BuzzFlash Review: A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror
Most Americans probably don't relish reading a book about the history of how our nation abandoned its noble ideals and joined the ranks of the torturers, but remember this is OUR country -- and we ARE torturing people.
"A Question of Torture" makes the logical argument that this didn't all happen overnight. The infrastructure, training, and experimentation in torture have been developed by the CIA for over 50 years. After all, under Reagan -- and the ongoing School of the Americas (whose name has now been changed for PR purposes) -- we trained a generation of torturers in Latin America.
The Bush Administration, one could argue, just went public with torture and authorized it as a national policy -- and then alternately lobbied to continue torturing and claiming that it didn't engage in torture. Well, Orwell would be proud, but the body bags and photos are just the tip of the iceberg in revealing the Bush-Cheney gulag of betraying our nation's civilized standards.
Alfred W. McCoy, Author of "A Question of Torture" and a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, not only establishes the historic development of government sanctioned torture, but he is most concerned about how it diminishes the standards of our nation.
Moreover, McCoy makes a strong case that torture rarely is effective. It is like looking for a needle in haystack. Selective torture inevitably leads to mass torture, as we saw in Chile and Argentina during the "dirty wars." Furthermore, McCoy points out that then mass torture leads to extra-judicial killings.
As we have seen, the Bush crew is worried about the cost of long-term imprisonment of terrorist suspects who are no longer of any potential intelligence value. It was just such a situation that led the French to practice summary execution during their anti-terror campaign at the time of the Algerian war for independence. According to McCoy, the CIA Phoenix program in Vietnam produced over 20,000 extra-judicial killings." McCoy notes, "the logical corollary to state-sanctioned torture is state-sanctioned murder."
Indeed, we know that this gruesome continuum has already occurred at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and likely at other sites in the Bush gulag of torture.
If we adopt the barbaric practices of terrorists, they have already beaten us.
Because when we adopt torture as a national policy, we have become what we have beheld. We have lost all pretense of moral superiority -- and the line between good and evil becomes blurred beyond all recognition.
Recently, Bush reluctantly signed an anti-torture bill passed overwhelmingly by Congress. But he used one of his "unitary executive" interpretation statements to indicate that he would bypass the law if he felt like it. (The tactic of using presidential signing statements to circumvent laws passed by Congress was a strategy formulated by Sam Alito during his service in the Reagan Administration.)
"A Question of Torture" is one of a laudable number of books that Henry Holt and Company publishers are issuing in a series that is called "The American Empire Project." Holt is to be commended for its contribution to public discourse about out nation's direction from impassioned, thoughtful authors who reflect upon our imperial ambitions.
31.1.06
30.1.06
Blair in Secret Plot with Bush to Dupe U.N.
Blair in Secret Plot with Bush to Dupe U.N.
No sh** sherlock.
A White House leak revealing astonishing details of how Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the Iraq war is set to cause a worldwide political storm.
A new book exposes how the two men connived to dupe the United Nations and blows the lid off Mr Blair's claim that he was a restraining influence on Mr Bush.
He offered his total support for the war at a secret White House summit as Mr Bush displayed his contempt for the UN, made a series of wild threats against Saddam Hussein and showed a devastating ignorance about the catastrophic aftermath of the war.
Based on access to information at the highest level, the book by leading British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands QC, Professor of Law at London University, demonstrates how the two men decided to go to war regardless of whether they obtained UN backing.
The revelations make a nonsense of Mr Blair's claim that the final decision was not made until MPs voted in the Commons 24 hours before the war - and could revive the risk of him being charged with war crimes or impeached by Parliament itself.
The book also makes serious allegations concerning the conduct of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith over Goldsmith's legal advice on the war.
And it alleges the British Government boasted that disgraced newspaper tycoon Conrad Black was being used by Mr Bush's allies in America as a channel for pro-war propaganda in the UK via his Daily Telegraph newspaper.
The leaks are contained in a new version of Sands' book Lawless World, first published last year, when it emerged that Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair the war could be unlawful - before a lastminute U-turn.
The new edition, to be published by Penguin on Thursday, is likely to cause a fierce new controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.
It follows recent charges against two British men under the Official Secrets Act after a transcript of another conversation between Mr Bush and Blair, in which the President raised the possibility of bombing the Al Jazeera Arab TV station, was leaked by a Whitehall official.
Both governments will be horrified that the stream of leaks revealing the grim truth about the war is turning into a flood. The most damaging new revelation concerns the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Bush at the White House on January 31, 2003, during which Mr Blair urged the President to seek a second UN resolution giving specific backing for the war.
The Mail on Sunday has established that the meeting was attended only by Mr Blair, his Downing Street foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, Mr Bush and the President's then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, plus an official note-taker.
The top-secret record of the meeting was circulated to a tiny handful of senior figures in the two administrations.
Immediately afterwards, the two leaders gave a Press conference in which a nervous-looking Mr Blair claimed the meeting had been a success. Mr Bush gave qualified support for going down the UN route.
But observers noted the awkward body language between the two men. Sands' book explains why. Far from giving a genuine endorsement to Mr Blair's attempt to gain full UN approval, Mr Bush was only going through the motions. And Mr Blair not only knew it, but went along with it.
The description of the January 31 meeting echoes the recent memoirs of Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer.
Meyer, who was excluded from the private session between Blair and Bush, claimed the summit marked the culmination of the Prime Minister's failure to use his influence to hold back Mr Bush.
Equally significantly, Meyer was puzzled by Blair's behaviour when the two leaders emerged to join other aides. Meyer writes: "We were all milling around in the State dining room as Bush and Blair put the final touches to what they were going to say to the media.
"Bush had a notepad on which he had written a form of words on the second resolution...He read it out...There was silence. I waited for Blair to say he needed something as supportive as possible. He said nothing. I waited for somebody on the No 10 team to say something. Nothing was said. I cursed myself afterwards for not piping up.
"At the Press conference, Bush gave only a perfunctory and lukewarm support for a second resolution. It was neither his nor Blair's finest performance."
In view of Sands' disclosures, Blair had every reason to look awkward: he knew that despite his public talk of getting UN support, privately he had just committed himself to going to war no matter what the UN did.
When, in due course, the UN refused to back the war, Mr Blair seized on the fact that French President Jacques Chirac said he would not support any pro-war resolution, claiming that the French veto was so 'unreasonable' that a UN vote was pointless. In reality, Bush and Blair had decided to go to war before Chirac uttered a word.
The disclosures will be seized on by anti-war critics in Britain, including Left-wing MPs who say Mr Blair should be impeached for his handling of the war.
However, Ministers will argue that after three major British inquiries into the war, and with thousands of British troops due to be sent home from Iraq this year, it is time to move on.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said last night: "These matters have been thoroughly investigated and we stand by our position."
No sh** sherlock.
A White House leak revealing astonishing details of how Tony Blair and George Bush lied about the Iraq war is set to cause a worldwide political storm.
A new book exposes how the two men connived to dupe the United Nations and blows the lid off Mr Blair's claim that he was a restraining influence on Mr Bush.
He offered his total support for the war at a secret White House summit as Mr Bush displayed his contempt for the UN, made a series of wild threats against Saddam Hussein and showed a devastating ignorance about the catastrophic aftermath of the war.
Based on access to information at the highest level, the book by leading British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands QC, Professor of Law at London University, demonstrates how the two men decided to go to war regardless of whether they obtained UN backing.
The revelations make a nonsense of Mr Blair's claim that the final decision was not made until MPs voted in the Commons 24 hours before the war - and could revive the risk of him being charged with war crimes or impeached by Parliament itself.
The book also makes serious allegations concerning the conduct of Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Attorney General Lord Goldsmith over Goldsmith's legal advice on the war.
And it alleges the British Government boasted that disgraced newspaper tycoon Conrad Black was being used by Mr Bush's allies in America as a channel for pro-war propaganda in the UK via his Daily Telegraph newspaper.
The leaks are contained in a new version of Sands' book Lawless World, first published last year, when it emerged that Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair the war could be unlawful - before a lastminute U-turn.
The new edition, to be published by Penguin on Thursday, is likely to cause a fierce new controversy on both sides of the Atlantic.
It follows recent charges against two British men under the Official Secrets Act after a transcript of another conversation between Mr Bush and Blair, in which the President raised the possibility of bombing the Al Jazeera Arab TV station, was leaked by a Whitehall official.
Both governments will be horrified that the stream of leaks revealing the grim truth about the war is turning into a flood. The most damaging new revelation concerns the meeting between Mr Blair and Mr Bush at the White House on January 31, 2003, during which Mr Blair urged the President to seek a second UN resolution giving specific backing for the war.
The Mail on Sunday has established that the meeting was attended only by Mr Blair, his Downing Street foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, Mr Bush and the President's then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, plus an official note-taker.
The top-secret record of the meeting was circulated to a tiny handful of senior figures in the two administrations.
Immediately afterwards, the two leaders gave a Press conference in which a nervous-looking Mr Blair claimed the meeting had been a success. Mr Bush gave qualified support for going down the UN route.
But observers noted the awkward body language between the two men. Sands' book explains why. Far from giving a genuine endorsement to Mr Blair's attempt to gain full UN approval, Mr Bush was only going through the motions. And Mr Blair not only knew it, but went along with it.
The description of the January 31 meeting echoes the recent memoirs of Britain's former ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer.
Meyer, who was excluded from the private session between Blair and Bush, claimed the summit marked the culmination of the Prime Minister's failure to use his influence to hold back Mr Bush.
Equally significantly, Meyer was puzzled by Blair's behaviour when the two leaders emerged to join other aides. Meyer writes: "We were all milling around in the State dining room as Bush and Blair put the final touches to what they were going to say to the media.
"Bush had a notepad on which he had written a form of words on the second resolution...He read it out...There was silence. I waited for Blair to say he needed something as supportive as possible. He said nothing. I waited for somebody on the No 10 team to say something. Nothing was said. I cursed myself afterwards for not piping up.
"At the Press conference, Bush gave only a perfunctory and lukewarm support for a second resolution. It was neither his nor Blair's finest performance."
In view of Sands' disclosures, Blair had every reason to look awkward: he knew that despite his public talk of getting UN support, privately he had just committed himself to going to war no matter what the UN did.
When, in due course, the UN refused to back the war, Mr Blair seized on the fact that French President Jacques Chirac said he would not support any pro-war resolution, claiming that the French veto was so 'unreasonable' that a UN vote was pointless. In reality, Bush and Blair had decided to go to war before Chirac uttered a word.
The disclosures will be seized on by anti-war critics in Britain, including Left-wing MPs who say Mr Blair should be impeached for his handling of the war.
However, Ministers will argue that after three major British inquiries into the war, and with thousands of British troops due to be sent home from Iraq this year, it is time to move on.
A Downing Street spokeswoman said last night: "These matters have been thoroughly investigated and we stand by our position."
28.1.06
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
The New Yorker: Fact
THE GRAY ZONE
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2004-05-24Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.
Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.
A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story.
He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance ...read on via the link.
THE GRAY ZONE
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2004-05-24Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq.
Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon’s operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq.
A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld’s long-standing desire to wrest control of America’s clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story.
He said, “Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding.” The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld’s testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, “Some people think you can bullshit anyone.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance ...read on via the link.
What I Saw in Iraq
Aidan Delgado What I Saw in Iraq -- 06.03.05
Part 1QuickTime DSL 56K Windows Media DSL 56K
Part 2QuickTime DSL 56K Windows Media DSL 56K
A young man, who grew up...in the right way. While on his tour, he started to become a conscience objector; The military took away his armor, denied him leave, and some members of his unit harrassed and abused him.
While Aidan softened, others did not, and he reveals the harshness overcoming our once young and innocent citizens.
Iraqi's initially offered goodwill; initially the soldiers were gracious. Over time they hardened and bewildered the Iraqi citizens with harsh abusive behavior.
He speaks openly about the conditions at Abu Garib; disentary and 80 prisoners to a tent, with only trenchs for the bathroom. They were served rotten food, often subjected to food poisoning, rats, etc.
I applaud Aidan Delgado for coming out of Iraq unjaded, but more sensitive to what he was exposed to, and compassion for those The US sought to destroy.
Part 1QuickTime DSL 56K Windows Media DSL 56K
Part 2QuickTime DSL 56K Windows Media DSL 56K
A young man, who grew up...in the right way. While on his tour, he started to become a conscience objector; The military took away his armor, denied him leave, and some members of his unit harrassed and abused him.
