David Enders (The Nation): Baghdad Under Siege

[Jack Rabbit]

From The Nation
Dated Friday March 18

Baghdad Under Siege
By David Enders in Baghdad

It is raining, and many of the yellow-jumpsuited prisoners in Camp Redemption are looking for a dry place to stand. There are few prisoners outside their leaky tents, save those receiving family visitors or those who have decided to take shelter under the concrete culverts provided for mortar attacks.

Redemption, which was built for 2,500 inmates but holds about 3,300 at the moment, is an open-air prison and all that remains of the US military's presence at Abu Ghraib, the facility that was formerly synonymous with Saddam Hussein's brutality and is now synonymous with the brutality of the US occupation. The cellblocks where the abuse scandal took place were turned over to the Iraqi justice system last spring.

As we slog through the mud to visit soaked soldiers at the camp (interviews with detainees are not allowed), a US spokesman says military officials in Iraq have requested that Redemption be replaced with a more permanent facility alongside Camp Cropper at Baghdad International Airport, where the United States has a military base and houses about 100 "high value" detainees. In part, the aim is to provide the prisoners with more suitable dwellings, but it also reflects the lack of safety on the few miles of road between the airport and Abu Ghraib. The Abu Ghraib site is often attacked by insurgents, as are the police in Abu Ghraib village.

Two years after the US invasion of Iraq, the theater-level detainee population is approximately 9,100, the highest it has been. The theater-level facilities are Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca in the south (the largest) and Camp Cropper at the airport. At any given time, there are 1,000-1,500 detainees at the nontheater level at various military bases around the country. Some of these are released without charge and others are eventually transferred to the theater-level facilities. But prisoners are essentially off the books until that point.

Read more.

[Jack Rabbit]

1. This most revealing

from the end of the article:

Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two main parties in the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition that garnered the largest share of January's vote, has another burning issue he expects the assembly to address.

"We are working to make the American forces and the non-American forces no longer exist. There is no nation in this world that's free and has dignity that would agree to have foreign forces on its land," Hakim told me in an interview last week. I asked him if this includes the apparently permanent US bases that are being built all over the country. "Iraqi people want a full pullout of the American forces," he replied.

Hakim blamed US and British policy for the country's continued instability and said Iraqis can do better. "They depend on figures with connections to the previous regime and didn't give the chance to the honest, good Iraqis to take part to be in charge," he said. Hakim and other members of the UIA have been extremely critical of US-appointed prime minister Iyad Allawi's repeal of US proconsul Paul Bremer's de-Baathification order. Essentially, Hakim plans to gut the Interior Ministry, replacing the current administration with his own people. Whether this will work or create further division within the government remains to be seen.

As I have been saying, those in the Bush administration who crow about the success of the elections in Iraq should at least be honest enough to point out that those who voted in the elections repudiated the foreign occupation of their nation.