Posted on 07/19/2003 5:14:50 PM PDT by Pokey78
Former inmates tell of inhumane conditions inside Baghdad cage - even for its most senior 'guests', reports Olga Craig
'He looked old, very old. And slightly stooped," says Adnan Jassim. "I stared at him for a long time. He was trailing a long-handled shovel with him as he shuffled along. I knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to dig what the American soldiers call a latrine. Yes, really - Tariq Aziz was digging his own latrine."
Jassim pauses, unable to hold back a smile. "It amused me to think of it. It didn't surprise me that the Americans treated us ordinary Iraqis like a herd of animals. But Tariq Aziz? He was one of those on Mr Bush's pack of cards. He is very important to them, isn't he?
"His hair had grown, it was coarse and to his collar. He could have been any one of us prisoners. He didn't look as though he was getting any special treatment. He looked like we all did. Dirty and hungry, desperate to get out."
Jassim turns to his Baghdad shoeshine stall, where he charges locals a few dinars, Westerners two dollars. It is, he says, the only work he can find. Seven days ago Jassim was released from American custody after 33 days in Camp Cropper, the makeshift prison erected on the edge of Baghdad international airport.
He claims that he was innocent, that American soldiers opened fire on his car for no reason. He was handcuffed, bundled into a Humvee and taken to Camp Cropper, with a badge stating "presumed killer" pinned to his shirt.
The camp, a tented site surrounded by 10ft-high bales of barbed wire, holds up to 3,000 inmates. Many are looters and rioters, others are fedayeen or suspected militia loyal to Saddam Hussein. Then there are the "special prisoners" whose fate is shrouded in mystery. All were high-ranking officials in the Ba'ath party, many of them Saddam's closest advisers.
These detainees - among them the former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, Saadoun Hammadi, the former speaker of the Iraqi parliament, and Ezzar Ibrahim, the son of Saddam's second in command on the Revolutionary Command Council - have not been seen by anyone outside the camp. There is only one woman: Huda Ammash - or Chemical Sally, as she is known in the West - said to be one of Iraq's most ruthless chemical and biological weapons experts and the only female to serve on Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council.
With the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross, no one has been allowed to visit the prisoners. They are not granted family visits and, despite the intervention last week of Dr Abdul Haq al Ani, Tariq Aziz's London-based barrister, the American authorities will not say what, if any, charges are to be pressed or even if the prisoners will be released. It appears that they intend to keep the goings-on inside the broiling, dusty compound as secret as those at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where more than 400 suspected Taliban prisoners are being held.
At Guantanamo Bay the CIA interrogates its detainees (who have been decreed non-combatants) while holding them in what is claimed to be inhumane conditions. They are kept in small individual cells, shackled and bound when being moved around the camp, and some are interrogated daily in rooms where the lights blaze for 24 hours a day. In recent weeks America has announced that six of the inmates (two of them Britons) will face military trials held in secret. Those found guilty will face execution.
No one yet knows if the same fate awaits those Ba'ath party officials at Camp Cropper but, according to the few inmates released in the past week - such as Adnan Jassim - conditions are equally austere. They talk of hunger, poor hygiene and punishments for those who protest.
Rafed Adel Mehdi, 32, who claims to have spent a month at Camp Cropper, says that he was terrified he would be killed. "We were kept in tents, even with the blazing 50-degree sun," he says. "There were up to 100 of us crammed into each one. At eight each morning we were handed yellow packets [most likely MREs, the Army's "meals ready to eat"] which were full of food inedible to Muslims. There was jam, biscuits, rice, beans, sometimes meat - often it was pork. It was cold but that was all we got every day. It was either eat it or starve. Many detainees threw them away in protest but when they got nothing else they had to eat them.
"We had no beds, just a mat on the floor. Some men who would not eat their yellow packets saved them up to use as pillows.
"Each of us got three litres of water a day. It just wasn't enough in the heat. We could use it to drink and try to keep clean but we weren't allowed to use it to wash our clothes. No one was issued with clean clothes, which meant that we stank. Only when lots of us started developing skin diseases did they say that we could have extra water to wash. But we had to do that in buckets."
Another detainee, Qays al Salman, 54, says: "One day we got so fed up that all the men in my tent began yelling, 'Freedom, freedom'. We were all left tied face down in the sun. We felt intimidated and threatened. We were made to feel like animals."
