Iraqi prison escape foiled, sort of

[Piglet 0]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5082301525.html

The Sunnis:

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq -- In the darkest hours before dawn, groups of 10 detainees toiled 15 feet beneath Compound 5 of America's largest prison in Iraq. The men worked in five-minute shifts, digging with shovels fashioned from tent poles and hauling the dirt to the surface with five-gallon water jugs tethered to 200 feet of rope. They bagged it in sacks that had been used to deliver their bread rations and spread it surreptitiously across a soccer field where fellow inmates churned it during daily matches, guards and detainees recalled.

The 105th Military Police Battalion, charged with running Camp Bucca in the scorching desert of southernmost Iraq, knew something was amiss: Undetectable to the naked eye, the field's changing color was picked up by satellite imagery. The excavated dirt was also clogging the showers and two dozen portable toilets. The dirt was showing up under the floorboards of tents; some guards sensed that the floor itself seemed to be rising. Mysteriously, water use in the compound had spiked.

Hours before the planned prison break on March 24, an informant tipped off the Americans, who then drove a bulldozer across Compound 5. What they discovered was breathtaking: a fully completed tunnel that stretched 357 feet, longer than a football field. Inside were flashlights built from radio diodes and five larger spaces to provide ventilation. The tunnel's walls were as smooth and strong as concrete, sculpted with water and, the Americans believe, milk. The exit, beyond the compound's fence, was camouflaged with sand-colored cardboard. It opened into a partially concealed trench that would lead the detainees to freedom.

The Shi'a:

Suddenly, everything the Americans had provided the inmates over the previous months was turned against them, according to guards and a videotape of the riot made available by the military. The cinderblock had been chiseled from the concrete base of a tent pole; hundreds of pieces had been stored inside a tent the inmates used as a mosque that the military designated off limits to the guards. The detainees used floorboards as shields. They hurled socks filled with a cocktail of feces, dirt and flammable, slow-burning hand sanitizer, the Americans said. One of the crude devices ignited a Polaris all-terrain vehicle.

Before long, the ground was carpeted with pieces of cinderblock, much of it flung with slingshots fashioned from thin rubber gloves the Americans had given the inmates to distribute food. The detainees used what Brown called "standard David and Goliath" slings cut from the canvas tents. The most skillful, Brown said, could propel the cinderblock chunks through a bank teller's window. One chunk, he said, embedded in the wall behind a tower guard's head.

The Americans fired back with rubber bullets and tear gas but failed to slow the projectiles cascading from the courtyard. "With that deadly velocity, they were out-ranging our nonlethal weapons, which becomes very dangerous," Brown said.

"The violence, it was just absolutely incredible," said 1st Lt. Shawn Talmadge, a fire engine salesman from Richmond. "The sheer volume of rocks and the accuracy of them throwing the rocks -- it was just a full-out battle."

Talmadge said he had an epiphany. "I realized, these guys have been fighting riots and wars a lot longer than we have. These guys have been fighting this way for hundreds of years." ...

On the fourth day of the riots, the Americans called in a Black Hawk helicopter, the video showed. The helicopter descended over the camp, the force of its rotor flattening the tents that hadn't already been burned down by the detainees. Bulldozers and 200 heavily armed soldiers encircled the compound. The Shiite prisoners finally gave up, complying with a list of demands that included handing over their weapons: the remaining floorboards and cinderblock rubble.