Iraq: Back in Iraq: US military police made one of their visits to a Baghdad police station yesterday. Lara Marlowe went with them.
"Detainee run," Sgt Mike Toole from Texas announces as I climb into his Humvee.
His Military Police unit has received its orders for the day: go to Adhamiya police station, collect as many of the 38 prisoners in the Iraqi police jail there as possible and transport them to Abu Ghraib prison in the Sunni Triangle northwest of Baghdad. Adhamiya is the last place where Saddam Hussein appeared in public, days before his regime fell. The MPs know it for its high crime rate and frequent attacks on US troops and Iraqi police.
Motorists hoot their horns and try to move away from the three-vehicle convoy - no one wants to get caught in an attack on the US army. More alarming are the drivers who pull up alongside and peer into the Humvee's moving arsenal.
The semi-automatic weapon on the roof is manned by 21-year-old Sgt Kelly Aber from Wisconsin. It's her first day as a gunner and she says she loves the wind in her face.
From where I sit, I can see her left hand looped through a metal ring to swivel the gun in 180 degree arcs, and her right hand on the trigger.
The driver and Sgt Toole have M16s poised beside them. The officer beside me clips an ammunition cartridge into his AK-47 with a familiar "click-clack", pulls a Stirling assault rifle from a rucksack and assembles it.
But guns aren't much use against remote control bombs. This MP company has had six soldiers wounded in Baghdad, all from bombs pre-positioned on the roads they travel. Anti-US attackers tend to target Humvees because they have soft (unarmoured) bellies. The army now covers the floors of the vehicles with sandbags.
"I was in my unit's first bombing on August 7th, the day they bombed the Jordanian Embassy," Sgt Toole recalls.
His experience shows the extent to which the US is fighting an urban guerrilla war.
"A Humvee parked in the middle of the road exploded. One of the soldiers lost his legs. We were driving by and the gunner of the vehicle behind me got peppered with shrapnel in the face. It was nothing - he was hard of hearing for a while. The driver the same.
"We had to stay on the spot for nearly five hours, taking sniper fire because we didn't have enough men to raid the building. We had to wait for reinforcements."
Within the past three weeks, Sgt Aber's friend Susan, also an MP, was wounded when her unit was called in by the Iraqi police to examine a suspicious object on the road in Adhamiya. It exploded, blinding the young woman in the left eye.
Sgt Aber's fiance is also an MP, and an explosive device detonated under his vehicle.
"I was sitting by the radio and I heard it, and I thought I'd die. He was okay, but it was a little too close to home . . . We're trying to help these people and they just want to blow us up. You feel like saying: 'What's the point?'"
The driver, Specialist Ron Bearce, plays a CD by the rock group Creed at deafening level, singing the words "here with me" in sync with the music. There's a pack of chewing gum on the dashboard, a jar of Powerade Mountain Blast Thirst Quencher and a bag of sunflower seeds stuck under the radio. Shiny handcuffs are stacked on a knob next to Sgt Toole.
We pass an open sewer and Specialist Bearce says: "Whee-ee. That's the smell of Iraq, right there."
The police station is surrounded by wrecked cars, acres of concertina barbed wire and queuing Iraqi civilians who ignore the arriving convoy. We look through an iron door at the back of the building. Thirty-eight men sit cross-legged on the floor, their eyes staring back at us. Most have been arrested by Iraqi police on theft charges.
Saddam Hussein freed 50,000 thieves, murderers and rapists a year ago, and they are believed responsible for the crime that plagues the country.
Two weeks ago, Sgt Toole's unit were called by Iraqi police to a shoot-out in Ash-Shaab district, where four men had kidnapped and were repeatedly raping five females, including a 12 year-old girl.
"Gangs of up to 30 guys come into Baghdad and sweep through stores, offices, houses," says Sgt Toole. "They steal everything that's not nailed down. It's the Wild West here. The only thing missing is Wyatt Earp and the horses."
But if the criminals are back to their old tricks, so are the police. "Whenever they seize a car, they always say it's stolen," says one of the MPs stationed in the "safe room" occupied by the Americans in the Adhamiya police station. "We ask them: 'How do you know it's stolen?' and they always say, 'We know'. Then they start fighting over which one of them gets it."
Sgt Toole is responsible for supplying uniforms, weapons and other basic needs for seven Baghdad police stations. But during our three-hour wait for paperwork and material evidence, there is virtually no contact between the Iraqi police and their mentors. A police colonel stops to ask Sgt Aber whether she has brought the five uniforms he asked for.
The court cases against the men awaiting transfer to Abu Ghraib disintegrate by the minute. The cell door clangs open and a middle-aged man in a long robe emerges, carrying his bedding. A school manager in Adhamiya, he shot one of his teachers twice in the leg, but an Iraqi judge has just signed a release order.
Another man, who was arrested for carrying a gun with a forged permit, has also been freed without apparent reason and the Americans suspect a bribe.
"There goes my investigation into the counterfeit permit ring," moans an angry lieutenant. The Czech pistol used to shoot the teacher sits in a plastic bag on the desk, now useless evidence. And the gun the MPs need, a Browning used in an attempted murder, has vanished. The Iraqi police can give no explanation. "Why don't you just switch the guns?" one US soldier suggests. "The serial numbers aren't the same," says another.
Sgt Toole begins assembling the evidence in the stairwell by the communal cell, wearing plastic surgical gloves. The MPs crowd around to study an old Soviet-made belt-fed machine gun. The thief who had it was carrying 79 rounds and two grenades; he said the ammunition was for fishing in the Tigris River.
Another man stole a cheap Japanese porcelain coffee set, still in its cardboard box, a bath towel, a set of worry beads and a meat scale. For this he is about to go to Abu Ghraib, a desolate walled camp of barbed wire, choking dust and stifling tents. Last April, looters stole far more valuable goods with impunity, after the US Secretary of Defence said they were merely "letting off steam".
The MPs wait but no more paperwork is produced. They decide to head for Abu Ghraib with only six of the 15 prisoners they had hoped to transport. One has a bullet wound in the leg, another a deep gash on his head, which medics pronounce infected when we reach the prison. Sgt Toole handcuffs and frisks each man and checks him with a metal detector. Two soldiers escort them to a waiting lorry.
"Sometimes when we drive out the front gate, the families shout, 'that's my boy'," says Sgt Aber. "We'd rather not have the families here. Women throw themselves on the ground and it gets the prisoners all upset and they start crying."
Could the Iraqi police be trying to undermine their work?
"Yeah," says Sgt Toole. "That's just the way they are. If another country comes in and tells you how to do your job, you don't like it."
The tall lieutenant fumes over his wasted efforts. "We had this place working. When Sgt Toole came to pick up the prisoners, everything was ready. Then last month they told us we're supposed to abide by the Iraqi system, not micro-manage. Everything fell to pieces. This country will never be fixed. It's broken."