Twenty five bucks and a Koran- "Hey, no hard feelings, eh?"

$25 and a Koran as inmates leave Iraq's Abu Ghraib

Clutching new Korans and given $25 apiece, about 500 Iraqi prisoners were released from the U.S. military's Abu Ghraib jail on Saturday in a goodwill gesture ahead of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

"I want you to go back to your families and say hello to them ... go back as good Iraqi citizens," Deputy Prime Minister Abed Mutlak al-Jibouri told the men, urging them to take part in a October 15 referendum on Iraq's new constitution.

"Don't listen to those who tell you don't vote -- vote! You are an Iraqi, and you have the right to participate."

The U.S. military agreed to an Iraqi government request to free more than 1,000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib in stages before the start of Ramadan around October 4, selecting detainees found by an Iraqi-led review board not to have committed serious crimes.

Iraqi authorities said they hoped the release of the second batch of detainees on Saturday would promote goodwill before the constitutional referendum, which has fired sectarian tensions between Iraq's Shi'ite majority and Sunni Arab minority.

U.S. forces are holding about 11,800 prisoners at several detention centers in Iraq, with the largest number, 6,300, held at Camp Bucca in the south.

About 4,200 were being held at Abu Ghraib, notorious for the images of U.S. soldiers mocking, physically abusing and torturing Iraqi prisoners that emerged last year.

On Saturday, the detainees due for release from Abu Ghraib echoed widespread concern in Iraq that U.S. military detentions are too arbitrary and too long.

"I was arrested at the beginning just based on accusations," one man shouted from behind the barbed-wire barricades. "Just tell me, what should I do not to come back here?"

Major General William Brandenburg, commander of U.S. prisons in Iraq, told the detainees through an interpreter that only about 1.5 percent of those released are returned to Abu Ghraib -- although he did little to assuage prisoners' fears.

"If somebody doesn't like me he will write something and I will end up here again," a second man shouted back.

CHANGING IMAGE

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal, both U.S. military and Iraqi authorities have been at pains to show that the vast complex 15 km (10 miles) west of Baghdad is now run as a model prison.

Along with the money and the Koran, prisoners released on Saturday were given new white shirts for their trip home.

Iraq's Minister for Human Rights Nermeen Othman, who attended the release, said she was satisfied that Abu Ghraib was now a well run facility and that abuse was a thing of the past.

"I think it is one of the best," she said. "When these people return home, they will repeat that there is no torture at this site."

Brandenburg said the conviction of Lynndie England, one of the soldiers at the center of the abuse scandal, showed U.S. authorities were doing things by the book.

However, the numbers of Iraqis passing through U.S. detention remain a sore point, particularly for those who say most have been rounded up without real evidence against them.

Lieutenant Colonel Guy Rudisill, spokesman for the U.S. military's prison operations, said that since March 2003 about 42,000 Iraqis had been in U.S. military detention and the average headcount at any given time was about 12,000.

Since August 2005 19,958 detainees had had their cases reviewed, he said, and 11,240 had been released.







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