US military shuts largest detainee camp in Iraq

The U.S. military closed down its largest detention center in Iraq on Thursday as it continued to release or hand to Iraqi authorities the thousands of people it has held since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

The closure of Camp Bucca, a sprawling complex in Iraq's southern desert near Kuwait, was a major step toward the unwinding of the $300 million-a-year U.S. detention program, as agreed under a bilateral security pact signed last year.

Bucca once housed as many as 14,000 detainees, the majority held for months or years without any charges made against them and with no way to defend themselves in court. Some were kept in steel shipping containers with a toilet and air conditioning.

The number of detainees dwindled before the camp's formal closure at 3:22 a.m. (0022 GMT), when a transport plane carrying the last group of 180 detainees left Basra for another military prison in Baghdad, a U.S. military statement said.

The Iraq-U.S. security pact, which also calls for all U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by 2012, obliges the United States to release detainees who do not face Iraqi arrest warrants or detention orders.

In total, around 100,000 people have been detained by U.S. forces since 2003.

Following Bucca's closure, around 8,300 detainees remain in U.S. custody in Iraq, either in Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport or at Camp Taji north of the Iraqi capital.

The security pact sets no specific date for the transfer of all detainees to Iraqi authorities to be concluded, but U.S. commanders say they expect it to occur in January.

The U.S. military aims to close Taji in early 2010 and Camp Cropper next August.

The overall detainee population in U.S. jails has almost halved from 15,500 in January to around 8,398.

Wake of scandal

Bucca opened in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004 when photographs surfaced showing naked and hooded prisoners being beaten bloody by their U.S. guards and made to commit humiliating acts such as simulated homosexual intercourse.

Abu Ghraib, which had already earned notoriety under the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein as a center for torture and execution where thousands lost their lives, has been back under Iraqi control since February.

The U.S. military insists that prisoners are treated with respect and that it has fully rehauled detention facilities since the Abu Ghraib scandal to allow no room for prisoner abuse.

Detained without trial

Prisons chief Brigadier General David Quantock said the military detention operation at its peak cost the U.S. government around half a billion dollars a year. That had come down to around $300 million a year now and if everything went as planned, his operation would have only 122 beds for detainees by August next year, he said.

The U.S. military has painfully tried to defend its detention policies amid repeated accusations from human rights groups who have slammed it for holding prisoners without charge.

"We are at war," said Quantock.

"Until January 1 of this year we were operating under the U.N. security resolution which allowed us to take security detainees," he said.

"There are many short memories out there, the insurgency was killing many of our soldiers, killing innocent Iraqis civilians by the dozens.

Until January 1 of this year we were operating under the U.N. security resolution which allowed us to take security detainees

Prisons chief Brigadier General David Quantock

"Then all of a sudden we're concerned ... that they may not have had the right judicial review."

The policy of detaining suspects without trial has also been a major point of anger among Iraqis, especially Sunnis who made up some 80 percent of the inmates.

Quantock acknowledged that in the early days of the war, many innocent people were most likely snapped up in U.S. military round-ups. But he said that had since improved. The remaining detainees were "not an accident," he said.

One of the detainees still held at Camp Cropper is Reuters freelance cameraman and photographer Ibrahim Jassam. Jassam was arrested just over a year ago.

Neither his family nor Reuters have been told what the precise allegations are against him and the evidence in the case is classified, according to the U.S. military.

There are many short memories out there, the insurgency was killing many of our soldiers, killing innocent Iraqis civilians by the dozens

Quantock