Amnesty International has been denied access to Camp Cropper, an outdoor U.S.-run "tent prison."

"The conditions of detention Iraqis are held under at the Camp Cropper Center at Baghdad International Airport -- now a U.S. base -- and at Abu Ghraib Prison may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, banned by international law," stated Amnesty International in a June 30 news release.

A July 22 article in The Independent confirms Amnesty International's concerns.

Journalist Robert Fisk cited an unnamed but "impeccable and Western" source, who informed him that Camp Cropper interrogation methods include beating of "selected" prisoners. Further, two prisoners were reportedly shot dead attempting to escape.

Fisk wrote that Amnesty investigators arrived in Baghdad last week, but were forbidden entry to Camp Cropper, believed to warehouse as many as 2,000 prisoners.

Fisk also recounted the experience of Iraqi-born Qais al-Salman, an engineer who fled his oppressive native country in 1976. Now a Danish citizen, al-Salman had returned to Iraq to aid U.S. reconstruction efforts "with a briefcase literally full of plans to help the restoration of his country infrastructure and water purification system."

Traveling with two other passengers on June 4, their vehicle was fired upon by U.S. forces after failing to stop at a checkpoint that al-Salman told Fisk he never saw.

While the others fled, al-Salman waited for U.S. officers and was placed under arrest. He was held in a large tent with 130 other prisoners and no water to cleanse themselves.

"There were people of high culture, doctors and university people, and there were the most dirty animal people, thieves and criminals the like of which I never saw before," al-Salman recalled.

After showing interrogators letters that confirmed his involvement in U.S. projects, al-Salman was pinned with a label reading "Suspected Assassin." Finally released after 33 days and a brief hunger strike, the engineer was never charged with a crime, nor was the Danish government ever informed of his imprisonment.

YellowTimes.org correspondent Lisa Ashkenaz Croke drafted this report.

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