US military training Iraqi prison guards

By JASON KEYSER, Associated Press Writer

CAMP CROPPER, Iraq – As the U.S. military prepares to hand over the remnants of its detention system to the Iraqi government next year, it is training Iraqi wardens and guards to ensure that changes it made after the Abu Ghraib scandal remain in place.

The military plans to teach Iraqi officers how to use non-lethal weapons like tasers, as well as how to handle riots at mock detention facilities and run vocational programs for inmates at a training academy just west of Baghdad that has been under construction since May.

The commander in charge of America's detention facilities in Iraq has spent the five years since the abuses at Abu Ghraib trying to change the doctrine guiding U.S. detainee operations.

He gave detainees better access to medical care, set up visitation centers and work programs and brought in approved clerics to lead religious discussions.

The military also hired teachers, offering illiterate detainees the chance to learn to read so they would not "have to take a radical imam's word for what the Quran says," said Brig. Gen. David Quantock, commander of detainee operations.

Now, the military is training wardens, midlevel supervisors and corrections officers in hopes they will keep those programs running at the two detention facilities near Baghdad that the U.S. will hand over to Iraqi control next year: Camp Cropper and Camp Taji. A third facility near the Kuwaiti border, Camp Bucca, closed shortly after midnight Wednesday.

Handing over prisons and detainees to Iraqi control has raised concerns for rights groups like Amnesty International, which says Iraqi authorities have held prisoners in appalling conditions.

Quantock said the transfer of the facilities could be delayed if Iraqi authorities are not ready.

"My red line is I do not want to be held responsible for turning over a facility that falls below humane conditions two months after we leave it," he said. "When we leave this behind, it will be the Iraqis running the system and we want to set them up for success."

Abu Ghraib, where abuses of prisoners by U.S. troops helped fuel anti-American sentiment in Iraq, has been handed back to Iraqi control. It reopened in February with a new name, Baghdad Central Prison. A week ago, inmates there rioted for two days to demand better conditions and the replacement of prison staff they accuse of mistreatment.

At Camp Cropper, which replaced Abu Ghraib as the main detention facility near the capital, detainees in yellow uniforms sat in the shade of their simple concrete living quarters on Thursday. Many of them read from Qurans. American guards paced back and forth on a catwalk above, armed with air-powered rifles that fire paint pellets intended to mark the instigators of any disturbances.

"Treat detainees with dignity and respect," reads a sign on a barbed-wire-topped fence.

Detainees at Cropper, like the other U.S. prisons in Iraq, are segregated based on threat risk, nationality and religious affiliation. Doing so, Quantock said, keeps more moderate detainees from being radicalized by extremists.

At Cropper, prisoners vetted to be a lesser threat are allowed to take classes in computers, art and sewing. Among the pictures in the tented art classroom is a portrait of President Barack Obama, which the Iraqi art teacher said was drawn by a detainee hopeful that he would pull troops out of Iraq.

Quantock wants Iraqi authorities to keep those programs in place when they gain control of the detention facilities.

There are about 3,780 detainees at Cropper. Among them are 39 former members of Saddam Hussein's government who are housed in separate quarters with a communal TV and a vegetable garden that some of them use to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs.

They include Saddam's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for the strikes he ordered against Kurds in the 1980s. Al-Majid has been sentenced to death for the killings of Kurds and other crimes, but it is not known when the sentence will be carried out.

Saddam, too, was held at Cropper before he was executed by Iraqi authorities in December 2006.

Not far from the prison, the nearly completed training academy will have a target range for non-lethal weapons, where Iraqi corrections officers will learn how to fire rubber pellets and use tasers and sting grenades, which are designed to subdue rioters with fragments of rubber.

Mock detention facilities as well as a model C-17 airplane will also be used for training in controlling and transporting prisoners.

Parts of the training center are already operational, and the entire facility is expected to be ready by the end of the year.

Iraqi prison authorities were also taken to visit prisons in the United States.

Another challenge in turning over the U.S. detention centers is trying to lower the enormous cost of running and maintaining them and ensuring the Iraqi government can afford it. The yearly cost of running the U.S. facilities reached half a billion dollars at one stage, Quantock said.

The Taji facility and its roughly 4,550 detainees is to be turned over to Iraqi authorities on Jan. 10. Cropper is to be handed over in August.