How The Islamic State Evolved In An American Prison -- Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
In March 2009, in a wind-swept sliver of Iraq, a sense of uncertainty befell the southern town of Garma, home to one of the Iraq war’s most notorious prisons. The sprawling Camp Bucca detention center, which had detained some of the war’s most radical extremists along the Kuwait border, had just freed hundreds of inmates. Families rejoiced, anxiously awaiting their sons, brothers and fathers who had been lost to Bucca for years. But a local official fretted.
“These men weren’t planting flowers in a garden,” police chief Saad Abbas Mahmoud told The Washington Post’s Anthony Shadid, estimating that 90 percent of the freed prisoners would soon resume fighting. “They weren’t strolling down the street. This problem is both big and dangerous. And regrettably, the Iraqi government and the authorities don’t know how big the problem has become.”
Read more ....
My Comment: The Americans knew that these men were dangerous (see above video) .... but the Iraqis n Baghdad were in denial of who and what these people were. If there is one thing that I have learned in my life .... it is that some people deserve to stay in jail for the rest of their lives. Camp Bucca clearly had some of these people .... but they are now free .... and they are doing the carnage and destruction that they themselves had vowed publicly that they would do.
3 comments:
Sorry, but this "story" is just part of the Blame Iraq meme being constructed in the US to excuse failures of US policy and procedure.
Camp Bucca was not a POW Camp, or a Prison, it was a "detainee" camp. It was filled with people who had been "swept" up in raids and actions, which could be any one from a IED makers, to a flower vendor, or just someone who was arrested for "driving while Iraqi".
The laberinthine bureaucracy and reliance on brutal interrogations, and snitches, with no formal legal status, meant that a detainee could spend years, with no charges, no convictions, and of course, no defence.
Camps like these used to be called Concentration Camps, back before the Nazi's, and have always been used as a punative deterrent in response to an insurrection.
When Bucca became too crowded, with 5,000 detainees, it was expanded to 10,000, then 20,000 and was in the process of being expanded to 30,000 when the Iraqi's killed the Occupation by not allowing a non-soverign SOF Agreement.
At the peak, there were over 157,000 "detainees" in Iraq.
You come to the Gitmo Kuwaitee problem, or the Xiguir problem. After holding a man, for over a decade, and torturing them, with out ever bring able to prove charges or convict them, how do you let them go?
Even if they wern't a terrorist when somebody sold them to the CIA, they probably are now.
True Jay .... many .... if not most ....of these prisoners/detainees had no business being there. But many did belong there ... and they probably did have a very good idea on who were the dangerous ones.
It's part of the problem, and part of the process, and was deliberate.
If you treat terrorism as a crime, then you have to go one way,
If you treat resistance as a Military Problem, then, you go another.
Some, 42,000 Iraqi's went through Camp Bucca, roughly 250 were charged, less than 200 were convicted, and some 200 "high value" detainee's were passed on to the Iraqi Prison system.
Like it or not, a " perfect" system was created for manufacturing, on an Industrial basis, for creating criminals, terrorists, and jihadi's.
At a certain point in time, it's no longer ignorance, errors, mistakes or a " bug", it's a feature.
Post a Comment