Iraqis released from Abu Ghraib taken on a bizarre journey and dumped

Bizarre Bus Ride for Abu Ghraib Detainees

Why they would do this is beyond me.

Scores of prisoners released from the controversial Abu Ghraib prison Tuesday were forced to take a winding, nearly five-hour journey through central Iraq on three hot, rickety buses escorted by U.S. military Humvees before being deposited without explanation in the middle of a gravel quarry near Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit.

It was unclear why the detainees, at least a hundred of them, were dropped off at the remote location 120 miles north of Baghdad. Some got rides home from relatives who had frantically followed the buses in their vehicles. Others climbed into the back of a dump truck or returned to their buses and got a ride back to Baghdad. A few were still milling about on the dirt road where they were released when a reporter and photographer left the scene.

The bizarre ordeal for the detainees came as the U.S. military continues to reel from the prisoner-abuse scandal that erupted last week. Photographs showed Iraqis at Abu Ghraib being subjected to various humiliations, including being stripped naked and forced to simulate sex acts.

U.S. military officials didn't respond to several requests for comment about the way detainees were released Tuesday. Soldiers who escorted the convoy said briefly that there was some kind of mix-up, then they quickly drove away.

One of the Iraqi bus drivers said angrily as he was driving away: "They are playing with their nerves. They are trying to destroy them. This is not the first time."

The Pentagon announced today that they were going to reduce the population of Abu Ghraib Prison by half. But why take them on this bizarre bus ride and dump them at a quarry? Why can't they just walk out the gate and get picked up by family?

On Tuesday, most of the detainees appeared relieved to be out of custody. Some embraced relatives while others danced and chanted. One furiously tore up what appeared to be a glossy English-language brochure.

All were bound at the wrists during the journey, which started at the prison just west of Baghdad sometime before 10 a.m.

The three buses were escorted by three Humvees as they traveled first to Baghdad. As they entered the city, the convoy made a U-turn and then headed north. The buses were followed by nearly two dozen vehicles that move from side to side with turns and lane shifts.

About 60 miles north of Baghdad, near the town of Balad, the buses turned down a side road and entered a military base.

Outside the gate, Iraqis hoping to find relatives on the buses asked what was happening but were told only that the convoy was refueling. After about 15 minutes, an Iraqi guard suggested that family members drive to a second entrance where the convoy might emerge.

The Iraqis drove back to the main highway and waited at the turnoff leading to the other gate. There they could see if the convoy was coming from either direction.

Kamell Hassen, 52, of Samarra, said he was at the prison to inquire about when his brother, Thamer, 40, would be released, but couldn't get any information.

"I saw three buses getting out of the prison," he said. "I decided to follow the buses."

Hassen said coalition forces came to his house in December and took his brother away after beating him in front of his family.

He said after the pictures of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were aired last week, "all my family is getting crazy."

"This is a crime against humanity," he said. "This is a crime against Islam and other religions."

Though he didn't know if his brother was on any of the buses, he said he was willing to follow them "until midnight."

Suddenly the convoy appeared again on the main highway. The detainees waved from their windows as they rode by. The awaiting Iraqis scrambled into their vehicles to resume the mysterious pursuit.

The convoy eventually reached the outskirts of Tikrit and wound its way down some residential streets before crossing a bridge and driving onto a dirt road.

About a mile down the road the convoy stopped and, after a few moments of confusion, the prisoners were released around 2:30 p.m.

One detainee, who declined to give his name, asked, "Is this democracy?"

This callous treatment just reinforces the impression of American disregard for the Iraqis' wellbeing and dignity. Why can't they do something decent for just once! Not even in the middle of the furor over the revelation of systematic torture and murder in Abu Ghraib, do they try to display some humanity. This is digusting.

Comments

[silentbutdeadly]

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040503-110300-1693r

Foreign fighters in unstable Fallujah
By P. Mitchell Prothero
Published 5/3/2004 11:48 AM

FALLUJAH, Iraq, May 3 (UPI) -- While U.S. Marine commanders are hopeful that patrols of local fighters will bring peace to Fallujah, -- a city wracked by anti-coalition activity since the arrival of U.S. forces a year ago -- a situation of even greater concern appears to be lurking; an entire neighborhood seems to be completely under the control of foreign Islamic fighters, mostly from Syria.

An Iraqi employee of United Press International entered Fallujah on Saturday with a source who serves as a mid-level official in the Army of Mohammed, the umbrella group of Iraqi resistance opposing the U.S. occupation. The source had agreed to help arrange a tour of the city and interviews with civilians and resistance fighters by a UPI reporter for the following day.

They entered the city using a route that passed a new Fallujah Protective Army checkpoint, which waved them into the center of the city without even a cursory search. After the local guide liaised with Iraqi fighters in Fallujah, the pair was given permission to travel to the city and was supplied with three armed guards from the Army of Mohammed while they attempted to identify damaged parts of the city and arrange interviews. Upon their arrival in the Golan neighborhood in the northern portion of the city, where much of the fighting has taken place, a group of fighters speaking with Syrian accents approached and ordered the resistance fighters to leave and took the two men into custody.

