I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by
Iraqi
prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families.
--Little George, 5
May 2004
Secretary Rumsfeld has been the secretary during two wars
and he is an important part of my cabinet, and he will stay
in my cabinet.
--Little George 5 May
2004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Electronic Iraq
http://electronicIraq.net/news/1484.shtml
6 May 2004
We have met the evildoers......and they
are us.
Laurie King-Irani
Despite the filthy hood covering his face, the soiled cape barely concealing
his naked body, and the exhaustion evident from the tilt of his head, the
Iraqi prisoner in this now iconic photograph radiates grace, dignity, and
humanity -- qualities that were lost on his tormentors. In his silence as an
Iraqi subjected to the cruelties of Saddam Hussein, the privations of the UN
sanctions regime, the passivity of Arab leaders, and now the depravities of
American soldiers, echoes our shame. Or it should. The acts depicted in the
now infamous Iraqi prison photos fall into a class of international offenses
for which no one can or should enjoy impunity: torture.
With glee, ingenuity, and apparent permission from their superiors, young
American men and women (some of whom claim they never heard anything about the
Geneva Conventions), tortured dozens of Iraqis in shameful and pornographic
ways for several months in Abu Ghraib prison. These digital depictions of
grave violations of the Geneva Convention and the 1984 UN Convention Against
Torture or Other Cruel, Degrading or Inhuman Treatment or Punishment are
evidence of war crimes.
And these bright-eyed young Americans are war criminals. They did not achieve
such infamy overnight or on their own, however. Rather, they, like the
Americans they represent back home in Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, and
Texas, gradually lost their bearings as a result of a media- and
policy-induced trance asserting that Americans and the United States
constitute a special class of humanity: privileged, above the law, stronger,
better, and more deserving than others.
From the evident joy they experienced while violating Iraqis arrested and
imprisoned in a murky political and legal twilight zone of Iraq/Guantanamo/Afghanistan
spawned by the "War on Terror," it is clear that they have not actually
violated human rights or international humanitarian law: These young
Americans, and their superiors, do not consider Iraqis to be human beings.
From the photos, it seems they have mistaken Iraqis for dogs.
Iraqis are to be disciplined, herded, leashed, brought to heal, beaten and
otherwise acted upon by their masters. Iraq and Iraqis are to be invaded,
sanctioned, bombed, starved, beseiged, governed, administered, handed over,
taught a lesson, de-Ba'athified, cleansed, and even "democratized." But Iraqis
never get to stand on two feet and be agents of their own individual or
collective will.
Only the US and UK military personnel, with the crucial aid of private (and
possibly unaccountable) contractors, are the actors, the sole engines of
discipline, governance, transformation, and decisionmaking. No other parties
need worry their heads about what goes on inside the nebulous borders of the
new quasi-sovereign Iraq. The UN, the EU, and the World Bank, along with
dozens of non-governmental and private voluntary organizations and countless
journalists and activists, can opine, declaim, suggest, and warn all they
want, but only the "coalition" may act.
With such privileges and powers, one would think, come duties and obligations.
Not so. Here we see the lethal elegance of US Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld's new "lean, mean, US armed forces." Not only is this new fighting
machine light on personnel, it is also unencumbered by respect for the laws
and usages of war. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the
Geneva Conventions (1949), the UN Convention Against Torture or Other Cruel,
Degrading or Inhuman Treatment or Punishment (1984), and international
customary law all clearly and unequivocally criminalize torture. It is a crime
that attaches universal jurisdiction, i.e., extraterritorial prosecution and
judicial processes. Torture is a profoundly serious offence that is not
allowed at any time for any reason. Period.
According to the US, however, these firm guidelines are for other, lesser
countries. The US is different: a nation apart, just like its close ally,
Israel. With Rumsfeld's off-hand dismissal of the gravity of these photographs
and all that they convey and imply about command culture in the US armed
forces, and with the arrival of Gen. Miller, fresh from Guantanamo, to oversee
the internal workings of Abu Ghraib prison, the US has effectively declared
itself beyond the reach of international law.
