Needlenose: “Iraq’s prison system is overrun with Shiite Muslim militiamen who have freed fellow militia members convicted of major crimes and executed Sunni Arab inmates, the country’s deputy justice minister said in an interview this week.
‘We cannot control the prisons. It’s as simple as that,’ said the deputy minister, Pusho Ibrahim Ali Daza Yei, an ethnic Kurd. ‘Our jails are infiltrated by the militias from top to bottom, from Basra to Baghdad.’
As a result, Yei has asked U.S. authorities to suspend plans to transfer prisons and detainees from American to Iraqi control. ‘Our ministry is unprepared at this time to take over the facilities, especially those in areas where Shiite militias exist,’ he said in a letter to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, the official in charge of American detention facilities.
. . . Gardner said the eventual transfer of prisons to Iraqi control would proceed gradually, preceded by several weeks of training for Iraqi guards, conducted by U.S. corrections officers and military police. The Iraqis would then work under the supervision of American guards for at least six months. A U.S. transition team would then be left in place for an additional period before the prison was handed over.”
::Tullycast:: 