Baghdad, Iraq ? The U.S. military is detaining more than 5,000 Iraqi men and women accused of common crimes or of being security threats — people whose legal rights are in dispute and whose living conditions are hidden from public view.

The Iraqi Lawyers League, under a new, elected leadership, is mounting a rights campaign on their behalf, and on behalf of the uncertain families they left behind.

“We’re in touch with the people. They come to us,” said the lawyers association vice president, Kamal Hamdoun. “We were obliged to do something. The detainees’ situation doesn’t meet the minimum of human rights.”

For one thing, six months after the U.S. and British military ousted the Baath party government and took control of Iraq, the league has posted lists of detainees’ names obtained from occupation authorities. Each morning anxious Iraqis scan the typed sheets taped to lobby walls at league headquarters.

“I’ve searched for him everywhere. I don’t know whether the Americans took him or not,” black-veiled Buthayna Ali, 42, said of her husband, who disappeared while traveling to see relatives outside Baghdad during the war last April. Not finding his name on the lists, she told a reporter stoically, “At least I want to see his body.”

“Tracing is a very big problem,” said Ali Ismael of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, which works to confirm detainees’ locations for families. It coordinates with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the agency designated under international law to visit wartime prisoners and inspect detention centers.

Uncertain numbers

Ismael and the lawyers believe the U.S.-led coalition is holding many more than the 5,500 names on the lists given to the Lawyers League. “I think it’s double this number,” Hamdoun said. “We know many whose names aren’t on the list.”

Col. Ralph Sabatino insists 5,500 is roughly correct. “Every day I get a copy of the (detainee) list,” said the U.S. Army lawyer, who handles detainee issues at the palace headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupation administration.

Other Army sources, however, have spoken of 10,000 “detainees and prisoners,” apparently including some held by Iraqi police. The tents and cells have been filling up both with alleged resistance fighters rounded up in U.S. military sweeps, and suspects in Baghdad’s monthslong crime wave.

U.S. Marines guard Iraqis suspected of looting at a checkpoint near Baghdad's airport in this April 14 file photo. Six months after Saddam Hussein's government was toppled thousands of Iraqi detainees remain behind prison walls.

In addition, Sabatino said, some 13,000 Iraqis detained by coalition forces have been released since the war.

One of the most recent to emerge is 80-year-old Abdel al-Majid al-Janabi, a high-ranking jurist under the Baathists, seized July 30 by American troops at his Baghdad home. He spent two months in the tents at the U.S. detention center at Baghdad’s airport, in summer heat that soared above 120 degrees, said his lawyer, Tariq al-Beldawi, who said the ex-judge told him, “I thought I was about to die.”

“They didn’t allow me to see him, to be there during the interrogations,” al-Beldawi complained.

He and other attorneys contend many Iraqis have been interned on the flimsy word of informants, possibly personal enemies. Someone had accused this retired chief appellate judge, for example, of “distributing weapons to mosques at dawn,” al-Beldawi said.

Conditions questioned

The airport site, Camp Cropper, grew notorious through the summer as descriptions of conditions leaked out through human rights groups. Behind the razor-wire fences, detainees were packed too many to a tent, had to dig their own latrines, and wore the same clothes for weeks, it was reported. Amnesty International also complained detainees “appear to be invariably denied access to lawyers.”

The Lawyers League president, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, said that in August he protested about the conditions and lack of legal defense directly to the chief U.S. occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer.

The campaign by the 82-year-old al-Hassan, who was a political prisoner under the Baath regime, bore fruit on Oct. 1 when the airport camp was shut down on Bremer’s orders. Col. Sabatino said it had been designed for 250 people, but its population swelled to 1,200. “It had a very bad reputation, appropriately,” he said.

Its several hundred prisoners were mostly distributed to two Baghdad-area prisons, Abu Ghraib and Rusafa. Lawyer al-Beldawi said he found Rusafa on a recent visit to have “much better conditions, cleaner and less crowded, than under the old government.”

Legal representation

Occupation authorities also began opening up to legal defenders. Sabatino said he met with Lawyers League representatives in late September, “and since that time we have been coordinating to facilitate their representation of people in custody.”

On Oct. 1, for the first time, eight Iraqi defense lawyers and eight investigative judges were summoned to Abu Ghraib prison to conduct preliminary hearings to formulate charges against a few detainees. But the lawyers are not satisfied.

“They just sent us a few to satisfy us, and they chose the detainees,” said the league’s Hamdoun.

The hearing process, moreover, is designed largely for those suspected of common crimes, the majority of those held, and not for the “security” detainees, including ranking Baathists.

All should have legal counsel, the Iraqis insist. Amnesty International agrees, citing principles embodied in U.N. documents. But Sabatino pointed out that, in fact, “there is no right to legal representation in the convention” — the Fourth Geneva Convention governing wartime internment of civilians.

The occupation authority hasn’t announced detailed plans for the security cases.