The crowd outside the prison walls seethes, demanding to visit the thousands inside.
Sunni and Shiite Muslims, engineers and farmers, mothers, uncles and militants are gathered on this scorching Friday. Each frantically waves the name and prisoner number of a brother, a father or a son, scribbled on a shred of paper, a scrap of a cigarette box, or typed on a crumpled bit of stationery.
“They will only let 30 people inside today,” the Iraqi official from Abu Ghraib prison shouts as the angry cluster of roughly 100 visitors erupts in jeers. “Whoever is here without an appointment must come back next week.”
More than a week into the fallout of abuse disclosures at Abu Ghraib prison, Iraqi outrage has swelled far beyond just photos of cruelty and torture and has seized on a much broader target: the entire U.S. system of raids, captures and detention. The human toll from a year of mounting confinements has emerged as an essential factor darkening Iraqi perceptions of the occupation and the United States.
Abu Ghraib, in short, has become the symbol of a deep sense of humiliation and frustration that crosses sectarian and class lines–a feeling that many argue is fueling the very insurgency the prisons are intended to contain.
“This will be a turning point,” Ismael Zayer, editor in chief of the daily Al-Sabah Al-Jadid newspaper, said of the prison scandal.
Facing that realization, U.S. officials acknowledge they are scrambling to sharply reduce the size of Iraq’s prison population, hoping to shrug off a costly project they never planned to manage on this scale. At its peak population early this year, Abu Ghraib prison held 8,000 people–nearly double its capacity–with all but several hundred prisoners living in basic canvas tents. The average detainee stayed more than four months.
“We recognized that is it is a bone of contention with the people we are supposed to be helping,” a senior coalition official said. “We are really pushing the accelerator pedal to reduce the prisoner population for obvious reasons.”
The Army never planned to be so enmeshed in the prison business in Iraq. But U.S. forces had barely settled in Baghdad in April 2003 before the bloodshed from a growing insurgency demonstrated that detaining civilian insurgents would fast become a part of the occupation.
Detention duty a struggle
From the beginning, the captures were presented by U.S. officials as steps toward peace. For months, U.S. military spokesmen stood before reporters in Baghdad and announced how many dozens of coalition opponents had been captured in raids each day. Thousands were being sent to Abu Ghraib and 15 other U.S.-run detention facilities throughout Iraq.
Yet military forces struggled to handle them. An internal Army report on the prison-abuse scandal prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba found that the military police unit at Abu Ghraib at the time had received no training in running a prison before setting foot in Iraq. In fact, neither of the Army’s two battalions trained in confinement have ever been assigned to Iraq, the report notes. One is in Afghanistan, and the other is in Kuwait.
By comparison, says Detlev Vagts, a Harvard international law professor and expert on the , Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, the U.S. planned far in advance for assuming a role as prison masters if needed.
“They had already started preparation of American troops to take control of Germans by the summer of 1942,” two years before the Allied invasion of Western Europe, Vagts said. “We trained interpreters. We had specialist teams who came in early and immediately began sorting out arrangements with police forces [for detention facilities].”
The prison abuse case has triggered an investigation into military intelligence practices and the training of military police who work in jails. The newly appointed chief of U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, says he is considering restricting the use of certain “particularly aggressive” interrogation techniques. President Bush, meanwhile, and other top U.S. officials have offered apologies to the Iraqi people.
Apologies too late
But to many Iraqis, the apologies and declarations are too late to bridge a widening gap in the U.S.-Iraqi relationship. Despite U.S. officials’ insistence that abusive practices are not widespread, many on the streets of Baghdad see the photos of men being forced into humiliating sexual positions as another illustration of the U.S. attitude toward Iraq.
“People feel their dignity has been insulted,” said Ahmad al-Samaree, the imam of a large Sunni mosque in Baghdad. “What will a father tell his son when an American soldier comes and handcuffs him, then makes him lay down and then a female soldier comes and steps on his head?”
U.S. officials argue that the insurgency is confined largely to loyalists to the former regime and foreign extremists. But to al-Samaree, who has close ties to rebels in Fallujah and Baghdad, that argument overlooks the effect that a year of building national frustration may have had in enabling rebels to operate.
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“That’s why we hear them on their way to the cemetery saying, `Revenge, revenge,'” he said.
That pervasive feeling of dishonor is voiced by a wide array of Iraqis, far beyond the ranks of those who have been arrested or detained. Zayer, the newspaper editor, is a prominent journalist and longtime U.S. ally who headed al-Sabah, a popular coalition-funded newspaper, until American “arrogance” recently drove him to quit, he said.
“They refused to recognize our independence,” Zayer said of coalition officials. “The whole newspaper resigned. We walked out.”
Many allegations credible
In the days since the abuse cases gained wide public notice with the publication of shocking photos, a flood of allegations have poured forth from former detainees–most of them impossible to confirm. Some are dubious, but many others are credible, including shared experiences of sleep deprivation, long hours forced into “stress positions,” and naked interrogations, among others.
The validity of those anecdotes was buttressed Thursday when the International Committee of the Red Cross announced it had reported precisely such allegations to U.S. authorities months before the abuse cases came to light.
But to the scores of Iraqis who flow into this bleak prison parking lot each day from around Iraq, the international spotlight does not mend the damage from a bitter year.
Mohammed Ahmed al-Samarai, 48, arrived April 6 for a scheduled visit with his uncle at Abu Ghraib, as he had several times since the arrest last May. But when he arrived, he was told that his uncle, Saadan Hassan had died, days earlier, in a rebel mortar attack on the prison. Instead of a visit, officials told al-Samarai to retrieve the body, he recalls. The uncle, he says, was 80 years old.
U.S. officials say they are working to accelerate the review board process that decides who gets a trial and who gets released.
But in the meantime, the problem for 30-year-old Fawzia Waharbia is more practical than matters of justice. Her husband, a clerk in a Baghdad court, was arrested 10 months ago, on charges that he was a captain in Saddam Hussein’s Fedayeen Saddam.
Waharbia says she soon ran out of money for her five children. She works now cleaning a school in the mornings and sells some of her government-supplied food rations for the bus ticket to the prison every day.
From a pocket deep inside her black abaya, the tiny woman pulls out a slip of paper scrawled with internee no. 15024065.
“Can you help me?” she pleaded, her eyes filling with tears. “I need him out.”