- The three rows of single-storey buildings stand among
a wilderness of flat scrub, surrounded by a double ring of razor wire.
In the winter the wind blows squalls of dust up from the south that insinuates
itself through doors and windows, and into the clothes of the US soldiers
who guard this place. The quiet is broken by the regular sound of the US
Apache and Kiowa Warrior helicopters on patrol, as they wheel low across
the dirt looking for insurgents attempting to infiltrate the vast closed
zone that is the hinterland of Baghdad International Airport and its constellation
of camps.
-
- Inside the buildings of Camp Cropper are the windowless
cells, two metres square. The only entry is through bolted steel doors
with a metal ventilation flap placed a metre from the ground. For those
who are held inside for up to 23 hours a day it is their only view of the
outside world. Sometimes the flaps are sealed as punishment.
-
- There is a small shower block at the end of each row.
Separate from the cell blocks - once used by the Republican Guard - are
the prison's administration wing and hospital infirmary. Set to one side
are the metal cabins where the interrogations take place.
-
- For Saddam Hussein - and the other 'high-value detainees'
- the shrinking of his world to the tiny boxes of Camp Cropper are the
most visible sign of how his life has been transformed. Where once there
were dozens of palaces, there is now only this.
-
- Most senior members of Saddam's former regime - about
half the prisoners held inside the camp - are held in solitary confinement.
For some that has meant almost two years without any contact with anyone
except their CIA interrogators, the occasional lawyer's visit, and their
guards.
-
- For two years Camp Cropper has been closed to the world.
Until last week the only details of Saddam's imprisonment were the short
reports of the International Commission for the Red Cross, who had visited
him, a few sketchy details from a letter to his wife, and anonymous reports
that Saddam had been tending some plants in the exercise yard where prisoners
are allowed out for an hour a day.
-
- That was until last week. Now, suddenly the secretive
world of Camp Cropper has been blown open - and in the way designed to
most antagonise the escalating security crisis in Iraq.
-
- In the space of a few days Saddam has been exposed before
the world in two tabloids belonging to Rupert Murdoch, a pathetic figure
emerging from the camp's washroom in his underwear as he washes his trousers.
US officials believe the pictures were taken between January and April
2004 when he was in US military custody. Apparently cameras were banned,
but he was under 24-hour video surveillance, so the belief is that some
of the stills, and perhaps all, are probably from that video surveillance
footage.
-
- And in a separate interview a former Australian interrogator
at Camp Cropper has revealed to The Observer for the first time the regime
inside the prison, including suggestions that some of those arriving at
the facility had been badly beaten.
-
- The publication on Friday of the photographs of Saddam
wearing only underwear in his cell in Iraq led the Bush administration
to open an investigation into how the pictures made their way into tabloid
newspapers in London and New York, apparently supplied by a source in the
US military in contravention of the Geneva Conventions.
-
- The newspapers, the Sun in London and the New York Post
, both part of Murdoch's media empire, said the pictures had been provided
by American military sources to 'undermine the Iraqi rebellion'.
-
- If true - and it is a big if - then it is a gambit that
the US government has tried before, and found to be wanting: in December
2003 it released pictures of Saddam in his cell immediately after his capture,
appearing dishevelled as he was examined by a doctor.
-
- In a statement issued Friday evening, the White House
said those pictures were of a different nature. 'Those photos were released
for overriding needs of security, to demonstrate to the Iraqi people and
the insurgents that Saddam Hussein was in fact in custody, which we believed
was important to help quell the insurgency,' the statement said. 'The recent
release of photos had no such justification.' And in any case that first
gambit failed. The insurgency got worse.
-
- The images of Saddam, which were joined by fresh images
from inside the camp in yesterday's Sun - including one of a stooped Ali
Hussein al-Majid (Chemical Ali) with a stick and wearing a bathrobe - have
once again drawn the Bush administration into an international row over
the conduct of American-controlled detention facilities from Bagram in
Afghanistan to Guant·namo Bay, and now Camp Cropper.
-
- Although the likely impact of the pictures on the insurgency
was at first dismissed as negligible, within a few hours of the photographs'
release a sense of alarm was spreading through the White Hose as officials
met urgently to discuss the possible repercussions of the images.
-
- By Friday afternoon Bush's deputy press secretary, Trent
Duffy, had been sent out to brief the media. The release of the pictures,
he said, violated American military regulations, and almost certainly the
Geneva Conventions too.
