In just one more case that shows us that the stated aims (depending on the day of the week) by Bush when it comes to Iraq (and just about anything else) are uncannily in direct contradiction to the actual results ...
I heard on Radio Netherlands the following story:
The British newspaper The Times reports that United States prisons in Iraq have turned into terrorist training centres. Supervision in the wards, where extremists mix with regular inmates, is so lax that detainees are free to preach hate and convert other inmates. The paper also says inmates seen as enemies or American informants are regularly beaten to death. In a reaction, the Iraqi human rights ministry says the situation is untenable and warns that the US authorities have no solution at hand.
Quotes from The Times below the fold
One wonders about the many ways this catastrophe, beyond what is already going on, is going to come back to bite the US in the near and longer-term future.
America’s high-security prisons in Iraq have become "terrorist academies" for the most dangerous militant groups, according to former inmates and Iraqi government officials.
Inmates are left largely to run their blocks, which are segregated on sectarian lines. The policy has created a closed world run by Iraq’s worst terrorists and militias, into which detainees with no links to insurgent groups are often thrown.
Inmates from Camp Cropper, the US prison at Baghdad airport, described to The Times seeing al-Qaeda terrorists club to death a man suspected of being an informer. Others dished out retribution with razor wire stolen from the fences.
Saad Sultan, the Iraqi Human Rights Ministry’s official for prisons, said: "It looks like a terrorist academy. There’s a huge number of these ‘students’; they study how they can kill. And we protect them, feed them, give them medical care. The Americans have no solution to this problem."
At Camp Cropper they were put in halls of about 85 inmates. The Sunni section was controlled by an imam from an al-Qaeda-affiliated group. The Shia hall was under the authority of a sheikh from al-Mahdi Army, a fundamentalist militia notorious for its death squads.
"I was terrified," said Abu Tibeh, a balding, podgy Sunni in his mid-thirties. "It was psychological warfare." His colleague Abu Usama — not their real names — also in the Sunni camp, was so horrified that he suffered a minor heart attack.
The full story here