Abu Ghraib in reverse?

Here.

Life in U.S.-run detention camps in Iraq is so good that a new trend has emerged: Detainees are refusing to leave. Agence France Presse reports:

“In the last three or four months we have begun seeing detainees asking to stay in detention, usually to complete their studies,” Major General Douglas Stone told a news conference in Baghdad.

The US military offers a wide range of educational programmes to the 23,000 or so detainees — adults and juveniles — being held at its two detention facilities. . . Some parents of juvenile detainees, too, have asked that their children remain behind bars so they can continue their schooling. . .

In an even crazier twist, parents are asking if the siblings of detainees can come and be locked up with their brothers so that they, too, can benefit from U.S. education programs. Such a development, of course, calls into question the popular leftist image of detention camps as American-run gulags. But I don’t expect to see any front-page pictures of detainees holding up schoolbooks as a counterpoint to the images of Abu Ghraib.

Great news from the - get this! - NYTimes

Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, both of the Brookings Institution, have often been vehemently against Bush and his work in Iraq. Until now. They just got back from that beleaguered nation, and they have this to say:

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

“[T]he surge cannot go on forever,” they say, “But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008.”

This good news isn’t from some wacko conservative rag. It’s from the New York Times.

Posted by Harrison Scott Key on Jul 30, 07 02:42 PM on the WorldMagBlog