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The CPT Report
“Is there anything you can do to help find my brother?” a worried looking young Iraqi man asked, after finding our Christian Peacemaker Teams’ (CPT) apartment in central Baghdad in June 2003. He had heard from friends that this was a place he could get help. Our first involvement with the U.S.-run prison system in Iraq and the problems of detainees and their families began in May 2003. Team members were assessing the effects of the war and the conditions under U.S. occupation and determining the focus of our work in post-invasion Iraq. CPT started working In Iraq in October 2002. In the beginning we documented suffering caused by the sanctions, and tried to prevent the war by organizing public actions at the UN headquarters and other places in Iraq. We were in Baghdad during the bombing and continued our work after the invasion. The team tried to visit the U.S.-run prison set up at the Baghdad airport, speak with the U.S. soldiers, and observe how Iraqi prisoners were treated. Despite several attempts, we were denied access. But while we were waiting we met several Iraqi families who had come to find their loved ones who had been arrested or had disappeared. They, too, were being denied access and information, so they asked the team for help. In May there was no system for locating prisoners, but later we were able to go to the Iraqi Assistance Center and there find some of the names, charges, and serial numbers of detainees. As more people came for help, we discovered this was not easy to do. We found information for only about 10 percent of the cases we brought. At first the disorganization of the system seemed to be a normal phenomenon of the chaos that follows war. But as we worked on this all summer, then into the fall and winter, we saw that the system did not improve. Sure, there would be a few successful inquiries, where the family was able to find and visit the prisoner, and even a few released. But for most families this didn’t happen. With each family or released prisoner we talked to, we heard various stories of violent house raids in which the men were knocked down, beaten and often detained, in which household furnishings were destroyed and money and jewelry stolen. Released detainees told us about physical and psychological abuse both during the processing and interrogation phases and within the prison system itself. As early as last summer we realized that abuse was widespread since the beginning of the occupation. At that time we shared with lower ranking military officers what we had found. They urged us to go to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. appointed civilian chief of the occupation authority, and to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. We went to both, giving them copies of our report on 72 cases of detainees, summarizing the abuses and problems of the system and suggesting changes. (The full report is available on our website: www.cpt.org.) In response, we were told that the violent house raids and wide sweeps of men from neighborhoods or streets were important for the security of U.S. troops. We, in turn, pointed out that the excessive violence and abuses not only caused much suffering for the Iraqi people, but put U.S. forces, civilian personnel, and international humanitarian workers in danger. With the recent exposure of the degrading pictures of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, the first thought is usually, “It must be an aberration, ‘a few bad people,’” as President Bush asserted. In our work with detainees over the past year we encountered countless honorable soldiers who work in the system. One female officer in particular at Bucca Prison Camp near Um Qasr, demonstrated great compassion when our team members accompanied an Iraqi mother and father to visit their three sons. Many released prisoners who told us stories of abuse, also talked about “noble soldiers” who protested such abuse and treated them with respect. Yet the sheer numbers of allegations of mistreatment, many of which I have heard personally, suggest that the problem is not just a few bad people but something broader and deeper, something rooted in the very nature of a foreign occupation. The Missing As the summer progressed, more Iraqi people came to us to help find information about family members who had been detained by the U.S. military. Dr. Amer, a dentist was distraught, because his brother, Ameer, a fourth year engineering student, had been arrested. He told us that Ameer and two friends had just left their classes and had been walking home on June 23 when they saw a fight break out among some Iraqi men nearby. He went to see what was happening, heard gunshots, and ran. U.S. military police caught him and at first were going to let him go, because he had no weapon. Then they found a weapon on the ground in the area and accused him of firing it. Soldiers took him to an Iraqi police station for questioning and arrested him. He had been scheduled to take his final exams the next day. At the end of August, when we got the lists of detainees from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), we found he was being held in Um Qasr. When I left Iraq, two months later, Ameer was still in detention. Ramuydh, age 39, left his job as a guard at a chicken farm between Falluja and Ramadi, as usual, at 6:30 a.m. on July 13, and started home on his motorcycle. He carried a gun that he uses to protect the chicken farm. Later, when he didn’t return home, his brother and friends went to find him along his usual route. They found tracks in the desert, some remnants of food he had with him, and small broken parts of his motorcycle. There were other tracks there, so they assumed he had been arrested by U.S. soldiers. His brother came to the governor’s office in Falluja, where we met him. We tried to find information about Ramuydh at the Iraq Assistance Center (IAC) in Baghdad, but had no success.
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