While Aidan softened, others did not, and he reveals the harshness overcoming our once young and innocent citizens.
Iraqi's initially offered goodwill; initially the soldiers were gracious. Over time they hardened and bewildered the Iraqi citizens with harsh abusive behavior.
He speaks openly about the conditions at Abu Garib; disentary and 80 prisoners to a tent, with only trenchs for the bathroom. They were served rotten food, often subjected to food poisoning, rats, etc.
I applaud Aidan Delgado for coming out of Iraq unjaded, but more sensitive to what he was exposed to, and compassion for those The US sought to destroy.
ConceptionMedia - Caught in the Crossfire
ConceptionMedia - Caught in the Crossfire
The plight of the civilians is the unreported story of the Iraq War. The refugees of Falluja risked their lives to tell their story to the world.
In November 2004, the American military took siege of the ancient city of Falluja, Iraq – a city comparable to the size of Cincinnati, Ohio with a population of at least 250,000.
The American attack on Falluja, and the subsequent costs to the people there, has been a humanitarian, social, moral and ethical disaster; yet the American government and media have largely ignored the plight of the innocent victims. The refugees of Falluja risked their lives in order to tell their story to the world through the groundbreaking new documentary film, Caught in the Crossfire.
Shot from November 2004 to April 2005 inside the city of Falluja, Caught in the Crossfire details the conditions experienced by civilians as they endured the violent clashes and consequences of Operation Phantom Fury and became refugees outside the eyes and care of the international community.
A joint production between Iraqi and American filmmakers, Caught in the Crossfire was filmed entirely un-embedded, outside the protection or influence of the military or corporate media, in order to capture the unique and honest perspective of the civilians themselves.
Due to military operations in Iraq, civilians in combat areas continue to live in horrific conditions with little or no aid.
Your purchase of Caught in the Crossfire will go directly to aid the innocent civilians and refugees caught in the crossfire of conflict areas inside Iraq.
The plight of the civilians is the unreported story of the Iraq War. The refugees of Falluja risked their lives to tell their story to the world.
In November 2004, the American military took siege of the ancient city of Falluja, Iraq – a city comparable to the size of Cincinnati, Ohio with a population of at least 250,000.
The American attack on Falluja, and the subsequent costs to the people there, has been a humanitarian, social, moral and ethical disaster; yet the American government and media have largely ignored the plight of the innocent victims. The refugees of Falluja risked their lives in order to tell their story to the world through the groundbreaking new documentary film, Caught in the Crossfire.
Shot from November 2004 to April 2005 inside the city of Falluja, Caught in the Crossfire details the conditions experienced by civilians as they endured the violent clashes and consequences of Operation Phantom Fury and became refugees outside the eyes and care of the international community.
A joint production between Iraqi and American filmmakers, Caught in the Crossfire was filmed entirely un-embedded, outside the protection or influence of the military or corporate media, in order to capture the unique and honest perspective of the civilians themselves.
Due to military operations in Iraq, civilians in combat areas continue to live in horrific conditions with little or no aid.
Your purchase of Caught in the Crossfire will go directly to aid the innocent civilians and refugees caught in the crossfire of conflict areas inside Iraq.
Saint Patrick's Four
January 28, 2006 Saint Patrick's (iraq_dispatches@dahrjamailiraq.com)
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
The date is March 17, 2003.
St. Patrick's Day and just two days before U.S. bombs began raining down on Baghdad, 40 year-old Teresa Grady, her older sister Clare, Daniel Burns and Vietnam veteran Peter De Mott decided to take action against the impending illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
The group of Catholic Workers from Ithaca, New York, known as the "St.Patrick's Four," entered an Army-Marine Recruiting Center and poured their blood on the walls, recruiting posters and an American flag in an act of non-violent civil resistance to what they knew already was to bethe first of countless violations of international law the BushAdministration would commit during their invasion and occupation of sovereign Iraq.
"We are about caring for the poor, needy and disenfranchised," Teresa told me two days ago when I asked her to sum up what the Catholic Worker movement was about, "We do this while confronting the political and economic structures that cause poverty."It had already been a long day, as Teresa had earlier sat through hersister's sentencing - six months in a federal prison.
The criminalization of dissent in our country is now obvious to anyone paying attention - Clare and Teresa will spend six months in a federal prison for a non-violent symbolic action to protest an illegal war; meanwhile someone guilty of manslaughter will spend less time behind bars, and not in a federal prison.
"As a mother who knows the preciousness of children, not just mine - butall children - I want the court to understand that before we walked into the recruiting station a million people had already died in Iraq fromU.S. imposed sanctions, half of them children," her sister Clare said earlier that day at her sentencing in Binghamton federal court.
I wanted to show my support for the actions of the St. Patrick's Four(SP4). But nearing the end of a short but concentrated tour of presentations in New York's capital area, I'd nearly decided not to venture to Binghamton for the sentencing of the group. After arriving there I quickly realized it would have been a big mistake not to have come.
"War is bloody. The blood we brought to the recruiting station was asign of the blood inherent in the business of the recruiting station,"read the statement the group issued the day of their action, "The young men and women who join the military, via that recruiting station, are people whose lives are precious. We are obligated, as citizens of a democracy, to sound an alarm when we see our young people being sent into harm's way for a cause that is wholly unjust and criminal."
I'd only met Teresa earlier that afternoon just before I gave a presentation about the countless violations of international law committed by occupation forces in Iraq, including the initial invasion itself which UN Secretary General Kofi Anan even referred to as an illegal act which contravened the UN Charter.
My presentation ended with a showing of the short film "Caught in the Crossfire" which shows footage of the desolation of Fallujah. The scourge of war is obvious in the city where 70% of the buildings were destroyed by bombs and between 4-6,000 civilians died while illegal weapons and collective punishment were meted out by the US military.
I sat watching this movie, one I'd seen dozens of times from previous presentations I've given, as it captured the true plight of the people of Fallujah better than anything else I've seen. But I'd never viewed it with someone who, in less than 48 hours time, would be sentenced to six months in a Federal Prison for trying to stop the bloodshed that has been flowing non-stop since the invasion began-and invasion which beganless than 48 hours after her action at the recruiting office.
I took the stage after the film ended, and fumbled to speak-caught off-guard by the deep sadness. It hit me that if more people in the US, on a national scale, had been willing to engage themselves in actions like that modeled by the SP4, massacres like that of Fallujah could have been averted. After the presentation we drove through snow filled hills to the Bronxin New York City.
Over a late dinner I asked her a few more questions about topics we hadn't covered on the way over."Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland," she said, "We are named after him because he represents all of us as Ireland is our heritage."As for why they chose to pour their own blood in the military recruiting station, Teresa replied "We poured it on the posters of those beautiful people-to see the blood on them. It was perverse. but it was truthful because war is ugly and perverse. People who join the military, like those in the posters, will be made ugly and perverse by war.
And as far as the flag-some of the blood dripped down on the flag-we didn't pour it on the flag to start. But when I saw the blood get on the flag, I decided to add more-because there really is blood on our flag now.
"The night grew late and we were both exhausted. Teresa had much to do before going to jail for six months. Before we left the diner where we'd sat, I asked her if she felt it was worth it:
"The action, the upcoming half a year in federal prison, wasit worth it?""After seeing that film, this feels right to me," she said while nodding, "It feels right that I'm gong to jail. It feels like a piece of cake.
Watching the film I thought 'This is criminal.' We belong in jail for allowing that kind of atrocity to occur."Just before we parted ways, Teresa provided me with the final statement she would make to her judge in less than 48 hours. She would soon leave these thoughts in the courtroom as she is about to begin serving her six month sentence in a federal penitentiary:
"No measure of punishment could change the rightness of the act of March17th 2003 to call people to conversion of heart and mind away from agreat national tragedy. My heart is at peace, in that my actions were inconcert with the millions of people of our nation who protested this war."
"What human being would sit silently by, listening to the screams of a child who is being bludgeoned to death, and do nothing? The people of Iraq were, and are being bludgeoned by our policies."
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
The date is March 17, 2003.
St. Patrick's Day and just two days before U.S. bombs began raining down on Baghdad, 40 year-old Teresa Grady, her older sister Clare, Daniel Burns and Vietnam veteran Peter De Mott decided to take action against the impending illegal Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.
The group of Catholic Workers from Ithaca, New York, known as the "St.Patrick's Four," entered an Army-Marine Recruiting Center and poured their blood on the walls, recruiting posters and an American flag in an act of non-violent civil resistance to what they knew already was to bethe first of countless violations of international law the BushAdministration would commit during their invasion and occupation of sovereign Iraq.
"We are about caring for the poor, needy and disenfranchised," Teresa told me two days ago when I asked her to sum up what the Catholic Worker movement was about, "We do this while confronting the political and economic structures that cause poverty."It had already been a long day, as Teresa had earlier sat through hersister's sentencing - six months in a federal prison.
The criminalization of dissent in our country is now obvious to anyone paying attention - Clare and Teresa will spend six months in a federal prison for a non-violent symbolic action to protest an illegal war; meanwhile someone guilty of manslaughter will spend less time behind bars, and not in a federal prison.
"As a mother who knows the preciousness of children, not just mine - butall children - I want the court to understand that before we walked into the recruiting station a million people had already died in Iraq fromU.S. imposed sanctions, half of them children," her sister Clare said earlier that day at her sentencing in Binghamton federal court.
I wanted to show my support for the actions of the St. Patrick's Four(SP4). But nearing the end of a short but concentrated tour of presentations in New York's capital area, I'd nearly decided not to venture to Binghamton for the sentencing of the group. After arriving there I quickly realized it would have been a big mistake not to have come.
"War is bloody. The blood we brought to the recruiting station was asign of the blood inherent in the business of the recruiting station,"read the statement the group issued the day of their action, "The young men and women who join the military, via that recruiting station, are people whose lives are precious. We are obligated, as citizens of a democracy, to sound an alarm when we see our young people being sent into harm's way for a cause that is wholly unjust and criminal."
I'd only met Teresa earlier that afternoon just before I gave a presentation about the countless violations of international law committed by occupation forces in Iraq, including the initial invasion itself which UN Secretary General Kofi Anan even referred to as an illegal act which contravened the UN Charter.
My presentation ended with a showing of the short film "Caught in the Crossfire" which shows footage of the desolation of Fallujah. The scourge of war is obvious in the city where 70% of the buildings were destroyed by bombs and between 4-6,000 civilians died while illegal weapons and collective punishment were meted out by the US military.
I sat watching this movie, one I'd seen dozens of times from previous presentations I've given, as it captured the true plight of the people of Fallujah better than anything else I've seen. But I'd never viewed it with someone who, in less than 48 hours time, would be sentenced to six months in a Federal Prison for trying to stop the bloodshed that has been flowing non-stop since the invasion began-and invasion which beganless than 48 hours after her action at the recruiting office.
I took the stage after the film ended, and fumbled to speak-caught off-guard by the deep sadness. It hit me that if more people in the US, on a national scale, had been willing to engage themselves in actions like that modeled by the SP4, massacres like that of Fallujah could have been averted. After the presentation we drove through snow filled hills to the Bronxin New York City.
Over a late dinner I asked her a few more questions about topics we hadn't covered on the way over."Saint Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland," she said, "We are named after him because he represents all of us as Ireland is our heritage."As for why they chose to pour their own blood in the military recruiting station, Teresa replied "We poured it on the posters of those beautiful people-to see the blood on them. It was perverse. but it was truthful because war is ugly and perverse. People who join the military, like those in the posters, will be made ugly and perverse by war.
And as far as the flag-some of the blood dripped down on the flag-we didn't pour it on the flag to start. But when I saw the blood get on the flag, I decided to add more-because there really is blood on our flag now.
"The night grew late and we were both exhausted. Teresa had much to do before going to jail for six months. Before we left the diner where we'd sat, I asked her if she felt it was worth it:
"The action, the upcoming half a year in federal prison, wasit worth it?""After seeing that film, this feels right to me," she said while nodding, "It feels right that I'm gong to jail. It feels like a piece of cake.
Watching the film I thought 'This is criminal.' We belong in jail for allowing that kind of atrocity to occur."Just before we parted ways, Teresa provided me with the final statement she would make to her judge in less than 48 hours. She would soon leave these thoughts in the courtroom as she is about to begin serving her six month sentence in a federal penitentiary:
"No measure of punishment could change the rightness of the act of March17th 2003 to call people to conversion of heart and mind away from agreat national tragedy. My heart is at peace, in that my actions were inconcert with the millions of people of our nation who protested this war."
