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The CPT Report
Allan felt pain and frustration with the injustice of this dysfunctional system and the unnecessary suffering it was causing this and other Iraqi families. He felt this so deeply that he decided to just stay at the offices until the officials investigated this family’s request. He called on officials to provide a more consistent, well-defined, efficient, and just system of responding to claims. Allan sat at the offices overnight and started a liquids-only fast, which he kept for four and a half days. Three of our team were there talking with him when the head of the IAC asked him to leave and threatened arrest. Instead, when he didn’t leave, the official brought over three military police to escort Allan to the door and tell him he was barred from the building. For a couple weeks after that CPTers were not allowed entry into the IAC. Two weeks later, on January 24, Sheila, Cliff and I met with Ambassador Richard Jones, Deputy Administrator and Chief Policy Officer of the CPA; Scott Norwood, liaison between military and CPA; and Ronald Schilcher, Office of Provincial Outreach, who had known CPT team members in Hebron in the West Bank when he had worked at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem. Ambassador Jones was personable and expressed respect for CPT’s perspective, saying, “The detainee issue is of great concern to us.” He said that the CPA has “competing interests,” security interests, public relations interests, and humanitarian interests. He said that until November the priority was security, but now they needed to work on relationships with the Iraqi people. He described the steps they were taking to resolve some of the “horror stories” of human rights abuses and detainee injustices. Such steps included creating an executive board to work on these issues, and reducing the time from 24 to 14 days that detainees spend in holding areas before they are assigned to a detention facility. He pointed out that this is now the policy, but that it remained to be seen whether or not the policy would be carried out. Ambassador Bremer also announced the planned release of 500 detainees, and ordered an informational center to be created in a trailer outside Abu Ghraib prison to assist families seeking information. Sheila, Cliff, and I then summarized CPT’s report of abuses against Iraqi people when detained and the lack of a clear, consistent, transparent process for families to find information or to make compensation claims, giving some examples. The men seemed surprised by what we described. We gave suggestions for policies that would reduce these abuses, and would be more respectful of the Iraqi people, as well as, in the long run, increase the security for international people in Iraq. We suggested that their staff arrange for regular meetings with Iraqi human rights lawyers to discuss these problems and involve them in the planning for the new justice system of Iraq. We left information with them about contacting three such groups that we work with on a regular basis and offered to help make initial connections with them. In response, Scott Norwood suggested they were in the process of setting up a website that would list the detainees so that family members could go to the Internet and check for themselves. He suggested we contact his office to get more information about filing a report on abuses by the U.S. Military. We continued to set up meetings with other officials in the military and the CPA. Our team began a series of follow up steps. We began to funnel information of claimed abuses to their offices by e-mail, the way they had suggested, but by the time I left in late March, we had not received any responses. We arranged for a meeting with Ambassador Jones and three Iraqi human rights organizations. This meeting was postponed three times, each time being called off just before it was scheduled to begin. As of April the meeting had yet to be held. The cancellations were especially hard because the phone system was still not working and it was difficult to contact the people who had been invited to participate. So each time they showed up at our apartment ready to go, we had to tell them the meeting was postponed. It seemed to hurt our credibility with their organizations. The promised releases of prisoners have been slow and small, compared to the number of new prisoners detained each day. Our next meeting was on February 14 with Col. Marc Warren, Chief Judge Advocate under Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez. Two military personnel picked us up at the IAC and drove us over to the Republican Palace. As we walked in, Col. Warren deliberately rearranged the furniture in the cramped office so that he was not sitting behind a desk, and we were all in a circle on the same level. When we introduced ourselves, he shared openly about missing his family. Sheila, Cliff, and I presented CPT’s report and summary of the report and shared our concerns, providing examples from Abu Hishma village, and the Al Dora suburb of Baghdad. Col. Warren responded, saying that he thought our report was well written. In response to my sharing some of the stories of the men we had interviewed in the Al Dora raid, He said, “You can’t believe everything you hear.” “That’s true,” I answered, “but I have been hearing similar stories widely in different areas of Iraq, so that we have concluded that these are not isolated incidents or accidents, but general practice.” He told us that his job was to see that the U.S. forces followed the law. They would work on correcting abuses by improving the training of the new soldiers who were being rotated into Iraq. They want to train them to be more culturally aware, to use precise force and to restrain their use of force.
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