Center for a New American Security

Is this story for real?! I never thought Iraqi prisoners could be so freaking awesome. These guys should all be pardoned:

BAGHDAD - It seems that the Brett Favre-Green Bay Packers saga is such a worldwide phenomenon that it's being used by detainees in American military camps.

 

According to a military official, detainees at a Wisconsin National Guard camp in Iraq are using Brett Favre as a manner of getting at the guard troops there.

 

"They know Favre by name," said First Lieutenant Tim Boehnen, who is from New Richmond, Wis. 

 

"One of the big words they know now is shenanigan.  They'll constantly talk about 'Favre shenanigans,' 'He's so good for the Vikings,' and 'The Packers have got to really feel bad about that one.'  "

 

According to Boehnen, it started when troops there started decorating their camp in Packers colors.

 

"We try to allow our troops to have as much fun in the compound as they can while still maintaining our professional manner," explained Boehnen.

 

"We spend a lot of time painting and making our compound our own and representing us.  Obviously, wherever Wisconsinites go, we bring the Packers with us."

 

Once the decoration job happened, detainees became curious.

 

"They obviously then started up the conversations, and started talking about Brett Favre.  They soon learned about Favre going to the Vikings, and things just started going downhill from there."

A reader of the blog flagged this interview conducted by Salon's Glenn Greenwald with Jonathan Horowitz, a researcher in Kabul, on detainees in Afghanistan and the detention facility at Bagram. It will surprise exactly zero members of this blog's readership to learn that at the time Horowitz was on the phone with Greenwald conducting this interview, I was in an adjacent room enjoying a really excellent gin and tonic.

I do not know Horowitz well, actually, but I was talking with him (and a friend of his, who I do know) about detention before the interview. Our concerns, as you might expect, are quite different. I have all the sympathy in the world for folks like Horowitz who worry U.S.-sanctioned detention policies are harming the U.S. and allied mission in Afghanistan. I am thus anxious to see what my buddy Phil does with Bagram, and I am similarly anxious to see what impact Gen. Stone's report has.

But one of the things that I worry about that Horowitz probably does not is not so much the procedures under which we detain but rather whether or not ISAF can detain at all. (It cannot.) As ISAF begins a pretty intense year of operations, it would be nice to have the ability to detain -- to take combatants off the battlefield and then exploit them for intelligence. Removing the enemy from the battlefield is a pretty common-sense thing to do, and the exploitation that comes with a well-run detention center and legally and morally appropriate interrogation procedures (.pdf) is invaluable. Instead, we are banking on the Afghans detaining and not releasing combatants -- and our ability to build up effective Afghan detention facilities. But how long will that take? How much longer do we have left in Afghanistan to defeat this insurgency?

Dr. iRack is sure that many readers are aware that, over the past year, the U.S. military has attempted to apply COIN principles inside detention facilities in Iraq. These steps were initiated by MajGen Doug Stone (the guy on the right in the picture above), the Marine in charge of MNF-I's detention ops. The idea was to not just prevent Abu Ghraib-style abuses, but also stop detention centers from becoming "jihad U," producing more insurgents than they took off the streets. The controversial system Stone put in place sought to expedite review of cases, physically separate extremists from reconcilables behind bars, mentally separate them by providing anti-extremist Islamic literacy classes, and reduce recidivism by providing education and vocational training to ease reintegration. So far, the results seem positive--at least compared to the old way of doing things (although, as more detainees are transfered into the Iraqi "system," who knows what will happen). For more on the reforms instituted by Stone, see here. And, if you plan to be in DC on June 11, you may want to stop by USIP to see Stone, just back from his 14-month tour, give a talk.