Mission: Iraqi Prisons

Last summer, Gary DeLand served as a senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Justice and the U.S. Department of Justice in the effort to build a new civilian prison system. The former director of the Utah Department of Corrections says his team was largely successful in setting up a Corrections Academy to train Iraqis in treating prisoners humanely. The team brought several civilian prisons online, but some top military officials often failed to grasp the rudiments of creating a working prison system.

After DeLand came home, the press insisted on viewing his team’s entire careers through the prism of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

DeLand describes a dangerous and chaotic mission that often lacked leadership. U.S. Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who oversaw the personnel charged with prisoner abuse in Iraq, seized Abu Ghraib for Army use after DeLand’s civilian team refurbished the facility. He believes his plan would have averted the mistreatment of prisoners.

“I’ve never in my life felt that I was accomplishing as much and as little, simultaneously,” says DeLand of the mission. “If you put it in context, we were enormously successful. If you compared it to what you would accomplish in the U.S., we were 15- or 20-percent effective.”

DeLand is currently executive director of the Utah Sheriff’s Association. He received his Master’s of Public Administration from the University of Utah and later helped add an MPA program with a criminal justice focus there.

As president of DeLand & Associates Inc., a criminal justice consulting firm, he has traveled the United States, Canada, and South Africa assisting in developing standards, and providing training and architectural support. He also acts as an expert witness in correctional litigation.

After accepting our request for an telephone interview, DeLand spoke to Correctional News from Salt Lake City on May 27, 2004.

Morgan Jones: What were the primary challenges in setting up a new prison system in Iraq?

Gary DeLand: The challenges started early because, first, the mission laid out before it started was changed before boots were on the ground. We were all supposed to go to Iraq together, but because the Justice Department screwed up the passports for a couple of us, the Law Enforcement and Corrections teams went over in two groups, and I went in the second group about a month and a half late.

We were told we would have three months to do an assessment of the physical facilities and the resources available, staffing and otherwise, that could be used to put a system together for the civilian government, not for the military. The military had their own show.

By the time the first group arrived in Baghdad, they were told the mission had changed and were given two weeks to perform a complete assessment of the nation’s corrections system. An interesting task, since by the time we left, there had been over 150 facilities discovered in a nation the size of California, and the team was limited in how far they could travel. They identified a dozen facilities that should be prioritized and wrote a quick and dirty master plan.

Gary DeLand, former head of the Utah DOC, was a senior advisor for the civilian prison-building mission in Iraq last summer. DeLand is now in Salt Lake City, where he runs a criminal justice consulting firm. Photos courtesy of Gary DeLand.

You have 6.5 million people in Baghdad, and Saddam released so many people from prison, some estimates as high as 100,000 criminals. These were not political prisoners but criminals, and the crime rate in Baghdad was phenomenal. There were something like 20 homicides a day during one period when I was there, and that was only how many came to the morgue. That didn’t count the bodies floating down the Tigris.

Within a week of my own arrival, two of the three of the remaining Americans had quit. They said they weren’t going to work under these conditions.

Mostly it was the frustration of having to work in the bureaucracy, but there’s also the reality that you live in a Red Zone. The Palace is the only Green Zone.

We had to work through interpreters who, sometimes just in general conversation, were hard to understand. Then put them in the middle of a fast-moving conversation, Arabic on one side and English on the other, and sometimes you were working in almost total confusion.

When I was there, there was no banking system where you can say, ‘Here’s a check.’ You load a plastic sack or your cargo pockets full of $100 bills when you go out and do business.

The other thing that would make the job hard were force protection requirements. If I’m in Baghdad and have to go to Hillah, Najaf, Carbalah or anywhere, then we had to lay on force protection. You then had to have a minimum of two vehicles, two armed drivers, and two long guns in each vehicle, which meant M-16s or AK-47s.

There was supposed to be six senior advisors, plus 60 or more support personnel. That’s what I was told by the Brit who was sort of the titular leader of our group. From July until about September, it was only Lane McCotter and me. [McCotter is also a former director of the Utah DOC, and a longtime friend and colleague of DeLand’s.] There was a Brit who was there off and on. He was gone on leave much of the time, or he stayed in the office.

If that wasn’t bad enough, Lane McCotter’s father-in-law died, so he flew straight from Kuwait back to the U.S., and he was gone for three weeks. Now all of a sudden, this ‘unit’ is one person – me. The Brit has gone back to the U.K. for R&R, which was supposed to be two weeks and ran into about a month. Everybody else has quit.