This should not surprise anyone who has watched as the US: pulled out of the
Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, attempted to
undermine other states' support for the court, and demonized attempts to
realize international justice in national courts, going so far as to
strong-arm the Belgian government into gutting its progressive universal
jurisdiction (or "anti-atrocity") legislation a year ago. Now that we all know
just what has been going on in Abu Ghraib prison, it is clear why the US is so
keen to guarantee its immunity from international humanitarian law. It wants,
like that frightening young woman soldier, to make the world it's "bitch."
But in a world of educated, on-line, savvy news consumers, how does the US get
away with being such a badly behaved top dog?
The Bush administration does not invoke secular notions of law, accountability
and governance to defend its impunity and exceptional status, but rather,
claims something akin to divine right. We are to believe that the blood shed
by US citizens on September 11th 2001 has given us a sacred right to ride
roughshod over others' rights and to dismiss the mulitateral frameworks of
international governance, peacekeeping, humanitarian law, and mediation
painstakingly built up through joint processes over the last 50 years. Israel
makes the same claims, implicitly or explicitly, about the Holocaust, invoking
Nazi horrors to excuse nearly a half century of clear and systematic
violations of International Humanitarian Law, including torture.
Though many Israelis and Americans might find arguments based on notions of
exceptionalism and manifest destiny emotionally compelling and morally
satisfying, they represent a dangerous conception of accountability that the
world can ill afford. This US-Israeli claim of being above the law is premised
upon a belief that Israelis and Americans are more human than others, more
worthy or deserving than others, to enjoy basic rights, dignity, and security.
Viewing recent events and deciphering the conceptual underpinnings of Israeli
and US military actions in the West Bank, Gaza, Falluja, and Abu Ghraib
prison, as well as Guantanamo, it is hard not to conclude that US and Israeli
decision makers view themselves as "ubermenschen," ultra-humans, while casting
Arabs and Muslims in the complementary, contrasting role of semi- or
quasi-human creatures whose rights, dignity, lives, health, future, wealth,
security we can steal, break or violate at will without any compunctions. We
can even have a good laugh while violating others -- and the laws meant to
protect us all.
For the Ariel Sharons and the Donald Rumsfelds of our world, no human rights
have, technically speaking, been violated in Iraq or Palestine. No grave
breaches of International Humanitarian Law have been committed, since no
actual humans have been harmed. Iraqis and Palestinians are faceless masses of
evildoers, not real people like us.
So slap, crack, smash and pummel away, snap some more prison-porn pix for the
guys and gals back home at the local watering hole, and keep smiling, troops:
As long as George Bush, Jr., Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld hold the leashes
(not the reins) of power in Washington, rest assured that you will remain
above the reach of the secular and international law. With God on your side.
We have met the evildoers, and they are us.
Laurie King-Irani is a co-founder of the Electronic Intifada and
Electronic Iraq. She teaches social anthropology in British Columbia,
Canada.
-----------------------------------------------
Daily Telegraph-UK
http://dailytelegraph.news.com.au/story.jsp?sectionid=1258&storyid=1302907
7 May 2004
Good ol' girl who enjoyed cruelty
POINTING crudely at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi,
the petite brunette with a cigarette hanging from her lips
epitomised America's shame over revelations US soldiers
routinely tortured inmates at Abu Ghraib jail near
Baghdad.
By SHARON CHURCHER in Fort Ashby
Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker's daughter, comes from a trailer park in
Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call "a backwoods world".
She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero.
At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong.
"A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq,"
Colleen Kesner said.
"To the country boys here, if you're a different nationality, a different
race, you're sub-human. That's the way girls like Lynndie are raised.
"Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey.
Every season here you're hunting something. Over there, they're hunting
Iraqis."
In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington,
the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an
active Ku Klux Klan presence.
There is little understanding of the issues in Iraq and less of why
photographs showing soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, mostly
from around Fort Ashby, abusing prisoners has caused a furore.
Like many, England signed up to make money and see the world. After her tour
of duty, she planned to settle down and marry her first love, Charles Graner.
