UMM QASR, Iraq - Buses rolled along a dark desert trail to deliver 240 Iraqi prisoners, who stumbled outside and blinked under harsh lights. The tired men clutching worry beads were the latest batch of suspected insurgents to arrive this month at Camp Bucca, the American-run prison built so far south in Iraq that workers sometimes cross the Kuwaiti border for a quick lunch.
To the military, Bucca is much more than a dust-covered tent city in which inmates attempt their escapes when thick morning fog hides the razor-topped fences. This far-flung outpost is a closely monitored laboratory in which experiments in long-term detention are changing U.S. military doctrine on enemy prisoners of war.
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Camp Bucca, named for a New York firefighter who died in the World Trade Center terrorist attacks, was built on the grounds of a radio station that Saddam Hussein's regime had used. Bucca now holds about 4,000 detainees and is expected to swell to 6,000. About 1,500 prisoners remain in Abu Ghraib. At Bucca, the detainee-guard ratio is 7 to 1, still above the ideal 5 to 1 but nowhere near the crush of Abu Ghraib at its most chaotic, when estimates of its prisoner-guard ratio varied from 1 to 15 to 1 in 75.
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Miller's touch is also evident in the inmates' quarters, rectangular camps where Iraqis earn privileges such as radios and English classes as rewards for good behavior. Miller is replacing weathered tents with air-conditioned sheds for the detainees, who are accused of financing or carrying out attacks on American and Iraqi forces. He's spending more than $1 million alone on cots, even though some soldiers complained that the detainees dismantle them to fashion weapons.
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9980213.htm
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