Two suggestions from the Wests

Bing and Owen West are ex-military men and father and son. In today's NY Times, they have two suggestions re improving the situation in Iraq:

1. Give our troops a device to enable them to identify those they stop.
2. Stop the policy of making it so difficult to retain captured insurgents.

With regard to the first suggestion, the Wests point out that 22,000 NYC cops made 313,000 arrests in 2006; 400,000 Iraqi and US troops made 40,000. This differential is due, they feel, to the ability of the NYC police to use an online database to verify the identity of those they detain. Forty years ago in Vietnam the Vietcong were damaged by a detailed town-by-town census that was conducted by hand. Biometrics and real time computing are light years ahead of where they were then.

The process we use to handle those we capture seems geared much more to protecting the captives' rights than imprisoning likely bad guys. (I need not remind you this is in sharp contrast to our efforts re Guantanamo.) Anyway, here's what the Wests say happens:

After an arrest, two soldiers must file affidavits, together with physical evidence and digital pictures, and then an American lawyer decides if the package is strong enough to withstand further review. About half of all detainees are released within 18 hours; the others are sent from battalion level to brigade level, where the evidence is re-examined, resulting in more releases.

Those detainees remaining are sent to a detention center where a combined board reviews the evidence again, and releases still more. After that, every six months a United States board must re-review the evidence in each case. Lastly, the detainee appears before an Iraqi judge, who in turn dismisses about half of the cases.

As for follow-up, before a detainee walks free, the American command sends notification to the battalion in the area where he was apprehended. But because many of the battalions have rotated back to the United States by this time, a new unit has to deal with the detainee.

Worse, there remains steady clamoring from both high-level Iraqi and American officials for yet another mass release (there have been several since 2003). To his credit, General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, has resisted, and the result is prison overcrowding since the surge began. Yet neither the American government, mindful of the criticism of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, nor the Iraqi government wants to take the political heat of building more prisons.

I find this truly unbelievable.