This afternoon, after the CNAS conference which I'll write about next, I headed over to the US Institute for Peace, where Major General Douglas Stone spoke with an audience of 50-60 people about his experience in reshaping American detainment facilities in Iraq over the last year and a half (background on Stone here). Stone offers a sweeping vision of these detention facilities as sites for education and the promotion of moderation (don't say re-education... he doesn't like it), and as a core part of COIN. He's a genuinely impressive man, who passionately and justifiably believes in what he accomplished during his tenure. But I came away troubled, in part by the questions not asked.
First, the accomplishments. There is little doubt that Stone cleaned up the American detention facilities, and was deeply concerned to rectify the mistakes which created Abu Ghraib. There is little reason to believe that prisoner abuse or torture still go on in these facilities. What's more, it is clear that Stone managed to install a genuinely impressive set of educational and training opportunities in the facilities - about 100 different programs, he says - against considerable opposition. I believe that he has transformed the culture of these facilities, and should be commended for doing so. I also believe that his approach has had some real success in disrupting the "prison gang" aspects of the insurgency (he didn't use that word for the processes of cell-formation and radicalization in prison which then translates to the outside upon release, but that's how I understood it). Finally, I believe that Stone overcame fierce opposition from others in the US military in order to release significant numbers of detainees deemed not to pose a threat.
But. He is proud of the low rates of recidivism, claiming that only about 40 out of 10,000 released detainees have subsequently reappeared - and many of those, he claims, were victims of local disputes rather than really rejoining the insurgency. The problem, which he did not address, is that this can be read in very different ways. Perhaps these 10,000 detainees were convinced of the error of their ways, taught to read and to rethink their religious beliefs, and then abstained from future violence. But that assumes that they were violent in the first place.
An equally plausible reading is that large numbers of innocent Iraqis were rounded up as potential threats who in fact were not members of the insurgency. The number of detainees surged in 2007, from some 16000 to over 24000, with the new COIN doctrine leading to a lot more people being taken off the street. (Even now, he reports about 16,000 Sunnis and 4,000 Shia in the facilities). As Stone himself pointed out, they were detained as potential threats in the field of combat. They were not "arrested", and had no rights to a trial, a judge, a lawyer, or any such niceties. Many of them were then held for years.
Stone never considered the possibility that the low recidivism rate may simply reflect the fact that a very large number of innocent men were detained, and upon release they continued to be innocent men... only with several years of their lives missing.
How does one get released? Stone went to considerable lengths to defend the judgement of the review boards, but pointedly noted several times that the detainees were not prisoners and had no right to a trial. He was fairly dismissive of the concept of "evidence". If they have evidence against someone, they might send him to an Iraqi court, but that's a small minority of the cases - he told a questioner from Human Rights Watch that they were getting those numbers, but estimated about 2000 thus far. But otherwise they just rely on their best judgment as to who poses a threat and who doesn't. A system which relies on the good intentions and good judgement of individuals is a bad system - after all, General Stone has now rotated out, so what guarantees does he have that his successors will have the same judgement?
The extent to which this is a problem comes into sharper relief from his description of the population of the facilities. When asked about the number of "irreconciliables" in the population (he does not like the word "prisons"), after some dancing around he offered the number of about 100. That's 100 hard cases, out of about 21,000 detainees. At another point, he mentioned 200-250 foreign fighters (a remarkably small number, as has been reported elsewhere, which he explained as "al-Qaeda fights to kill and die and not to be captured", but which could have other explanations). At another point he labeled about 2000 of the detainees as "al-Qaeda", including a higher percentage of youth. That leaves 19,000 or so "civilian detainees" who are not - and who have no evident means of legal redress for their incarceration.
They are also not eligible for the general amnesty passed by the Iraqi Parliament, which has led to the review of some 80,000 cases in the Iraqi prisons supposedly (but very few actual prisoner releases, it appears) - a matter of some serious concern to Iraqi politicians. The release of Bilal Hussein drew headlines. But have there been many other cases where Iraqis held in US facilities have been handed over to Iraqi authority where the Americans would prefer to detain them? Stone deflected such questions by referring to the need to negotiate the new terms of the American presence, but this is a problem now and not just one for the future.
I was also somewhat troubled by his nearly evangelical sense of mission about these detention facilities, which he seems to feel are actually superior to the Iraqi society on the outside. He spoke in rapturous tones about the ideal society within the, of Iraqi men receiving better education, health care and security than they ever did on the outside. He likes to talk about the Iraqis who want to send their other children or siblings to the facilities, or who don't want to leave. All of that may be true. But I can't help but feel that human nature being what it is, most people do not like being rounded up and incarcerated away from their loved ones without hope of a trial or appeal... no matter how nice the facilities.
None of this is meant to minimize the very real accomplishments of Gen Stone's tenure - he inherited a nightmare, and seems to have done quite a lot to improve conditions in these facilities. He pointedly noted that the one common feature of all the foreign fighters in detention, from 21 different countries, is that they had seen a 7 minute al-Qaeda propaganda film about Abu Ghraib. He really does seem to have good intentions, and to have a clear strategic concept of their role in the wider COIN campaign. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue to raise tough questions about the purpose and functioning of these US facilities in Iraq, and their future status.
Marc, a fascinating account. I was especially struck by your ref to Gen. Stone's "almost evangelizing sense of mission" about these prisons. It seems he has absolutely no familiarity with either (a) the way that previous colonial powers have all used mass incarceration techniques as a means of trying to effect social-engineering goals, or (b) the ways that administrators in those earlier colonial systems also liked to talk up the great benefits of their project-- both to society in general and to the detainees themselves.
You might want to look at this (PDF) article I published in 2006 on precisely that colonial-era phenomenon, with special ref to the remarkably well documented case of imperial Britain's infamous "Pipeline" detention system in Kenya in the 1950s.
Posted by: Helena Cobban | June 14, 2008 at 10:31 AM
bissane el sheikh had some excellent articles on the prisons in al hayat a few months ago
the idea that if you teach prisoners a different interpretation of islam it will get them to stop fighting the americans or the occupation is so offensive, they arent fighting because of lack of education or understanding of islam, they're fighting because there's an occupation, thirty years ago they would have been fighting it as leftists or marxists, now the dominant discourse of resistance groups in the region is islamic. and iraqis arent even joining militias or fighting each other because of lack of education or lack of proper islamic training, its a civil war and there are other dynamics at work. and the americans are holding hundreds of minors. and what right do they have to hold any iraqis anyway?
Posted by: nir rosen | June 15, 2008 at 06:59 AM
But I came away troubled, in part by the questions not asked.
Meaning that there was a Q&A and you wanted to ask some hard questions but didn't get to?
Or is this just a euphemistic phrasing for "disagreements so complete that it would have been pointless to raise them as questions"?
I've come to realize that Gen. Stone is the source of the Orwellian new term "reconciliation centers" for U.S. prisons in Iraq, the ones featured in Walter Pincus' recent article.
Posted by: Nell | June 30, 2008 at 05:27 PM