"What human being would sit silently by, listening to the screams of a child who is being bludgeoned to death, and do nothing? The people of Iraq were, and are being bludgeoned by our policies."
27.1.06
Bush Urged to 'Tell the Truth About Torture'
Bush Urged to 'Tell the Truth About Torture'
WASHINGTON - A red-and-black, 22-by-10-foot billboard mounted on a truck and emblazoned with the words ''Tell the truth about torture, Mr. President'' began circling the White House Wednesday as activists ratcheted up efforts to force President George W. Bush to confront U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects.
The human rights watchdog group deployed the mobile billboard as part of a two-week campaign including an online petition. Launched a week ago, that effort so far has drawn ''at least 25,000 signatures,'' Singh said.
''Americans believe in justice and due process, and that everyone is entitled to due process. We have certain values,'' she told OneWorld. ''Ultimately, we the U.S. are seen as an upholder of human rights and we need to continue to do that.''
Amnesty is among a number of organizations and lawmakers calling for an independent commission to investigate alleged mistreatment of terrorism suspects on U.S. soil, at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo military base in Cuba, and at secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries.
Also Wednesday, Amnesty sent Bush a letter imploring him to make clear during his State of the Union speech that ''anyone responsible, even at the highest levels, for policies that have led to torture and ill-treatment will be held accountable and to ensure such abuses do not occur in the future.''
In the letter, William Schulz, Amnesty International USA's executive director, said his group welcomed passage late last year of the Anti-Torture Amendment, a piece of legislation he described as ''reaffirming the U.S. prohibition against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.''
Bush signed the legislation, Schulz added, but the president also issued a ''signing statement,'' or legal interpretation of the amendment, stating that it would not bind him in all circumstances.
WASHINGTON - A red-and-black, 22-by-10-foot billboard mounted on a truck and emblazoned with the words ''Tell the truth about torture, Mr. President'' began circling the White House Wednesday as activists ratcheted up efforts to force President George W. Bush to confront U.S. treatment of terrorism suspects.
The human rights watchdog group deployed the mobile billboard as part of a two-week campaign including an online petition. Launched a week ago, that effort so far has drawn ''at least 25,000 signatures,'' Singh said.
''Americans believe in justice and due process, and that everyone is entitled to due process. We have certain values,'' she told OneWorld. ''Ultimately, we the U.S. are seen as an upholder of human rights and we need to continue to do that.''
Amnesty is among a number of organizations and lawmakers calling for an independent commission to investigate alleged mistreatment of terrorism suspects on U.S. soil, at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo military base in Cuba, and at secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries.
Also Wednesday, Amnesty sent Bush a letter imploring him to make clear during his State of the Union speech that ''anyone responsible, even at the highest levels, for policies that have led to torture and ill-treatment will be held accountable and to ensure such abuses do not occur in the future.''
In the letter, William Schulz, Amnesty International USA's executive director, said his group welcomed passage late last year of the Anti-Torture Amendment, a piece of legislation he described as ''reaffirming the U.S. prohibition against cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.''
Bush signed the legislation, Schulz added, but the president also issued a ''signing statement,'' or legal interpretation of the amendment, stating that it would not bind him in all circumstances.
26.1.06
Post-9/11 Dragnet Snares Class Action Lawsuit
Post-9/11 Dragnet Snares Class Action Lawsuit
NEW YORK - Four Muslim men who were detained without charge for months in the aftermath of Sep. 11, 2001, eventually cleared of any connection to terrorism, but then deported to Egypt, have been allowed to return to the U.S. to pursue their class action civil lawsuit against the U.S. government.
Shortly after 9/11, the Department of Justice detained approximately 2,000 Muslim men, primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. Not one of these men was ever found to have been guilty of any form of terrorism, or even linked to terrorism.
Bill Goodman, CCR legal director They are charging unlawful imprisonment and abuse on behalf of 1,200 other Muslim and South Asian men rounded up and jailed following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Yasser Ebrahim, the first of the men allowed to return from Egypt under strict conditions, gave his deposition in New York Monday.
The men, who charge they suffered inhumane and degrading treatment in a Brooklyn detention centre, are being allowed to participate in the case under strict conditions, including confinement to their hotel rooms and a ban on their speaking to anybody outside the case for the duration of their stay. The three other plaintiffs are expected to arrive in the U.S. over the next two weeks.
Four other deportees are parties to the suit but are not expected to return to the U.S. for depositions. The plaintiffs charge that they were placed in solitary confinement, and suffered severe beatings, incessant verbal abuse and a total blackout on communications with their families and attorneys.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a civil rights advocacy group handling the case, said the conditions for their return to the U.S. are highly unusual in a civil case and a sign of what he called government "paranoia over Muslim and Middle Eastern men".
The case names former Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller, immigration officials and prison officers among the defendants. The suit, originally filed in 2002, seeks compensation and punitive damages.
CCR legal director Bill Goodman told IPS, "Shortly after 9/11, the Department of Justice detained approximately 2,000 Muslim men, primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. Not one of these men was ever found to have been guilty of any form of terrorism, or even linked to terrorism."
"These men were held for many months longer than necessary, in solitary confinement, often physically abused and under degrading conditions. The government fought tooth and nail against any judicial oversight of what was going on."
"This was the beginning of what has been shown to be the U.S. policy of indefinite detention without due process, often involving torture," he said.
"This lawsuit seeks to challenge and to rectify the illegal actions of the government." The plaintiffs' claims will be bolstered by a 2003 report by Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (IG), which found that some prison officers slammed detainees against the wall, twisted their arms and hands in painful ways, stepped on their leg restraint chains and punished them by keeping them restrained for long periods of time.
The IG's report also cited videotapes showing that some detention centre staff "misused strip searches and restraints to punish detainees and that officers improperly and illegally recorded detainees' meetings with their attorneys". The Federal Bureau of Prisons said it had fired two people, demoted two more, and six had been suspended for periods from two days to 30 days.
"It means a lot to our clients that finally someone is being held accountable for the brutality they experienced," said CCR attorney Matthew Strugar. "But we believe the responsibility for these abuses goes further up the chain of command at the Bureau of Prisons and we are disappointed more individuals have not yet been held accountable." A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.
Last week, the CCR and the American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits asserting that Pres. Bush's authorisation of the wiretaps of U.S. citizens without court warrants was illegal. They say it violates the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978.
The FISA law established a permanent court that alone has the authority to issue warrants for surveillance of U.S. persons. The law defines U.S. persons as those in the U.S., whether citizens or not.
The Bush administration contends it has "inherent" constitutional authority to protect the people in time of war, as well as implicit authority in the resolution passed by Congress that authorised the president to take military action to win the "Global War on Terror".
BU*SH*IT There is no such thing as this war on terror you fabricated...the countries pissed at the US have a right to be pissed. GMAFB
NEW YORK - Four Muslim men who were detained without charge for months in the aftermath of Sep. 11, 2001, eventually cleared of any connection to terrorism, but then deported to Egypt, have been allowed to return to the U.S. to pursue their class action civil lawsuit against the U.S. government.
Shortly after 9/11, the Department of Justice detained approximately 2,000 Muslim men, primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. Not one of these men was ever found to have been guilty of any form of terrorism, or even linked to terrorism.
Bill Goodman, CCR legal director They are charging unlawful imprisonment and abuse on behalf of 1,200 other Muslim and South Asian men rounded up and jailed following the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Yasser Ebrahim, the first of the men allowed to return from Egypt under strict conditions, gave his deposition in New York Monday.
The men, who charge they suffered inhumane and degrading treatment in a Brooklyn detention centre, are being allowed to participate in the case under strict conditions, including confinement to their hotel rooms and a ban on their speaking to anybody outside the case for the duration of their stay. The three other plaintiffs are expected to arrive in the U.S. over the next two weeks.
Four other deportees are parties to the suit but are not expected to return to the U.S. for depositions. The plaintiffs charge that they were placed in solitary confinement, and suffered severe beatings, incessant verbal abuse and a total blackout on communications with their families and attorneys.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a civil rights advocacy group handling the case, said the conditions for their return to the U.S. are highly unusual in a civil case and a sign of what he called government "paranoia over Muslim and Middle Eastern men".
The case names former Attorney-General John Ashcroft, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller, immigration officials and prison officers among the defendants. The suit, originally filed in 2002, seeks compensation and punitive damages.
CCR legal director Bill Goodman told IPS, "Shortly after 9/11, the Department of Justice detained approximately 2,000 Muslim men, primarily from the Middle East and South Asia. Not one of these men was ever found to have been guilty of any form of terrorism, or even linked to terrorism."
"These men were held for many months longer than necessary, in solitary confinement, often physically abused and under degrading conditions. The government fought tooth and nail against any judicial oversight of what was going on."
"This was the beginning of what has been shown to be the U.S. policy of indefinite detention without due process, often involving torture," he said.
"This lawsuit seeks to challenge and to rectify the illegal actions of the government." The plaintiffs' claims will be bolstered by a 2003 report by Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General (IG), which found that some prison officers slammed detainees against the wall, twisted their arms and hands in painful ways, stepped on their leg restraint chains and punished them by keeping them restrained for long periods of time.
The IG's report also cited videotapes showing that some detention centre staff "misused strip searches and restraints to punish detainees and that officers improperly and illegally recorded detainees' meetings with their attorneys". The Federal Bureau of Prisons said it had fired two people, demoted two more, and six had been suspended for periods from two days to 30 days.
"It means a lot to our clients that finally someone is being held accountable for the brutality they experienced," said CCR attorney Matthew Strugar. "But we believe the responsibility for these abuses goes further up the chain of command at the Bureau of Prisons and we are disappointed more individuals have not yet been held accountable." A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment on the case.
Last week, the CCR and the American Civil Liberties Union filed lawsuits asserting that Pres. Bush's authorisation of the wiretaps of U.S. citizens without court warrants was illegal. They say it violates the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978.
The FISA law established a permanent court that alone has the authority to issue warrants for surveillance of U.S. persons. The law defines U.S. persons as those in the U.S., whether citizens or not.
The Bush administration contends it has "inherent" constitutional authority to protect the people in time of war, as well as implicit authority in the resolution passed by Congress that authorised the president to take military action to win the "Global War on Terror".
BU*SH*IT There is no such thing as this war on terror you fabricated...the countries pissed at the US have a right to be pissed. GMAFB
25.1.06
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
by James Glantz
Don't even act surprised
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.
Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.
"What's sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction," said Wayne White, a former State Department official whose responsibilities included Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research organization.
Instead, Mr. White said, large amounts of that money may have been wasted or stolen, with strong indications that the chaos in Hilla might have been repeated at other provisional authority outposts.
Others had a similar reaction. "It does not surprise me at all," said a Defense Department official who worked in Hilla and other parts of the country, who spoke anonymously because he said he feared retribution from the Bush administration. He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the major southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar province. "It's a disaster," the official said of problems with contracting in Anbar.
No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.
That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official's stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official "had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash," the report says.
Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. "One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office," the report says.
The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein's government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.
In another connection to Iraq's Olympic effort, a $108,140 contract to completely refurbish the Hilla Olympic swimming pool, including the replacement of pumps and pipes, came to nothing when the contractor simply polished some of the hardware to make it appear as if new equipment had been installed. Local officials for the provisional authority signed paperwork stating that all the work had been completed properly and paid the contractor in full, the report says.
The pool never reopened, and when agents from the inspector general's office arrived to try out the equipment, "the water came out a murky brown due to the accumulated dirt and grime in the old pumps," the report says.
Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.
The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general's agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: "The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people."
by James Glantz
Don't even act surprised
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq, and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003 and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the secretary of state.
Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.
One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million, some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations into those cases are continuing.
Some of those cases are expected to intersect with the investigations of four Americans who have been arrested on bribery, theft, weapons and conspiracy charges for what federal prosecutors say was a scheme to steer reconstruction projects to an American contractor working out of the southern city of Hilla, which served as a kind of provincial capital for a vast swath of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority.
But much of the material in the latest audit is new, and the portrait it paints of abandoned rebuilding projects, nonexistent paperwork and cash routinely taken from the main vault in Hilla without even a log to keep track of the transactions is likely to raise major new questions about how the provisional authority did its business and accounted for huge expenditures of Iraqi and American money.
"What's sad about it is that, considering the destruction in the country, with looting and so on, we needed every dollar for reconstruction," said Wayne White, a former State Department official whose responsibilities included Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and who is now at the Middle East Institute, a research organization.