Left to right, Gary DeLand, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Senior Advisor Lane McCotter, and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski tour the death house at Abu Ghraib. “Before we left Abu Ghraib, we constructed a five-meter wall around the death house to isolate it from the rest of the prison,” says DeLand. “The intention was to chronicle the brutality of the Sadaam years.”

Now I did have some MPs assigned to us. They were very skilled people, but there were limits that [Brig. Gen. Janis] Karpinski had put on what they could do for us. Everything had to be in a support role. Gen. Karpinski, so you understand, was running the military side of the prison and we had been responsible for the civilian side.

Imagine starting a corrections system the size of California from scratch, and doing it with one person or two. And in a war zone. And not speaking the language. And not being able to get around unless you could get X number of people to join you.

We worked seven days a week. We worked 10, 12, sometimes 14 hours days. The Department of Justice ordered us to take every Friday off, which is the Sabbath over there, their Holy day. We did not. We liked it better for working because the roads were more free and you didn’t have as much chance of getting bottled up in traffic. If you weren’t moving, the risk factor went up substantially.

Those are some of the things that made it tough to accomplish the mission. Lane had been there since May. [Former state DOC directors] Terry Stewart from Arizona and Larry DuBois from Massachusetts had also been there since may, although they both left July 1. With their assistance, and what Lane and I did later, by the time we left the theater Sept. 1, we had added 3,000 beds to the civilian system.

The biggest part was implemented. Tasfirat, Rusafa, As Sulaymaniyah, Hillah, Abu Ghraib, and Karkh for juveniles. Those six were high on our list to at least open as civilian prisons before we left. Actually, Abu Ghraib had not opened, but we attended the dedication ceremony. But, of course, Karpinski seized Abu Ghraib for the Army, and our plan for it never happened.

Our master plan never got carried out after we left. That would have had just over 12,000 beds in place by the end of the year, by Dec. 31, 2003.

MJ: How far were those facilities from what we consider Western correctional standards?

GD: Abu Ghraib, one of the facilities we strongly argued to be able to put up, was very close to Western standards if you’re talking about 1960s construction. Telephone-pole, linear construction, the old Southern Steel model. That’s exactly what Abu Ghraib was. It was certainly not a podular-remote or podular-direct facility, but as linear facilities go, it was extremely well-designed, extremely well-built. Good concrete, good craftsmanship.

MJ: Compared to…?

GD: Okay, Tasfirat. They started putting prisoners there when they were still building it. Well, I’m standing in an area where we have prisoners, and all of a sudden, I noticed bricks are falling out of the wall! So we walk around the other side and see workers putting up bookshelves in the administrative area.

DeLand promotes Jumah Zamel to brigadier general. Along with Capt. McIntyre (at podium), Zamel was to have run Abu Ghraib as a civilian prison, but Gen. Karpinski scuttled the plan and seized Abu Ghraib for use by the U.S. military.

The inmates could probably have kicked right through the walls at any place in the Tasfirat facility. When you watched the way the contractor was working, the amount of water and cement they put in the grouting was nothing close to Western standards.

At Abu Ghraib, we already had a well-built facility and only had to clean up after the disruption from the war. Iraqi guards had burned records. The fires were so intense, entire wings were destroyed. I’m disappointed that President Bush is talking about closing it. I don’t know that they ever will. Right now, they’re probably about 70,000 beds short.

Inside Abu Ghraib, there were actually two other prisons besides our prison, the Army’s prisons. One was called Camp Ganci and another was Camp Vigilant. Vigilant was there when I got there, and what it was was nothing but a great big dirt courtyard. Just as I got there, they were starting to add tents to it and split trenches for latrine.

Camp Ganci then opened in about the first week of August, and it was a little bit more well planned, as tent cities go. It was built in 500-bed modules with a certain amount of support infrastructure built into it. But again, all with tents, no hard structures like we were building. Those belonged, lock, stock and barrel, to the Army. We had no authority or responsibility there.

We were involved peripherally with other projects, getting bags of cash out to them. There was a limited extent to which the military, on their own, could put facilities together. We would try and help them with some funding as long as it was going to ultimately be a facility for the civilian government.

I had to go down En Najaf and approve a 350-bed facility the Marines down there had put together. Lane had gotten $1.9 million in cash for the 101st Airborne to put a facility together up in the Sunni Triangle. We also had money going out to at Al Nazariyah.

MJ: To what extent did you use Iraqi contractors?

GD: We worked entirely through Iraqi contractors. Some were very good. We built a large medical wing at Abu Ghraib, the only medical wing that had ever been built in an Iraqi prison. Kitchens, dining rooms, program areas. These were all things we were building and that were in various stages of completion when I left. Generators, water tanks. We’d done a lot of work out there.

