The
Ugly Truth Of Camp Cropper
By
Robert Fisk
Independent,
UK
23 July 2003
Now
here's a story to shame us all. It's about America's shameful prison
camps in Iraq. It's about the beating of prisoners during interrogation.
"Sources"
may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but the sources for the
beatings in Iraq are impeccable. This story is also about the gunning
down of three prisoners in Baghdad, two of them "while trying to
escape". But most of all, it's about Qais Mohamed al-Salman. Qais
al-Salman is just the sort of guy the US ambassador Paul Bremer and
his dead-end assistants need now. He hated Saddam, fled Iraq in 1976,
then returned after the "liberation" with a briefcase literally
full of plans to help in the restoration of his country's infrastructure
and water purification system.
He's an engineer
who has worked in Africa, Asia and Europe. He is a Danish citizen. He
speaks good English. He even likes America. Or did until 6 June this
year.
That day he was
travelling in Abu Nawas Street when his car came under American fire.
He says he never saw a checkpoint. Bullets hit the tyres and his driver
and another passenger ran for their lives. Qais al-Salman stood meekly
beside the vehicle. He was carrying his Danish passport, Danish driving
licence and medical records.
But let him tell
his own story. "A civilian car came up with American soldiers in
it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I didn't understand
what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher. But they made
me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel
cuffs and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles."
The next bit of
his story carries implications for our own journalistic profession.
"After 10 minutes in the vehicle, I was taken out again. There
were journalists with cameras. The Americans untied me, then made me
lie on the road again. Then, in front of the cameras, they tied my hands
and feet all over again and put me back in the vehicle."
If this wasn't a
common story in Baghdad today - if the gross injustices meted out to
ordinary Iraqis and the equally gross mistreatment in America's prison
camps here was not so common - then Qais al-Salman's story would not
be so important.
Amnesty International
turned up in Baghdad yesterday to investigate, as well as Saddam's monstrous
crimes, the mass detention centre run by the Americans at Baghdad international
airport in which up to 2,000 prisoners live in hot, airless tents. The
makeshift jail is called Camp Cropper and there have already been two
attempted breakouts.
Both would-be escapees,
needless to say, were swiftly shot dead by their American captors. Yesterday,
Amnesty was forbidden permission to visit Camp Cropper. This is where
the Americans took Qais Al-Salman on 6 June.
He was put in Tent
B, a vast canvas room containing up to 130 prisoners. "There were
different classes of people there," Qais al-Salman says. "There
were people of high culture, doctors and university people, and there
were the most dirty, animal people, thieves and criminals the like of
which I never saw before.
"In the morning,
I was taken for interrogation before an American military intelligence
officer. I showed him letters involving me in US aid projects . He pinned
a label on my shirt. It read, Suspected Assassin'."
Now there probably
are some assassins in Camp Cropper. The good, the bad and the ugly have
been incarcerated there: old Baathists, possible Iraqi torturers, looters
and just about anyone who has got in the way of the American military.
Only "selected" prisoners are beaten during interrogation.
Again, I repeat, the source is impeccable, and Western.
Qais Al-Salman was
given no water to wash in, and after trying to explain his innocence
to a second interrogator, he went on hunger strike. No formal charges
were made against him. There were no rules for the American jailers.
"Some soldiers
drove me back to Baghdad after 33 days in that camp," Qais al-Salman
says. "They dropped me in Rashid Street and gave me back my documents
and Danish passport and they said, Sorry'."
Qais al-Salman went
home to his grief-stricken mother who had long believed her son was
dead. No American had contacted her despite her desperate requests to
the US authorities for help. Not one of the Americans had bothered to
tell the Danish government they had imprisoned one of its citizens.
Just as in Saddam's day, a man had simply been "disappeared"
off the streets of Baghdad.
Copyright: The Independent