Nur al-Cubicle

A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Prisoner Flow to US Prison Camps in Iraq

The big US-run prison camps in Iraq are rarely mentioned in the US media. But the foreign press was recently invited to take a look at Camp Cropper, the "small" prison camp (4,000 detainees) outside Baghdad Airport compared to sprawling Camp Bucca outside Basrah. In addition to the surprising news that retinal scans are made of all prisoners, two statistics jumped out at me. The first is that there are 30 new prisoner arrivals PER DAY. If there are 30 arrivals per day at Camp Cropper, you can bet your tin cup there's double that at Camp Bucca, bursting at the seams with 22,000+.
Second, in Camp Cropper alone there are 950 juveniles.

If there's any indication that the US plans to stay in Iraq for decades, it is the permanency and the dimension of the prison camps it runs.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Depressing.

And by the way, I love your blog. And your little avatar picture too.

10:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What are we supposed to do, let them all go? A large percentage of them would go out and do what sent them there in the first place, kill innocent civilians and coalition soldiers.

They are Iraqi prisoners (not "ours")and it is the Iraqi government's duty to get off their butts and do something about their legal system so their cases can all be reviewed to weed out the ones that should never be released.

9:23 PM  
Blogger ziz said...

What do you have to do to be put in the slammer in Iraq ?

What due process is observed ?

How do we know Abu Ghraib Mark II ( even III) isn't operating ?

Fascinating article in Vanity Fair about the US Enbassy in Bagdhad. Reminds me of the Colosseum built at El Djemm (now Tunisia) on the southern fringes of the Roman Empire as it collapsed...or the UK Concorde which heralded the demise of the UK passenger plane manufacturing.

1:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"What do you have to do to be put in the slammer in Iraq ?"

Well, from the world of popular entertainment I recommend The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair as an example.

3:54 AM  
Blogger paul said...

Do we ever not hear anything about this- even the so called progressive websites, all they talk about is Guantanamo which is the only prison people can see. I don't want it shut until everyone in Bucca and Cropper and all those secret CIA prisons yet to be discovered are sent home.
Thanks so much for posting this

3:51 PM  

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