Insurgents transform US military jails into ‘terror training camps’

[maddezmom]

Source: The London Times

America’s high-security prisons in Iraq have become “terrorist academies” for the most dangerous militant groups, according to former inmates and Iraqi government officials.

Inmates are left largely to run their blocks, which are segregated on sectarian lines. The policy has created a closed world run by Iraq’s worst terrorists and militias, into which detainees with no links to insurgent groups are often thrown.

Inmates from Camp Cropper, the US prison at Baghdad airport, described to The Times seeing al-Qaeda terrorists club to death a man suspected of being an informer. Others dished out retribution with razor wire stolen from the fences.

Captain Phillip Valenti, a US officer responsible for prisons, said he knew of at least three cases of prisoners being murdered by inmates. “We are very concerned about insurgent efforts to recruit and convert detainees,” he said.



Read more: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1623909.ece

[Demeter]

1. Ooookaaaay

Says who? The wardens? Why don't we let a little sunshine in on these prisons? Then we might have some idea what was really going down there....

[Kagemusha]

2. Simple logic would support this view of the prisons

purely from experience with American prisons. Juvenile detention, for example, is often seen by criminologists and criminals alike as "high school for crime" where future adult criminals complete their formative "education".

[Demeter]

3. Granted. But There Is Nothing Simple or Logical About Anything BushCo Has Touched

Credibility is lacking all around.

[grytpype]

4. K&R -- this is a must read article, your blood will run cold

If half of this is true we are more screwed than even I believe.

[maddezmom]

7. even a 1/4

:(

[bemildred]

5. Gee, who could have predicted this? nt

[Laughing Mirror]

6. Terror Academy ™ Made in U.S.A.

How many thousands of happy alumni down the years will these profitable branches in Iraq turn out?

[sabra]

8. Under the Petraeus plan, US forces are gearing up to hold up to 40,000 Iraqi captives

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=590254&mesg_id=590254

[cascagraphic]

9. Let's train the Iraqi army and train their enemies too. Great plan.

[ShortnFiery]

10. And in the process, The War Machine Corporations get fat and full of pride. n/t

[fedsron2us]

11. Sounds just like Long Kesh

[bemildred]

13. They haven't learned a thing.

http://www.dannymorrison.com/articles/longkesh.html

[CHIMO]

12. "The Worse Things Get in Iraq, the More Privatized This War Becomes, The More Profitable This War Be

NAOMI KLEIN: This drive to the privatize every aspect of the state of government is about a 35-year-old campaign. Many people date it, many historians date it to the 1973 coup in Chile, which is something that is interesting in terms of Jeremy’s research, because he talks about how Blackwater are now hiring Chileans to go to Iraq, and I’ll let him do that. But the first example of the attempt to build a fully privatized corporate utopia was in Chile in 1973 after Pinochet’s coup, when he joined up with a team of economists from the University of Chicago to engage in that experiment.

It is a different kind of colonial project. In Latin America, this project, which is often called neoliberalism, is referred to as neocolonialism. The first stage of colonialism was the opening of the veins of Latin America, as Eduardo Galeano describes it, the pillaging of raw resources, the exporting of raw resources. The second stage of colonialism -- and, of course, that first stage never fully goes away -- was pillaging the state. What had been constructed in the aftermath of the Great Depression and during the post-war boom years -- the construction of healthcare systems, education systems, roadways, railways -- but this is really what was launched in Chile with the help of the Chicago boys: the strip mining of the state itself.

The way I imagine this corporate project, this privatization project, is if we imagine the state as a kind of an octopus with all of these limbs. And for the past thirty years, and certainly in this country since Reagan, what the privatization campaign has really been doing is lopping off the limbs of the state -- the phone system, the roadways, these sort of non-essential services, if you will. And after you've chopped off all the limbs, all you have left is the center, is what they call the core.

And what the Bush administration has really been doing is going for the core, privatizing those core essential government services that are so inherently part of what we think of as the state, that it almost seems impossible to imagine that they could be privatized, like the government itself, like cutting Social Security checks, like welfare, like prisons, like the army, which is where Blackwater fits in.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/02/1345218

Ultimate result: NEMESIS

[rodeodance]

14. dang, I wish our papers would print this stuff.