Demolishing Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq seen as 'waste of resources'

By Seattle Times news services

WATHIQ KHUZAIE / GETTY IMAGES An Iraqi man waits for the release of a relative detained in the Abu Ghraib prison. More than 400 prisoners were released recently from the facility near Baghdad, Iraq.

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BAGHDAD, Iraq — President Bush's offer to demolish Abu Ghraib prison — made in a speech Monday night — found little support among Iraqis, with the head of the Governing Council yesterday calling the idea "a waste of resources."

"We must not be sentimental," Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer told reporters. "As the Governing Council, we do not agree with demolishing it and the matter will be left for the transitional government," which is scheduled to take office June 30.

He called the idea of destroying the prison "a waste of resources."

Bush told an audience Monday night at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., that Abu Ghraib, scene of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops and notorious for torture under Saddam Hussein, will be destroyed "as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."

Seven members of the U.S. Army's 372nd Military Police Company have been charged with abusing detainees at the prison. Some Iraqi leaders and human-rights activists criticized Bush's proposal, arguing the country needs prisons — albeit well-run ones — and cannot afford the luxury of tearing down usable structures — even if it means stamping out symbols of past repression.

Interior Minister Samir Shaker Mahmoud al-Sumeidi said he understood Bush's desire to "remove the memory and the stain" of the prisoner-abuse scandal. Still, he argued it would be better to change the way the prison is managed rather than construct a new building.

In an interview at the prison, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commander of U.S. military detainee operations in Iraq, said the military had already relinquished the cell blocks at Abu Ghraib and plans to vacate the prison by August, handing over operation of the facility to Iraqi security forces and transferring the remaining detainees 300 miles to the southeast.

The last of the security detainees — civilians accused of attacks on U.S. forces — being held by the U.S. military were moved last week from the cell blocks to tent camps on the grounds of the compound, 20 miles west of Baghdad.

About 1,500 prisoners accused of common crimes remain in the cell blocks, guarded by Iraqi police.
 
The 3,000 security detainees will remain in tents here until they are released or transferred to Umm Qasr, the port in southern Iraq where 2,000 detainees are already being held at a facility called Camp Bucca. Miller said the prisoners will be safer at Camp Bucca than at Abu Ghraib, where a mortar attack in April killed 22 detainees and wounded 91.

In related developments:

• Larry Di Rita, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, left open the possibility that some foreign fighters captured in Iraq could be declared exempt from the Geneva Conventions' requirement for humane treatment of prisoners.

"... There is a body of law which suggests that there could be individual cases in which, while the general provisions apply, an individual case could be exempted," Di Rita said.

There was legal precedent for determining that an individual foreign fighter was "not in fact subject to the Geneva Conventions," Di Rita said. The administration decided in 2002 that the Geneva protections did not apply fully to al-Qaida prisoners in U.S. control in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Now, some question if that policy may have led to the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

• Di Rita also said yesterday the Pentagon had inadvertently failed to give the Senate Armed Services Committee a full copy of the 6,000-page Army investigation into the prison-abuse scandal. Committee staff raised concerns last week that they hadn't received 2,000 pages of the report and its annexes. Di Rita said the committee was provided with a CD-ROM of the report and "there was a disconnect between the CD-ROM and the printed submission."

• New photographs said to depict an aggressive interrogation of naked Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison were shown on the NBC network yesterday.

Compiled from The Associated Press, Reuters and The Washington Post