The Not-Quite News About Prisons

The thing about prison is that you’re locked away. No
one can see you unless they’re let in or you’re let
out. Suddenly – and I am relieved that the world knows
about it at last – the abuse of prisoners in Iraq has
become partly visible. The Photos made news in a way
that countless Iraqi people’s stories did not.

The Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) has been taking
statements and testimonies from released detainees and
their relatives for months – www.cpt.org – as has an
awesome Italian woman called Paola Gasparoli and there
are several Iraqi human rights organisations working
on individual cases. And yes, they do also work on
cases relating to the old government.

The pictures which have been published cause outrage
and rightly so but they are the tip of the iceberg.

Women are often detained because their husbands are
wanted. There have been many reports of them being
kept naked. There have also been a lot of women
detained because they were prostitutes used by
high-ranking officials of the old leadership. A woman
human rights worker from one of the major
organisations working on detainee issues disappeared
into a US prison for two months.

It is known that many women have been detained,
including over a dozen bank clerks, to force them to
pay for the discrepancy between the genuine currency
handed in and that given out in the January
changeover. They were told to pay out new currency for
all notes handed in, even suspect ones, because there
was no way of verifying which were real. But to be
imprisoned is deeply shameful for a woman, mainly
because it is assumed that she will have been raped,
so most are unwilling to talk about what happened,
even confidentially and there is as a result very
little information about women detainees.

One prisoner told CPT about hearing rumours of a mass
grave under the prison. He said that he and fellow
prisoners dug under their tent and found recently dead
bodies a few feet down. There were stories,
independently back up by various former detainees, of
demonstrations against conditions in the camp being
brutally suppressed by soldiers and another man
reported one incident where the prisoners were
shouting “Freedom” and soldiers opened fire, killing
four men and injuring three.

There are reports in the cases known to me, to CPT and
to the local human rights organisations of the
following:

Extrajudicial executions during a raid which turned
out to be on the wrong house.
Violent arrests of children from their school.
A prisoner having his toenail being pried off by
guards.
Prisoners being forced to swallow liquid.
Psychological torture: being left blindfolded in an
open air passage, wit a tank driving towards them so
they thought they would be run over and killed.
A minor reported having his buttocks held apart by
soldiers who were kicking his anus.

The following appear routinely throughout the
statements of detainees and their families:

Beating and kicking of prisoners and of residents
during house raids; soldiers and guard treading on
backs and heads
Guns being pointed at children or held to their heads
during raids.
Denial of water
Denial of food or very low quantities and poor quality
of food, sometimes including pork which is forbidden
for Muslims.
Denial of blankets, shade or air conditioning.
Excessive chemicals being added to water so it is
dangerous to drink.
Denial of washing and toilet facilities, both within
the prison camps and during long road transfers.
Hands being tied behind the back for prolonged
periods, including when this prevents the prisoners
from drinking water.
Hands being tied so tightly that the arms swell.
Denial of medical attention or being taken to a
military ‘doctor’ who kicks and otherwise abuses or
else ignores and refuses to examine the prisoner.
Overcrowding of tents so that there is not enough room
to lie down to sleep.
Prisoners being forced to kneel or squat all day and
to remain in the sun all day in temperatures of up to
120 degrees F.
Detention of minors.
Individuals being kept for their entire detention in
only underwear or nightwear, having been refused the
chance to get dressed when arrested at night,
sometimes suffering severe sunburn as a result.
Severe verbal abuse.
Theft of money and jewellery by US soldiers during the
raid.
Failure to return documentation, IDs, passports and
other personal property that was with the prisoner
when detained.
Use of Kuwaiti military as translators and prison
guards, who are apparently particularly aggressive
with Iraqi detainees, believing that they are taking
revenge for the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Additionally there is no provision for detainees to be
given access to legal advice or representation. From
arrest, it can take weeks even to be processed. There
is limited provision for family visits and relatives
have to wait at prison gates with the tag number of
the prisoner. Most are told to return in several weeks
or months.

It may be impossible for the family to find out the
tag number, because names are transliterated into
English and stored in a computer. There is no
standardised transliteration system for Arabic into
English and a tiny difference in the spelling of a
name could make it impossible to trace the prisoner,
leaving the family uncertain which jail the person is
in or even whether he is still alive and lost in the
system somewhere.

There is a huge amount of evidence that US forces are
acting on false information and ‘malicious tips’ which
they do not bother to investigate or verify before
carrying out raids and arrests. Accusations include
harbouring wanted members of the old regime who had in
fact already been arrested, being a member of the
Fedayeen or trafficking weapons, with one man who had
been repeatedly tortured by the Baathists being jailed
for being a Baathist.

The fact that the ‘information’ is false is evidenced
by the fact that so many are released without any
charges or evidence being brought against them. Of 63
former or current detainees interviewed by CPT
members, not one was convicted of anything.
Unfortunately, because the review board meets so
irregularly, it can take many months before the
release without charge is effected.

Mass arrests also occur, with soldiers seizing every
man in a given area after an incident, which may have
involved only one or two individuals, or during a
raid. In some cases the raid has been on the wrong
house and the soldiers have admitted the mistake but
nonetheless arrested the young men in the house.

The detentions often mean the loss of the family’s
only earner and also the only driver, so that children
can’t get to school, and in some cases loss of the
family home if they can’t pay the rent. There are
indications that some families have managed to
retrieve individuals from the prisons by way of bribes
to people working with the coalition forces. Others
say they would gladly pay if they could find someone
reliable to give money to. Depression is ubiquitous
among the prisoners and some families report severe
behavioural changes following release.

This information relates to US prisons. I’m sorry that
I haven’t got any for the British troops in the south.
There are one or two local human rights groups down
there but fewer international activists and fewer
journalists. The pressure needs to be kept up so the
detainees don’t just disappear again. The governments
involved have to be pressed for more information and
to take responsibility for and control of their
troops.

Lawyers acting for the US soldiers charged are
claiming that it was a system wide problem and their
clients are not responsible because they weren’t given
clear guidelines. Do you really need a guideline to
know you’re not meant to beat, kick and sexually abuse
a prisoner? But their individual guilt shouldn’t be
used to absolve those higher up the system of theirs.

The commanders are responsible, right to the top of
the military, right to the political leadership, the
ministers and secretaries of state whose job it was to
provide clear rules, supervision, protections, to know
what was going on and to get rid of individuals
responsible. They won’t take that responsibility of
their own accord. It’s left to us to persuade them.