OSINFO - Open Sources Information

When much of the world thinks about America’s treatment of detainees in Iraq, it thinks of torture, humiliation, abuse, and pictures from Abu Ghraib. But do most people know that the American military is now running one of the Middle East’s largest Islamic schools for those detainees? Or that it sponsors religious discussion programs among them about Islam? Or that it trains suspected insurgents to be carpenters, farmers, and artists who are paid for their work each day? The school, programs, and training are core elements of the American military’s radically new approach to detention in Iraq, an integral part of its counterinsurgency effort.

For the past nine months, Task Force 134—led by Major General Douglas M. Stone, a two-star Marine general who oversees civilian detention in Iraq—has been experimenting with a series of unconventional initiatives at two large “camps” where 23,245 suspected insurgents, Iraqi and foreign, are being held. The aim of these programs, which I visited in April, is not only to accelerate the identification and release of those falsely accused of “jihadi” activity, but also to de-radicalize and rehabilitate others who may have joined the insurgency primarily to feed their families, or because they were motivated by a militant, perverse interpretation of Islam.

The results to date suggest that Stone’s approach seems to be working, at least for the vast majority of those people who have been arrested as suspected threats to American forces and are now being detained. While a relatively small hard core of detainees probably cannot be safely released any time soon, officers say that the overwhelming majority of detainees, probably over two-thirds of them, are likely to be freed by the end of 2008. Initial data, once in short supply, are impressive: of the 8,000 detainees released so far under the program, only 21 have been recaptured as a result of suspected insurgent activity, a rate that officers say is unprecedented. “It means that only .2 percent of those detained have returned to the fight,” Stone told me after I spent five days with his 9,000-person task force, drawn from all the uniformed services. “At no time in the history of collected data in Iraq do we have anything remotely like this.”

While I was not permitted to talk privately with detainees, I visited both Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, and remote Camp Bucca, near Basra in southern Iraq. I also attended the educational, religious, and vocational classes and watched three-member administrative panels as they questioned detainees, reviewed their records, and decided their fates. I saw detainees praying, watching television, and playing soccer, volleyball, and ping-pong. I also interviewed more than a dozen American soldiers and Iraqi teachers, social workers, and religious clerics working in the program.

One detainee who agreed to talk with me as he was being released said that he had never been physically abused or mistreated during his 11-month detention and had learned how to read, write, do carpentry, and play chess. “Because I had never played chess before, I had to cheat to win,” joked the apparently relaxed 30-year-old Sunni, who identified himself as Ahmed. “None of this would have happened in an Iraqi jail.”

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Judith Miller is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.