Abu Ghraib is not closing.

The headlines--for instance, those of the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Irish Times, The Australian, and National Public Radio in the US--commonly got this basic fact wrong, despite perfectly clear statements from the US Army (and the facts cited in those same articles). But it's not as though the papers came up with this propaganda line all on their own. After the publication of the notorious torture photos in 2004, US President George W. Bush announced that Abu Ghraib would be razed "as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."

The president's pledge met with less enthusiasm than one might imagine. Amnesty International suggested that the prison should be preserved, since it may contain important evidence of human rights abuses. (An American court later agreed.) Others, including Mahmoud Othman, then a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, expressed hopes that the site might become a museum to remind the public of Baathist horrors. But the deciding factor was more pragmatic: the Iraqi government needed the jail space and didn't want the expense of building a new prison.

So, after numerous delays, the US government announced on March 9 that it would leave Abu Ghraib sometime in early summer. Its 4,500 prisoners will be transferred to other facilities, mostly to Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport. Abu Ghraib will then be under the complete control of the new Iraqi government, which has already started housing its own prisoners there.

The US insists that this conversion has nothing to do with the prison's poisoned reputation. And, for certain, the occupying forces have plenty of other reasons for wanting to be rid of the facility. The buildings were already deteriorating when the Baath Party fell, and suffered heavy looting in the first days of the US invasion. Despite some cursory efforts at rebuilding, the physical structure never approached the conditions necessary for the job it was given; among other problems, it was too small for the number of prisoners. And moreover, the prison was, strategically speaking, very badly placed--more or less in the middle of the battle zone, easy to attack, hard to supply. (The site's former commander, General Janis Karpinski, makes this point very effectively in her otherwise lackluster memoir, One Woman's Army.) The military was aware of these problems from the outset, and never intended Abu Ghraib to become its permanent prison. But with security consistently lacking, and reconstruction perpetually deferred, the weeks bled into months, and then years. It is now, finally, time to leave.

Of course, passing the prison from American to Iraqi hands won't do anything to address its poor condition or its endless security problems. And it is unlikely to mark progress in terms of human rights. The new Iraqi government has already shown itself to be adept at the game of state terror--including kidnapping, torture, and death-squad murders. A US military raid on an Interior Ministry prison in November discovered 173 prisoners who had been starved and beaten; some had broken bones or were missing fingernails. Subsequent inspections found similar abuses at other prisons.

Not that prisoners in American custody can expect much better. According to a recent Amnesty International report titled "Beyond Abu Ghraib"--"Although the US authorities introduced various measures to safeguard prisoners after the Abu Ghraib scandal, there continue to be reports of torture or ill-treatment of detainees by US troops... given that torture or ill-treatment have continued, [Amnesty International] is concerned that insufficient safeguards have been put in place in order to protect detainees from the recurrence of abuse."

The Iraqi public, it seems, has an intuitive grasp on the situation. One Iraqi shopkeeper was quoted in The Times (of London), saying, "the Americans will close one Abu Ghraib and open a hundred new ones somewhere else."

The decision to relocate the prisoners to Camp Cropper is particularly ironic. The main detention and interrogation center there was closed in October 2003 after the International Committee of the Red Cross reported fifty abuses "tantamount to torture"--including beatings, sleep deprivation, death threats, painful restraints, soldiers urinating on prisoners, and one incident in which a man was "force-fed a baseball."

Just weeks after the report, the US military converted the prison into a smaller holding facility reserved for high-value detainees. Citing overcrowding and the bad state of the facilities, the military transferred the bulk of the prison population--and the interrogation staff--from Camp Cropper to Abu Ghraib. Now, it seems, they'll be headed back.

--Kristian Williams, the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination (South End Press, 2006), and of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Soft Skull Press, 2004).