In June of 2007 we discussed Constabulary Operations and Prison Overcrowding, in which I said that “I do not believe in the healing, therapeutic or rehabilitative powers of imprisonment,” but that we were facing a prison overcrowding problem of major proportions going forward if we continue to engage in constabulary operations in Iraq.

In the following articles:

Religion and Insurgency: A Response to Dave Kilcullen
Smith Responds
A Modest Proposal

I discussed my views concerning religion and insurgency, and that contrary to Kilcullen’s view that there isn’t a single fighter who actually fights for the insurgency in Iraq for religious reasons, religion can provide a robust understanding of the motivations of all peoples in all of their actions, not just insurgents.

It appears that the commanders who are concerned with pragmatic affairs and who are faced with actual, real life day-to-day problems are following counsel that is similar to my own as it regards prisons (they need to be emptied or more need to be constructed) and religion (we need to know and act on what the enemy believes).

Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, commanding general of detainee operations in Iraq, is fighting what he has called “the battlefield of the mind.” He has instituted extensive screening of incoming prisoners and has made available about 30 training and education courses, including religion and civics, to the 25,188 prisoners under his control.

At a news conference last week, he said that once a person is in custody at his facilities, Camp Cropper near Baghdad and Camp Bucca in southern Iraq, “we spend a lot of time learning about them now, studying their motivations . . . why they’re fighting, who they fight for — more so than we’ve ever known before.”

At Cropper and Bucca, he said, there is “an assessment phase, and we take 72 hours and then we work really hard on categorizations.” Based on those assessments, which include having imams evaluate prisoners on their religious beliefs, a decision is made about where to house them in the detention facility.

As Stone was describing his program, the Multi-National Force-Iraq Joint Contracting Command was advertising for 12 contract intelligence analysts to work for Stone at Cropper and Bucca for six to 18 months, beginning in March.

Their jobs will be mainly to “conduct in-processing assessment of new detainees coming into the theater internment facilities,” according to the statement of work. They will screen the circumstances of each detainee’s capture and any sworn statements or intelligence about the person contained in an accompanying packet.

After that, the work statement says, the contracted analysts will “determine what category a detainee is assigned to based on age, religion, threat level and insurgent group affiliation.” They will also decide “where to place the detainee in the segregation plan.”

Stone said the compounds are not organized by geographical areas, so most prisoners “don’t really know each other.” Because extremists are “generally the guys that know each other . . . and they come in to set up kind of a gang court,” people from the same areas are spread out across the prison.

The courses they take, almost all of which are voluntary, include basic education, vocational training and religion. The religion course, run by one of 43 imams working on the program, lasts four days.

The civics course, which each detainee must take before he is released, covers “why you should try to get an education — why you should try to have a job,” Stone said. Other courses touch “on how you control anger, the oath of peace, the sacredness of life and property and references back to the Koran,” he added. The demand for classes has “stripped” the 150 teachers he has available.

“I don’t change people,” Stone said. “Those people or God changes them, not me, but we do set in motion the ability to have that change take place.”

Stone sees the overall program as working with detainees so that “they cannot conduct an insurgency inside the wire.” He added that he hopes that detainees “someday maybe even work with us and, of course, by telling us who the bad guys are.”

One result already seen, he said, is that moderates in the prisons are identifying extremists, thus facilitating their segregation from the rest of the population. At Camp Bucca, about 1,000 extremists were identified and pulled from among the 21,000 prisoners, and “that made a big difference,” he said.

In addition to being theologically and anthropologically sound, this approach is pragmatic – and it is the approach we have advocated from the beginning.