DeLand (in sunglasses) negotiating removal of 1,500 Arabs who took over and dismantled a prison at Kan Ban’i Saad.

To look at it now and see the shame that’s been brought upon the situation, it almost brings tears to your eyes. We put so much effort into that place.

MJ: What did Lane McCotter bring to Iraq’s civilian master plan?

GD: Lane essentially wrote the master plan. He was the one who cranked it out. The other people, the two other Americans, the Brit, and the Canadian helped gather data on the facilities and helped select the facilities that would be high on the priority list.

There was also a unit at The Palace made up of military and others who could go out and look at a facility, break it down, and tell you how much it was going to cost to make it operational in terms of plumbing, lighting, and what had to be done to harden the walls.

MJ: Lane McCotter’s name is now in the news. It was said his presence in Iraq raised “serious questions” about the U.S. handling of the Iraqi prison system. No one has directly charged that Mr. McCotter was tied to the abuse at Abu Ghraib, but the headlines hint at it.

GD: It bothers me. If they can’t find a smoking gun in Baghdad, they’ll go back several years into your history to find something to defame you.

They had claimed that Lane had turned dogs on prisoners as a sport, while in fact such an event took place, it was two years after Lane left. They said he was forced out of a job in New Mexico because he was a civil rights violator, when in fact I hired him away to Utah.

In Utah, Rocky Anderson makes two claims. [Anderson is a former state chair of the ACLU and currently mayor of Salt Lake City.] One is that Lane was a violator of civil rights and held in disdain prisoner rights. The other is that he presided over the death of an inmate in a restraint chair. It seems like inaccuracies are best molded around half-truths.

An inmate did in fact die from a blood clot after being in a restraint chair. He had been banging his head against a wall, and they needed to stop him. In this case, policy required that a psychiatrist make that decision. The inmate in question was under the psychiatrist’s care.

Lane McCotter can’t be expected to micromanage these large systems, but Rocky Anderson tries to portray Lane McCotter as someone who would be comfortable with the torture of inmates. We never lost a case on appeal, and we always appealed unless we knew when a staff member had acted out of policy and made a mistake. Lane McCotter’s record of litigation is better than most.

Here’s Lane, who’s done two honorable combat tours for the 82nd Airborne in Vietnam. In Iraq, I would meet people who knew him who had great respect for his service. Someone from Sam Houston University said he studied McCotter for the things he did for when took over the U.S. Military Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, which was a mess after Vietnam.

I would hear on the news that soldiers over there were low morale, that these guys being extended were angry at their president and their nation. But people who were extended four or five months, you would think that would be a blow after fighting their way up from Iraq. “Well, sir, we’re the military,” they would say. They were just great people. Then to come back here and have to hear from people who don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Within a month of the time I had gotten there, members the Army Corps of Engineers were telling me there was more electricity going through Baghdad than there was before the war. But all you heard was how many people were suffering from blackouts.

MJ: What are the misperceptions about what’s going on in the prisons?

GD: Unfortunately, everybody is looking through the prism of the half- dozen or dozen MPs who got out of hand in Abu Ghraib. If you count all the people who’ve served since 9-11, we’re talking about 250,000 people. They’re now on a scale of justice where six people doing bad deeds are outweighing the dedication, hard work, and courage of so many others.

A graduating class from the Iraqi Correctional Services Academy. DeLand says roughly two out of five classes graduated.

People have a misperception that somehow the majority of Iraqi prisoners are being commonly mistreated. Quite the opposite was true. For example, the MPs that I worked with over there said they believed Iraqi Brig. Gen. Ahmed Abbas Ahmed and his people were starting to shake down the visitors. Visiting was a new concept there, but you would have over 1,500 people show up for visitation at a 400-bed facility.

Gen. Ahmed’s people figured out they could go to the back of the crowd and say for this many dinar and this many packages of cigarettes, we will take to you to the front of the line. We did an investigation, and we fired Gen. Ahmed at gunpoint. Took his shoulder boards, took his keys, ID card and gun, and walked him out the front door of the Tasfirat facility.

On the other end of the spectrum, we took Gen. Jumah Zamel, a colonel I had promoted to brigadier general, took him out to Abu Ghraib, and at the ceremony we announced he would be the general at this and three other facilities. Capt. McIntyre, a BOP guy who was an MP with the 494th, would be the warden over the facility. We felt we had to have both an Iraqi and an American command presence there to make sure it got done right. McIntyre was extraordinary, and the Iraqis loved him.

We had some in the Corrections Academy who had been somewhat vetted from the old regime, that we felt were safe enough to work with MPs watching them, who had corrections experience, although we were running them through the academy with the new guys. We wanted to blend them.