Suheil Laibi Mohammed, another former detainee, says that while those held for looting and rioting were not questioned he did see high-ranking prisoners being taken for interrogation each day. "They would be taken in the morning and returned at night. They were held in a separate tent and we were not allowed to speak to them. One man who tried was hit with the butt of a rifle.'
For Tariq Aziz's family, the only communication they have received has been a letter forwarded by the Red Cross and stamped with the words "SAFE AND WELL". Its message is simple: "I am well and thinking of you, Tariq."
Aziz's wife, Zureida, and his two sons fled to Jordan when the war ended. Dr al Ani, their lawyer, is awaiting instructions on whether to serve a writ of habeas corpus on Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, arguing that, in contravention of the Geneva Convention and the Human Rights Act, Aziz has been denied legal advice. "I spent a week in Baghdad but I was not allowed to see my client," says Dr al Ani. "I have spoken to detainees who have been released: I know the conditions there. It is outrageous that I cannot see or speak to him."
The family of Huda Ammash are also considering legal intervention. They are worried that Mrs Ammash, who has had breast cancer, may not be receiving the medical attention she needs.
In the ramshackle surroundings of the family home, Mrs Ammash's husband and mother spoke publicly for the first time. "My daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late Eighties," wept Kasma Ammash, 70. "She went to Pittsburg for chemotherapy and underwent a mastectomy. She has been in remission since but still attends a doctor - how can we know she is seeing one?"
"Huda is not the wicked woman the Western press says," says Ahmed Makki, 59, her husband, who was the director general of the Iraqi committee for computers during the Ba'ath regime. "They try to say she was ruthless, but her life's work was seeking out bacteria in the Iraqi soil. I have read about the camp in Cuba. How will Huda stand up to psychological torture - she is just a wife and mother?
"My wife became a grandmother for the first time three months ago. She barely saw the baby before she was arrested. How can the Americans be so cruel?"
A spokesman for the American army said that while the detainees were housed in tents, they had adequate food and water. They were not allowed family visits because, he said, "the compound is within a secure military base. No one is allowed in. You have to remember the law system is just being rebuilt here".
The Red Cross remains the only body that has gained access to Camp Cropper. "We never comment on the conditions at detention centres," said Nada Doumani, its spokesman in Baghdad. "We do have access but the problem is there is confusion because there are so many people being detained and being released.
"The Geneva Convention is clear about the obligations that exist for legal advice and visits. If someone is being held as a PoW then there is a legal obligation to allow family visits. If they are held as a civilian detainee, that is not the case. A tribunal has recently been set up to decide which category each person in the camp fits into. Until their work is finished we can say little more."
Because some of us still remember Americans jumping from the Twin Towers so they didn't burn to death.
Cry me a river, Ahmed.
/john
The fact that he was surprised (?) that Aziz might be treated like any other prisoner, even if for a shorter period of time is sad. Why is it that Muslims aren't understanding what should?
I'll tell you why:
Like Democrats, they are still looking for "The Angle". They can't seem to find it. President Bush has pulled the most devious misdirective bluff of all, which invariably results in a much stronger check or checkmate than most chess tactics : in this case, there isn't one. There is NO bluff, no misdirection, no nothing but a deep need to do exactly what is right and true.
Been there, done that in the political world. Will do it again. The Enemy takes apart you words over and over, bound and detirmined to find The Angle...and when they can't find one, they keep looking and/or make up An Angle to give themselves time.
In the end, they outsmart themselves, because all along you meant and did no more nor less than you said or did.
The Bush administration will survive this latest leftist-generated, media Soap episode just because of this. Tony Blair should survive for the same reason. Not sure there. Thre's a consolation prize (of sorts) for him though: if he doesn't, he's more welcome here in America than he is at home in Britain.
Like how you treated the Shi'ites?? You reap was you sow.
"How can the Americans be so cruel?" Now that in particular is music to my ears. You who have sneered and snickered that Americans are so soft, so uncertain, so weak and lazy.... turns out we're capable of being rifle-buttin', hard-nosed SOBs, eh? Surprise, surpise, Tariq et al. No more Mr. Nice Guy, eh? Yeah!
Cry me a river, Ahmed.
you took the words out of my mouth. thanks.
My thoughts exactly. I wish everything in this article was true, but the obvious one-sidedness of it tells me it isn't so.
Yes, and there hasn't been any complaint from them. Says it all.
May those who feel the need to go into spasoms of hystrionic hyperbole over nothing be forever condemned to attempt to take flying reproductive attempts at multiple rolling pastries and FOREVER MISS.
Shalom.
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