"We were having people who weren't insurgents who were being forced to be insurgents because of the power of these courts, the power of al-Qaida and other extremist groups," said Lt. Col. Kenneth Plowman, a spokesman for Task Force 134, which operates coalition detention facilities in Iraq.
He told The Associated Press Friday that the jailhouse Sharia courts were formed, despite the presence of U.S guards, to enforce an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. They were then used to convict moderate inmates, who were then tortured or killed, he said.
In comments published in the Sierra Vista Herald in Arizona, Brig. Gen. Rodney L. Johnson, commander of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, put the number of detainees tried by the courts in the double-digits. Neither he nor Plowman would give specific numbers.
The courts were eradicated and none has been detected in six months although some gang-related issues persist, Plowman said.
This is not surprising. The Nazis did this in World War II and it was a constant struggle to fight them. The North Koreans did it in the Korean War, with some camps effectively controlled by our enemies who cowed other prisoners. We even had major fighting against "surrendered" enemies who rose up inside the camps.
So we've done pretty well to have kept enemy attempts to wage war within the prisons limited and to have suppressed it.
