U.S. brings Iraq prison camp out of legal black hole

By Peter Graff

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq (Reuters) - In the visiting hall of the U.S. prison camp, Delal Hashem, 25, sat opposite her husband Abbas Daoud Salman with the children she had brought to see him for the first time since he was captured 14 months ago.

Amna, the infant daughter who had never seen her father, clung to her mother's neck. Four-year-old Abdullah put his arms around his father, who smiled silently.

"They miss him. It hurts," their mother said.

Approached from the air, the U.S. military's Camp Bucca detention center emerges from desert heat haze like a cross between a mediaeval fortress and a run-down suburban trailer park. The first thing you notice is its staggering size.

Home to 8,000 jailers and more than 15,000 prisoners from all over Iraq, it lies in a remote brown wasteland along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border surrounded by razor wire, guard towers and scrap metal junkyards.

Its bakery produces 150,000 pitas a day. Its purification system churns out 700,000 gallons of drinking water. Guards on 40 towers peer out and in, round the clock, rifles ready.

"Bucca," says Brigadier General David Quantock, in charge of U.S. detentions in Iraq, "is the seventh wonder of the world."

The camp is the main center of a vast archipelago of U.S. military detentions that has ensnared tens of thousands of Iraqis over 5 1/2 years of war, the vast majority held for months or even years without any charge or legal representation.

The U.S. military says the system has been completely overhauled since the Abu Ghraib debacle in 2004, when photographs of soldiers sexually humiliating detainees brought the military into global disgrace.

With violence across the country at four-year lows, detainees are now being freed faster than they are captured. Bucca is slated to be emptied by the middle of 2009.

But for many Iraqis, especially Sunni Arabs who make up 80 percent of detainees, that is not soon enough.

"We demand the closure of the American prisons and the release of the detainees in the framework of a suitable agreement," Iraq's Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi, a Sunni Arab, told Reuters.

"Definitely it is not enough. The daily releases are not noticeably decreasing the total number of detainees. The (prisons) are still crowded."

FUNDAMENTAL CHANGE

A fundamental change in U.S. detentions is coming soon.