Down a dirt track at the edge of town, in the trailer where England grew up,
her mother Terrie dismissed the allegations against her daughter as unfair.
"They were just doing stupid kid things, pranks. And what the Iraqis do to our
men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, do they apply to
everybody or just us?" she asked.
She said she didn't know where her daughter was being held, but had spoken to
her on the phone.
"She told me nothing happened which wasn't ordered by higher up," she said.
"They are trying to pin all of this on the lower ranks. My daughter was just
following orders. I think there's a conspiracy. "
A colleague of Lynndie's father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the
whingeing.
"We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis," he said.
"We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie
didn't kill 'em, she didn't cut 'em up. She should have shot some of the
suckers."
Six soldiers from the 372nd are facing court-martial.
The commander of the prison service in Iraq, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski,
50, has been suspended from duty and is expected to be charged.
Colleagues of the tough, super-fit officer last night described her as a woman
with one mission to raise her own profile.
Sources also said soldiers at Abu Ghraib, where Saddam Hussein was held after
his capture, were often drunk including when the shocking pictures were
taken.
One colleague said: "Janis sees herself as making way for women to get to the
top in the US Army. But many of her soldiers said she had been promoted beyond
her ability because she was a woman.
"She was out of her depth and on a mission to raise her own profile. Now, she
ll be forced to quit.
"She should have been aware what her troops were doing, but she wasn't."
Another soldier facing charges is Staff Sergeant Ivan Chip Frederick, 37, of
Dillwyn, Virginia.
His father, Ivan Frederick, 76, said his son, an ex-prison guard, sent him a
journal outlining the barbaric treatment of Iraqi PoWs.
He said his son was a scapegoat.
"He was unhappy with what he saw. There is no way Chip would do these things
unless he was ordered to do," Mr Frederick said.
Pentagon officials have confirmed that other alleged incidents of torture
under Brig-General Karpinski's regime were being investigated.
A military source said: "The word is that she was told it would be beneficial
if the prisoners were willing to talk.
"Let's just say a blind eye was turned to certain events."
-------------------------------------------
The New York Times
5 May 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
By Ian Fisher
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot
move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq.
But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet
again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American
soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a
black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked
and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face
poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a
"thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing
nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not
know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the
identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched
image.
Mr. Abd, 34, is at the center of an explosive scandal over American
mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners, but he remained calm in a detailed, two-hour
account of his time at the fearsome Abu Ghraib prison. He claimed that he was
never interrogated, and never charged with a crime. Officials at the prison
said Tuesday that they could not comment on his case.
In November, when the abuse took place, few Shiite Muslims like Mr. Abd
were carrying out attacks against United States forces. Nearly all the attacks
were attributed to forces loyal to Saddam Hussein, mostly Sunni Muslims, and
fighters from other Muslim countries.
"The truth is we were not terrorists," he said. "We were not insurgents.
We were just ordinary people. And American intelligence knew this."
Mr. Abd spoke with no particular anger at the American occupation, though
he has seen it closer than most Iraqis. In six months in prisons run by
American soldiers, in fact, he said most of them had treated him well and with
respect.
"Most of the time, they wouldn't even say, 'Shut up,' " he said.
That changed in November - he does not know the exact date - when
punishment for a prisoner fight at Abu Ghraib degenerated into torture. That
night, he said, he and six other inmates were beaten, stripped naked (a
particularly deep humiliation in the Arab world), forced to pile on top of one
another, to straddle one another's backs naked, to simulate oral sex. American
guards wrote words like "rapist" on their skin with Magic Marker, he said.
The curiosity, through much of the ordeal, was the camera. It was a detail
he mentioned repeatedly as he recalled being forced against a wall and ordered
by the Arabic translator to masturbate as he looked at one of the female
guards.
"She was laughing, and she put her hands on her breasts," Mr. Abd said.
"Of course, I couldn't do it. I told them that I couldn't, so they beat me in
the stomach, and I fell to the ground. The translator said, `Do it! Do it!
It's better than being beaten.' I said, `How can I do it?' So I put my hand on
my penis, just pretending."
