U.S. brings Iraq prison camp out of legal black hole

By Peter Graff

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq (Reuters) - In the visiting hall of the U.S. prison camp, Delal Hashem, 25, sat opposite her husband Abbas Daoud Salman with the children she had brought to see him for the first time since he was captured 14 months ago.

Amna, the infant daughter who had never seen her father, clung to her mother's neck. Four-year-old Abdullah put his arms around his father, who smiled silently.

"They miss him. It hurts," their mother said.

Approached from the air, the U.S. military's Camp Bucca detention centre emerges from desert heat haze like a cross between a mediaeval fortress and a run-down suburban trailer park. The first thing you notice is its staggering size.

Home to 8,000 jailers and more than 15,000 prisoners from all over Iraq, it lies in a remote brown wasteland along the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border surrounded by razor wire, guard towers and scrap metal junkyards.

Its bakery produces 150,000 pitas a day. Its purification system churns out 700,000 gallons of drinking water. Guards on 40 towers peer out and in, round the clock, rifles ready.

"Bucca," says Brigadier General David Quantock, in charge of U.S. detentions in Iraq, "is the seventh wonder of the world."

The camp is the main centre of a vast archipelago of U.S. military detentions that has ensnared tens of thousands of Iraqis over 5 1/2 years of war, the vast majority held for months or even years without any charge or legal representation.