They cleaned out a lot of folks by giving them a scenario, saying what do you do when a prisoner says no. In the beginning, all the hands would go up because they all knew the answer. It was, “Beat the hell out of them! Torture them!” We taught them that wasn’t the answer. They learned to teach the trainees a whole different approach, and I can’t tell you how foreign that concept was to many of the trainees.

MJ: What were the challenges of setting up the Corrections Academy?

GD: When I set up the Iraqi Corrections Academy, I had on my hard drive hundreds of lesson outlines I had written when I ran the Utah Department of Corrections, because I had set up a full-service training academy there. I had nine Iraqi interpreters assigned to my unit, so we got them busy.

As we were writing outlines, they were converting them to Arabic. So when we went to the academy we were working from two training manuals with an Iraqi instructor. We would start out with five or six classes, but there was enormous attrition, and we would end up with two or three graduating classes.

We didn’t work with the 372nd MPs. [Members of the 372nd MPs were implicated in the abuse scandal.] The MPs I did work with were great. Guys from the 223rd MP Brigade from Kentucky joined the 494th Brigade’s people from Indiana. Two guys from 223rd had some corrections experience. I also had a female specialist by the name of Candy Madison, part of the 494th, and she would go out and assist with any of the training that involved any physical touching of the females or anything that was a little dicey for men to be talking to Islamic women about.

I’ve never in my life felt that I was accomplishing as much and as little, simultaneously. If you put it in context, we were enormously successful. If you compared it to what you would accomplish in the U.S., we were 15-or 20-percent effective.

Imagine that you would have to get three or four different suppliers and order the same locks or razor wire. I would order from one company, and they may take three or four months to deliver, or they may come back and say they can’t ever get it. So we got smart enough to put in duplicate orders, at least that’s how I did it while I was there alone.

MJ: Were you able to take advantage of expertise back in the U.S., or were you completely reliant on whatever military personnel were made available to you?

GD: The latter. We were supposed to have other people coming in for support, and that never materialized. The Department of Justice worked through a group called ICITAP [International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program]. They’ve mostly been on the law enforcement side, border patrols and that sort of thing. They send people all over the world. They’re constantly out there working and helping, but corrections they had never really done before.

I was very frustrated that it took them a month and a half to get me over there after they rushed me home from Hawaii, where I was on vacation at the time ICITAP called me. A combination of business and vacation. Then I sit around, waiting until the end of June until I got boots on the ground.

They were supposed to have our replacements in Baghdad a month before we leave. It takes you a month to teach somebody how to stay alive in Baghdad. That’s not hyperbole, that’s flat out fact. There will sometimes be a donkey cart parked in the bottom to stop you. They’ll drop hand grenades off the top or have explosives wired, that they’ll detonate as you drive through a tunnel.

Saddam had great roads. Most of the main roads through Baghdad were three lanes each direction with a divider in the middle. The freeways looked like American freeways, but for the Arabic writing on the signs. The trouble was they were all laced with mines and snipers. Ambush Alley.

You had to know where to go, where not to go. If I’m on these three lane roads, which lane do you drive in? You drive on the inside lane against the divider. Why? That means that anybody shooting at you from the side has to shoot through two Iraqi vehicles to hit you. And if you’re stuck in traffic, you suddenly hit total gridlock in an area of risk, then you can simply go right over the divider and pop into oncoming lane and drive against traffic. What are the driving rules? Don’t stop. If you stop for any of the traffic lights, you’ll get rear-ended or shot.

We were told to drive like you’re in a stolen car and the sheriff is chasing you. If you get in wreck, do not stop. I said, what if they try to stop you? That’s why you’re armed. Point your gun at them. What if the car’s disabled?

That’s one of the reasons there are two vehicles, so you grab whatever you can grab and jump in the other vehicle. Your car will be stripped by the time you get back, and we’ll just write it off and get you another one. But do not stick around, because you’ll end up getting killed.

When we drove through Baghdad, there may be fairly heavy traffic, and without exaggeration, I often drove 80 miles an hour through that kind of traffic. There’s few traffic signals and yet I saw very few wrecks. Everybody’s waving at everybody and pulling in front of people, but they learned very quick that when our SUVs came through – which quickly got labeled ‘Israeli vehicles,’ because Israelis drive white SUVs. That was very comforting.

We were asked to lead because we could make holes in traffic where holes didn’t exist. Iraqis saw you coming and if they had to pull on the sidewalk, by God, they did it. A car careening 80 miles an hour, seemingly out of control, creates all kinds of hole in traffic. We learned how to go through four-way traffic by going straight at a vehicle, turning off its back bumper and then swinging back in and going the other direction. It was an interesting approach and took me a while to master.

