By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters, 02 April 2006
BAGHDAD, April 2 (Reuters) - Enough Iraqis should be trained within a year to run jails for insurgent suspects, but concern over torture and legality of detention without charge may see Washington keep legal custody for longer, a U.S. official says.
The commander of U.S. prison operations, which include Abu Ghraib and three other sites, said he could not predict when the Iraqi government will match U.S. standards of care for detainees and pass laws allowing it to hold people without trial -- key conditions for handing over detainees, numbering 14,700 today.
"The final decision to pass legal and physical custody and pull all the Americans out is truly conditional and I would not venture to guess when that will be because the environments are too complicated," Major General Jack Gardner told Reuters.
With all U.S. forces focusing on a withdrawal conditional partly on training Iraqis, the detentions command Task Force 134 hopes to have some 3,600 Iraqi staff for its three jails trained and ready by the end of this year, Gardner said last week.
By then Baghdad's Abu Ghraib should have closed and most of its 4,300 inmates moved to a site nearby at the high-security Camp Cropper -- "ideally sometime through the summer and into the fall," he said in an interview.
Some 800 Iraqis have completed a five-week basic course, 200 are training and a further 250 would begin their courses in mid-April. Further training is conducted on the job under U.S. supervision within a plan to hand the work gradually to Iraqis.
Acknowledging that "Abu Ghraib still resonates in much of the world" for the abuse of prisoners by American soldiers in 2003, Gardner said U.S. officials had worked hard to improve the safeguards for detainees. Most of them are held without charge as "imperative security threats" but not prosecuted.
Questions over a future Iraqi government's ability to ensure standards, especially in the light of the discovery of abuse at a secret Interior Ministry prison bunker in Baghdad in November and allegations of sectarian police death squads, make it uncertain when the United States will finally hand over control.
"We have to make sure that, in the conditions that we're transferring them into, they're not at risk," Gardner said.
LEGAL BASIS
While 50,000 detentions since 2003 have fueled resentment of Americans among minority Sunnis who constitute the bulk of the insurgents, their fears of the Shi'ite-led authorities are often greater. Though guards will be hired locally, central control will be required to avoid sectarian problems, Gardner said.
The U.S. and Iraqi governments would work with organisations like the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure Washington meets legal obligations not to endanger detainees.
Moreover, while the United States points to a United Nations Security Council Resolution allowing it to detain people without charge as suspected guerrillas, the Iraqi government would need to pass its own legislation to do that, he said.
Gardner acknowledged the "sensitivities" of holding people without charge -- the Iraq detentions and Taliban suspects held at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay have prompted widespread criticism of U.S. policy. He said he was now working to increase the number of detainees sent for trial in a U.S.-sponsored Iraqi court.
The handover conditions mean while training of Iraqis is going "fairly well", giving a prospect of many of the 5,200 Americans working in jails going home, ultimate U.S. control of Camp Cropper, Camp Bucca in the south and Fort Suse in Kurdistan may continue for an as-yet undefinable period, Gardner stressed.
"The final transfer, when we might pass both physical and legal custody to the Iraqis, is conditional and when that'll happen I'm not sure," he said, adding he could not predict how the number of detainees in his custody might vary over time.
Currently close to double what it was at the start of last year, Gardner said he could not predict future trends and declined to speculate whether a new Iraqi unity government that will include many Sunnis may exert pressure for mass amnesties.
"That's between the new government and (the overall U.S. commander) and the U.S. ambassador whether something materialises a few months down the road," he said.
Conditions at the much expanded Camp Cropper, currently home only to Saddam Hussein and 130 other high-ranking inmates, would be better than at Abu Ghraib -- Saddam's torture centre where prisoners are now housed in tents in razor-wire compounds.
Other changes include distribution of newspapers and several hours of recorded television and video material -- "so they understand the world a bit better".
Among popular demands from prisoners at Abu Ghraib, he said, were violent American movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
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Citation: Alastair Macdonald. "US trains Iraq jailers, no date for prison transfer," Reuters, 02 April 2006.
Original URL: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MAC937962.htm
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