US-Iraqi detention centers are breeding grounds for recruiting insurgents

Extremism + American-style detention = Extremism² [1]: 

U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq have become a breeding ground for extremists where Islamic militants recruit and train supporters, and use violence against perceived foes, say former inmates and Iraqi officials.

Extremists conducted regular indoctrination lectures, and in some cases destroyed televisions supplied by the Americans for use with educational videos, banned listening to music on radios, forbade smoking and stoked tensions between Sunni and Shiite detainees, they said.

Iraqis swept up in security operations and held indefinitely while the Americans try to determine whether they have any links to the insurgency are susceptible to the extremists' message, former detainees said. 

Nobody stopped to think that maybe swooping in and arresting en masse Iraqi’s who were in the wrong place at the wrong time might be a bad move?  Ruining the lives and families of petty criminals and innocent bystanders through forced cohabitation with legitimate extremists amounts to nothing more than sending them to insurgent university. 

I’m sympathetic to the necessity of neutralizing a credible threat when you’re in a war zone.  Politics aside, war is – obviously – chaotic and dangerous.  However you feel about whether or not we belong there, there are those who pose an imminent threat to the lives of those around them and preventing that is the least we can do.  But once again the Pentagon’s policy of shoot first think later, well … when they get around to it, has inserted ourselves as a causal factor in the very conflict we purport to address.  

Comments

Stacy (not verified)Tue, 2007-04-10 19:25

Re: US-Iraqi detention centers are breeding grounds...

Hypocracy at its best: we want to bring "democracy" to a country that largely does not want it yet we do not hold them to the same standards or give them the rights that other democratic peoples enjoy. I imagine that if a U.S. run detention center is the first taste of democracy an Iraqi gets, they'd be even less likely to want it! Mission Accomplished!