All the while, he said, the flash of the camera kept illuminating the dim
room that once held prisoners of Mr. Hussein, recording images that have
infuriated the Arab world and badly sullied America's image in a country more
willing these days to think the worst of its occupiers.
"It was humiliating," Mr. Abd said in Arabic through an interpreter. "We
did not think that we would survive. All of us believed we would be killed and
not get out alive."
Though the pictures tell their own story, the details of Mr. Abd's account
could not be verified. But a military official here said the prisoner number
that Mr. Abd gave, 13077, matched that of a former prisoner who submitted a
sworn statement alleging abuse by American soldiers. He also said the man's
account was consistent with those verified by a military investigator. Several
episodes that Mr. Abd recounted also matched, in some detail, testimony given
by other American soldiers horrified by what they saw.
But Mr. Abd's account differed in one crucial way from the substance of a
report, written by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba and first reported last week by
The New Yorker magazine and the CBS News program "60 Minutes II." While the
report says the military police in the prison often mistreated prisoners to
help military intelligence officers gain information during interrogations,
Mr. Abd said his case appeared to be punishment for bad behavior, in this case
a jail-yard fight.
Mr. Abd is a slight, bearded man, the father of five children and a Shiite
Muslim from the southern city of Nasiriya. He said he had served 18 years in
the Iraqi military, for a time in the Republican Guard, Mr. Hussein's elite
troops. But he said he had deserted several times and was demoted to the
regular army, where he was serving when American troops invaded Iraq last
March.
He was arrested in June at a military checkpoint, when he tried to leave
the taxi he was riding in. He was taken to a detention center at the Baghdad
airport, he said, and then transferred to a big military prison in Um Qasr,
near the Kuwaiti border. He said he had stayed for three months and four days.
The treatment in Um Qasr, he said, "was very good," adding: "There was no
problem. The American guards were nice and good people."
After the three months, he said, he was transferred to Abu Ghraib, a
sprawling prison complex 20 miles west of Baghdad, where Mr. Hussein
incarcerated and executed thousands of his opponents.
But after the prison fight, the victim pointed out Mr. Abd and six others
to American guards, and at that moment, his time in prison turned.
Mr. Abd said he and the other men had been handcuffed and taken inside the
prison to a cellblock called "the hard site," reserved for the most dangerous
prisoners. There he saw, for the first time, an American soldier called
"Joiner or something." (Mr. Abd does not speak English. The man he pointed out
in the picture as Joiner has been identified in other reports as Specialist
Charles A. Granier, of the 372nd Military Police Company.)
"In my pocket, I had three cigarettes," Mr. Abd said. "Joiner said to me,
`Put them in your mouth and smoke all of them. If one falls out of your mouth,
I will crush you with my boot.' "
The command came through the translator, an Egyptian known by the
prisoners as Abu Hamid. In an area in front of the cells, he said, were
"Joiner," the translator and two other male soldiers, one bald and one with
reddish hair and complexion. He said there were two women: the one whose name
he did not know, and the one with the camera, whom he knew as Miss Maya.
"I had no choice," Mr. Abd said. "I smoked all of them."
The seven men were all placed in hoods, he said, and the beating began.
"They beat our heads on the walls and the doors," he said. "I don't really
know: I couldn't see." He said his jaw had been broken, badly enough that he
still has trouble eating. In all, he said, he believes that he received about
50 blows over about two hours.
"Then the interpreter told us to strip," he said. "We told him: `You are
Egyptian, and you are a Muslim. You know that as Muslims we can't do that.'
When we refused to take off our clothes, they beat us and tore our clothes off
with a blade."
It was at this moment in the interview on Tuesday that several pages of
the photographs made public last week were produced - photographs that Mr. Abd
first saw when a military investigator came to visit him in January, and which
are now broadcast every few minutes on Arab news channels as proof of American
brutality. He had been through this before, and he quickly and unemotionally
pointed out all his friends - Hussein, Ahmed, Hashim - naked, hooded, twisted
around each other.
