropper inmate.

But the story's core lies in the vivid account provided by a newly released detainee:

One night, Abu Usama recalled, a group of Al Qaeda enforcers, their faces masked by towels, murdered an inmate. “Six of them came, two guarding the door and four to kill him. One of them hit him on the head with a sock filled with rocks. They beat him to death.”

The leader of the assassins told the cowering prisoners that the man had been an informer, although merely being seen talking to a U.S. guard could count, said Abu Usama. Another suspected informer was clubbed to death in the latrines, he said.

When a new inmate arrived, the takfiris, or Sunni fundamentalists, would move in quickly to recruit him. Abu Usama listened politely to one recruiter—a youth half his age—then tried to avoid him.

In the Shia camp, their comrade Abu Mustafa, a lean 31-year-old, was faring only slightly better. The imam there was Sayyid Adnan al-Enabi, an al-Mahdi Army commander who ordered the men to join prayer sessions and lectures.

Abu Mustafa refused. “No one should force your religion,” he explained this week. In revenge, the al-Mahdi inmates told the U.S. guards that he was planning to escape. The Americans put him in a metal punishment box 6ft by 4ft (1.9m by 1.2m) known as “the coffin”, and kept him there for days.

Both men were freed when the leader of their party intervened with the US military.

These accounts align with what I have learned in the last half year from people who have passed through Camp Cropper. Late last summer, I spoke with an American security contractor who was picked up and held in Cropper for three months in one of its high-security cells, and more recently I conferred with a lawyer who had recently been permitted a lengthy visit with his client there. All reported that one of their greatest fears was simply being associated with the Americans. This facility was in fact a terrorist training camp, and the fear of retribution against those who were not ideologically committed to the insurgency (and indeed, to particular flavors of insurgency) was very high.

The Petraeus plan has focused on restoring stability to Iraq on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, block-by-block basis. But establishing prison camps in which the insurgents are free to recruit and organize will likely offset any gains that are achieved. Once again, it points to insufficient planning for the conflict at hand and a faulty strategy in dealing with the civilian population. A foreign occupier can achieve a measure of success when it demonstrates a real commitment to provide security for the ordinary man and woman in the street. But the mass detention policy and the formula used to run the camps reflects an “us” and “them” way of thinking that will ultimately prove both very expensive and self-defeating. There is no shortage of bright planners at the Pentagon who know this. The tragedy is that they no longer seem to set policy.