US concedes, shuts prison in Iraq

By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press, 10/6/2003

BAGHDAD -- The US military has shut down Camp Cropper, an increasingly notorious makeshift prison where hundreds of Iraqis were crowded into tents through Baghdad's scorching summer, a US official reported yesterday. The detainees were scattered to other facilities.

The Iraqi Lawyers League, pressing a rights campaign under a former political prisoner of the Ba'ath regime, won that concession from the Americans, and another: accelerated hearings, with lawyers, for some of at least 5,500 detained Iraqis.

That newly elected league president, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, met with US occupation chief L. Paul Bremer III a month ago to register complaints about the internment of thousands of Iraqis without charge since a US-British invasion force toppled Saddam Hussein's government in April.

"I told Bremer the Americans and the Iraqi people ought to have become friends since then, but the way they have handled these things has produced just the opposite effect," Hassan said.

Journalists were barred from Camp Cropper, but released detainees this summer told of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, and they alleged physical abuse by guards. The human rights group Amnesty International protested it "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law."

The camp population included both Iraqis picked up for allegedly committing common crimes, and "security detainees," mainly Ba'athists deemed to be a threat to the security of the occupation force.

"They are living in tents in the desert, in a very hot climate. Some detainees are sick," said Hassan, interviewed yesterday before the closing of the camp was disclosed.

The former law professor and Iraqi information minister, who was himself imprisoned for 1.5 years by the Ba'athists after they seized power in 1968, also complained that lawyers were not allowed into the heavily guarded airport.

"That was another reason why we closed the airport [camp]," said US Army Colonel Ralph Sabatino, who specializes in detainee issues and is a chief liaison with the interim Iraqi Justice Ministry.

Sabatino said that Cropper was shut down last Wednesday, on Bremer's orders and that its several hundred inmates were transferred to at least three Baghdad-area prisons.

Cropper held as many as 1,200 detainees this summer, Sabatino said. "It wasn't supposed to be a detention center" but a temporary holding facility, he said. "It was designed for 250 people. When it grew to 500 to 700, it got very crowded. It had a very bad reputation, appropriately."

The Army Reserve officer, in civilian life an assistant corporation counsel for the City of New York, said he met with Lawyers League representatives two weeks ago. "Since that time, we've coordinated to facilitate their representation of people in custody," he said.