"First, a guy came up to me speaking like a Syrian and told me to put out my cigarette," the UPI employee, Osama Mansour said." When our guards told him that we were with them, he told them to leave and go back to their base. And they did. Then his men searched our car and found business cards and a picture of (Shiite Cleric Moqtada) Sadr."

"I knew right they must be (fundamentalists) because of how they acted when they thought I was Shiite," Osama said. "And they broke the (music) cassettes they found in the car and put me in handcuffs, claiming that I was a Kufr (non-believer) and a spy."

While Osama was handcuffed and locked in a closet, the guide he was working with was taken to another room, and both were then subject to semi-professional interrogation.

"They would ask me questions and then take them to (the guide) and come back and question me on parts of my story," he said.

"They found the (business) cards (of the UPI reporter) and asked me why I worked for Kufr. When I said that we just wanted to interview them to tell the truth, he told me to shut up," Osama said. "They called their leader, who interviewed me, and they all spoke with Syrian accents. They were not Iraqi."

"After they found the picture of Sadr and a letter from Sadr's office giving us permission to travel in the south, they asked me if I was Shiite or Sunni. I told them 'Hey I'm a Muslim, there is no Shiite and Sunni.' They respected that but told me that the Shiite were worse than Kufr, who just don't believe. They said the Shiite disagreed with (the Prophet Mohammed) and should all be killed."

Osama said at least 10 Syrians were in the compound he was held in and estimates that far more were hidden in various fortifications around the area.

But after three hours of questioning and searches, the men returned all of the equipment taken from the car and drove the two men out of the neighborhood.

"If your name wasn't Osama, we would have killed you," said one of the fighters as they left, making an obvious reference to al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, U.S. military officials named a former general with anti-Baathist credentials to head a newly formed Iraqi military unit intended to help pacify the restive Sunni city of Fallujah after an outcry against the pro-Saddam Hussein background of the first choice.

While it's not clear if U.S. officials even offered the job of heading the newly formed Fallujah Protective Army to Gen. Jasim Mohamed Saleh -- who once headed Republican Guard units and served as governor of the local province -- the original plan appears to have put Saleh in charge.

But after questions arose about his long history as a key player in the former regime, U.S. officials quickly disputed that the job had been offered and named Gen. Mohammed Latif to head the FPA, while speculating that Saleh would have a role in the unit.

And the top officer for the U.S. Marines in the area used a weekend press conference to dispute reports that the Marines would withdraw from Fallujah and turn local security over to the new unit. The initial reports to that effect came from embedded reporters and eyewitness accounts of Marines pulling back from their positions in Fallujah and turning over several checkpoints to the FPA.

"We have chosen not to commingle U.S. and Iraqi units, and that has prompted some realignment of Marine forces," Lt. Gen. James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said Saturday. "In fact, we have assigned the Iraqi battalion to our least-engaged sector until they can get their feet on deck, absorb the weapons and equipment we are passing their way, and prepare for the next phase of the operation."

Conway said the decision to incorporate local fighters -- some of whom undoubtedly had recently been fighting the U.S. forces -- stemmed from a need to co-opt Iraqis frustrated by the occupation from the most committed anti-coalition fighters.

"It got at what was essentially at that point our operational objective, which was to separate out the hard-core insurgents and freedom fighters from the other citizens of the city that may well have taken up weapons against us, based upon the fact that they thought they were defending their city, based upon the call of the imams and those types of things," Conway said.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

[Mooser]

But if they are going to reduce the population of the prison by half, isn't that as much as admitting that at least half of the population has no reason to be there in the first place?
Or are "terrorists" fungible?

[tex]

...at least half of the population has no reason to be there in the first place?

Yes. Which corroborates the stories of Iraqis of raids in which the Americans just took all the men for no reason.

[Oldman]

It's the war of pictures. Imagine the photos of hundreds of Iraqi prisoners released from the front gates of Abu Gharaibi which has of course the henious reputation as a maw of no return from Saddam's day, with half of them yammering about abuses or pulling up their shirts to show beating bruises and scars.

They dump them out back away from the bright lights for the same reason why people put the garbage out back in cities - so the trash doesn't make the public face of the establishment look dirty.

[DoDo]

Making it harder for Western journalists to track ex-inmates down and interview them might have also played a role.

An off-topic note: I noticed the US, even British press largely ignores Iraq polls in "Coalition of the Willing" (aka Second Warshaw Pact) countries. But maybe some here are interested - here are the numbers from one, taken end of April:

Q: Have you agreed with sending Hungarian soldiers to Iraq when it happened?

Totally: 14%, rather yes: 7%, ambiguous: 19%, rather not: 11%, not at all: 45% [Yours truly too]

Q: Should Hungarian soldiers in Iraq be withdrawn or stay now?