Instead, Mr. White said, large amounts of that money may have been wasted or stolen, with strong indications that the chaos in Hilla might have been repeated at other provisional authority outposts.
Others had a similar reaction. "It does not surprise me at all," said a Defense Department official who worked in Hilla and other parts of the country, who spoke anonymously because he said he feared retribution from the Bush administration. He predicted that similar problems would turn up in the major southern city of Basra and elsewhere in the dangerous desert wasteland of Anbar province. "It's a disaster," the official said of problems with contracting in Anbar.
No records were kept as money came and went from the main vault at the Hilla compound, and inside it was often stashed haphazardly in a filing cabinet.
That casual arrangement led to a dispute when one official for the provisional authority, while clearing his accounts on his way out of Iraq, grabbed $100,000 from another official's stack of cash, according to the report. Whether unintentional or not, the move might never have been discovered except that the second official "had to make a disbursement that day and realized that he was short cash," the report says.
Outside the vault, money seemed to be stuffed into every nook and cranny in the compound. "One contracting officer kept approximately $2 million in cash in a safe in his office bathroom, while a paying agent kept approximately $678,000 in cash in an unlocked footlocker in his office," the report says.
The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from Saddam Hussein's government, also easily found its way out of the compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money. Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.
In another connection to Iraq's Olympic effort, a $108,140 contract to completely refurbish the Hilla Olympic swimming pool, including the replacement of pumps and pipes, came to nothing when the contractor simply polished some of the hardware to make it appear as if new equipment had been installed. Local officials for the provisional authority signed paperwork stating that all the work had been completed properly and paid the contractor in full, the report says.
The pool never reopened, and when agents from the inspector general's office arrived to try out the equipment, "the water came out a murky brown due to the accumulated dirt and grime in the old pumps," the report says.
Sometimes the consequences of such loose controls were deadly. A contract for $662,800 in civil, electrical, and mechanical work to rehabilitate the Hilla General Hospital was paid in full by an American official in June 2004 even though the work was not finished, the report says. But instead of replacing a central elevator bank, as called for in the scope of work, the contractor tinkered with an unsuccessful rehabilitation.
The report continues, narrating the observation of the inspector general's agents who visited the hospital on Sept. 18, 2004: "The hospital administrator immediately escorted us to the site of the elevators. The administrator said that just a couple days prior to our arrival the elevator crashed and killed three people."
CIA Flights Likened to the Work of Gangsters
CIA Flights Likened to the Work of Gangsters
Did you expect something different, because there's not much difference?
The United States was accused of "gangster tactics" yesterday, and European governments were accused of turning a blind eye to the "outsourcing of torture", as a human rights watchdog concluded that the CIA conducted illegal anti-terror activities in Europe.
Dick Marty, a Swiss parliamentarian conducting a formal inquiry, said evidence pointed to a system of "relocation" of torture of terror suspects, and that reliable indications suggested secret interrogation centres may have existed in Europe.
The document highlighted cases under legal investigation in Europe involving an Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who disappeared from Milan in 2003, and a Lebanese-born German, Khaled el-Masri, who was abducted in Macedonia last year and flown to Afghanistan where he was held for four months.
Mr Marty said he was "scandalised that a few kilometres from where I live people can be lifted by foreign governments. When someone goes on holiday in Macedonia they are lifted by foreign agents."
He added: "If a government has to resort to gangster tactics - I say 'no'."
Speaking to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights watchdog, Mr Marty revealed he had received flight logs, archived by the Brussels-based air safety organisation Eurocontrol, that could show the route of CIA-sponsored flights.
However, Mr Marty's interim report yesterday uncovered little unpublished evidence and prompted immediate criticism from British parliamentarians.
The row over CIA activities has raised transatlantic tensions, leaving European governments apparently embarrassed. Mr Marty's interim findings argued there was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture'. It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware," he added.
The report suggested that more than 100 terror suspects may have been transferred to countries where they faced torture or ill-treatment in recent years. "Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," the report said.
With more information coming to light over suspected CIA flights across EU airspace, Mr Marty also accused some European governments of showing more interest in conducting leak inquiries than in pursuing the truth.
The allegations that sparked the investigation surfaced in the US press last November with claims of the existence of secret CIA prisons thought to be in Poland and Romania.
Mr Marty conceded there is "no formal, irrefutable evidence" they were set up. But he said there were "many indications from various sources that must be considered reliable, justifying the continuation of the investigative work".
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who appeared at yesterday's session, said he had "direct experience that the governments of the UK and the US are willing to accept intelligence obtained by foreign intelligence agencies under torture". He said he was satisfied people had been held in "pre-existing American bases as part of rendition".
But he argued: "I have not yet seen anything that convinces me that the there has been a kind of purposefully constructed detention centre in either Poland or Romania." you're not looking...
Though Mr Marty has, so far, failed to uncover any significant new evidence, he has raised the profile of the rendition issue, raising pressure on national government to answer questions.
The secretary general of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, has invoked article 52 of the European Convention to ask all his 46 member nations to reply to a series of questions on the claims by 21 February.
Moreover, the European Parliament has launched its own investigation and Franco Frattini, European commissioner for justice and home affairs, called on EU member states to co-operate with the investigation.
Critics accuse Mr Marty of grandstanding. Denis MacShane, former Europe minister, said: "The report has more holes than a Swiss cheese. I have read it carefully and there is nothing new, no proof, no witness statement, no document that justifies the claims made."
Did you expect something different, because there's not much difference?
The United States was accused of "gangster tactics" yesterday, and European governments were accused of turning a blind eye to the "outsourcing of torture", as a human rights watchdog concluded that the CIA conducted illegal anti-terror activities in Europe.
Dick Marty, a Swiss parliamentarian conducting a formal inquiry, said evidence pointed to a system of "relocation" of torture of terror suspects, and that reliable indications suggested secret interrogation centres may have existed in Europe.
The document highlighted cases under legal investigation in Europe involving an Egyptian cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, who disappeared from Milan in 2003, and a Lebanese-born German, Khaled el-Masri, who was abducted in Macedonia last year and flown to Afghanistan where he was held for four months.
Mr Marty said he was "scandalised that a few kilometres from where I live people can be lifted by foreign governments. When someone goes on holiday in Macedonia they are lifted by foreign agents."
He added: "If a government has to resort to gangster tactics - I say 'no'."
Speaking to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, the continent's main human rights watchdog, Mr Marty revealed he had received flight logs, archived by the Brussels-based air safety organisation Eurocontrol, that could show the route of CIA-sponsored flights.
However, Mr Marty's interim report yesterday uncovered little unpublished evidence and prompted immediate criticism from British parliamentarians.
The row over CIA activities has raised transatlantic tensions, leaving European governments apparently embarrassed. Mr Marty's interim findings argued there was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture'. It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware," he added.
The report suggested that more than 100 terror suspects may have been transferred to countries where they faced torture or ill-treatment in recent years. "Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried outside national territory and beyond the authority of national intelligence services," the report said.
With more information coming to light over suspected CIA flights across EU airspace, Mr Marty also accused some European governments of showing more interest in conducting leak inquiries than in pursuing the truth.
The allegations that sparked the investigation surfaced in the US press last November with claims of the existence of secret CIA prisons thought to be in Poland and Romania.
Mr Marty conceded there is "no formal, irrefutable evidence" they were set up. But he said there were "many indications from various sources that must be considered reliable, justifying the continuation of the investigative work".
Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who appeared at yesterday's session, said he had "direct experience that the governments of the UK and the US are willing to accept intelligence obtained by foreign intelligence agencies under torture". He said he was satisfied people had been held in "pre-existing American bases as part of rendition".
But he argued: "I have not yet seen anything that convinces me that the there has been a kind of purposefully constructed detention centre in either Poland or Romania." you're not looking...
Though Mr Marty has, so far, failed to uncover any significant new evidence, he has raised the profile of the rendition issue, raising pressure on national government to answer questions.
The secretary general of the Council of Europe, Terry Davis, has invoked article 52 of the European Convention to ask all his 46 member nations to reply to a series of questions on the claims by 21 February.
Moreover, the European Parliament has launched its own investigation and Franco Frattini, European commissioner for justice and home affairs, called on EU member states to co-operate with the investigation.
Critics accuse Mr Marty of grandstanding. Denis MacShane, former Europe minister, said: "The report has more holes than a Swiss cheese. I have read it carefully and there is nothing new, no proof, no witness statement, no document that justifies the claims made."
24.1.06
Group Presses US Military on Jailed Journalists
Group Presses US Military on Jailed Journalists
NEW YORK - The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called for the U.S. military to free two journalists, one held without charge in Iraq and the other, the media rights group said, detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The New York-based group also demanded an explanation from the U.S. military for holding a Reuters TV cameraman for eight months without charges until his release on Sunday.
Samir Mohammed Noor, a 30-year-old Iraqi freelancer, was freed from military custody after being held in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and then at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
"Samir Mohammed Noor should not have been jailed for eight months without charge, explanation, or due process," CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said in a statement.
"The military owes an explanation for this open-ended and unsubstantiated detention," she said. "U.S. officials should also credibly explain the basis for the other detentions or release those journalists immediately," Cooper said.
The CPJ said the military continued to hold without charge at least one journalist in Iraq and another at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States keeps foreign detainees captured in its war against terrorism.
The military does not confirm the names of most of those detained at Guantanamo.
Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman working for CBS News, was taken into custody after being wounded by fire from U.S. forces as he filmed clashes in Mosul in northern Iraq on April 5 last year, the CPJ said.
It said Sami Muhyideen al-Haj, a 35-year-old Sudanese national and assistant cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was detained by Pakistani forces after he and an Al-Jazeera reporter tried to re-enter southern Afghanistan at a border crossing in Pakistan in December 2001 and was being held in Guantanamo.
Two Reuters journalists from the Iraqi city of Ramadi, cameraman Ali al-Mashhadani and reporter Majed Hameed, who also works for Al-Arabiya television, were freed on January 15 after five and four months in custody in Iraq respectively.
NEW YORK - The Committee to Protect Journalists on Monday called for the U.S. military to free two journalists, one held without charge in Iraq and the other, the media rights group said, detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The New York-based group also demanded an explanation from the U.S. military for holding a Reuters TV cameraman for eight months without charges until his release on Sunday.
Samir Mohammed Noor, a 30-year-old Iraqi freelancer, was freed from military custody after being held in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison and then at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq.
"Samir Mohammed Noor should not have been jailed for eight months without charge, explanation, or due process," CPJ Executive Director Ann Cooper said in a statement.
"The military owes an explanation for this open-ended and unsubstantiated detention," she said. "U.S. officials should also credibly explain the basis for the other detentions or release those journalists immediately," Cooper said.
The CPJ said the military continued to hold without charge at least one journalist in Iraq and another at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States keeps foreign detainees captured in its war against terrorism.
The military does not confirm the names of most of those detained at Guantanamo.
Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, an Iraqi cameraman working for CBS News, was taken into custody after being wounded by fire from U.S. forces as he filmed clashes in Mosul in northern Iraq on April 5 last year, the CPJ said.
It said Sami Muhyideen al-Haj, a 35-year-old Sudanese national and assistant cameraman for Al-Jazeera, was detained by Pakistani forces after he and an Al-Jazeera reporter tried to re-enter southern Afghanistan at a border crossing in Pakistan in December 2001 and was being held in Guantanamo.
Two Reuters journalists from the Iraqi city of Ramadi, cameraman Ali al-Mashhadani and reporter Majed Hameed, who also works for Al-Arabiya television, were freed on January 15 after five and four months in custody in Iraq respectively.
EU Investigator Says US Exported Torture Via Europe | Europe | Deutsche Welle | 24.01.2006
EU Investigator Says US Exported Torture Via Europe Europe Deutsche Welle 24.01.2006
EU Investigator Says US Exported Torture Via Europe
European airspace was used by the CIA to fly prisoners, the report says
A European investigator has said there's convincing evidence that Washington sent detainees to third countries to be tortured but there was no "irrefutable evidence" of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe.
Dick Marty, a Swiss member of the European Parliament and the chief investigator in the EU probe into alleged US abductions of prisoners and their illegal detention in secret CIA camps in Europe, said Tuesday that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of CIA activities on their soil.
Dick Marty has ruffled feathers in Europe with his findings
There was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of relocation or outsourcing of torture", Dick Marty said in an interim assessment presented to the 46-nation Council of Europe human rights watchdog in Strasbourg.
