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Prison BreakMaybe the Army's not so hidebound after all.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, May 8, 2008, at 6:07 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Stone brought in 60 imams to conduct religious classes and more than 200 Iraqi teachers to run an education program, as well as vocational trainers, psychiatrists, counselors, and contractors.

This idea is very different from the U.S. Army's traditional view of detention—that it's a one-way street (those going in are never coming out) and that bad guys are bad guys (there's no point in drawing distinctions).

All the detainees are at least suspected of planning or executing violent acts against U.S. or Iraqi forces—setting off bombs or transporting the explosives or selling the supplies. But surveys indicated that only about 6,000 of the detainees were irreconcilables and only a few hundred were foreign fighters. The vast majority of the rest had no ideological leanings. Most were in it for the money or to avenge the deaths of relatives, caused either by the Americans or by rival Iraqi tribes.

Since Stone's reforms were put in place, 8,000 detainees have been released, and only 24 have been rearrested.

Stone is quick to admit that he doesn't know if the program is working. Those 24 returning detainees might be merely the ones who got caught. It could well be that hundreds, even thousands of those let go have not found jobs or peace of mind; they might have gone right back to committing violence.

A monitoring program is set to begin in June. Released detainees will be paid each month to report, and supply some documentary proof, on what they're doing. This, too, might be of limited use; the ex-detainees might simply lie.

But here's the point, as far as my April 23 column is concerned: An assignment to detainee operations does not seem to be the dead end that it was just a few months ago, and the deputy commander of detainee operations does not seem to be a job handed out as punishment for past sins.

One point that I did get right: Yingling was not going to be given this or any other important job through normal channels. Stone says that Petraeus specifically wanted Yingling to be put in charge of the new program. It was so out of line with the Army's traditional concept that the job required a maverick. Yingling was that maverick.

It is not at all clear, however, that this means Yingling will someday be promoted to general or that, once the smoke clears, his superiors will view this job as a laudable milestone on a career path. Despite Gates' urgings that senior officers protect their loyal dissidents, and despite the fact that Petraeus did just that, there are plenty of generals who still don't like what Yingling wrote. There are plenty of officers who consider this concept of detention too coddling. There is plenty of institutional resistance to reforms as a matter of principle. There is a fierce—and honest—debate going on over whether, and to what degree, the Army overall should be shifting toward counterinsurgency and away from conventional combat.

Still, things are not as bleak, not as black and white, as I suggested on April 23.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
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