Business is booming

June 26, 2005:

BAGHDAD — Faced with a ballooning prison population, U.S. commanders in Iraq are building new detention facilities at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca near the Kuwaiti border and are developing a third major prison, in northern Iraq.

The burgeoning number of detainees has also resulted in a lengthy delay in plans for the U.S. to transfer full control of Abu Ghraib to the Iraqi government.

Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg, who oversees U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, had planned to be out of Abu Ghraib by early spring. "I believed it until mid-December, but the numbers just weren't going that way," he said. "Business is booming."

[...]

The number of prisoners held by the U.S. in Iraq reached record levels this month before falling slightly. As of Saturday, the average prisoner total in June stood at 10,783, up from 7,837 in January and 5,435 in June 2004.

The two main U.S. Army-run prisons, Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, are operating near their maximum or "surge" emergency limits. On Saturday, the two prisons together held 10,178 inmates, with 1,630 detainees awaiting processing in different Army divisional and brigade headquarters.

[...]

The Army is expanding both sites and working on the third major prison, near Sulaymaniya, which would house up to 2,000 prisoners; the additions will increase the total U.S. long-term detention capability to more than 16,000 prisoners.

[...]

The expansion campaign will cost more than $50 million: $30 million for Camp Cropper, $12 million to expand Camp Bucca, $8 million to renovate Ft. Suse and less than $1 million for Abu Ghraib.

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Let me guess....Halliburton gets the contract?

Gee - here I thought we were releasing prisoners and closing down Abu Ghraib.

May 2004:

"A new Iraq will also need a humane, well supervised prison system. Under Saddam Hussein, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values. America will fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison. When that prison is completed, detainees at Abu Ghraib will be relocated. Then, with the approval of the Iraqi government, we will demolish the Abu Ghraib prison, as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning." -- George Bush

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January 2004:

Iraq's U.S.-led administration will release 506 prisoners from detention camps, while simultaneously offering bounties for 30 more Iraqis wanted in the anti-American insurgency, officials said Tuesday.

Coalition officials said the releases - out of some 12,800 detainees - are aimed at fostering more goodwill and intelligence tips, which they said have surged in the three weeks since the capture of Saddam Hussein.

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May 2004:

Last Friday, about 300 male prisoners were freed from Abu Ghraib, the first detainees to be released since the abuse scandal first broke. A further 475 are due to be released tomorrow, although it is not clear if any of the women will be among them. General Geoffery Miller, who is responsible for overhauling US military jails in Iraq, has promised to release 1,800 prisoners across Iraq "within 45 days". Some 2,000 are likely to remain behind bars, he says.

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Well, whoopsie. We're back up to "surge emergency" limits now.

And nearly a year ago, I thought there would be some fallout about the children "detainees" and the women.

Sy Hersh, the journalist who broke the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, told an American Civil Liberties Union audience that film exists of young Iraqi men at Abu Ghuraib being sodomized by US troops. He said, "The boys were sodomised with the cameras rolling, and the worst part is the soundtrack, of the boys shrieking. And this is your government at war."

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The note claimed that US guards had been raping women detainees, who were, and are, in a small minority at Abu Ghraib. Several of the women were now pregnant, it added. The women had been forced to strip naked in front of men, it said. The note urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail to spare the women further shame.

[...]

Late last year, 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 last year, 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.'"

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How do they keep the lid on these things?