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Legal Maneuver
To Make a Point,
An Army Officer
Helps Iraqi Convict
Rule of Law Should Apply
To All, Capt. Carter Says;
Confessions Won by Cable
'Grudge' of the 'Fat Woman'?
By GREG JAFFE
June 13, 2006; Page A1
BAQUBAH, Iraq -- Capt. Phillip Carter visits the filthy, overcrowded prison here at least twice a week to meet with the warden and police officers who oversee the facility. Each time he stops by, the warmest greeting he receives comes from a burly 46-year-old convicted murderer.
Hamid Abboud was found guilty in 1998 of killing a man in a fight and sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released and granted amnesty in 2002. Under Iraqi law, he should now be free. But he was mysteriously re-arrested in 2004 on the old charges and remains incarcerated, ordered to serve out the rest of his sentence.
SEEKING JUSTICE
Capt. Carter, a 30-year-old military police soldier who is a lawyer in civilian life, could demand Mr. Abboud's release and the Iraqis would likely comply. But he doesn't. Instead he prods judges and prosecutors in this province an hour's drive from Baghdad to uphold Iraqi law and set Mr. Abboud free on their own.
"I have faith because of your work," Mr. Abboud told Capt. Carter in late May, when the temperature had risen above 100 degrees and the stench in the prison, crammed to four times its legal capacity, was almost unbearable. "My fate is in your hands."
Why a U.S. Army captain took on the case of a convicted murderer speaks volumes about how the American strategy has changed in Iraq in the past six months, as the U.S. tries to turn control back to the Iraqis. It also shows how painful and halting progress in Iraq can be.
Capt. Carter hopes to use the case to make a larger point: that the Iraqi judicial system, dominated by personal and sectarian grudges, needs to follow its own rules. "It appeared like the perfect test case, because it would show that the result should be dictated by Iraqi law and not by the whim of any individual," he says.
[Phil Carter]
He became interested in the case this spring, when he and fellow officers saw rapidly deteriorating conditions at the jail in Baqubah, a city of about 300,000, about five miles from the spot where notorious terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed last week. The jail's population surged to 475 prisoners in March, up from 350 just two months earlier. The facility was so overcrowded that some prisoners had to lie on their sides at night to fit in the jail's four small cells.
Many prisoners were being held without any charges, say U.S. and Iraqi officials. Others said they had been beaten into confessing to crimes they didn't commit, and bore bruises and scars that seemed to lend credence to their stories, U.S. military officers say. Running the police department's counterterrorism unit was a colonel known to fellow officers as "Ali the Cable," for his history of beating confessions out of suspects with a cable.
Faced with such a problem a year ago, the Americans would have taken over the prison and run it for the Iraqis. Now, the push from the Pentagon is to reduce the U.S. presence in Iraq. "It is all about allowing Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems that are solved with Iraqi resources," Gen. George Casey, the top military officer in Iraq, says he tells all incoming commanders. "We are here to help them win it; not win it for them. That is the flat-ass rule."
[Hamid Abboud]
That guidance led Capt. Carter to Mr. Abboud.
Mr. Abboud was among those granted amnesty in 2002 when Saddam Hussein, just before the U.S. invasion, freed tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq.
Following the fall of Mr. Hussein in 2003, the U.S. decided to honor the amnesty. The decision was made largely out of necessity: It would have been too hard to round up all the prisoners, and then figure out who had been imprisoned legitimately and who had been incarcerated for political reasons, say U.S. officials familiar with the decision. The Iraqi government has let the amnesty stand. So under Iraqi law, prisoners released in 2002 should be free today.
Capt. Carter figured that if he could persuade judges in Baqubah to follow their own rules and release a guilty man, maybe they would be more likely to respect the law in other cases, where the inmates appeared to be innocent. "If we can solve this case according to the law, we can solve all the cases in the jail," he says.
Capt. Carter came to Baqubah in November via an unusual route. After dropping out of high school in Santa Monica, Calif., he earned a graduation-equivalency degree and attended community college. He did well enough to get into the University of California, Los Angeles and, after graduating, became an Army officer.
[Once a week women are allowed to visit the Diyala Province jail in Baqubah, Iraq, in groups of 30 to visit the inmates.]
Once a week women are allowed to visit the Diyala Province jail in Baqubah, Iraq, in groups of 30 to visit the inmates.
He spent four years with the military police, leaving the Army to attend UCLA law school, where he graduated in 2004. Last fall, he was practicing at a big law firm in Los Angeles. During that time, he had an Internet blog and wrote occasional opinion pieces in U.S. magazines criticizing the U.S. decision not to follow the Geneva Conventions at its prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
By last year, the Army, desperately short of military police, was calling such officers back. Capt. Carter volunteered to return. He was assigned to a police transition team run by 38-year-old Lt. Col. William Benson.
Technically, the 70-soldier team wasn't supposed to have anything to do with the jail or court system. Its job was to build an Iraqi police force that could stand up to insurgents. The U.S. soldiers helped build a practice range for marksmanship, walked patrols with the Iraqis and taught them to fight as a team. The efforts paid off when insurgents launched a major attack on a police station in Baqubah in March. The Iraqi police, who had fled past assaults, stood and fought, this time driving off insurgents.
After seeing conditions in the jail, Col. Benson concluded that just training the police to fight wasn't enough. "We realized we had a big hole in our campaign strategy," he says. The jail, which has a capacity of about 150, housed about 475 inmates. Some had been held without charges for more than a year. "The perception among the public was that the only way to get out was to bribe someone," Col. Benson says.
Staff Sgt. Bradley Greer, a military-police soldier from Birmingham, Ala., began reading files of about 150 prisoners. "Most of the cases looked like total bull crap. There was no evidence, no information about the incident that led to their arrest. Nothing," he says. When he ventured into the prison, gaunt-looking inmates showed him scars they said came from beatings by the Iraqi Army. Many said they had no idea why they had been arrested. "It just chilled me to see them living like that," he says.
Sgt. Greer says he wanted to confront the chief judge in the province. "I wanted to go in and say, 'You need to let these guys go today!' " he recalls. "That never happened."
Capt. Carter and his boss, Col. Benson, opted for a less-direct approach. They decided to focus attention on all aspects of the legal process, from arrest through imprisonment, and pressure the Iraqis to fix problems on their own.
Imbuing Baqubah's security forces with a respect for the rule of law, Col. Benson believed, would help stem sectarian violence in the city, which is 50% Shiite, 40% Sunni and 10% Kurd. As long as Sunnis believed the Shiite-dominated security forces could imprison them indefinitely, sectarian fighting would only grow worse. "We as Americans get tied around democracy, democracy, democracy. But the rule of law is really at the heart of stopping the violence here," Col. Benson says...
Kathianne said:Someone said earlier this morning, that we should stop worrying about how we got into Iraq and pay more attention to how it's going. I'm seeing more and more positive things, it seems like the military is doing just fine:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB115016394400078554-lMyQjAxMDE2NTEwMzExNjMzWj.html
Stop talking like that! Your scaring the kids.Bonnie said:I don't know if you happened to catch any of Bush's press conference today but he had an aire of confidence that I haven't seen with him for a while.
CSM said:Stop talking like that! Your scaring the kids.
And justifiably so, it's been a good month for him. Several MSM papers have editorials saying just that.Bonnie said:I don't know if you happened to catch any of Bush's press conference today but he had an aire of confidence that I haven't seen with him for a while.
Kathianne said:And justifiably so, it's been a good month for him. Several MSM papers have editorials saying just that.
Kathianne said:I have my problems with GW, for awhile there I thought he was also dropping the ball in GWOT, glad to see he's getting back on track.
