BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military has shut down Camp Cropper, an increasingly notorious makeshift prison where hundreds of Iraqis were crowded into tents through Baghdad's scorching summer, a U.S. official reported yesterday. The detainees were scattered to other facilities.
The Iraqi Lawyers League, pressing a rights campaign under an ex-political prisoner of the Baath regime, has won another concession from the Americans as well: accelerated hearings, with lawyers, for some of at least 5,500 detained Iraqis.
That newly elected league president, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, met with U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer a month ago to register complaints about the internment of thousands of Iraqis without charge since a U.S.-British invasion force toppled Saddam Hussein's Baath government in April.
I told Bremer the Americans and the Iraqi people ought to have become friends since then
but the way they have handled these things has produced just the opposite effect Malik said.
Journalists were barred from Camp Cropper, but released detainees this summer told of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, and they alleged physical abuse by guards. The human rights group Amnesty International protested it may amount to cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
banned by international law.
The camp population included both Iraqis picked up for allegedly committing common crimes, and so-called security detainees
mainly Baathists deemed to be a threat to the security of the occupation force.
They are living in tents in the desert
in a very hot climate. Some detainees are sick
said Malik, interviewed yesterday before the closing of the camp was disclosed.
The former law professor and Iraqi information minister, who was himself imprisoned for 1 1/2 years by the Baathists after they seized power in 1968, also complained that lawyers were not allowed into the heavily guarded airport.
That was another reason why we closed the airport (camp)
said U.S. Army Col. Ralph Sabatino, who specializes in detainee issues and is a chief liaison with the interim Iraqi Justice Ministry.
Sabatino said Cropper was shut down last Wednesday, on Bremer's orders, and its several hundred inmates were transferred to at least three Baghdad-area prisons.
Cropper held as many as 1,200 detainees this summer, Sabatino said. It wasn't supposed to be a detention center but a temporary holding facility, he said. It was designed for 250 people. When it grew to 500 to 700
it got very crowded. It had a very bad reputation
appropriately.
The Army Reserve officer, in civilian life an assistant corporation counsel for the City of New York, said he met with Lawyers League representatives two weeks ago. Since that time we've coordinated to facilitate their representation of people in custody
he said.
Ignacio Rubio, a Spanish judge assigned to Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority, is developing a program to assign court-appointed attorneys to represent detainees who will be charged at a kind of preliminary hearing under Iraqi law.
The process began last week when eight investigative judges and eight defense lawyers were summoned by the occupation authorities for a day of hearings at Baghdad Central Detention, the former Abu Ghraib prison on the capital's southwestern outskirts, Sabatino said. Other hearings are to be held today.
The slowly progressing hearings are intended for Iraqis held for common crimes, not the security detainees, Sabatino said. There's been no formal process for many of the civilian detainees