My wife screamed when I got back the first time we went for a drive. I approached an intersection, the classic layout was in front of me, I didn’t even think anything, I just geared down, punched it. I put the brakes on and skidded into the intersection.

Every morning, you come out of the Baghdad Hotel, you had a little breakfast, you try to get out by 7 a.m., put your body armor on, make sure you have at least three magazines for the 9 mm, three for the AK-47, briefcase with your camera and computer, throw it all in your SUV, and then you hit the road as hard as you could hit it. That’s the way your spent the day.

While I was there, there were incidents at the gate, including a number of shootings. Demonstrations would form and someone would pull out an AK-47, and start shooting, and the military, who had no sense of humor, would shoot back. They would shoot with deadly efficiency, and there would suddenly be dead Iraqis who had once been shooting either in the air or at the military.

The guys on the gates were very tense because they were targets all day long. It was deadly serious business over there.

MJ: Did your activities involve an interface with intelligence gathering?

GD: Don’t get me wrong. Intelligence is incredibly important over there. It’s going to keep Americans alive, hopefully. But about half the people, in any one of our facilities, had no reason being there. Even General Karpinski, who was my bitter enemy over there, we agreed on that issue.

Why were they there? Americans would get shot at, so they did the right thing and rounded up everyone in the area. Well, you need to sort them out and decide who was just running a Coca-Cola stand when everything went down, and who was there because they were mujahideen that had slipped in from out of town. Cops know that when you arrest somebody, you’re supposed to have a charge. Soldiers, bless their hearts, know that when someone’s shooting at me, we’re going to round everyone up.

Here’s where the rub came in. You would get ready to release them, and the commanding general in that area of operation would refuse to allow the release. I would bus in Iraqi judges and we’d interview the prisoners, go through their charts, decide who needed to be released, and try to release them. And these MPs, many of them friends of mine who had been urging me to help get these prisoners out, would stop us at the gate and say we have direct orders from General So-and-so that until MI and CI clears their release, they can’t go out.

We would meet with generals and colonels from all these units, and with MI. We’ve got to get these people out of here. We’re hurting for space, and we have people in here who are sole supporters of families, who’ve never done anything, and we’re turning them into our worst enemies. ‘Well, we haven’t had a chance to interrogate them yet.’ Interrogate them for what? ‘Well, who knows, you guys don’t know who may know something that could keep an American alive.’

But you could drive the streets of Baghdad and say you, you, and you, for no reason you’re arrested. Aren’t we supposed to be winning the hearts and minds over here?

MJ: On which issues did you clash with General Karpinski?

GD: On which issues didn’t we clash? The only one I can think of was getting people out of prison that didn’t belong there. We clashed over her having to supply us troops. We clashed because she didn’t want us to use them in the fashion we were using them.

When I mentioned that I’d put Gen. Zamel and Capt. McIntyre, in place to run Abu Ghraib – which would have saved her, by the way – she and Lane McCotter got into a shouting match right during the Abu Ghraib dedication ceremony. She says, ‘You will not put that captain out there. He works for me. And this prison is not going to be for Iraqis, so that Iraqi general will be out of here too.’

We would have promises that they would come in and do evaluations and begin getting some engineering units, for example, to increase the security around Tasfirat, or to get generators out to Rusafa. And it would never get done. She was critical of everything going on around her, even when she had no facts. I had the opportunity to be at briefings with higher ranking officials, where I frequently challenged her assertions and assessments.

With Americans and others now being targeted to a much greater extent even than when I was there, any American firms thinking about bidding on projects in Iraq very much need to know what’s going on. Much more than we can provide in an article.

I thought I knew what was going on over there because I studied it carefully. Every waking moment was in front of the television. I read everything I could on Baghdad, Al Quaeda and Saddam. I read about the economic breakdown on the Iraqi population, and certainly that information was useful, but when you get your boots on the ground, you find out nothing works. The corruption, the nepotism, the tribalism. There’s a lot to know, and you’re either a quick study, or you need to go home before you get shot.

MJ: How did you feel when you left in September?

GD: When I left, my feelings were mixed. On the one hand, I had an enormous sense of accomplishment because of what we’d been able to do in the short time we had available and the conditions we were working under. Even with all the crap that’s hit the fan, this is the service of a lifetime of which I am the most proud. And I was looking forward to seeing my family again. But when you’re walking out and leaving those people behind, you feel you’re doing something wrong, and that you’re not entitled to go home until everyone else gets to go home.