Iraqi prisoners vanishing in 'black hole': Blair envoy

By Agence France Presse

04/08/06 "AFP" -- -- Iraqis arrested by US-led forces have been vanishing into a "black hole," British Prime Minister Tony Blair's human rights envoy told a Sunday newspaper.

Had the United States taken this problem seriously from the beginning, it may have helped prevent the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Ann Clwyd, an MP for the governing Labour Party, told The Observer newspaper in a rare interview about her work.

Clwyd, who reports directly to Blair, expressed concern about the "tremendous effort" required to trace detainees.

"You did feel that people were disappearing into black holes and it's very difficult," she said.

The human rights envoy suspected the reason for this problem was incompetence rather than malice.

US officials wrote down names "sometimes in Arabic, sometimes not, sometimes in bad Arabic", which rendered any attempt to trace prisoners much harder.

Clwyd said Washington should have done something to resolve this matter sooner.

"If they had followed it up harder at the time I think it might have avoided some of the allegations -- and proof -- of abuse that took place."

The MP spoke about the plight of two detainees who went missing.

The first was an elderly Iraqi woman picked up in the middle of the night by US soldiers shortly after the war. Relatives in Britain appealed to Clwyd for help in finding her.

"I spent days and weeks trying to trace where this woman was," she recalled.

In the end, Clwyd flew to Washington to meet top White House officials including former deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who eventually ordered an investigation in Iraq.

The woman was located at a US-run prison near Baghdad airport.

The second case was of an elderly Iraqi man who vanished in 2004 and was reportedly sighted in a US-run prison. Despite Clwyd's efforts, however, the man remains unaccounted for.

"Mistakes were being made. People were being scooped up -- (although) that was all at a time when they were still looking for some of the most wanted," she said, referring to a list of leading members of Saddam Hussein's regime drawn up by the US-led coalition.

The envoy spoke to The Observer to defend Blair against suggestions that he had been unwilling to tackle Washington over the abuse of detainees.

"I know, in conversations he has with the people of influence in the US, he doesn't pull his punches. He pushes them, sometimes with direct results," she said.

Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.

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