when they closed Abu Ghraib, here's where the prisoners went

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI28Ak01.html

Mini-gulags, hired guns and lobbyists


Last month a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W Bush, was emptied.

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Of course its prisoners, who remained generally uncharged and without access to Iraqi courts, weren't just released to the winds. Quite the opposite: more than 3,000 of them were redistributed to two other US prisons, Camp Bucca in Iraq's south and Camp Cropper at the huge US base adjoining Baghdad International Airport, once dedicated to the holding of such "high-value" detainees as Saddam Hussein and top officials of his regime.

Camp Cropper itself turns out to be an interesting story, but one with a problem: while the emptying of Abu Ghraib made the news everywhere, the filling of Camp Cropper made no news at all. And yet it turns out that Camp Cropper, which started out as a bunch of tents, has now become a US$60 million "state-of-the-art" prison. The upgrade, on the drawing boards since 2004, was just completed and hardly a word has been written about it. We really have no idea what it consists of or what it looks like, even though it's in one of the few places in Iraq that an American reporter could safely visit, being on a vast US military base constructed, like the prison, with taxpayer dollars.

Had anyone paid the slightest attention - other than the Pentagon, the Bush administration, and whatever company or companies had the contract to construct the facility - it would still have been taken for granted that Camp Cropper wasn't the business of ordinary Americans (or even their representatives in Congress) - despite the fact that the $60 million, which made the camp "state of the art", was surely Americans', no one in the United States debated or discussed the upgrade and there was no serious consideration of it in Congress before the money was anted up, any more than Congress or the American people are in any way involved in the constant upgrading of US military bases in Iraq.

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Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere in the United States - and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables", and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops the US will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008 or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent". (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of US towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent US prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best-fortified "embassy" in the solar system, with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

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Looked at another way, however, that secret Central Intelligence Agency detention system, which seems to consist of makeshift or shared or borrowed facilities around the world, sits in place, ever ready for use. It's not going anywhere and in the most basic sense it probably cannot be shut down. Nor, it seems, are the almost 14,000 prisoners the US holds in Iraq, the 500 (or more) in Afghanistan, and the nearly 500 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, going anywhere. Even with Abu Ghraib empty and the secret prison system officially emptied, nearly 15,000 prisoners are being held by the US in essence incommunicado, most beyond the eyes of any system of justice, beyond the reach of any judges or juries. In many cases, as in that of Bilal Hussein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi photojournalist, who has been held, probably at Camp Cropper, without charge or trial "on suspicion of collaborating with insurgents" for the past five months, even that most basic right - to know exactly why you are being held, what the charges are against you - is lacking.
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wish I could post more of this horrifying news - like: contractors doing CIA work; contractors doing the military's work. and the military is a zero without the contractors. read it!

please read it all.

americans are being suckered daily.