EFLtrainer

Joined: 04 May 2005
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Posted: Sun Apr 08, 2007 2:16 pm Post subject: Creating Militants in Iraq |
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Making Matters Worse
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Today, Ned Parker reports in the Los Angeles Times on yet another example of how the Administration is making matters worse:
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U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq have become a breeding ground for extremists where Islamic militants recruit and train supporters, and use violence against perceived foes, say former inmates and Iraqi officials. ...
Iraqis swept up in security operations and held indefinitely while the Americans try to determine whether they have any links to the insurgency are susceptible to the extremists' message, former detainees said.
Their accounts of life in Camp Cropper, the main U.S. detention center at the Baghdad airport, indicate that three years after the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. is still struggling to find a balance in the way it runs its detention system. ...
After the Abu Ghraib scandal, the U.S. pledged to speed up processing of detainees, the vast majority of whom the International Committee of the Red Cross said had been wrongly arrested. But as U.S. troops continue to confront the insurgency, the inmate population has soared, to 18,000, from 10,000 in 2003. ...
Iraqi officials also struggle with a crowded system where prisoners can languish as long as two years before getting a trial. But they say the Americans have allowed militants to flourish in their facilities.
"It looks like a terrorist academy now," said Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry's liaison to U.S. and Iraqi prisons. "There's a huge number of these students. They study how they can kill in their camps. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care.
"The Americans have no solution to this problem," he said. "This has been going on for a year or two, we have been telling them." ...
An Iraqi official who works on issues related to the Sunni insurgency said he had received a report that a moderate Sunni fighter had been killed at Camp Cropper. "The report came back to me that the Americans were in complete denial," he said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "They said, 'No such thing happened. Everything is under control.' That's not true." |
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