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   From: DEMI_GOD_@SHAW.CA   
      
    U.S. military closes makeshift prison Camp Cropper   
      
   Notorious detention center held hundreds of crime suspects, Baathist   
   'security detainees'   
      
   Associated Press   
   BAGHDAD, IRAQ--The U.S. military has shut down Camp Cropper, an increasingly   
   notorious make-shift prison where hundreds of Iraqis were crowded into tents   
   through Baghdad's scorching summer, a U.S. official reported Sunday. The   
   detainees were scattered to other facilities.   
      
   The Iraqi Lawyers League, pressing a rights campaign under an ex-political   
   prisoner of the Baath regime, has won another con-cession from the Americans   
   as well: accelerated hearings, with lawyers, for some of at least 5,500   
   detained Iraqis.   
      
   That newly elected league president, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, met with U.S.   
   occupation chief L. Paul Bremer a month ago to register complaints about the   
   internment of thousands of Iraqis without charge since a U.S.-British   
   invasion force toppled Saddam Hussein's Baath government in April.   
      
   "I told Bremer the Americans and the Iraqi people ought to have become   
   friends since then, but the way they have handled these things has produced   
   just the opposite effect," Malik said.   
      
   Journalists were barred from Camp Cropper, but released detainees this   
   summer told of overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, and they alleged   
   physical abuse by guards. The human rights group Amnesty International   
   protested it "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or   
   punishment, banned by international law."   
      
   The camp population included both Iraqis picked up for allegedly committing   
   common crimes and so-called "security detainees," mainly Baathists deemed to   
   be a threat to the security of the occupation force.   
      
   "They are living in tents in the desert, in a very hot climate. Some   
   detainees are sick," said Malik, interviewed Sunday before the closing of   
   the camp was disclosed.   
      
   The former law professor and Iraqi information minister, who was himself   
   imprisoned by the Baathists after they seized power in 1968, also complained   
   that lawyers were not allowed into the heavily guarded airport.   
      
   "That was another reason why we closed the airport (camp)," said U.S. Army   
   Col. Ralph Sabatino, who specializes in detainee issues and is a chief   
   liaison with the interim Iraqi Justice Ministry.   
      
   Sabatino said Cropper was shut down Wednesday, on Bremer's orders, and its   
   several hundred inmates were transferred to at least three Baghdad-area   
   prisons.   
      
   Cropper held as many as 1,200 detainees this summer, Sabatino said. "It   
   wasn't supposed to be a detention center" but a temporary holding facility,   
   he said. "It was designed for 250 people. When it grew to 500 to 700, it got   
   very crowded. It had a very bad reputation, appropriately."   
      
   The Army Reserve officer, in civilian life an assistant corporation counsel   
   for the city of New York, said he met with Lawyers League representatives   
   two weeks ago. "Since that time we've coordinated to facilitate their   
   representation of people in custody."   
      
   Ignacio Rubio, a Spanish judge assigned to Bremer's Coalition Provisional   
   Authority, is developing a program to assign court-appointed attorneys to   
   represent detainees who will be charged at a kind of preliminary hearing   
   under Iraqi law.   
      
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    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)