The report, however, found no direct evidence of CIA-run facilities on European soil.
"At this stage of the investigations, there is no formal, irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret CIA detention centers in Romania, Poland or any other country," he wrote.
Were EU governments in the know?
The EU probe comes in the wake of an explosive report published in US daily The Washington Post last November, alleging the existence of a network of secret jails operated by the CIA in Europe and covertly flying prisoners though airports on the continent in CIA planes.
The US government has neither denied nor confirmed the report.
Swiss military intelligence is said to have intercepted a fax confirming the existence of secret CIA prisons
Marty on Tuesday also alleged that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were almost certainly aware of the rendition "affecting Europe" of more than a hundred persons in recent years.
"Hundreds of CIA-chartered flights have passed through numerous European countries," Marty noted, adding that certain revelations had already been published in the media.
"It has been proved and in fact never denied that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered torture," the Swiss lawmaker said in a press release.
Marty pointed out that the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in a December speech to Europeans, did not at any point deny that the so called "extraordinary rendition" of terrorism suspects to third countries was taking place.
But he stopped just short of accusing the United States of lying outright in noting that "the only thing that Rice categorically denied was torture."
Tuesday's statements in Strasbourg weren't exactly a surprise given that Marty had already indicated earlier where his preliminary investigations were leading.
Earlier this month he accused EU leaders of "shocking" passivity, arguing they were aware of the CIA activities for at least two to three years.
"There are countries that have collaborated actively, and there are others who have tolerated. Others have simply looked the other way," Marty said.
Ramifications unknown
It remains unclear what the fallout of the probe will be. The Council of Europe investigation coincides with a European Parliament temporary committee set up last week to probe CIA activities in European airspace and territory.
The committee has plans to summon high-ranking politicians and intelligence officials in Brussels during spring.
But some have doubts whether that will happen.
"Intelligence will not go to their national parliaments for hearings, so there is little chance that they will come to Brussels," British conservative MEP Charles Tannock, a member of the committee, told EUobserver.
"I doubt it seriously that European defense ministers will willingly come to Brussels to be cross-examined by the European Parliament."
EU Investigator Says US Exported Torture Via Europe
European airspace was used by the CIA to fly prisoners, the report says
A European investigator has said there's convincing evidence that Washington sent detainees to third countries to be tortured but there was no "irrefutable evidence" of the existence of secret CIA prisons in Europe.
Dick Marty, a Swiss member of the European Parliament and the chief investigator in the EU probe into alleged US abductions of prisoners and their illegal detention in secret CIA camps in Europe, said Tuesday that it was "highly unlikely" that European governments were unaware of CIA activities on their soil.
Dick Marty has ruffled feathers in Europe with his findings
There was "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of relocation or outsourcing of torture", Dick Marty said in an interim assessment presented to the 46-nation Council of Europe human rights watchdog in Strasbourg.
The report, however, found no direct evidence of CIA-run facilities on European soil.
"At this stage of the investigations, there is no formal, irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret CIA detention centers in Romania, Poland or any other country," he wrote.
Were EU governments in the know?
The EU probe comes in the wake of an explosive report published in US daily The Washington Post last November, alleging the existence of a network of secret jails operated by the CIA in Europe and covertly flying prisoners though airports on the continent in CIA planes.
The US government has neither denied nor confirmed the report.
Swiss military intelligence is said to have intercepted a fax confirming the existence of secret CIA prisons
Marty on Tuesday also alleged that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were almost certainly aware of the rendition "affecting Europe" of more than a hundred persons in recent years.
"Hundreds of CIA-chartered flights have passed through numerous European countries," Marty noted, adding that certain revelations had already been published in the media.
"It has been proved and in fact never denied that individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered torture," the Swiss lawmaker said in a press release.
Marty pointed out that the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, in a December speech to Europeans, did not at any point deny that the so called "extraordinary rendition" of terrorism suspects to third countries was taking place.
But he stopped just short of accusing the United States of lying outright in noting that "the only thing that Rice categorically denied was torture."
Tuesday's statements in Strasbourg weren't exactly a surprise given that Marty had already indicated earlier where his preliminary investigations were leading.
Earlier this month he accused EU leaders of "shocking" passivity, arguing they were aware of the CIA activities for at least two to three years.
"There are countries that have collaborated actively, and there are others who have tolerated. Others have simply looked the other way," Marty said.
Ramifications unknown
It remains unclear what the fallout of the probe will be. The Council of Europe investigation coincides with a European Parliament temporary committee set up last week to probe CIA activities in European airspace and territory.
The committee has plans to summon high-ranking politicians and intelligence officials in Brussels during spring.
But some have doubts whether that will happen.
"Intelligence will not go to their national parliaments for hearings, so there is little chance that they will come to Brussels," British conservative MEP Charles Tannock, a member of the committee, told EUobserver.
"I doubt it seriously that European defense ministers will willingly come to Brussels to be cross-examined by the European Parliament."
US outsourced torture: probe
Top News Article Reuters.com
STRASBOURG, France (Reuters)
The United States flew detainees to other countries where they would be tortured and European governments probably knew about it, the head of a European investigation into the controversy said on Tuesday.
But Swiss senator Dick Marty said in a preliminary report for the Council of Europe human rights watchdog that he had found no irrefutable evidence to confirm allegations that the CIA operated secret detention centers in Europe.
His report kept pressure on the CIA and European governments over the allegations that the U.S. intelligence agency flew prisoners through European airports to jails in third countries, but critics said it offered no hard new evidence.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks sparked a U.S. global war on terrorism against al Qaeda and led to the invasion of Iraq. Public opinion has hardened in Europe since deadly bomb attacks in London last July and in Madrid in March, 2004.
"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing of torture'," Marty told the 46-nation Council, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
He said it had been proved that "individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture."
He estimated that more than 100 people had been involved in "renditions" -- delivering prisoners to jails in third countries, where they may have been mistreated or tortured.
"It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware," he said.
EVIDENCE LACKING ON DETENTION CENTRES
But Marty said there was no firm evidence of detention centers in Europe similar to the one operated by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Marty, who has said European states turned a blind eye to the "dirty work," said not all countries appeared to want to cooperate with his probe.
The United States did not immediately respond to Marty's interim findings.
The U.S. government has neither denied nor confirmed the reports of secret detention centers, first made in the Washington Post newspaper in November. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said Washington has done nothing illegal.
The allegations followed widespread anger in Europe about the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq and detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of people judged by the U.S. military to be illegal combatants are held without charge.
Denis MacShane, a British member of parliament and former minister for Europe in U.S. ally Britain, told reporters Marty's report "has more holes than a Swiss cheese." A British government spokesman said there seemed to be no new facts.
European Security Commissionner Franco Frattini called on European Union member states to cooperate fully with the investigations but said the European Commission would not draw any conclusions yet because the investigation is still going on.
STRASBOURG, France (Reuters)
The United States flew detainees to other countries where they would be tortured and European governments probably knew about it, the head of a European investigation into the controversy said on Tuesday.
But Swiss senator Dick Marty said in a preliminary report for the Council of Europe human rights watchdog that he had found no irrefutable evidence to confirm allegations that the CIA operated secret detention centers in Europe.
His report kept pressure on the CIA and European governments over the allegations that the U.S. intelligence agency flew prisoners through European airports to jails in third countries, but critics said it offered no hard new evidence.
The September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. landmarks sparked a U.S. global war on terrorism against al Qaeda and led to the invasion of Iraq. Public opinion has hardened in Europe since deadly bomb attacks in London last July and in Madrid in March, 2004.
"There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing of torture'," Marty told the 46-nation Council, based in the eastern French city of Strasbourg.
He said it had been proved that "individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture."
He estimated that more than 100 people had been involved in "renditions" -- delivering prisoners to jails in third countries, where they may have been mistreated or tortured.
"It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware," he said.
EVIDENCE LACKING ON DETENTION CENTRES
But Marty said there was no firm evidence of detention centers in Europe similar to the one operated by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Marty, who has said European states turned a blind eye to the "dirty work," said not all countries appeared to want to cooperate with his probe.
The United States did not immediately respond to Marty's interim findings.
The U.S. government has neither denied nor confirmed the reports of secret detention centers, first made in the Washington Post newspaper in November. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said Washington has done nothing illegal.
The allegations followed widespread anger in Europe about the U.S. treatment of prisoners in Iraq and detainees at Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of people judged by the U.S. military to be illegal combatants are held without charge.
Denis MacShane, a British member of parliament and former minister for Europe in U.S. ally Britain, told reporters Marty's report "has more holes than a Swiss cheese." A British government spokesman said there seemed to be no new facts.
European Security Commissionner Franco Frattini called on European Union member states to cooperate fully with the investigations but said the European Commission would not draw any conclusions yet because the investigation is still going on.
The siege of Fallujah America on a killing spree
The siege of Fallujah America on a killing spree
The televised broadcast of videotape showing a US marine executing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi at point-blank range inside a Fallujah mosque has provoked outrage throughout the Middle East, while creating a fresh crisis for the American military.
The marine has been suspended from his command, as the Pentagon initiates an official investigation into whether the killing constituted a war crime.
“We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability,” said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
Please, general, spare us.
This killing was noteworthy only because it happened to be captured on camera by an “embedded” reporter. Similar actions have taken place throughout the siege of Fallujah, where the rules of engagement essentially amounted to “kill anything that moves.”
Once again—as in the crisis over the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib—the Pentagon will go through the motions of turning a young enlisted man into a scapegoat. The exposure of this one shooting will be used to obscure the reality that the entire operation in Fallujah constitutes a massive war crime carried out on the orders of the White House, with the active or tacit support of every segment of the American ruling establishment.
The razing of Fallujah has exposed the ugly face of US militarism to the world, while posing disturbing questions about the nature of American society itself.
The operation combined the Bush administration’s lust for vengeance over the killing of four US mercenaries in the city last April with a cold-blooded exercise in exemplary punishment aimed at intimidating all those who oppose the continued US occupation of Iraq.
Fallujah now lies in ruins. While the US military claims to have killed up to 2,000 “insurgents,” the number and identity of the dead are not so easily discerned. US forces have responded to small arms fire from houses and other structures by calling in artillery barrages, air strikes with 2,000-pound bombs and air-to-surface missiles together with volleys of tank fire. Homes, apartment buildings and nearly half of the city’s 120 mosques have been destroyed or severely damaged in this fashion.
Eyewitnesses report human corpses littering the city’s streets, gnawed at by starving dogs. Parents have been forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens.
According to one credible account, US troops machine-gunned an entire family of five to death when they tried to escape the fighting by swimming across the Euphrates River.
Civilians remaining in Fallujah were ordered to stay in their homes under a round-the-clock curfew or risk near-certain death at the hands of US troops. What was the fate of those who stayed inside?
With the media reporting at least one out of every ten buildings flattened by the US bombardment, there is no way of knowing how many bodies lie beneath the rubble. It is also reported that US troops were equipped with thermal sights capable of detecting body heat inside houses. Any such detection was assumed to indicate the presence of “insurgents,” prompting a lethal barrage.
Those wounded by US bombs, rockets and shells have been left to die. The first targets of the siege were the city’s medical facilities. The city’s main hospital was seized by Special Forces troops, while a clinic in the city was bombed, killing dozens of medical staff and patients.
A humanitarian catastrophe
The city’s remaining population has gone over a week without electricity or water, and food has run out. In short, Fallujah faces a humanitarian catastrophe.
There has been an effective blackout of any reporting on these conditions in the American mass media. The US military onslaught has turned an estimated 200,000 people into homeless refugees.
The suffering of these people—the supposed beneficiaries of US “liberation”—evokes even less media interest.
What have the people of Fallujah and the rest of Iraq done to deserve such homicidal cruelty? What could conceivably justify the US military killing Iraqis for the “crime” of living in their own country?
The US troops sent into the city are indoctrinated with the lie that the invasion of Iraq is part of a “war on terrorism,” and, on a more visceral level, that the violence inflicted upon the country’s population can somehow be justified as revenge for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington.
The result has been a bloodbath. According to one recent study appearing in the British medical magazine The Lancet, the US invasion has resulted in 100,000 additional violent deaths in the space of barely 20 months. This is the equivalent of a September 11 every week-and-a-half in a country with less than one-tenth the population of the US.
That the Iraqis had nothing whatsoever to do with September 11 has been officially confirmed by multiple US government reports and investigations.
