Camp Bucca: Iraq's Guantanamo

It may seem hard to imagine a place where people incarcerated by the U.S. military have fewer rights than they do in Guantanamo Bay.

Welcome to Iraq.

It is just after 4 a.m., and hundreds of Iraqis are lining up to visit their relatives outside Camp Bucca, which in August held about 18,000 detainees. Near the Kuwaiti border, Bucca shimmers in the predawn of the southern Iraqi desert, a beacon of light in a country where electricity is on for no more than 12 hours a day. It is the U.S. military's largest detention center in Iraq. The total number of those officially in U.S. custody in Iraq has fluctuated between a low of 7,200 and a high of more than 26,000 since 2005.

The three hotels in Zubair, one of the closest towns to Bucca, are always full. "We don't have tourism here," says Jabbar Mubarak, the clerk at the Tower of Babil, Zubair's largest hotel. "Everyone who comes to our hotel comes to visit their sons." The lobby swarms with families, some of whom have driven more than 10 hours. Despite major offensives in the past year against the Mahdi Army, Iraq's largest Shiite militia, about 80 percent of those in custody here are Sunni and hail from the central and northern parts of the country.

One of the biggest complaints is that the vast majority of detainees have not been charged with any crime. "Why don't the U.S. forces charge him if he has done something? Then at least we would know how long he will be here," said Hadia Khalaf, whose son Qusay was arrested in September 2007. "He was our provider," she said, reflecting the plight of many families who rely on extended family and charity to survive.

Since 2003, approximately 96,000 Iraqis have been officially detained by the U.S. military, with 100,000 more having been temporarily detained but never sent to a theater-level internment facility like Bucca. The other theater-level facility currently open is Camp Cropper, near Baghdad International Airport, which serves as the system's in- and out-processing center and holds about 3,000 detainees, including roughly 300 juveniles.

The legal basis for detentions stems from a single line of a 2004 UN Security Council resolution, which has been renewed every year since by agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. This resolution, which gives the legal justification for continued U.S. military occupation, allows "internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security."

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are negotiating a status of forces agreement between the two governments that they hope to reach by the end of the year, when the current UN mandate expires. A key issue at stake is detentions, part of a broader area of contention between the two governments over the rights that U.S. troops should have to operate unilaterally in Iraq. The Iraqi government has demanded that the U.S. military no longer be allowed to detain Iraqis without its approval. The State Department and White House have been largely mum about the discussions, while Maliki's office has regularly leaked parts of the agreement and says that the final sticking points are whether U.S. troops will continue to be immune from prosecution under Iraqi law and the extent to which the U.S. military will have to coordinate with and receive approval from the Iraqi government before launching operations.

On the issue of detentions, Joseph Logan, a researcher for Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa section, thinks an amnesty might be the answer. "If you don't have the evidence to transfer someone to the Iraqi system, it's probably the case that their outright release should be considered," Logan said. "It does seem they've been expediting the process of clearing some people out, and that's praiseworthy. But that doesn't deal with the underlying legal problem -- that these people can't challenge their detention and don't have counsel."