Ziad Tarik, 24

Compared to Saddam, the Americans are better," he said

Ex-detainee Muslim says he knows of a worse fate – to have been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, as his late father was for three months in 1995.

Fawzia Ibrahim

"There's no law," Rahad Naif said. "It's up to them. It's arbitrary."

Saad Naif said he saw a prisoner shot dead at Abu Ghraib when he approached the razor wire.

elderly woman "whose hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust."

Seeing her lying bound in the sun, the brother angrily started to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, "and they shot him in the shoulder," Naif said.

especially when we saw Iraqi women punished in the same way as men."

There was an old black soldier we called 'al-Haji' who argued with the other Americans if they weren't respecting our rights."

punished by having rations reduced or withdrawn,

"The Gardens" – a razor-wire enclosure where prisoners were made to lie face down on the burning sand for two or three hours, hands bound.

Sometimes we'd fight the Americans with tent poles. The Americans would come at us behind riot shields, firing plastic bullets and electric pistols (stun guns).

"Twenty or so of us would start shouting, 'Get us out! Let us go!

He said two died in the next tent while he was there.

The ex-prisoners, uniformly, said the sick men among them were the camps' saddest sight

They'd give us hot water while we'd see them drinking cold water

throw ice into the sand just to make us suffer psychologically

Kuwaiti translators

Water was the first concern for internees everywhere, especially as summer temperatures topped 120 degrees. There was never enough to drink and wash with, they said.

Hassan Ali Muslim.

Baathists

ICRC's decision to reduce its Baghdad staff, because of the bombing of its headquarters, may limit its ability to visit detention sites.

organization's policy does not allow any public comment on any abuse or other poor conditions detected

representatives are the only outsiders allowed into the camps

Geneva Conventions

The Baghdad spokeswoman for the ICRC

listing and processing of detainees has improved in recent weeks.

responsible under international law for inspecting wartime prison camps,

International Committee of the Red Cross

unjustly held Iraqis

Iraqi lawyers and judges

Iraq's chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer

In toppling the Saddam government last April, the U.S.-British invasion force inherited a legal vacuum and began incarcerating ordinary criminals with prisoners of war and less well-defined detainees.

The U.S. command says it holds 5,500, but some lawyers and other Iraqis believe the figure is higher

In one, four soldiers are accused of beating Iraqi prisoners; in the other, two Marines are charged in connection with an Iraqi's death in detention.

no response has been received

treated humanely and fairly

Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Army commander

a half dozen former detainees

Amnesty International

Associated Press

They confined us like sheep

Baghdad airport's overcrowded Camp Cropper, was closed.

most notorious U.S. center

Ex-detainees

and none compares with Saddam's bloody political prisons

good people" among the U.S. guards, like an older man the Iraqis respectfully dubbed "al-Haji" – "Pilgrim.

curfew-breakers and drivers who tried to evade U.S. checkpoints, suspected common criminals, anti-U.S. resistance fighters, and many of deposed President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party leadership.

They never faced charges

Americans

influential neighbor

Naif, 31

detainees in wheelchairs, and of a man carried into a stifling hot tent in his sickbed. "They humiliate everybody."

they don't respect anyone, old or young,

to recently released Iraqis.

By Charles J. Hanley

riots, punishment in the sun