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The CPT Report
Tony expressed a lot of frustration with the military. He was eager to leave Iraq and the military, and said he could be killed any day. He was wearing a ragged piece of cloth as an armband in remembrance of a buddy who was killed a few days earlier. Tony said, “If you try to do what is right, you get kicked. I tried to do what is right, and I got knocked down into the cellar.” He didn’t explain what he meant. He was fighting back tears as Cliff and Art told him they wanted him to be safe, that they cared about him. Here was a good person, caught in a force he could not control, trying to preserve his integrity, trying to keep his heart from becoming hard and cold, trying to do the best he could. In early January, we began to take our CPT Report to meetings we had set up with U.S. military and civilian officers who were influential in carrying out detainee policies. Since the previous August, when I had gone into the Republican Palace in the Green Zone for the first time and Judge Campbell had given me copies of the lists of detainees, other U.S. personnel, supportive of our work of giving information to families, continued to give us updated lists on a computer flash disk. We in turn provided this list to the three Iraqi human rights organizations working closely with us. Lower ranking military personnel, concerned about the problems in the system, encouraged us to talk to higher ranking officers who have more influence on policy making. The first one they suggested that we talk to was Col. Ralph Sabatino, who oversaw the CPA Ministry of Justice, and who had been in charge of classifying the names of all the detainees since immediately after the war was declared over, May 1, 2003. In early January, three CPT members, Sheila Provencher, Allan Slater, and I went to talk to Col. Sabatino and two other officers. I summarized our concerns about the excessive violence used in house raids, abusive treatment of detainees, and unjust confiscation of property. Sheila outlined our concerns about the inaccessibility of information and poor visitation policies. Allan shared specific examples that he had observed. Col. Sabatino stated right out that night raids would continue, because they were military operations procedure. The "bad guys” operate at night, and that is when military forces have the best chance to capture them, he explained. “It is safer to hold such raids than to try to dialogue,” he said. CPTers suggested that, in the long run, the trauma to families and their resentment and their anger compromised security. Might treating the people with dignity and respect make a difference? Col. Sabatino confirmed that the house raids were often timed to be less than 45 seconds, and there were usually 25 seconds of “absolute fury,” that soldiers physically pushed and subdued people who “did not comply” quickly with orders (shouted in English!) to get down. He clearly supported this use of force, despite acknowledging that sometimes military units raided the wrong house. This was the area of our greatest disagreement. “Abusive treatment of detainees is a training problem,” he said. “Detainees who have been mistreated or their families should file a complaint. It will be investigated and prosecuted.” He then outlined the proper steps for filing a complaint. When we related the extreme difficulties families have had in trying to go through these steps, with very little results, he acknowledged that, “Yes, there isn’t a good way for an Iraqi civilian to report a military crime.” Col. Sabatino defended the practice of confiscating property, but agreed with us that there were many problems connected to this. Soldiers were not following their own policies of issuing receipts. He admitted that he had never seen any soldier issue a receipt. He suggested that the head attorney at the Organization for Human Rights request a meeting with the staff Judge Advocate at the airport detention center to discuss the claims procedure. CPT agreed to draft the letter of request. “Yes, a four to six month wait for visitation at Abu Ghraib prison is poor policy, but we are trying to work on it,” he said. He also said it was unlikely that international NGOs or Iraqi organizations would receive access to the lists of prisoners. CPA’s plan is to update the list, translate it into Arabic, and make it available to every Civil Military Operations Center. He suggested we write letters to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, asking for meetings, if we wanted to pursue the issues of inaccessibility of information. Less than two weeks later Allan briefly took our advocacy work another step further, when he had a short “sit-in” and fast at the Iraqi Assistance Center. He had been working hard to help a family go through the system to try to get back their property or at least get compensation. The property had been confiscated by U.S. soldiers when their house was raided the previous September. They had gone more than five times to different offices since October and finally got a letter from a U.S. Colonel saying their case should be investigated. Each time they were put off until finally they were told there was nothing U.S. agencies could do for them.
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