Iraq prison tour elicits complaints

By Patrick J. McDonnell
Los Angeles Times

ANJA NIEDRINGHAUS / AP A U.S. soldier walks yesterday through the prison of Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad, where U.S. soldiers were photographed abusing Iraqis interned there.

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"Where's the freedom, Mr. Bush?" he shouted.

A dozen or so other inmates joined him, raising their crutches in protest.

This was the scene yesterday at the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the primary U.S. detention facility in Iraq.

U.S. authorities — reeling from revelations of physical and sexual abuse at the lockup — invited the media yesterday to the sprawling compound 25 miles west of Baghdad.

But the situation quickly spun out of military control as prisoners — including the disabled in an area of the camp that houses injured inmates — abandoned their outdoor tents in the midday sun and approached journalists. They were eager to voice their grievances — even from behind barbed wire.

Using a U.S.-issued megaphone, a man read from a legal pad brimming with accusations. "The problem of the Iraq prisoners is not only what is written in the news," he said.

It was clear that news of the scandal had reached the nearly 4,000 prisoners held at this jail, which once housed torture chambers of Saddam Hussein's interrogators.

After the prisoners' outburst, Army officials hastened to usher the media back into a pair of buses, refusing to let journalists interview any inmates or photograph them — even though some prisoners appeared anxious to talk. Officials cited prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.

"We respect international law," said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Army's new detention chief in Iraq, fresh from his previous assignment running the lockup at the U.S. base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Later, journalists were escorted to a cinder-block wing that was the place where the now infamous photos were taken of inmates being abused physically and sexually. Only a relatively few prisoners — 19 "high-risk" men and 5 women — were being kept in these indoor facilities, known as the "hard site."
 
The vast majority of Abu Ghraib's inmates live in the rambling tent city.

The wing was squeaky clean, but there was a disturbance: Several distraught women inmates on the second floor were crying out incessantly, pleading their innocence. Their shrieks echoed in the chambers.

"I have children," said one, her arms extending from behind bars. "I am not part of the resistance."

Despite the apparent public relations setback, Army commanders tried to put a positive spin on the day. The major units implicated in the abuse have left Iraq, officials said.

A new hospital inside a former warehouse includes a well-equipped trauma room and a recovery unit. Most of the patients, including a man who had his left hand amputated, are victims of mortar attacks that strike the camp with regularity from insurgent strongholds outside, along the road to Fallujah and the nation's Sunni Muslim heartland.

The jail compound was hit hardest last April 20, when more than two dozen mortar rounds were lobbed into the jail, killing 22 detainees and injuring 91.

Nearby are the interrogation chambers where the base 'Tiger Teams" — composed of Army intelligence officers, translators and analysts — question prisoners in rooms behind two-way mirrors.

The scandal has prompted Miller to announce that the military in Iraq would abandon controversial interrogation techniques, such as sleep deprivation, pain-inducing "stress positions" and placing hoods over detainees' heads.

Miller said the International Committee of the Red Cross has been invited to establish a permanent presence at the camp. The previous administrators tried to hide prisoners from Red Cross scrutiny, according to an Army investigative report.

"I would like to apologize for our nation, for our military," Miller told Western and Arab reporters gathered in a mess hall at the end of the day. "I will personally guarantee that this will not happen again. ... We may make mistakes in the future, but they will not be mistakes of character."