By Jo Wilding
May 5th

The thing about prison is that you’re locked away. No one can see you unless they’re let in or you’re let out. Suddenly � and I am relieved that the world knows about it at last � the abuse of prisoners in Iraq has become partly visible. The Photos made news in a way that countless Iraqi people’s stories did not.

The Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) has been taking statements and testimonies from released detainees and their relatives for months � www.cpt.org � as has an awesome Italian woman called Paola Gasparoli and there are several Iraqi human rights organisations working on individual cases. And yes, they do also work on cases relating to the old government.

The pictures which have been published cause outrage and rightly so but they are the tip of the iceberg.

Women are often detained because their husbands are wanted. There have been many reports of them being kept naked. There have also been a lot of women detained because they were prostitutes used by high-ranking officials of the old leadership. A woman human rights worker from one of the major organisations working on detainee issues disappeared into a US prison for two months.

It is known that many women have been detained, including over a dozen bank clerks, to force them to pay for the discrepancy between the genuine currency handed in and that given out in the January changeover. They were told to pay out new currency for all notes handed in, even suspect ones, because there was no way of verifying which were real. But to be imprisoned is deeply shameful for a woman, mainly because it is assumed that she will have been raped, so most are unwilling to talk about what happened, even confidentially and there is as a result very little information about women detainees.

by Kathy Kelly
May 1, 2004

It’s Saturday morning, May 1, 2004, and women here at Pekin Federal Prison Camp who watched CNN news feel indignant about the way Iraqi prisoners have been treated by US military guards. “Did you see those pictures?” Ruth asked. What in the world is going on over there?”

The news coverage they watched had photo-ops from last year’s May Day, when President George Bush triumphantly boarded a USS Carrier ship to declare “Mission Accomplished,” juxtaposed with the recently released ghastly photos of US military members apparently enjoying degradation and torture of Iraqi prisoners.

“Where did May Day traditions come from?” I later asked aloud, in the prison library. The librarian, Lori, quickly found an Encyclopedia item detailing various May Day traditions. Several of us laughed about one which holds that the dew on the grass, on May 1, holds special qualities for restoring youth. Authorities would be mighty surprised if we all started rolling on the grass. “It would be better to celebrate morning dew than to boast about dropping all those bombs over Iraq,” said Carol. “Looks like people there are going to hate us so much, they’d rather kill us than look at us.”