At long last, the possible shrugging off of a media nightmare by the American military.
Abu Ghraib, the prison that served as a house of torture under Saddam Hussein and was latterly the scene of the US military’s worst prisoner abuse scandal, is to be handed over to the Iraqi government.
The decision yesterday came as the Iraqi authorities announced they had hanged 13 insurgents, marking the first time militants have been executed in the country since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
The US military said yesterday that its new facility near Baghdad airport to house security prisoners now held at Abu Ghraib prison should be ready within three months.
Lt Col Kier-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for US military detainee operations, said completion of the new prison at Camp Cropper, where Saddam and his co-defendants have been held since their capture, would set the transfer in motion.
“We will transfer operations from Abu Ghraib to the new Camp Cropper once construction is completed there. No precise dates have been set, but the plan is to accomplish this [completion of construction] within the next two to three months,” Lt Col Curry said.
“Once we transfer operations from Abu Ghraib, the facility will be turned over to the Iraqi government.”
The prison, which currently holds over 4,500 detainees, came to symbolise US mishandling of some prisoners captured in Iraq, both during the US-led invasion three years ago and in the fight to subdue the largely Sunni Muslim insurgency since then.
Although I recognize that the prison is now sadly infamous for American military abuses, I have two key questions here. First, does anyone really believe that the Iraqi government and military is sufficiently mature yet to prevent worse abuses? Second, why are Saddam’s abuses, far worse than any chronicled against the American military, never carried in these stories as a frame of reference like the American abusese?
Widely publicised photographs of prisoner abuse by US military guards and interrogators led to intense global criticism of the US war in Iraq and fuelled the insurgency.
Photos showed one of the guards, Private Lynndie England, abusing naked Iraqi prisoners, including an image where she held a leash tied around an undressed male detainee’s neck. England was sentenced to three years in prison.
She was among nine US soldiers who were charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal. Her ex-boyfriend, Specialist Charles Graner, with whom she had a child, was sentenced in January 2005 to ten years in prison.
Yes, we abused. Yes, we prosecuted. I thank the author of this story for making the latter clear, though I feel a little more of the prison’s brutal history would have added some perspective. Hell, there would have been no shortage of ways to put the American Abu Ghraib abuse into perspective historically, but that never has been attempted in the handling of this tale.
The hand-over of authority at Abu Ghraib will take place in phases, Lt Col Curry said, beginning with basic training for prison guards, followed by Iraqis working side by side with US forces at detention facilities. Iraqi guards will then start running detainee operations themselves with a transition team overseeing them before they assume complete control.
Okay, here’s my predictions on how this story will be handled by the New York Times, the same Paper of Record that carried front-page coverage of American Abu Ghraib for some thirty-some-odd consecutive days: no front page coverage and any article will be accompanied by a tired old American-abuse photo. If I’m wrong about this, it will be on the absence of a photo — it would, after all, attract attention to a story best left buried.