-
- Unlike the previous anonymous briefers, Duffy was less
sanguine about the potential harm of the photographs' release, in the wake
of a further US report confirming prisoner abuse - this time at Bagram
in Afghanistan - and following global riots over the claim that a Koran
had been flushed down the toilet at Guant·namo Bay.
-
- 'I think this could have a serious impact,' Duffy said
on Friday afternoon, as he compared it with the revelations of prisoner
abuses last year. Once again the White House had been forced to condemn
the actions of those responsible for managing its detention facilities
set up to process those it had captured in its 'war on terror'. 'There
will be a thorough investigation into this,' said Duffy, adding that the
President was 'upset' about the release and 'wants to get to the bottom
of it immediately'.
-
- 'These photos were wrong; they're a clear violation of
Department of Defence directives, and possibly Geneva Convention guidelines
for the humane treatment of detained individuals,' Duffy said. 'Multinational
forces in Iraq, as well as the President, are disappointed at the possibility
that someone responsible for the security, welfare and detention of Saddam
Hussein would take and provide these photos for public release.'
-
- The publication the photographs has come at the end of
a bad week for the administration as it has been forced to fight allegations
of abuse that have sprung up in every corner of the war on terror. Although
the White House was successful in persuading Newsweek to retract a story
on abuse involving the Koran at Guant·namo Bay after riots in Afghanistan
and around the Islamic world, it was then confronted by allegations that
bored and violent US servicemen in Afghanistan had overseen a regime of
terror at the holding facility at Bagram airport near Kabul.
-
- Hard on the heels of that came the pictures of Saddam,
which powerfully recalled other terrible images that have emerged from
Iraq: of the sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US troops and trophy
photographs taken by British soldiers as they abused Iraqi looters in the
south.
-
- And although the new pictures may have been taken as
long as a year ago, according to the Pentagon, which has examined the images,
that is all the more serious for the US authorities as Saddam was at that
point classified a prisoner of war and subject to protection from 'public
curiosity' and humiliation. The critical question also remained unanswered
this weekend - who took the photographs and why?
-
- It has emerged that the Sun - or journalists in News
International at least - had sat on the images for a considerable time,
apparently concerned over the authenticity of the images in the wake of
the scandal surrounding the Daily Mirror's publication of fake pictures
of British soldiers apparently abusing an Iraqi.
-
- But what it most worrying of all is the confirmation
of long-held suspicions - reported by this newspaper last May - that some
prisoners were subjected to coercive interrogation that could be classified
as being abusive, as part of their interrogation.
-
- The treatment of Saddam and other high-value Detainees
was disclosed for the first time by Dr Rod Barton, an Australian who conducted
interviews at the camp. 'Interrogations are carried out in metal portakabins
on the prison complex. What happens is we decide when to interrogate them.
-
- 'This is normally at the dead of night, which was deliberate
to disorientate them. The prisoner had no idea where he was being taken.'
-
- Barton said he witnessed no physical abuse at the jail,
but he believed some prisoners had been physically 'softened' up before
they arrived in an induction process known as 'purgatory'.
-
- He told The Observer last week: 'The prisoners, who I
believe had been abused, were not the scientists. I believe some were former
intelligence officials who had been beaten prior to their arrival at Camp
Cropper to soften them up for questioning.' Barton, who saw photographs
of at least two prisoners with bad facial abrasions, asked questions about
the situation and was told they had received them when they 'resisted arrest'.
-
- It is a slow process. But like Guant·namo and
Bagram before it - like the process of 'renditions' of terrorist suspects
by the US to foreign countries, where they can be tortured - the secrets
of Camp Cropper are now emerging into the light.
-
- Images that made the news
-
- The pictures from inside Camp Cropper are suggestive
of the source, writes Peter Beaumont
-
- As in the most dramatic image of Saddam in his underwear,
the subject seems unaware that the picture is being taken. One of yesterday's
pictures shows Saddam, in a white dish-dash, his hands before him and preparing
to pray, the picture shot from behind barbed wire. Other images of the
camp's inhabitants appear shot from the same low angle, as if a camera
or cameras had been set to cover the exercise yard.
-
- Other pictures, shot from inside, seem to have been taken
from on high - a camera covering a corridor perhaps. It is also suggestive,
as US officials are beginning to suspect, that the stills may have been
taken from security cameras.
-
- Another clue is the pixelation. Blown up even to tabloid
size, it is clear that the camera is low-resolution and digital - a telephone
camera perhaps - but again suggestive of a security camera. If true, it
would seem to back up the Sun 's story that the pictures were supplied
by a member of the US military involved in guarding Camp Cropper.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1489575,00.html
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