411

I get calls from my Iraqi contacts at random times. One of the chips I have in my favor when making relationships here is that when things go down out there, at least they have a phone number to call. It’s a tough, double-edged sword for these guys. Being close to a US Army officer is both an asset and a liability for them. I may be able to help them out; I may make them a bigger target as a ‘collaborator’. I can’t say there’s a whole lot of strings I can pull for somebody, but maybe from their point of view its better than nothing. There’s a prestige factor when I attend one of their community meetings. I didn’t realize it at first, but a lot of them count the number of meetings I’ve attended with so-and-so and they’ll consider themselves ‘out of favor’ if I haven’t visited them lately. In reality, I may have just forgotten that they always have their meeting on the first Tuesday of the month. So I got a call about some detainees the other night. Pretty common; somebody’s cousin gets arrested during a raid, the family calls the local leader, and he calls me. And I call our legal officer and he makes some calls and eventually somebody calls me back and then I make a call. The answer is usually pretty vague. All I could say was ‘they are in American custody.’ There was a sigh of relief on the other end. This has happened a couple of times, so now I know what it means; at first I felt sorry that I couldn’t really give them a lot of information. Now I know that I’ve given them one of the most critical pieces of information. The sigh of relief that I have heard repeatedly is because Iraqis are generally thankful to hear that someone has been detained by American forces; and not the new Iraqi security units. Now, that’s not necessarily an absolutely positive indicator. Being favorably perceived relative to the Iraqi incarceration system is no big award for anybody, but it’s an indicator nonetheless.