All: 60% withdraw, 31% stay

Men 53:41, women 67:22

Level of education: Elementary school 62:29, worker's highschool 64:30, highschool 63:28, university degree 44:44

Party preference: Socialists [main govt. party] 54:39, Yuppie-nationalist-populists [main opp. party] 74:21, Liberals [minor govt. party] 41:56 [I'm in this 41% :-(], Paleoconservatives [minor opp. party] 64:26

[DoDo]

I forgot the link - 230 kB .pdf and in Hungarian, with the Iraq tables on the last two pages, but just for authenticity:
http://www.politicalcapital.hu/sajtoanyag/politikai_kutatas_capital_research_20040503.pdf

[Allayne]

plez check out this site

Female Lawyers Prove Iraqi Women Pack Raped by Americans
"...happening all across Iraq..." Scroll Down To Blue Update 26 May 2004

Update 26 May 2004

Female Lawyers Prove Iraqi Women Pack Raped by Americans
"...happening all across Iraq..."

Counterpunch

Much has been made of the sexual humiliation of the men incarcerated by the Crusaders in Abu Ghraib Prison. However the abuse of the female prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and other prisons in Iraq, have gone nearly unnoticed. Although it took photographs to wake the world’s attention to the shenanigans, within the cells, it was actually a letter scribed by a woman prisoner that first exposed what was going on in the infamous prison. The contents of a note that was smuggled out of the prison were so shocking that, at first, Amal Kadham Swadi and the other Iraqi women lawyers who had been trying to gain access to the jail found them hard to believe. It claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said.
Swadi, one of seven female lawyers now representing women detainees in Abu Ghraib, began to piece together a picture of systemic abuse and torture perpetrated by US guards against Iraqi women held in detention without charge. This was not only true of Abu Ghraib, she discovered, but was, as she put it, “happening all across Iraq”. In November 2003, Swadi visited a woman detainee at a US military base at al-Kharkh, a former police compound in Baghdad. “She was the only woman who would talk about her case. She was crying. She told us she had been raped,” Swadi says. “Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, ‘We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.’” During Swadi’s visit to Abu Ghraib in March, one of the prisoners told her that she had been forced to undress in front of US soldiers. “The Iraqi translator turned his head in embarrassment,” she said.
The Taguba inquiry has corroborated the contents of the letter smuggled out of Abu Ghraib by a woman known only as "Noor". The enquiry found the letter to be entirely in line with the activities going on within the prison. While most of the focus since the scandal broke three weeks ago has been on the abuse of men, and on their sexual humiliation in front of US women soldiers, there is now incontrovertible proof that women detainees have also been abused. Among the 1,800 digital photographs taken by US guards inside Abu Ghraib there are, according to Taguba's report, images of a US military policeman “having sex” with an Iraqi woman. Taguba discovered that guards have also videotaped and photographed naked female detainees. Bush refused to release other photographs of Iraqi women forced at gunpoint to bare their breasts (although Congress were shown them) - ostensibly to prevent attacks on US soldiers in Iraq. However in reality this is merely to prevent further domestic embarrassment.
Earlier this month it emerged that an Iraqi woman in her 70s had been harnessed and ridden like a donkey at Abu Ghraib and another coalition detention centre after being arrested last July. UK Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who investigated the case and found it to be true, said, “She was held for about six weeks without charge. During that time she was insulted and told she was a donkey.”
Several women are housed in solitary confinement, within cells 2.5m long by 1.5m wide. There remain extremely troubling questions as to why these women came to be classified as “security detainees” - a term invented by the Crusaders to justify the indefinite detention of prisoners without charge or legal access, as part of the war on terror. According to Swadi, who managed to visit Abu Ghraib in late March, the allegations against the women are "absurd". "One of them is supposed to be the mistress of the former director of the Mukhabarat. In fact, she's a widow who used to own a small shop. She also worked as a taxi driver, ferrying children to and from kindergarten. If she really had a relationship with the director of the Mukhabarat, she would scarcely be running a kiosk. These are baseless charges," she adds angrily. "She is the only person who can provide for her children."
The women appear to have been arrested - not because of anything they have done, but merely because of who they are married to, and their potential intelligence value. US officials have previously acknowledged detaining Iraqi women in the hope of convincing male relatives to provide information; when US soldiers raid a house and fail to find a male suspect, they will frequently take away his wife or daughter instead.
The horrific abuses that are taking place in the prisons of Iraq have come to symbolise the horrific nature of the Iraqi crusade in general. The brutality of the six military personal, that happened to get caught out, is the logical continuum of the occupation. Bush may claim that these abuses have only been committed by six sick individuals and their behaviour “does not represent the America that I know,” as he proclaimed on Arabic television. All the evidence now points to the facts that Donald Rumsfeld, authorised physical coercion and sexual humiliation in Iraqi prisons. America’s political establishment actively encouraged the abuse. Donald Rumsfeld was hand picked by Bush, who was chosen by a minority, and a Court, to be the president of the USA. Therefore the behavior of the six is wholly representative of the American way.