Smoke And Mirrors

With many individuals, countries and organisations including the UN calling for Bush to close Guantanimo Bay prison, he responds in typical idiot fashion and decides to close Abu Ghraib prison instead. He really does live in his own little world.

But it's all smoke and mirrors because the prisoners won't walk.

Abu Ghraib, the prison which will be forever linked with images of Iraqi detainees stripped naked and humiliated by their American jailors, is to be closed, US military officials said yesterday. The sprawling, low-slung prison in the western suburbs of Baghdad, a torture chamber under Saddam Hussein that gained even more notoriety with the photographs of abuse committed by US troops, is likely to close within three months.

Its 4,500 inmates will be transferred to other jails in Iraq - including Camp Cropper, the facility at the Baghdad airport where Saddam is being held. [emphasis mine]

In fact this is an attempt to make people forget about the torture. We won't, of course, and it is quite possible the torturing will happen again, but at new locations. Maybe there will be no torture at Camp Cropper.

Oops! Spoke too soon.

An American-run detention center outside Baghdad known as Camp Cropper was reportedly the site of numerous abuses of Iraqi prisoners several months before the mistreatment of prisoners unfolded last fall [of 2003] at Abu Ghraib prison, according to documents and interviews.

The detention facility, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, appears to have served as an incubator for the acts of humiliation that were inflicted months later on Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. [emphasis mine]