He also saw himself, as degraded as possible: naked, his hand on his
genitals, a female soldier, identified in another report as Pvt. Lynndie
England, pointing and smiling with a cigarette in her mouth. Mr. Abd said one
of the soldiers had removed his hood, and the translator ordered him to
masturbate while looking at Private England. He refused, was beaten, and then
did what he could.
Then, he said, his friend Hussein was pushed up toward Mr. Abd's genitals.
"They made him sit next to me," he said, adding that he had been re-hooded.
"My penis was very close to his mouth. I did not know it was my friend because
of the hood."
One of the photographs shows what appears to be this exact scene. In
testimony in April, Specialist Matthew Carl Wisdom, a military police officer
who witnessed part of the incident, remembered that the naked prisoner on the
floor did not have his hood on. Specialist Wisdom's testimony, like Mr. Abd's
account, cited seven detainees in the room.
"I thought I should just get out of there," Specialist Wisdom said,
according to documents from an April 2 military court hearing. "I didn't think
it was right."
Mr. Abd said it was then that the soldiers had begun piling the men on top
of one another, and taking lots of pictures. Three or four times, he said, the
soldiers made them pile up in pyramids. Twice, he said, the soldiers had made
some prisoners kneel on the ground as others straddled their backs. At one
point near the end, Mr. Abd said, "Joiner" grabbed the prisoners' hoods as if
they were leashes.
"He said, 'When I whistle, you bark like dog,' " Mr. Abd said.
Finally, after an ordeal of what Mr. Abd believed to be about four hours,
it was over.
The soldiers removed the beds from their cells, he said, and threw cold
water on the floor. The prisoners were forced to sleep on the ground with
their hoods still on, he said.
"I was so exhausted, I fell asleep," Mr. Abd said. "These were the same
walls where Saddam Hussein used to interrogate people. We thought we would be
executed."
But the next morning, he said, doctors and dentists arrived to care for
their injuries. Beds and pillows were brought back in. They were fed. Everyone
was nice, Mr. Abd said. Then at night, the same crew with "Joiner" would
return and strip them and handcuff them to the walls.
In sworn testimony, another soldier and a translator said they had seen
handcuffing and shackling, as well as the removal of beds and sheets from
cells, though it remains unclear if they were referring to Mr. Abd's group.
About 10 days after it started, the nightly abuse ended, for no explained
reason. "Joiner" just stopped coming to the cell block, and about a month
later, Mr. Abd and two others among the seven were transferred to a civilian
Iraqi prison in Baghdad.
Two weeks or so after that, an American military investigator came to
visit him. He showed Mr. Abd the pictures and said he needed him to make a
statement against the military police who had mistreated him. Mr. Abd trusted
him.
"He said, 'Don't be afraid. Tell us what happened. We are on your side,' "
Mr. Abd remembered. " `Tell us everything they have done.' "
Mr. Abd was released in mid-April. Looking back, the only explanation he
can imagine for the mistreatment is that "Joiner" had been drinking.
"Americans did not mistreat me in general," he said. "But these people
must be tried."
"I can't tell you my feelings," he said. "The Americans got rid of Saddam
Hussein. They told us about democracy and freedom. We are happy about that."
But then he tapped the photos again.
"Then this man did this to the seven of us," he said. "I am asking: Is
that democracy? Is that freedom?"
On Tuesday, he said, he would travel, finally, with his family back to his
home in Nasiriya, though he said he could not stay. He said he would be too
ashamed. He wants the American government to pay compensation. He said he felt
he needed to move out of Iraq, and despite it all, he said he would not refuse
an offer to move to America.
-------------------------------------------
News That Stays News - 119
Kent State, May 4, 1970
Ran out of tear gas and became panicky,
poor inept kids, and therefore they poured lead
into the other kids and shot them dead,
and now myself and the whole country
are weeping. It's not a matter of degree,
not less not more than the Indo-Chinese slaughtered,
it is the same; but mostly folk are shattered
by home truths (as I know who lost my boy).
I am not willing to go on this week
with business as usual, this month this year
let cars slow down and stop and builders break
off building and close up the theater.
You see, the children that we massacre
are our own children. Call the soldiers back.
--Paul Goodman
Collected Poems
