The Associated Press, 30 March 2005.
WASHINGTON, March 30 (AP) -- The United States is holding about
10,500 prisoners in Iraq, more than double the number held in October,
the U.S. military says.
About 100 of those prisoners are under age 18, said Army Lt. Col.
Guy Rudisill, a spokesman for detention operations in Iraq.
Five months ago, the military said it was holding about 4,300 prisoners
in Iraq. The growth in the prison population has come amid a lingering
insurgency in Iraq and despite the formal transfer of power to an interim
Iraqi government last June.
The number of U.S.-held prisoners in Iraq declined last summer after
international outrage over abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Revelations of abuse have continued since then; on Friday, the Army
released documents detailing a half-dozen prison abuse investigations
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The reports said soldiers had stripped prisoners naked and released
them to walk home, beaten detainees with their fists and feet,
broke a prisoner's jaw and forced detainees to exercise to the point
of exhaustion. One investigator concluded prisoners at a temporary
jail near Mosul were systematically mistreated and possibly tortured
in December 2003.
Spokesmen for U.S. Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan did not respond
Monday and Tuesday to e-mailed questions about the number of prisoners
there. The military estimated in January that it was holding about
500 people in Afghanistan.
A human rights group was issuing a report Wednesday saying the
rising number of detainees increases the risk that the prisoners will
be mistreated. The report from New York-based Human Rights First
says secrecy about the prisoners is also increasing, citing the refusal
of military officials to discuss the number of prisoners in Afghanistan
since January.
"We're seriously concerned about overburdening of what the Pentagon
has called transient facilities, the field prisons," Human Rights First
lawyer Deborah Pearlstein said Tuesday. "These are places where conditions
are terrible, where the worst abuses occurred from 2002 to 2004, and
ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) access is limited to
nonexistent."
About 1,200 of the prisoners in Iraq are being held at temporary
facilities at forward bases, Rudisill said. He said the other 9,300
are held in three permanent prisons: the Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad,
Camp Cropper at the Baghdad International Airport and Camp Bucca in
southern Iraq.
In December, U.S. officials said they were holding about 65 prisoners
age 16 and under. The 100 or so under-18 prisoners in custody now are
being held separately from adult prisoners, Rudisill said.
In an interview transcript made public earlier this month, the former
head of prison operations in Iraq described meeting an imprisoned boy
who said he was 11 years old but looked more like an 8-year-old.
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski said the boy was crying for his mother,
but did not say what happened to him.