Camp Nama

Camp Nama was a military base in Baghdad, Iraq, originally built by the government of Saddam Hussein, from which its name derives, and now used by Iraqi military forces. Purportedly, the original Iraqi name has been repurposed by U.S. personnel involved with the facility as a backronym standing for "Nasty Ass Military Area".

History

After the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the camp was taken over by elite American special operations forces. The main purpose of the camp was to interrogate prisoners for information about Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The New York Times reported on 19 March 2006, the three-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion, that the elite unit, known as Task Force 6-26, used the facility to interrogate prisoners both before and after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Some of the interrogation took place in "The Black Room", which used to be a torture chamber when Saddam's government ran the facility. The camp was the target of repeated warnings and investigations from U.S. officials since August 2003. There were placards around the camp that read "No Blood No Foul", a reference to the notion, described by a Pentagon official, that "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it."

Allegations of abuse were first reported in the mainstream U.S. media in 2005. After the more extensive New York Times report in 2006, which was "based on documents and interviews with more than a dozen people", the independent organization Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting detainee abuse in Iraq. The report confirmed the charges about Camp Nama uncovered by The New York Times, noting that "from 2003 to the present, numerous U.S. personnel and Iraqi detainees have reported serious mistreatment of detainees by the special task force, including beatings, exposure to extreme cold, threats of death, humiliation, and various forms of heavy interrogation.