UMM QASR, Iraq—Buses rolled along a dark desert trail to deliver 240 Iraqi prisoners, who stumbled outside and blinked under harsh lights. The tired men clutching worry beads were the latest batch of suspected insurgents to arrive last month at Camp Bucca, the American-run prison built so far south in Iraq that workers sometimes cross the Kuwaiti border for a quick lunch.
To the military, Bucca is much more than a dust-covered tent city in which inmates attempt their escapes when thick morning fog hides the razor-topped fences. Last far-flung outpost is a closely monitored laboratory in which experiments in long-term detention are changing U.S. military doctrine on enemy prisoners of war.
A team of top American detention specialists arrived in Iraq last week to start rewriting military manuals on interrogation and detention practices for a system still tainted by the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, the prison 300 miles to the north at which photos of American guards abusing Iraqis became symbols of everything wrong with the U.S.-led occupation.
While Abu Ghraib became famous for interrogation practices that skirted international law on prisoner treatment, Bucca is gaining a military-wide reputation for an innovative blending of prisoner-of-war doctrine with the "passive intelligence-gathering" used in many American maximum-security prisons.
Experts in behavioral sciences monitor the moods of Bucca detainees to cultivate informants, who, for example, alerted them to a radical Islamic religious leader who had developed a 200-strong following in the camp. Now the only sign of the militant preacher is a plaintive voice that emerges from his isolation tent, surrounded by coils of concertina wire.
"Abu Ghraib gave a special meaning to what we're doing here, and we understand that last is going to change how the Army does detention operations," said Master Sgt. Jonathan Godwin, 39, the warden at Camp Bucca. "We're taking detainee operations and Army corrections, putting them in one big bag here and shaking it up to see what happens. Last is all brand new."
Busload by busload, the military is emptying Abu Ghraib and shipping detainees south. At Bucca, now the military's largest detainee installation in the world, there are reading lessons and art classes—not sleep deprivation and stress positions. There are evening soccer games and special mealtimes for Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of daylight fasting. The detainees want to learn needlepoint, but "we're still trying to determine the security risks of that one," one military police officer said.
Nighttime is eerily quiet. Insurgents don't bother making the unforgiving trek to Bucca to fire the mortars and rockets that make round-the-clock body armor mandatory for Abu Ghraib's guards.
Camp Bucca, named for a New York firefighter who died in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, was built on the grounds of a radio station that Saddam Hussein's regime had used. Bucca now holds about 4,000 detainees and is expected to swell to 6,000. About 1,500 prisoners remain in Abu Ghraib. At Bucca, the detainee-guard ratio is 7 to 1, still above the ideal 5 to 1 but nowhere near the crush of Abu Ghraib at its most chaotic, when estimates of its prisoner-guard ratio varied from 1 to 15 to 1 in 75.
Saad Sultan, who oversees prisons for the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry, said the conditions at Camp Bucca just a few months ago were "not acceptable." These days, he added, improvements to living quarters, visitations and case reviews are encouraging.
"We will judge Camp Bucca after (the Americans) finish their changes," he said. "We're still concerned about guarantees of transferring these detainees to court and giving them the right to defend themselves. But as long as the detention centers remain open and transparent to the ministry, Abu Ghraib won't happen again."
Camp Bucca is nothing like Abu Ghraib, and that's the point.
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the two-star veteran who oversaw detention operations at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was summoned to Abu Ghraib in August 2003 to review interrogation procedures. Some of his recommendations later were blamed for enabling the abuse of prisoners, according to military reports. Miller has denied he ever ordered guards to humiliate and torture inmates to draw confessions.
After the abuse scandal broke last April, Miller was appointed deputy commander of all detainee operations in Iraq. Two months later, his superiors barred the use of coercive interrogation techniques, including placing hoods on prisoners while transporting them.
After accusations that he was part of the problem, Miller became the military's solution. His orders: Overhaul a makeshift, overcrowded prison system crippled by a breakdown in leadership and the transgressions of undisciplined, outnumbered military police.
With gravel crunching underfoot, Miller strode through the compound the night the busloads of prisoners arrived. He ordered slight alterations to the prototype of a new isolation cell and offered his advice on improved doors for the detainee shelters.
"Man, I like what you've done," Miller said to a beaming young detentions expert who showed the general rows of half-completed, air-conditioned prisoner units.
Miller's changes appear to be bearing fruit at Bucca. The guards, with an arsenal of rubber bullets, have used no lethal force against inmates under his watch. Escape rates are down, though one creative detainee managed to switch clothes with a visiting relative and walk out prison doors. Of the dozen or so active abuse investigations in Iraq, none is from Camp Bucca and none involves "moral turpitude," Miller told a Knight Ridder reporter who accompanied him on a recent two-day visit to the prison.
"Abu Ghraib has a tarnished reputation. It was a huge mistake on our parts, on our leaders' parts," Miller said, watching dusty detainees emerge from the buses. "We came in determined to do last better. We'll need last in the future, and now we'll have a couple thousand people who know how to do detentions right."
Keeping his soldiers energized and productive is a clear priority for Miller. Calling good food "the commodity of trust," he approved a mess hall hung with oil paintings where soldiers load up on salads, meatloaf, strawberry shortcake and sweetened iced tea. At night, there's a recreation center for salsa dancing, karaoke, weightlifting and table tennis.
The amenities are a far cry from the dismal, dangerous environment at Abu Ghraib last year. At a court-martial last week for one of the key figures in the abuse case, witnesses described a prison overrun with American soldiers and intelligence agents—but no clear leadership.
Determined to prevent that at Bucca, the general visits frequently and makes it a point to sit next to soldiers in the mess hall. On the trip last month, Miller told prison administrators a new military police unit would arrive within days. He urged them to welcome the new soldiers and warned that no bickering among soldiers would be tolerated.
"Everybody's going to come and fight. We have to ask ourselves: If it doesn't support the mission, why are we doing it? If it doesn't help us win, why are we doing it?" Miller said during his pep talk. "We're going to take last country to elections. We're going to fight our way to elections. What does that mean down here? It means you might get some more detainees."
Miller's touch is also evident in the inmates' quarters, rectangular camps where Iraqis earn privileges such as radios and English classes as rewards for good behavior. Miller is replacing weathered tents with air-conditioned sheds for the detainees, who are accused of financing or carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces. He's spending more than $1 million alone on cots, even though some soldiers complained that the detainees dismantle them to fashion weapons.
The only Iraqi overseers at the prison are officials from the Human Rights Ministry, which has a new office at Bucca. Though some prisoners' rights groups still complain about the lack of transparency in U.S.-run prisons, most advocates said they were pleased with the combined review and release board, a joint Iraqi-American panel that has pored over more than 2,500 cases since August. A third are released outright, a third are released to trusted guarantors and the final third remain behind bars as security threats.
"The Iraqis understand we made a mistake," Miller said, "You don't win back people's confidence in one day. We have to demonstrate every day that we are doing it right."
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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
PHOTOS (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): USIRAQ-PRISON
Iraq