Even putting aside the lies about Iraq, the “war on terrorism” is itself a fraud, invented by Washington as a pretext for carrying out long-planned military actions. The September 11 plot emerged not out of Baghdad, but from within the murky world of American intelligence and its sponsorship of Islamic fundamentalist movements in the war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
While US troops are being told to kill Iraqis to avenge terrorism, state sponsors of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks are well ensconced in the regimes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—Washington’s close allies in the “war on terrorism”—and, in all likelihood, in the Bush administration itself.
The supposedly omnipresent threat of terrorism has been used as a pretext by Washington to justify its use of military power to pursue US geo-strategic interests through the domination of key global oil reserves. This imperialist motivation is clearly recognized the world over.
However, there is a peculiar and malevolent element within the conduct of this US policy. It is the sense, communicated from Washington, that America is motivated by a generalized anger against the rest of the world, and is using its violence in Iraq to teach everyone a lesson.
The US doctrine of preventive war means what it says: we can do the same thing to any of you whenever we please.
US television news reports—once again dominated by retired military commanders and “embedded” reporters who speak as cheerleaders for the combat units they have joined—convey the sense that translating this anger into overwhelming violence is not only justified, but feels good too.
That the massacre of an innocent people more than 5,000 miles away can be promoted as a means of boosting public morale and fostering national unity is an indication of a society suffering from protracted and profound degeneration.
Historians investigating Hitler’s Germany have spent some 60 years trying to fathom what made it possible for such a regime to arise in what was the most technically and culturally advanced country on the European continent.
For all but the most facile “bad Hitler” theorists, the question arose: what were the deep contradictions within German society that gave rise to the murderous fury that Nazism unleashed against Europe?
While the atrocities carried out by Hitler’s regime were on a different scale than those now being committed by the Bush administration, there are undeniable parallels.
For the first time since the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, the world is witness to a major imperialist power launching an unprovoked war of aggression, placing an entire people under military occupation and carrying out acts of collective and exemplary punishment against civilian populations. Such heinous acts must be rooted in America’s own social contradictions.
That this war was foisted upon the American people based on lies is undeniable, as is the media’s abject complicity in this deception.
Given the political environment and the media’s role, the fact should not be lost in analyzing the election returns that some 56 million people—just under half of the voters—turned out on Election Day to vote against Bush—and, in their minds, against the Iraq war.
Kerry’s declarations committing himself to continuing the occupation and “winning” in Iraq notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of those who voted for him did so because they want an end to this war. This popular sentiment is extraordinary, given that it has never been genuinely embraced by a single major leader of the Democratic Party, nor by any major figure in the media.
Among the 59 million who voted for Bush, there remains considerable ambivalence about the war. There is also plenty of confusion. Polls show that a substantial majority of these voters continue to believe the administration’s lies about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9/11.
The social roots of militarism
The relentless efforts—by both Republicans and Democrats—to portray a global “war on terror” as the paramount issue facing the American people have obviously had their effect. But there are also powerful social as well as ideological forces at work in the confused acceptance of American militarism, including among some of the most impoverished layers of the population.
First, there are the interests of the financial oligarchy that dominates US society. The fortunes of America’s multimillionaires and billionaires are inextricably bound up with Washington’s drive for global hegemony and the use of military force to sustain US dominance of the world economy.
The interests of those at the top of the social ladder are the foundation for the predominant political, philosophical and religious views that are communicated to the population by myriad means of mass media and mass culture.
Then there is the objective role played by militarism itself within US society. It was outgoing President—and former top US general—Dwight Eisenhower who warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex.” In the 43 years since, this complex has grown far beyond Eisenhower’s worst fears, with a US military budget approaching half a trillion dollars—higher than those of the next 20 largest military powers combined.
In addition to over 2.5 million active-duty troops and reservists, there are hundreds of thousands more whose jobs are directly dependent upon the arms industry, which not only supplies the seemingly insatiable needs of the Pentagon, but also constitutes one of the most profitable export sectors of the US economy.
Add to that those who are employed in what is now referred to as “homeland security,” a term that broadly encompasses all federal, state and local police as well as the army of prison guards that oversees the million-and-a-half incarcerated Americans, and one has a sizeable constituency whose societal roles predispose them to embracing the “war on terrorism,” lies and all.
But there is another element involved that is less visible and far more contradictory. One of the principal functions of capitalist militarism is to divert social tensions, to direct popular anger over conditions of life outward against real or manufactured foreign enemies.
The explosive, angry character of American militarism’s eruption on the world arena is, to a large degree, a manifestation of the depth of these tensions and the lack of any political means for expressing, much less ameliorating them.
American society is the product of the most unrestrained development of the free market in the world. It is the most developed form of capitalist civilization—or anti-civilization. A Darwinian struggle for survival dominates all aspects of life, while the polarization between a wealthy elite and the masses of working people is greater than in any other advanced capitalist country.
Workers are treated as throwaway commodities, subject to unending rounds of “downsizing” and layoffs, while those at the top of the corporate ladder reap multimillion-dollar compensation packages. Every aspect of society, and everyone in it, is subordinated to the drive for profit.
A political system dominated by two capitalist parties that are fundamentally united in defending the interests of the corporations and the financial elite offers no alternative and no means of expressing social grievances. Institutions that in an earlier period played such a role—the trade unions, civil rights organizations, etc.—have been either reduced to empty shells or directly incorporated into maintaining the existing social order.
The government and the media worked throughout the post-World War II period to make anticommunism the state ideology. They continue to exercise a de facto ban on socialist views, insisting that there is no alternative to a society based upon the accumulation of wealth by a tiny elite at the expense of the broad majority of working people.
Under these conditions, large numbers of distressed and disoriented people are susceptible to the campaign to whip up nationalist hatreds for external enemies that are presented as the source of America’s problems.
This campaign serves to blind people, both to the terrible crimes being carried out in their names abroad, and to the way in which the ruling elite manipulates nationalism to facilitate its own predatory financial interests at home.
Yet the same profound social contradictions that find toxic expression in the popular appeal of militarism can and are giving rise to a wholly opposed political perspective, one of opposition to the existing social order of inequality, exploitation and massive violence.
This opposition finds no outlet in the existing political setup in America. It can advance only by intersecting with a socialist and internationalist program for society’s transformation on a world scale.
The conditions are rapidly maturing for this perspective to find a path to the consciousness of masses of working people, providing them with a genuine means of realizing their own social interests, while putting an end to US militarism once and for all.
See Also:Horrific scenes from the ashes of Fallujah
[18 November 2004]
Fallujah in US hands as uprising sweeps Sunni regions of Iraq[16 November 2004]
Iraq aflame over mass killings in Fallujah
[13 November 2004]
US assault leaves Fallujah in ruins and unknown numbers dead[11 November 2004]
US massacres civilians in Fallujah
[10 November 2004]
US media and liberal establishment: accomplices in the assault on Fallujah
[9 November 2004]
The televised broadcast of videotape showing a US marine executing a wounded, unarmed Iraqi at point-blank range inside a Fallujah mosque has provoked outrage throughout the Middle East, while creating a fresh crisis for the American military.
The marine has been suspended from his command, as the Pentagon initiates an official investigation into whether the killing constituted a war crime.
“We follow the law of armed conflict and hold ourselves to a high standard of accountability,” said Lt. Gen. John Sattler, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
Please, general, spare us.
This killing was noteworthy only because it happened to be captured on camera by an “embedded” reporter. Similar actions have taken place throughout the siege of Fallujah, where the rules of engagement essentially amounted to “kill anything that moves.”
Once again—as in the crisis over the torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib—the Pentagon will go through the motions of turning a young enlisted man into a scapegoat. The exposure of this one shooting will be used to obscure the reality that the entire operation in Fallujah constitutes a massive war crime carried out on the orders of the White House, with the active or tacit support of every segment of the American ruling establishment.
The razing of Fallujah has exposed the ugly face of US militarism to the world, while posing disturbing questions about the nature of American society itself.
The operation combined the Bush administration’s lust for vengeance over the killing of four US mercenaries in the city last April with a cold-blooded exercise in exemplary punishment aimed at intimidating all those who oppose the continued US occupation of Iraq.
Fallujah now lies in ruins. While the US military claims to have killed up to 2,000 “insurgents,” the number and identity of the dead are not so easily discerned. US forces have responded to small arms fire from houses and other structures by calling in artillery barrages, air strikes with 2,000-pound bombs and air-to-surface missiles together with volleys of tank fire. Homes, apartment buildings and nearly half of the city’s 120 mosques have been destroyed or severely damaged in this fashion.
Eyewitnesses report human corpses littering the city’s streets, gnawed at by starving dogs. Parents have been forced to watch their wounded children die and then bury their bodies in their gardens.
According to one credible account, US troops machine-gunned an entire family of five to death when they tried to escape the fighting by swimming across the Euphrates River.
Civilians remaining in Fallujah were ordered to stay in their homes under a round-the-clock curfew or risk near-certain death at the hands of US troops. What was the fate of those who stayed inside?
With the media reporting at least one out of every ten buildings flattened by the US bombardment, there is no way of knowing how many bodies lie beneath the rubble. It is also reported that US troops were equipped with thermal sights capable of detecting body heat inside houses. Any such detection was assumed to indicate the presence of “insurgents,” prompting a lethal barrage.
Those wounded by US bombs, rockets and shells have been left to die. The first targets of the siege were the city’s medical facilities. The city’s main hospital was seized by Special Forces troops, while a clinic in the city was bombed, killing dozens of medical staff and patients.
A humanitarian catastrophe
The city’s remaining population has gone over a week without electricity or water, and food has run out. In short, Fallujah faces a humanitarian catastrophe.
There has been an effective blackout of any reporting on these conditions in the American mass media. The US military onslaught has turned an estimated 200,000 people into homeless refugees.
The suffering of these people—the supposed beneficiaries of US “liberation”—evokes even less media interest.
What have the people of Fallujah and the rest of Iraq done to deserve such homicidal cruelty? What could conceivably justify the US military killing Iraqis for the “crime” of living in their own country?
The US troops sent into the city are indoctrinated with the lie that the invasion of Iraq is part of a “war on terrorism,” and, on a more visceral level, that the violence inflicted upon the country’s population can somehow be justified as revenge for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington.
The result has been a bloodbath. According to one recent study appearing in the British medical magazine The Lancet, the US invasion has resulted in 100,000 additional violent deaths in the space of barely 20 months. This is the equivalent of a September 11 every week-and-a-half in a country with less than one-tenth the population of the US.
That the Iraqis had nothing whatsoever to do with September 11 has been officially confirmed by multiple US government reports and investigations.
Even putting aside the lies about Iraq, the “war on terrorism” is itself a fraud, invented by Washington as a pretext for carrying out long-planned military actions. The September 11 plot emerged not out of Baghdad, but from within the murky world of American intelligence and its sponsorship of Islamic fundamentalist movements in the war against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
While US troops are being told to kill Iraqis to avenge terrorism, state sponsors of those who carried out the 9/11 attacks are well ensconced in the regimes of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—Washington’s close allies in the “war on terrorism”—and, in all likelihood, in the Bush administration itself.
The supposedly omnipresent threat of terrorism has been used as a pretext by Washington to justify its use of military power to pursue US geo-strategic interests through the domination of key global oil reserves. This imperialist motivation is clearly recognized the world over.
However, there is a peculiar and malevolent element within the conduct of this US policy. It is the sense, communicated from Washington, that America is motivated by a generalized anger against the rest of the world, and is using its violence in Iraq to teach everyone a lesson.
The US doctrine of preventive war means what it says: we can do the same thing to any of you whenever we please.
US television news reports—once again dominated by retired military commanders and “embedded” reporters who speak as cheerleaders for the combat units they have joined—convey the sense that translating this anger into overwhelming violence is not only justified, but feels good too.
That the massacre of an innocent people more than 5,000 miles away can be promoted as a means of boosting public morale and fostering national unity is an indication of a society suffering from protracted and profound degeneration.
Historians investigating Hitler’s Germany have spent some 60 years trying to fathom what made it possible for such a regime to arise in what was the most technically and culturally advanced country on the European continent.
For all but the most facile “bad Hitler” theorists, the question arose: what were the deep contradictions within German society that gave rise to the murderous fury that Nazism unleashed against Europe?
While the atrocities carried out by Hitler’s regime were on a different scale than those now being committed by the Bush administration, there are undeniable parallels.
