As most American troops reportedly are leaving Iraqi cities, the occupation enters a new phase in which it will become more clear whether the US-backed Iraqi government will be able to retain control without having US firepower instantly available to it in the street. In this situation, detention of Iraqi citizens, a key element of the occupation, may increase.

Detainees at prayer at Camp Bucca, Iraq. (Photo: AP)

    It is a grim prospect that the US would prefer to leave in the shadows, judging from the unwillingness of US military spokespersons to provide comprehensive responses to email questions on Iraqi detention presented to them over the last six months. The small amount of information that the Pentagon has provided, however, suggests that many if not most in Iraqi prisons are facing harsh conditions with no legal representation - a violation of their rights under international law.

    This conclusion is reinforced by a hunger strike of 300 detainees protesting their treatment in Rusafa prison near Baghdad that started over the weekend of June 13-14, 2009, according to a June 16 Associated Press report. Iraq's Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, the report also said, would charge 40 police officers for jailing inmates without warrants and other rights violations.

    On June 12, 2009, Harith al-Obaidi, perhaps Iraq's leading campaigner against abuse in Iraqi prisons, a Sunni cleric and deputy chair of the Parliament's human rights committee, was assassinated one day after condemning prison abuse in a fiery debate in Parliament. Mr. Obaidi, the report said, "was fighting against such practices as torture and indefinite detention for prisoners, and was trying to improve their living conditions."

    Emails requesting information on what the US military knows about torture in Iraqi prisons have brought no response, with the exception that I was referred by a military press officer in Baghdad to a June 7, 2009, Agence France Presse (AFP) report on torture and prisoner abuse. The article says that the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior investigated the torture of 10 prisoners at a prison in Diwaniyah and that the chief of the prison and interrogators there were transferred to another prison. The AFP report said the ministry also reported that eight prisoners at a prison in Amara, arrested in June 2008, had gone on a hunger strike protesting the delay in processing their cases.

    In response to questions about conditions in Iraqi prisons, the Pentagon has taken the position most recently stated in a June 30, 2009, email from a military press officer: "The US does not run prisons, the Iraqis do."

    The US is likely to have, however, detailed knowledge of conditions within Iraqi prisons, judging from a December 5, 2008, DoD email saying: "U.S. advisors and trainers are co-located in many of the Iraqi prisons to which Iraqi nationals are transferred. These individuals provide real-time mentoring and training to assist the Government of Iraq in meeting international standards of judicial and human rights."

    The Pentagon has failed over the last six months to answer questions about specifics of the prison mentoring program.

    The Pentagon did provide some insight into Iraqi prison conditions, whether intentionally or not, in the person of David King, a British civil servant working with US forces in Iraq. In answer to questions on conditions in Iraqi prisons during a Pentagon-sponsored phone conference for Internet reporters on April 17, 2009, Mr. King gave what appears to be the most forthcoming description of Iraqi prison conditions provided directly by any Pentagon-connected source:

    "I personally engage on issues that arise around detention facilities and the sort of challenge that there is between operational pressure and frankly the rule of law now. And I have been to a number of facilities. So I do have some idea of the issues that face up ...

    "I would sort of say that, in the round ... it's an uncomfortable place to be, to be in an MOD (Iraqi Ministry of Defense) facility. If you judged it by the standards we hope at our best we'd apply in, say, the US and the UK, we would say that they are very overcrowded ... and they are very poorly equipped. And they are, therefore, uncomfortable.

    "But there are some cultural pieces to this about a willingness to accept more people in a smaller space that we might. I make no judgment on that, but overcrowding, and overcrowding is an issue in many facilities; it's not an issue in all of them.

    "And if I'm specific, again, medical conditions - I do hear often, I do see, issues that result from proximity of people and lack of light and lack of air. You know, as I say, these are not - these are not great places."

    Mr. King went on to say that he had also seen good care in Iraq prisons and "some improvements" and that "quite a few of the indicators are the right way ... in terms of getting clean bedding and clean clothing to people, getting visits to detainees, getting family access, getting notification to the families after arrests. These are things which are better than they were.

    "But there is no disguising the fact that the detention facilities, even in the MOD, are not ideal."

    Mr. King said that overcrowding is related to military operations "where people are being picked up for what should be - sometimes is, sometimes isn't - a short period before investigation and either release or processing into the system.

    "So overcrowding tends to be worse in areas where there is - and this is understandable - where there is an intense effort to try to deal with the terrorism in the field."

    Detention, he continued, "is a very live issue that gets a lot of attention in - not just by us, but inside the government of Iraq and inside the Ministry of Defense. There is a debate all the time about what to do, how to do and how best to meet the obligations under law. And that's a very healthy thing even if there are problems day by day."

    The number being held in Iraqi prisons and detention centers was put at 26,200 by Iraqi Human Rights Minister Wejdan Mikheil, according to the June 7, 2009, AFP report.

    Asked in an email request, following up on the conference call, how many prisoners in Iraqi jails have legal representation, Mr. King said: "We would say it is a minority (one suggestion perhaps 20 percent). Others would have to offer their accounts to the investigating judges."

    The imprisonment and treatment of Iraqi citizens has been an extremely sensitive subject since the occupation began in 2003, with the height of global awareness and outrage reaching a crescendo with the release in 2004 of photos of US military personnel torturing Iraqis.

    With the "surge" in US troops into Iraq in 2007, detentions by US forces increased, reaching a peak of about 26,000 in late 2007, concurrent with other suppression tactics, including air and ground assaults on suspected resistance forces in urban areas and erection of urban walls.

    With the rise in its detentions, the US moved to improve living conditions for those entering its prisons, established reeducation programs and publicized the changes.

    While US detention centers were receiving press attention, the conditions in Iraqi prisons and detention centers were known only through piecemeal reports that pointed uniformly to overcrowding, abysmal health conditions and instances of torture. (Truthout, Dec. 3, 2008). The conditions in Iraqi jails became a heightened concern in early 2009 as a US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) required the US to begin releasing its Iraqi prisoners or turning them over to the Iraqi government for jailing.

    It is not known at this writing exactly how many Iraqi prisoners the US continues to hold or how many have been transferred to Iraqi custody. Email information requests to Task Force 134, which is responsible for US detention facilities, have gone unanswered since early January 2009. Such information requests received responses prior to 2009.

    The Economist reported May 7, 2009, that the number of Iraqis being held in US prisons at that time was less than 7,400. However, the article continues:

    "It is hard to tell how many former detainees are being rearrested and imprisoned again by Iraq's own security forces. Quite a few are known to have been sent recently to Camp Cropper." Camp Cropper is a US prison in Iraq.

    This raises the question of whether the US is now acting as jailer for the Iraqi government as it relinquishes its role, under the SOFA, as jailer of prisoners it captured since the 2003 invasion.

    The article concludes:

    "The future may be shakier still for those who get transferred by the Americans to one of the nine approved Iraqi prisons. Cases often take months to come to court. Corruption is rife, with reports of inmates being freed after bribing their guards. Several prisons have notoriously bad human-rights records. In truth, what happens once the detainees are out of American hands, whether they are set free or switched to an Iraqi jail, is anyone's guess."

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