Three hots, a cot, and education, to boot.
BAGHDAD (AFP) – An increasing number of Iraqi detainees are refusing to leave detention centres despite being eligible for release because they want to complete studies begun behind bars, a US general said on Sunday.
“In the last three or four months we have begun seeing detainees asking to stay in detention, usually to complete their studies,” Major General Douglas Stone told a news conference in Baghdad.
The US military offers a wide range of educational programmes to the 23,000 or so detainees — adults and juveniles — being held at its two detention facilities, Camp Cropper near Baghdad’s international airport and Camp Bucca near the southern port city of Basra.
Some parents of juvenile detainees, too, have asked that their children remain behind bars so they can continue their schooling, said Stone, the commanding general for US detainee operations in Iraq.
The US military, he added, was not encouraging the trend.
“We don’t want them to remain in detention,” he said. “When they are no longer considered a threat we want them to go home.”
Teachers at the House of Wisdom school at Camp Cropper told AFP recently that parents of juvenile detainees had asked that siblings be locked up with their brothers so they too could benefit from the educational programmes offered at the camp.
……Where there is enough evidence, detainees are transferred to the Iraqi justice system for trial.
Of those still in detention, around 2,000 are confirmed Al-Qaeda members and another 7,000 are ideologically close to Al-Qaeda. There are also around 500 juveniles and some 240 foreign fighters behind bars.
How about that? The little slugs get captured by us and treated so well, they don’t want to go home.
Sheesh.