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In Iraq, 'a Prison Full of Innocent Men'
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Ali Sabri Abood, 31, a private in the Iraqi military who was released from Bucca this summer after being detained for a year, was shocked by how well he was treated at the facility. The U.S. military taught him carpentry skills, improved his English and provided him with first-rate medical care. Still, the kind treatment did little to soothe his fury at being detained on charges he still doesn't understand.
"Even if they turn the place into a paradise," he said, "it is still a prison full of innocent men."
'As Clear as Mud'
When Stone arrived in Iraq last year to command Task Force 134, which oversees detainee operations, he was shocked at what he found.
"Detention here in Iraq was an abject failure," Stone said. "I realized nobody had any idea what we were doing here."
Muslim extremists effectively controlled Camp Bucca, gouging out the eyes and cutting out the tongues of more moderate prisoners who disobeyed them, U.S. officials said. Stone created an internal PowerPoint slide displaying the carnage with the title "The Powder Keg Exploding, Jihadist University."
He decided he would create a counterinsurgency strategy centered on the fundamental tenets of the Army's counterinsurgency strategy: protect the population and engage moderate voices. He believed that the vast majority of the detainees were not extremists. According to U.S. military statistics, less than a quarter were members of al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Mahdi Army and 70 percent did not even attend mosque every week.
Violence began to plummet and the rate of recapture dropped from 7.6 percent between 2004 and 2006 to less than 1.2 percent last year. As the detainee population skyrocketed from about 15,000 at the beginning of last year to 26,000 at the height of the "surge" in U.S. troops in Iraq, Stone implemented measures to explain to detainees how the process worked and why they were being held.
The military created a cartoon booklet for detainees, featuring an Iraqi named Ahmed, who was arrested for planting roadside bombs, and an anthropomorphized yellow manila folder filled with evidence against him. Stone, despite the objections of his top lawyer, also created the review panels so detainees could hear why they were being held and what the charges were against them.
But Stone angrily rejected what he called impossible demands from detainee advocates to implement an American-style judicial system in the middle of a war zone.
"Now, Miss Human Rights, how does that happen?" Stone said. "I'm a pragmatic believer in human rights, but you can't just have it from the beginning."
He added that the U.N. Security Council had authorized the U.S.-led coalition to detain any "imperative security risk."
He quickly acknowledged, though: "That's about as clear as mud."
