At prison gate, Iraqi families vent

A ripple of excitement spread through the few hundred family members, gathered outside the gates of the US military's Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, when three buses crammed with men rolled out of the front gate.

Tripping over their shapeless black robes, mothers rushed to the Marine cordon, some bursting into tears as they saw sons for the first time in months, many of them hanging out the windows and shouting "follow me, follow me" as the buses sped down the highway.

With the US release of 440 men earlier this week, many visitors thought they were witnessing another mass release and scrambled for their cars and taxis to follow the disappearing buses.

But the marines intervened to slow the convoy down, leaving families, some of whom had been waiting eight months to be reunited with loved ones, with fresh disappointment and a deepening sense of grievance against the US.

Fighting guerrilla wars is always ugly, and Abu Ghraib and two other principal detention centers - Um Qasr and Habbaniyah - are another face of the compromises regarding American values that the US feels it needs to make to win here. Charges or evidence aren't needed to keep men indefinitely detained.

"Is this the definition of the freedom that America promised us?" asks Ibrahim Hamid, a farmer from the Sunni Triangle town of Ramadi. His brother Ahmed has been held at Abu Ghraib for five months, ever since a platoon of soldiers broke into their home during dinner. "They dragged him off, no explanations why. What's the difference from Saddam?" he asks.

An ugly but perhaps necessary aspect of the US occupation of Iraq has been the prolonged detention of suspected insurgents, many of whom are never charged and are eventually released.

The US says it has complied with the Geneva Conventions in handling its prisoners in Iraq, pointing out the conventions allow for the detention of people "reasonably believed" to have been involved in attacks on coalition forces.

Brig. Gen Mark Kimmitt, a coalition military spokesman, said earlier this month that most of the people at Abu Ghraib and other facilities deserve to be there. "There are a number of procedures that have to be followed and a number of filters that have to be penetrated before a detainee ends up at Abu Ghraib or one of the other facilities," he said. "We typically have a 72-hour time period in which the unit that captured that person has to demonstrate why that person is an imperative threat to the coalition, which is the legal standard."

But with soldiers converted into jailers and convinced that many of their wards were involved in the killing of comrades, Abu Ghraib also been the apparent site of some ugly scenes.

Last Saturday, the US military formally charged US six military police with abuse of prisoners, including allegations of cruelty, "indecent acts," and assault. A further 11 soldiers are being held without charge. The incidents occurred in November and December at Abu Ghraib, where a riot Nov. 24 ended with three prisoners dead and eight wounded.

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