In all, nine members of the Islamic State’s top command did time at Bucca, according to the terrorist analyst organization Soufan Group. Apart from Baghdadi himself, who spent five years there, the leader’s number two, Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, as well as senior military leader Haji Bakr, (now deceased), and leader of foreign fighters Abu Qasim were incarcerated there, Soufan said. Though it’s likely the men were extremists when they entered Bucca, the group added, it’s certain they were when they left. “Before their detention, Mr al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America,” wrote military veteran Andrew Thompson and academic Jeremi Suri in the New York Times this month. “Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. The prisons became virtual terrorist universities: the hardened radicals were the professors, the other detainees were the students, and the prison authorities played the role of absent custodian.” It’s a scenario that’s long confounded law enforcement: how do you crack down on extremism without creating more of it? From the radicalisation of white supremacists in U.S. prisons to the United Kingdom’s disastrous bid in the 1970s to incarcerate Irish Republican Army members, the problem is nothing new: prisons are pools of explosive extremism awaiting a spark. And at Camp Bucca, there was no shortage of sparks. As news of Baghdadi’s tenure at Bucca emerged, former prison commander James Skylar Gerrond remembered many of them. “Re: Badghadi,” he wrote on Twitter in July, “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism.” He worked at the prison between 2006 and 2007, when it was glutted with tens of thousands of radicals, including Baghdadi. And at Camp Bucca, there was no shortage of sparks. As news of Baghdadi’s tenure at Bucca emerged, former prison commander James Skylar Gerrond remembered many of them. “Re: Badghadi,” he wrote on Twitter in July, “Many of us at Camp Bucca were concerned that instead of just holding detainees, we had created a pressure cooker for extremism.” He worked at the prison between 2006 and 2007, when it was glutted with tens of thousands of radicals, including Baghdadi. Many were guilty of attacking American soldiers. But many more were not; “simply being a ‘suspicious looking’ military-aged male in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars,” according to the Times opinion piece. Shadid reported as much in 2009, confirming many viewed it “as an appalling miscarriage of justice where prisoners were not charged or permitted to see evidence against them and freed detainees may end up swelling the ranks of a subdued insurgency.”
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 00:11:51 +0000
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