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Turning Shame Into Pride
After Major General Douglas Michael Stone arrived in Baghdad in April 2007 to take command of security prisoners in Iraq, he promptly assembled his officers for some blunt talk. The abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib were a "moral failure" that had shamed a nation long admired for respecting international law and human rights, he told them. They were also a betrayal of the U.S. military's and America's "core values.""Abu Ghraib was a leadership failure that telegraphed to 1.3 billion Muslims that we had no respect for them," Stone told me as we flew in an H-60 Black Hawk helicopter to Camp Bucca, the sprawling civilian detention facility in the flat desert of southern Iraq. "Abu Ghraib will not be forgotten. But it is being replaced."
Unvarnished assessments and cool determination are Stone hallmarks, say his friends and colleagues. So, apparently, is unorthodox thinking. Gen. David Petraeus, who commands the multinational forces in Iraq, says it was Stone's ability to "think outside the box," and his flair for encouraging creativity in subordinates, that prompted him to recruit Stone for the vexing, politically charged detention mission. Although the two men had never before "soldiered together," Petraeus says, "we needed that kind of thinker and leader to take the detainee effort to the next level."
A little over a year after Stone's arrival, America's civilian detention program in Iraq has indeed been transformed. Cement walls and concertina wire still surround the two vast camps where nearly 23,000 people suspected of aiding the Iraqi insurgency are being held. But the men, women, and teenagers "inside the wire" no longer languish without hope, not knowing why they have been detained or what they need to do to be released -- and they're no longer subjected to horrific and occasionally criminal abuses. Nor are they burning down their tents or hurling "chai rocks" made of dried tea and sand at the soldiers who guard them, as they did before Stone arrived.
Rather, thousands of once illiterate detainees have learned how to read and write. Hundreds more are now studying math, science, geography, civics, Arabic, and English and learning carpentry, bricklaying, and other skills that may enable them to feed their families after their release. They play soccer and Ping-Pong, visit their families, pray, and debate how to accurately interpret the Koran they can now read for themselves.
And detainees appear in person every six months before a military review board that determines whether they can be released. While more than 8,000 have been released since last September, only 21 have been recaptured for suspected insurgent activity, a recidivism rate that Stone calls unprecedented.
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