In the heat of the night of the Iraqi desert, the US military transferred the last 180 prisoners out of Camp Bucca and padlocked its largest detention centre in Iraq. High-risk prisoners were relocated from the remote jail in southernmost Iraq to Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport and Camp Taji, north of the capital, in Wednesday's overnight operation.
Hours before they moved out, a dozen bearded prisoners took their final daily walk around the prison's sunbaked courtyard wearing yellow jump-suits and fingering Muslim prayer beads. An armed guard perched in a high tower watched as the men shuffled around. "Welcome to section 16. There are a number of al Qaeda here and a number of extremists groups," Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth King told journalists invited to Camp Bucca one last time.
Lieutenant Latesha Ford recalled that force had at times been needed to control the prisoners, particularly in 2005 when four detainees were killed during riots. "Once or twice we had to use force. Sometimes they insult us but the guards are trained and don't answer," Ford said. The closure of Camp Bucca marked a turning page for the US occupation of Iraq which has been rocked by violence and a scandal over Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison.
In 2004, photographs surfaced showing naked and hooded prisoners at Abu Ghraib being beaten bloody by their US guards and made to commit humiliating acts such as simulated homosexual intercourse. Abu Ghraib - which had already earned notoriety under the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein as a centre for torture and execution where thousands lost their lives - has been back under Iraqi control since February.
The US military has painfully tried to defend its detention policies amid repeated accusations from human rights groups who have slammed it for holding prisoners without charge. "We are at war," said prisons chief Brigadier General David Quantock. "Until January 1 of this year we were operating under the UN security resolution which allowed us to take security detainees," he said.
"There are many short memories out there, the insurgency was killing many of our soldiers, killing innocent Iraqis civilians by the dozens. "Then all of a sudden we're concerned ... that they may not have had the right judicial review." The US military insists that prisoners are treated with respect and that it has fully rehauled detention facilities since the Abu Ghraib scandal to allow no room for prisoner abuse.
Camp Bucca was the largest US-run jail in Iraq, located in an isolated desert north of the border with Kuwait and where temperatures soar above 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit) in the summer. After the March 2003 US-led invasion, the Americans set up the detention facility by pitching tents around the site but as the anti-US insurgency grew so did the number of the detainees and Camp Bucca.
It developed into a multi-section jail, tents were replaced by barracks surrounded by high walls, barbed wire and watchtowers and the prison got its own water purification plant, as well as factories to make ice and bricks. As many as 22,000 prisoners were once held in Camp Bucca, with the largest number of suspects arrested during a surge in military operations in 2007 to crack down on al Qaeda in Iraq operatives.
But the US military has been releasing prisoners or handing them to Iraqi control since January as part of an agreement with the Baghdad authorities, and ahead of a US pullout from the country in 2011. The US military aims to close Taji in early 2010 and Camp Cropper next August.
The overall detainee population in US jails has almost halved from 15,500 in January to around 8,398, from an overall high of 100,000 shortly after the invasion of six-and-a-half years ago. With the prisoners gone, Camp Bucca will serve as a joint US-Iraqi military base but after the last American soldier leaves in 2011 it will become a full-fledged Iraqi naval base.
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