Second video

A second video was released by Jazeera last night showing my friends from CPT looking in worse condition and with a threat to kill them on Thursday unless all detainees are released. This is dreadfully ironic given that the primary work of CPT in Iraq has been helping detainees, both of the Occupation and of the Iraqi government.

In April I joined the Iraqi Islamic Party in a rally of hundreds of family members of detainees and many in the crowd recognised us for working on their cases. The first problem for Iraqis is that when relatives are detaineed in a raid or whatever, it can take months to find out where they are being held. The next stage is arranging family visits. In March I went all the way down to camp Bucca in Umm Qasr in March accopanying an Iraqi who had been twice turned away when trying to visit his brothers there, he got in on that occassion. The hardest step is encouraging the authorities to conduct a fair and quick judicial process or release them. Some of my close friends have been detained for really no reason for a year and then never even question or told the alleged charges against them. A number of people whose cases we've lobbied on (letter writing to authorities etc.) have been released and the families have credited us with the release (and invited us to joyful reunion parties) though to be honest its often hard for us to tell how big a role our intervention played in the release. Many others have not been release, but we continue to try and stand by their families. Also to document and report on the overall detainee situation to try and change policy.

I'm still in the cloths I was wearing last Sunday, which I've been sleeping in (for max 3hrs a night) as well. I'm in Jordan now but hopefully on my way to Baghdad soon. See www.cpt.org for arabic statements, petition, CPT's detainee reports etc. also see Tom Fox's blog.