For the first time since the Wehrmacht swept through Europe, the world is witness to a major imperialist power launching an unprovoked war of aggression, placing an entire people under military occupation and carrying out acts of collective and exemplary punishment against civilian populations. Such heinous acts must be rooted in America’s own social contradictions.
That this war was foisted upon the American people based on lies is undeniable, as is the media’s abject complicity in this deception.
Given the political environment and the media’s role, the fact should not be lost in analyzing the election returns that some 56 million people—just under half of the voters—turned out on Election Day to vote against Bush—and, in their minds, against the Iraq war.
Kerry’s declarations committing himself to continuing the occupation and “winning” in Iraq notwithstanding, the overwhelming majority of those who voted for him did so because they want an end to this war. This popular sentiment is extraordinary, given that it has never been genuinely embraced by a single major leader of the Democratic Party, nor by any major figure in the media.
Among the 59 million who voted for Bush, there remains considerable ambivalence about the war. There is also plenty of confusion. Polls show that a substantial majority of these voters continue to believe the administration’s lies about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to 9/11.
The social roots of militarism
The relentless efforts—by both Republicans and Democrats—to portray a global “war on terror” as the paramount issue facing the American people have obviously had their effect. But there are also powerful social as well as ideological forces at work in the confused acceptance of American militarism, including among some of the most impoverished layers of the population.
First, there are the interests of the financial oligarchy that dominates US society. The fortunes of America’s multimillionaires and billionaires are inextricably bound up with Washington’s drive for global hegemony and the use of military force to sustain US dominance of the world economy.
The interests of those at the top of the social ladder are the foundation for the predominant political, philosophical and religious views that are communicated to the population by myriad means of mass media and mass culture.
Then there is the objective role played by militarism itself within US society. It was outgoing President—and former top US general—Dwight Eisenhower who warned against “the acquisition of unwarranted influence ... by the military-industrial complex.” In the 43 years since, this complex has grown far beyond Eisenhower’s worst fears, with a US military budget approaching half a trillion dollars—higher than those of the next 20 largest military powers combined.
In addition to over 2.5 million active-duty troops and reservists, there are hundreds of thousands more whose jobs are directly dependent upon the arms industry, which not only supplies the seemingly insatiable needs of the Pentagon, but also constitutes one of the most profitable export sectors of the US economy.
Add to that those who are employed in what is now referred to as “homeland security,” a term that broadly encompasses all federal, state and local police as well as the army of prison guards that oversees the million-and-a-half incarcerated Americans, and one has a sizeable constituency whose societal roles predispose them to embracing the “war on terrorism,” lies and all.
But there is another element involved that is less visible and far more contradictory. One of the principal functions of capitalist militarism is to divert social tensions, to direct popular anger over conditions of life outward against real or manufactured foreign enemies.
The explosive, angry character of American militarism’s eruption on the world arena is, to a large degree, a manifestation of the depth of these tensions and the lack of any political means for expressing, much less ameliorating them.
American society is the product of the most unrestrained development of the free market in the world. It is the most developed form of capitalist civilization—or anti-civilization. A Darwinian struggle for survival dominates all aspects of life, while the polarization between a wealthy elite and the masses of working people is greater than in any other advanced capitalist country.
Workers are treated as throwaway commodities, subject to unending rounds of “downsizing” and layoffs, while those at the top of the corporate ladder reap multimillion-dollar compensation packages. Every aspect of society, and everyone in it, is subordinated to the drive for profit.
A political system dominated by two capitalist parties that are fundamentally united in defending the interests of the corporations and the financial elite offers no alternative and no means of expressing social grievances. Institutions that in an earlier period played such a role—the trade unions, civil rights organizations, etc.—have been either reduced to empty shells or directly incorporated into maintaining the existing social order.
The government and the media worked throughout the post-World War II period to make anticommunism the state ideology. They continue to exercise a de facto ban on socialist views, insisting that there is no alternative to a society based upon the accumulation of wealth by a tiny elite at the expense of the broad majority of working people.
Under these conditions, large numbers of distressed and disoriented people are susceptible to the campaign to whip up nationalist hatreds for external enemies that are presented as the source of America’s problems.
This campaign serves to blind people, both to the terrible crimes being carried out in their names abroad, and to the way in which the ruling elite manipulates nationalism to facilitate its own predatory financial interests at home.
Yet the same profound social contradictions that find toxic expression in the popular appeal of militarism can and are giving rise to a wholly opposed political perspective, one of opposition to the existing social order of inequality, exploitation and massive violence.
This opposition finds no outlet in the existing political setup in America. It can advance only by intersecting with a socialist and internationalist program for society’s transformation on a world scale.
The conditions are rapidly maturing for this perspective to find a path to the consciousness of masses of working people, providing them with a genuine means of realizing their own social interests, while putting an end to US militarism once and for all.
See Also:Horrific scenes from the ashes of Fallujah
[18 November 2004]
Fallujah in US hands as uprising sweeps Sunni regions of Iraq[16 November 2004]
Iraq aflame over mass killings in Fallujah
[13 November 2004]
US assault leaves Fallujah in ruins and unknown numbers dead[11 November 2004]
US massacres civilians in Fallujah
[10 November 2004]
US media and liberal establishment: accomplices in the assault on Fallujah
[9 November 2004]
The Devastation We Inflict: Two Letters from Vietnam Vets on "Collateral Damage" in Iraq
The Devastation We Inflict: Two Letters from Vietnam Vets on "Collateral Damage" in Iraq
Almost two weeks ago, I published a piece by Michael Schwartz, "A Formula for Slaughter," on the brutal nature of American "rules of engagement" from the air in Iraq and the consequent proliferation of Iraqi civilian casualties. As it happened, this piece spurred powerful memories in a number of Vietnam veterans who wrote vivid e-responses in to Tomdispatch -- striking enough that I chose the two most eloquent to send out (with permission, of course) in my latest dispatch (along with a discussion of my own on the way the Vietnam experience has dogged the Bush administration in its Iraqi adventure). The first letter comes from Wade Kane, once a helicopter door gunner and crew chief in Vietnam, who wrote in from Crescent City, Florida; the second is from George Hoffman, a former Vietnam medic, from Lorain, Ohio, which he describes as being "thirty miles west of Cleveland, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, and my apartment has a scenic view of the smokestacks and the steel mill." Both in their accounts give the Vietnam analogy in Iraq painful new meaning. These are the sorts of voices we should hear far more from in this country and, unfortunately, almost never do. -- Tom Engelhardt
Wade Kane writes:
Dear Tom,
Although I'm sure we occasionally execute some innocent person after years on Death Row, we as a nation go to great lengths not to execute any innocents. Only the worst of murderers seem to reach death row. So it seems quite ironic that we accept seeing some men apparently planting a bomb on the side of a road in Iraq via a video from a Predator drone and, using that information, decide to drop a 500-pound bomb on a house where they might be hiding, a house where we don't have a clue if there are other people.
Killing innocent women and children is okay, "just" collateral damage… If this is "okay," then why wasn't what Lt. Calley did in Vietnam okay? Similarly, why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki okay, but My Lai wasn't? Somehow, when our soldiers shoot innocents at close range we are appalled, but when it is done via bombs or artillery it's "okay."
At about the same time My Lai occurred, I was flying as a crew chief/gunner on a Chinook [helicopter]. Passing a small village I thought I heard a single shot directed at my helicopter. Or maybe it was just "blade pop." Looking into the village, I could see women and children in the streets in what I'd call a "pastoral scene." I elected not to "return fire," though by my unit's rules of engagement I could have done so. About an hour later we happened to fly past that village again. There was no one in sight, but there were numerous bomb craters in the rice paddies and where homes had been. My guess is that someone else received fire, or thought they received fire, returned fire, and the pilots called for an air strike. I doubt any of the people in the village had time to flee from the attack. Never ever have I heard anything about that event, just My Lai...
I'm not guiltless. At about the same time, flying low level -- like 20 feet AGL [Above Ground Level] at 140 mph -- we passed a family tending a tapioca field. As we came by, a young boy of 12 or so picked up his hoe and pointed it at us like a weapon. I tried to swing my M-60 around and shoot him, but we were going too fast. At the time, I would have felt it was a good shoot as he was "practicing" shooting us down. Now, with young sons of my own, I'm appalled I could have been so callous.
People here got really worried about a flashlight at a Starbucks (which might have been a bomb). Had it been a bomb, which it wasn't, it would have weighed about 1/500th of what we routinely drop in residential neighborhoods in Iraq. It's like most people don't seem to realize what devastation we inflict there on a frequent basis. Today, for example, someone I know sent me some "feel good pictures" about our troops in Iraq. You know: old ladies holding up "Thanks, Mr. Bush" signs, smiling kids. Pictures she said that "just don't make the news." For "don't make the news," how about some pictures of kids that our bombs have eviscerated? Pictures of the sort that are found in Where War Lives, a Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance (intro by Ron Kovic).
We should be the bright light to the world, spending our tax monies on cures for malaria, not on killing innocents.
Have we no shame?
From the bottom of my heart I wish to thank those who, like yourself, are trying to bring an end to this war madness.
Wade Kane
War time:SP/5 Wade O. Kane RA 14952996Co. A, 228th AVN BN (ASH)1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)June ‘67 to June ‘68Door Gunner on Chinook 64-13137, Aug '65 to Nov '67Crew chief/door gunner on Chinook 64-13140, Nov '67 to June '68Occasional ramp gunner various Co. A Chinooks, Feb '68 to June '68
Campaigns/Battles:
The Que Son Valley & LZ Leslie
Battle for the Citadel at Hue during Tet '68
The relief of the Marines at Khe Sanh
The April ‘68 A Shau Valley campaign
George Hoffman writes:
Dear Tom,
I want you to know that many Vietnam vets really have had a hard time dealing with this unnecessary war in Iraq that has taken the lives of so many innocent Iraqis as well as American men and women serving there. I am sure that the reason I have such deep feelings about this war is that, as a medical corpsman in Vietnam, every day for a year I had to go into a hospital, face such casualties, and deal with them on such a visceral level.
I served in Vietnam as a medical corpsman from May 31, 1967 to May 31, 1968 at the 12th USAF Hospital in Cam Ranh Bay. Besides treating wounded soldiers, the facility also had a special ward for Vietnamese nationals. Usually they were the officials and relatives of the Thieu administration, highly educated and employed in government positions. But occasionally the patients were peasants, average people whom the Americans were supposedly trying to win over to our side (the hearts-and-minds issue). And they were usually patients wounded by shrapnel -- "collateral damage." And, of course, having been wounded by the Americans, they were angry at them and their hearts and minds were lost to the other side, the supposedly evil VC guerillas.
With that bit of unfortunately necessary personal information, let me move on to your latest dispatch. I understand the rationale of the Bush administration's policy of air supremacy which seems logical in military terms, but it is a complete failure in diplomatic terms. I am sure that many thousands of innocent Iraqis, whose only sin is that they lived next to some house with insurgents, or in that house, have been murdered in these so-called surgical air strikes with precision bombs; and, as in Vietnam, these operations are becoming a major reason that Americans are losing Iraqi hearts and minds as well turning Iraqi civilians into insurgents.
In addition to the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, most of whom remain ignorant of the horrible reality for Iraqi civilians in these operations, the average American citizen seems to have taken the bait of the Bush administration's propaganda about how the war is being prosecuted, hook, line, and sinker. Civilians really have no concept of how horrible "collateral damage" can be and it will be a hard lesson to learn, since major media outlets basically refuse to report on this issue.
Of course, the insurgents love the American policy of air supremacy, because each new wound and/or death is a great tool for recruitment to their side. I think it is more than a coincidence that the married couple, who traveled from Iraq to Jordan and were found to have lived in Fallujah, were among the suicide bombers that participated in the attacks in the hotels in Amman. In one article that I read, a reporter stated that residents in Fallujah were quietly celebrating the attacks. Remember, the siege of Fallujah in November 2004 leveled close to two-thirds of all the buildings in that city. As the grunts used to say in Vietnam, payback is a real motherf----r.
Related to the siege of Fallujah is another issue that hasn't been well reported by the mainstream media. During the siege, the American forces used white phosphorus artillery rounds. I treated soldiers in Vietnam, who had been wounded by shrapnel coated in white phosphorus or, as the grunts nicknamed it, Willy Peter. Unlike napalm, Willy Peter shrapnel burns until it completely oxidizes with the air. So it burns through the skin and down to the bone. Again, the American military commanders in Iraq have used a weapon which turned Iraqi civilians against their so-called liberators and put them into the camp of the insurgents. As more American troops are redeployed out of Iraq, due to the political pressure applied to the Bush administration since Rep. Murtha came out so strongly against the war, I am sure that the field military commanders have been told to keep American casualties to a minimum, so they are likely to rely even more upon a policy of using air supremacy to take out insurgents.
