A very tough job in Iraq
INTEL DUMP
By Phillip Carter
inteldump.powerblogs.com
Monday's Washington Post carried a very good article by Bradley Graham on the challenges facing the Army and Air Force units guarding Iraqi detainees at Camp Bucca in Iraq. Three weeks ago, the detainees there rioted, and the ensuing melee resulted in four inmate deaths when U.S. troops deemed it necessary to respond with deadly force. The article notes how the riot showed the problems in managing such a large and unruly prison population -- and the limits of U.S. non-lethal technology in dealing with it.
washingtonpost.com
"What happened here on January 31st has changed the dynamics" of managing such situations, said Maj. Gen. William Brandenburg, who oversees U.S. military detention operations in Iraq and toured the facility last week. "It showed that the prisoners could hurl rocks farther than we could fire nonlethal weapons. It also showed that we have to do a better job of understanding who we have in detention."
Four inmates died and six were injured in the uprising the morning of Jan. 31, the most deaths in a prison disturbance since U.S. forces invaded Iraq two years ago. Frightened guards, some having arrived in Iraq only a month before, tried vainly to quell the rioting, spraying pepper gas and shooting rubberized pellets into throngs of prisoners, according to accounts by troops here.
The clashes spread through five of eight compounds at the sprawling detention facility in the southern Iraqi desert near the Kuwaiti border. Prisoners pelted guards with large stones and makeshift weapons, heaving debris over 15-foot-high metal fences and up at 30-foot-tall guard towers that ring the compounds.
Only after two Army guards in separate towers opened fire with M-16 rifles, killing the inmates, did the violence subside. U.S. officers say the guards acted on their own, with no order to fire. Rules here allow for use of deadly force if soldiers feel endangered.
For the first time since the incident, U.S. authorities allowed a reporter to visit the facility last week and talk with some of those who were involved. The episode remains under criminal investigation by the military, but the interviews yielded many previously unreported details and information about internal concerns.
Detention operations in Iraq have proved a persistent challenge for the U.S. military, which was caught unprepared to fight what has become a relentless insurgency and to deal with thousands of captured suspects. Photos documenting abuse and humiliation of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad in late 2003 surfaced last spring, igniting a public scandal and triggering a series of investigations.
Since then, commanders have tightened controls on U.S. military prison guards and improved conditions for detainees. Plans call for much of the effort involving detentions in Iraq to shift to Camp Bucca, a 100-acre facility developed from scratch to showcase the Army's revised detention methods. But a surge in military operations over the past few months -- and a decision to suspend the release of detainees until after the Iraqi elections on Jan. 30 -- have kept the number of detainees high.
About 3,180 prisoners are now at the Abu Ghraib facility, which has remained the U.S. military's primary interrogation center. Camp Bucca, which has a maximum capacity of 6,000 detainees, is up to about 5,150. Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, houses about 100 "high-value" detainees. Another 1,300 or so suspected insurgents are being held for initial screenings at military brigade and division levels, according to military figures.
Analysis: Holding prisoners is one of the toughest MP tasks in the book. It's also one of the ones least trained-on; least liked; and least planned for. Institutionally, it just isn't the path to glory for MP officers and NCOs. It doesn't help matters that all of the Army MP units that specialize in internment/resettlement operations are in the Army Reserve or National Guard. It may well be true that many of these soldiers work in law enforcement or some other capacity that helps them as MPs. Fine. I'll grant you that. But there's no substitute for 24/7 soldiering -- I don't care what you do. Even if you're a SWAT team member who's in a Special Forces unit in the National Guard, you're not training on your wartime mission when you work as a civilian. So there's a learning curve. There are also serious equipment and resources problems which have yet to be fixed. When you actually get down to the tip of the spear, notwithstanding the aggregate unit figures cited in this article, there still appears to be a high detainee:MP ratio. That may not be fixable in a wartime environment -- but it's certainly a risk to identify and consider.
Non-lethal weapons, at least for the time being, are not the panacea that many think. Determined prisoners can often times fight through non-lethal weapons, especially things like tear gas and pepper spray. Sponge bullets and other non-lethal munitions don't work that well against a large mob, especially one that develops its own countermeasures like these Iraqis did. So, you're left to old-fashioned brute force -- a graduated series of measures from unarmed force to the use of batons up to and through the use of lethal force. I'm surprised the MPs handled this uprising with so few Iraqi fatalities, given the circumstances described. |
