By Jason Szep WELLESLEY, Mass., Nov 15 (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair's human rights envoy for Iraq warned against an early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq on Wednesday, saying it would accelerate rights abuses against ordinary Iraqis. But Ann Clwyd, a member of parliament for Blair's Labour Party, also urged Iraq's government to press harder to investigate police abuses, weed out corruption and free thousands of mostly Sunni prisoners in Iraqi prisons. "I personally would be totally opposed to an early withdrawal," she told Reuters before delivering a speech at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "It is dreadful that people are forced to flee from certain areas where there is sectarian violence, but a lot of Iraq is living normally. Children are going to university, people are going to the markets and going about their everyday lives." She said those hard-won gains would be undone if U.S. and British forces began a phased withdrawal, as suggested by some U.S. Democrats, who seized both houses of Congress last week partly because of voter anger over the war. Clwyd met with members of both the Democratic and Republican parties this week in Washington, where she also held talks with officials in the Bush administration and State Department. Her visit coincided with Blair telling the United States on Tuesday that progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the way to get moderate Muslim states to support any new plan for Iraq. "The Israel-Palestinian-Lebanon conflict has to be resolved. And in my own personal view, I think the Palestinians are suffering disproportionately," she added. INVESTIGATIONS INTO POLICE ABUSES NEEDED-CLWYD Blair, Bush's closest ally, has outlined a plan for Iraq based on building support for better governance, particularly on how money is distributed by the Iraqi government, helping that government root out sectarianism from the security forces and equipping Iraq's army. Clwyd said the U.S.-sponsored trial of Saddam Hussein showed how Iraq's judicial system was strengthening and could serve as a model for the Middle East. "There is a proper judicial process that is going on and you can't say that is going on in neighboring countries. As it proceeds, I think it will be seen as a model for the Middle East," she said. "The lawyers that we talk to think the justice system is pretty good. They think the Saddam trial is pretty fair. It's not perfect but it is a huge step forward," she said. But she urged the government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to follow through with investigations into abuses by police and to free thousands of men held by police and the U.S. military most without charge. "About 85 percent of them are Sunnis. That has to be addressed because it builds up resentment if the families of those people who are in detention feel that they are in detention for no other reason apart from their ethnicity." "I understand the Americans are keen to move them on into the Iraqi judicial system, but there is some resistance on the part of the Iraqis to deal with this," she said. "It's possible that the Shia are not in a hurry to let them out." She said a mass kidnapping of civil servants during a raid this week at a Higher Education Ministry building highlighted abuses within the Iraqi security forces. Senior police officers were detained and quizzed over the raid, the latest such kidnap carried out by gunmen in police uniform in which complicity is suspected between the security forces and sectarian Shi'ite militia groups
