COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

This doesn't look good.

Still, you can't believe everything you read in the paper.

For example:

In the 24-page report, the Red Cross also said coalition military intelligence officers estimated up to 90 percent of those detained in Iraq were arrested by mistake.

The figure seems high to me. First of all, "detained" can mean a lot of things. If our troops staged a raid on a house, we would briefly detain everybody in the household. Which could mean a lot of people, in a tribal society of extended families. It would not be unusual to enter a house and find ten people there, almost always relatives. All of them would be "detained" until the search was complete.

Or if the commander decided he didn't want his forces exposed at someone's house for hourse to conduct a search, he would frequently simply load up the military-aged males in a truck and bring them back to the unit, where we would often have a team of linguists standing by to conduct an initial screen.

Early on--in May and June, we would ordinarily keep everyone we detained long enough to get them in front of a team of military intelligence screeners. When we maintained a detention facility at the battalion level, our policy was to keep them not longer than 48 hours. After that I or my support platoon leader would transport them to the 3rd ACR facility at Al Asad Air Base--the closest facility with dedicated linguists and screeners.

As we got better at our jobs, though, we figured out that not everybody with 2 AK-47s in the house was a terrorist, and not everyone with a Saddam Hussein wall clock was Fedayeen. And so we started turning people guilty of routine weapons violations and other routine crimes not deemed a direct threat to the coalition forces over to the Iraqi police. Which was always an interesting and enjoyable process for me, since I like playing "charades."

Some time around July, the screening process became much more formalized, and our regimental detention facility would not accept detainees without either hard evidence, two written, sworn statements (it could be from soldiers, but it had to be two different soldiers, and signed by an officer), or have their name on the regimental most wanted list developed by the Regimental S-2.

Maybe that was reliable, and maybe not. I do know that every full intelligence report forwarded to my battalion (the real reports--not the executive summaries included in the FRAGOs) would routinely include a section critically assessing the reliability of the source. So they weren't acting on just anything that came their way, and would routinely attempt to corroborate intelligence by relying on multiple sources.

Companies had to fill out multiple pages of information on every detainee, listing specifically what the charges were, why he was picked up, what contraband was found at his residence and/or on his person. Any physical evidence--weapons, explosives, blasting caps, mortar shells, everything--had to be either labeled or turned in with the detainee or photographed.

The idea was that if we wanted to put someone away, the paperwork accompanying each detainee would have to build an airtight case, to withstand the examination of a tribunal who was to meet to determine each detainee's status. The tribunal, according to my orders, was to include at least one Iraqi.

I don't know if this tribunal ever really got off the ground.

We weren't trained on any of this going in--we learned it on the fly, working with Military Intelligence and Military Police officers and NCOs who were working hard to make it work, too.

I can say that a lot of innocent people were turned into the detention system early on, during the larger sweeps. The assumption at the unit level was that the screeners would quickly release anyone who wasn't involved with the insurgency. We didn't have linguists of our own, typically, and couldn't effectively screen ourselves, at our level.

By July, however, the safeguards were in place. The 3rd ACR would not accept a detainee without the paperwork in order to effect some due process. And on several occasions, I refused to transport some Iraqis into the detention system if there were simply zero evidence connecting him to the insurgency.

The units quickly adjusted, though, and as the requirements were more widely disseminated, the screenings happened at a lower and lower level. By August, the platoons were making excellent calls, and I can't remember too many borderline cases even then.

I don't know what other units were doing. And we weren't perfect, by a long shot. But as we negotiated the learning curve, every Iraqi at least got a fair shake from the 1-124th Infantry.

If he wasn't on the wanted list, and there was no physical evidence to connect him with anti-coalition activities, we didn't pick him up (except in a few specific cases where we detained people we believed to be material witnesses).

It helped, of course, that our Battalion Commander was a career Miami Dade police officer. It also helped that, being a guard unit, we had law enforcement professionals sprinkled throughout the battalion who were used to preparing paperwork to withstand critical scrutiny and cross examination.

We also had good NCOs and good soldiers throughout the unit who adjusted quickly to the requirements as we developed them and did a great job of executing.

But we certainly didn't have a monopoly on good troops.

If the MI officers were saying that perhaps 90% of the detainees at Abu Ghraib were innocent, then Abu Ghraib screwed up in accepting them without looking closely at the documentation, anyway.

In any case, it's clear that there are a lot of people who should be released. If that tribunal is not up and running yet, I hope the press puts their feet to the fire and starts asking why?

Among "serious violations of international humanitarian law" the report listed a failure to set up a system to notify family members of arrests, resulting "in the de facto 'disappearance' of the arrestee for weeks or months."

This is true, although I don't know that it's a violation of international law to decline to knock on a terrorist's mother's door to tell her her son's been arrested. We didn't notify Saddam Fedayeen family members of the arrest of her son. If the Saddam Fedayeen wants to do that, that's the Saddam Fedayeen's job.

There are military reasons NOT to notify. First of all, in the REAL world, it's a great way to get the poor sap who has to notify the family killed. Or you can tie up a whole squad of security personnel to defend him while he delivers the news.

Second, it gives us more time to exploit the intelligence given to us by a captured insurgent. If his family knows he's captured, then his whole clan knows. And the terrorists within the clan know what he knows. And would doubtless work to render that intelligenc obsolete by the time we could act on it.

If we came into possession of a dead body, we would usually notify the Red Crescent, and they could work with the community. We weren't uncaring ghouls. There was one exception, when one of our patrols killed a high level Baath Party Official outside a relative's home in Ramadi, and recovered the body. We transported his body to a US Military morgue precisely because if they knew that we had found him, they could infer who betrayed him and murder our source.

And yes, we did have plenty of sources murdered.

So the ICRC's hearts are in the right place. But they aren't Gospel.

Just a little background...the news behind the news.

Splash, out

Jason