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The CPT Report
by: Peggy Gish
June - July
2004
The Link - Volume 37, Issue 3
Page 12
He mentioned the book and movie Algiers, a story that took place during the Algerian revolution against French colonization. What struck him in this account was that the French started using extreme interrogation tactics and used extreme counter-force measures, which seemed effective in the short run, but increased the resistance and later “blew up in their face.” It’s instructive for the situation we are in right now,” he added.
“Family visits are a real concern of mine.” he said and acknowledged that they have done a poor job of disseminating information and that the process of moving detainees through the system was incredibly slow. Soon, however, the CPA website will include a list of lesser security prisoners. “Information about high security guys, we will keep under our control.” One other improvement he mentioned was that more judge advocates had been commissioned to work on the review board to make decisions on individual cases. Instead of only two days a week, they will work on this seven days a week and each week try to process at least a hundred cases.
In response to our talking about prisoners’ legal rights and referring to the Geneva Conventions, he said the Geneva Conventions allow occupying forces to hold security detainees “forever.” “But we will try to cull out those amenable for trial.” When we asked if they would turn over the oversight of security detainees to Iraqis when the transfer of power came on July 1, he said, “No.”
Because of the rotating in of new military troops during February and the CPA’s work on reorganizing the detainee lists, we did not receive any more updated lists. In early March, Cliff met Edward Schmultz, the former assistant attorney general of the U.S., who told him, “There are thousands of Iraqis being held who should be at home. We’re working on a list to get all the names straight.”
No one actually knows just how many Iraqis have been detained by the U.S. military. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority asserts between 11,000 and 13,000 but they acknowledge that their records are incomplete. The Baghdad-based Organization for Human Rights (OHR) estimates at least 18,000.
We began to study more closely the last list we had received, dated December 30, 2003, which listed 8,855 names. We were aware that there were thousands more detainees, considered higher security detainees, not on this list. We found that of those on this list, 453 had no charges listed, 22 were held because they are relatives or friends of a suspected person (hostages), 89 detained because they were at or near the target of a military raid, and the charge of 79 was listed as being a Baath Party member. We took this study to various journalists. In his testimony before Congress on May 7, 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld noted that some 43,000 people had been captured or detained in Iraq, of whom 31,850 had been released, leaving over 11,000 still in prison.
There were many good people in this horrible system, many who wanted to do things differently, but were under orders or felt like they had no power to change things. Talking with the U.S. military and CPA officials seemed important to do, but we didn’t have very high expectations for what would come from it. We didn’t know how much influence our work had on the recent increase of releases of security detainees or of the CPA’s investigation into allegations of abuse by U.S. soldiers in detention centers. We would continue to seek out meetings with people in the system. We would still urge giving decision making power to the Iraqi human rights workers in this early stage of the process.
Any change, however, seemed very slow and fairly small, not really addressing the basic structural violence used to prop up a system of occupation.
That, of course, was before “Sixty-Minutes II”—and all those photographs.
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