One last personal observation: I suspect that, in the coming decades, historians will look back on the war in Iraq in the same way they now do on the war in Vietnam. Both wars were predicated on a false premise (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution versus Iraq's nonexistent WMD and Saddam's nonexistent links to Al Qaeda's jihadists) and blindly accepted by congressional representatives who had the moral fortitude of jellyfish. LBJ's [President Lyndon Baines Johnson's] propaganda about nations in Southeast Asia falling like dominoes to the communists fits all too well with Bush's assertion that making Iraq a democratic model in the Middle East will mean the surrounding kingdoms and dictatorships then fall like so many dominoes to democratic reforms. Widespread illegal domestic spying on American civilians during Vietnam matches the current warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency and the American military's TALON program. Finally, as with key officials in LBJ's administration, the very officials who influenced President Bush to prosecute this unnecessary war are the first to leave the administration when domestic criticism is directed at them. Of course, here I am referring to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was the architect of the Vietnam War, and Paul Wolfowitz, who served a similar role in the war in Iraq. They both fled to the World Bank, where each later admitted that he had discounted the resolve and determination of the enemy; and, in Wolfowitz's case, that he was surprised when the war became a guerilla-style one.
If I had one word to describe the most essential quality of both the New Frontiersmen in LBJ's administration and the neocons in the Bush administration, that word would be hubris.
Sincerely,
George Hoffman
Almost two weeks ago, I published a piece by Michael Schwartz, "A Formula for Slaughter," on the brutal nature of American "rules of engagement" from the air in Iraq and the consequent proliferation of Iraqi civilian casualties. As it happened, this piece spurred powerful memories in a number of Vietnam veterans who wrote vivid e-responses in to Tomdispatch -- striking enough that I chose the two most eloquent to send out (with permission, of course) in my latest dispatch (along with a discussion of my own on the way the Vietnam experience has dogged the Bush administration in its Iraqi adventure). The first letter comes from Wade Kane, once a helicopter door gunner and crew chief in Vietnam, who wrote in from Crescent City, Florida; the second is from George Hoffman, a former Vietnam medic, from Lorain, Ohio, which he describes as being "thirty miles west of Cleveland, in the heart of the industrial rust belt, and my apartment has a scenic view of the smokestacks and the steel mill." Both in their accounts give the Vietnam analogy in Iraq painful new meaning. These are the sorts of voices we should hear far more from in this country and, unfortunately, almost never do. -- Tom Engelhardt
Wade Kane writes:
Dear Tom,
Although I'm sure we occasionally execute some innocent person after years on Death Row, we as a nation go to great lengths not to execute any innocents. Only the worst of murderers seem to reach death row. So it seems quite ironic that we accept seeing some men apparently planting a bomb on the side of a road in Iraq via a video from a Predator drone and, using that information, decide to drop a 500-pound bomb on a house where they might be hiding, a house where we don't have a clue if there are other people.
Killing innocent women and children is okay, "just" collateral damage… If this is "okay," then why wasn't what Lt. Calley did in Vietnam okay? Similarly, why were Hiroshima and Nagasaki okay, but My Lai wasn't? Somehow, when our soldiers shoot innocents at close range we are appalled, but when it is done via bombs or artillery it's "okay."
At about the same time My Lai occurred, I was flying as a crew chief/gunner on a Chinook [helicopter]. Passing a small village I thought I heard a single shot directed at my helicopter. Or maybe it was just "blade pop." Looking into the village, I could see women and children in the streets in what I'd call a "pastoral scene." I elected not to "return fire," though by my unit's rules of engagement I could have done so. About an hour later we happened to fly past that village again. There was no one in sight, but there were numerous bomb craters in the rice paddies and where homes had been. My guess is that someone else received fire, or thought they received fire, returned fire, and the pilots called for an air strike. I doubt any of the people in the village had time to flee from the attack. Never ever have I heard anything about that event, just My Lai...
I'm not guiltless. At about the same time, flying low level -- like 20 feet AGL [Above Ground Level] at 140 mph -- we passed a family tending a tapioca field. As we came by, a young boy of 12 or so picked up his hoe and pointed it at us like a weapon. I tried to swing my M-60 around and shoot him, but we were going too fast. At the time, I would have felt it was a good shoot as he was "practicing" shooting us down. Now, with young sons of my own, I'm appalled I could have been so callous.
People here got really worried about a flashlight at a Starbucks (which might have been a bomb). Had it been a bomb, which it wasn't, it would have weighed about 1/500th of what we routinely drop in residential neighborhoods in Iraq. It's like most people don't seem to realize what devastation we inflict there on a frequent basis. Today, for example, someone I know sent me some "feel good pictures" about our troops in Iraq. You know: old ladies holding up "Thanks, Mr. Bush" signs, smiling kids. Pictures she said that "just don't make the news." For "don't make the news," how about some pictures of kids that our bombs have eviscerated? Pictures of the sort that are found in Where War Lives, a Photographic Journal of Vietnam by Dick Durrance (intro by Ron Kovic).
We should be the bright light to the world, spending our tax monies on cures for malaria, not on killing innocents.
Have we no shame?
From the bottom of my heart I wish to thank those who, like yourself, are trying to bring an end to this war madness.
Wade Kane
War time:SP/5 Wade O. Kane RA 14952996Co. A, 228th AVN BN (ASH)1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile)June ‘67 to June ‘68Door Gunner on Chinook 64-13137, Aug '65 to Nov '67Crew chief/door gunner on Chinook 64-13140, Nov '67 to June '68Occasional ramp gunner various Co. A Chinooks, Feb '68 to June '68
Campaigns/Battles:
The Que Son Valley & LZ Leslie
Battle for the Citadel at Hue during Tet '68
The relief of the Marines at Khe Sanh
The April ‘68 A Shau Valley campaign
George Hoffman writes:
Dear Tom,
I want you to know that many Vietnam vets really have had a hard time dealing with this unnecessary war in Iraq that has taken the lives of so many innocent Iraqis as well as American men and women serving there. I am sure that the reason I have such deep feelings about this war is that, as a medical corpsman in Vietnam, every day for a year I had to go into a hospital, face such casualties, and deal with them on such a visceral level.
I served in Vietnam as a medical corpsman from May 31, 1967 to May 31, 1968 at the 12th USAF Hospital in Cam Ranh Bay. Besides treating wounded soldiers, the facility also had a special ward for Vietnamese nationals. Usually they were the officials and relatives of the Thieu administration, highly educated and employed in government positions. But occasionally the patients were peasants, average people whom the Americans were supposedly trying to win over to our side (the hearts-and-minds issue). And they were usually patients wounded by shrapnel -- "collateral damage." And, of course, having been wounded by the Americans, they were angry at them and their hearts and minds were lost to the other side, the supposedly evil VC guerillas.
With that bit of unfortunately necessary personal information, let me move on to your latest dispatch. I understand the rationale of the Bush administration's policy of air supremacy which seems logical in military terms, but it is a complete failure in diplomatic terms. I am sure that many thousands of innocent Iraqis, whose only sin is that they lived next to some house with insurgents, or in that house, have been murdered in these so-called surgical air strikes with precision bombs; and, as in Vietnam, these operations are becoming a major reason that Americans are losing Iraqi hearts and minds as well turning Iraqi civilians into insurgents.
In addition to the reporters and editors in the mainstream media, most of whom remain ignorant of the horrible reality for Iraqi civilians in these operations, the average American citizen seems to have taken the bait of the Bush administration's propaganda about how the war is being prosecuted, hook, line, and sinker. Civilians really have no concept of how horrible "collateral damage" can be and it will be a hard lesson to learn, since major media outlets basically refuse to report on this issue.
Of course, the insurgents love the American policy of air supremacy, because each new wound and/or death is a great tool for recruitment to their side. I think it is more than a coincidence that the married couple, who traveled from Iraq to Jordan and were found to have lived in Fallujah, were among the suicide bombers that participated in the attacks in the hotels in Amman. In one article that I read, a reporter stated that residents in Fallujah were quietly celebrating the attacks. Remember, the siege of Fallujah in November 2004 leveled close to two-thirds of all the buildings in that city. As the grunts used to say in Vietnam, payback is a real motherf----r.
Related to the siege of Fallujah is another issue that hasn't been well reported by the mainstream media. During the siege, the American forces used white phosphorus artillery rounds. I treated soldiers in Vietnam, who had been wounded by shrapnel coated in white phosphorus or, as the grunts nicknamed it, Willy Peter. Unlike napalm, Willy Peter shrapnel burns until it completely oxidizes with the air. So it burns through the skin and down to the bone. Again, the American military commanders in Iraq have used a weapon which turned Iraqi civilians against their so-called liberators and put them into the camp of the insurgents. As more American troops are redeployed out of Iraq, due to the political pressure applied to the Bush administration since Rep. Murtha came out so strongly against the war, I am sure that the field military commanders have been told to keep American casualties to a minimum, so they are likely to rely even more upon a policy of using air supremacy to take out insurgents.
One last personal observation: I suspect that, in the coming decades, historians will look back on the war in Iraq in the same way they now do on the war in Vietnam. Both wars were predicated on a false premise (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution versus Iraq's nonexistent WMD and Saddam's nonexistent links to Al Qaeda's jihadists) and blindly accepted by congressional representatives who had the moral fortitude of jellyfish. LBJ's [President Lyndon Baines Johnson's] propaganda about nations in Southeast Asia falling like dominoes to the communists fits all too well with Bush's assertion that making Iraq a democratic model in the Middle East will mean the surrounding kingdoms and dictatorships then fall like so many dominoes to democratic reforms. Widespread illegal domestic spying on American civilians during Vietnam matches the current warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency and the American military's TALON program. Finally, as with key officials in LBJ's administration, the very officials who influenced President Bush to prosecute this unnecessary war are the first to leave the administration when domestic criticism is directed at them. Of course, here I am referring to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who was the architect of the Vietnam War, and Paul Wolfowitz, who served a similar role in the war in Iraq. They both fled to the World Bank, where each later admitted that he had discounted the resolve and determination of the enemy; and, in Wolfowitz's case, that he was surprised when the war became a guerilla-style one.
If I had one word to describe the most essential quality of both the New Frontiersmen in LBJ's administration and the neocons in the Bush administration, that word would be hubris.
Sincerely,
George Hoffman
The American Rules of Engagement From the Air
The American Rules of Engagement From the Air
A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies.
The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000.
Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.
This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.
One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war.
This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.
Mayhem in Baiji
But the Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and wound many more) during a routine day's work, made up of small skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American foot patrols.
In early January 2006, the New York Times and the Washington Post both reported a relatively small incident (not even worthy of front page coverage) that illustrated perfectly the capacity of the American military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.
Here is the Times account of what happened in the small town of Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on January 3, based on interviews with various unidentified "American officials":
"A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men planting a roadside bomb about 9 p.m. The men ‘dug a hole following the common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement,' the military said in a statement.
‘The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots.'
"The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which was then bombed with ‘precision guided munitions,' the military said. The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at the site.
An additional military statement said Navy F-14's had ‘strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds' and dropped one bomb."
Crucial to this report is the phrase "precision guided munitions," an affirmation that U.S. forces used technology less likely than older munitions to accidentally hit the wrong target. It is this precision that allows us to glimpse the callous brutality of American military strategy in Iraq.
The target was a "building nearby," identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy hiding place. According to eyewitness reports given to the Washington Post, the attack effectively demolished the building, and damaged six surrounding buildings.
While in a perfect world, the surrounding buildings would have been unharmed, the reported amount of human damage in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.
The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that fourteen members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed.
The Washington Post, which reported twelve killed, offered a chilling description of the scene:
"The dead included women and children whose bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping. A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday from the house."
Because in this case -- unlike in so many others in which American air power utilizes "precisely guided munitions" -- there was on-the-spot reporting for an American newspaper, the U.S. military command was required to explain these casualties.
Without conceding that the deaths actually occurred, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, commented: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."
Notice that Lt. Col. Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had actually died) did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield themselves."
These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures. Put another way, it is more important to stop the insurgents than protect the innocent.
And notice that the military, single-mindedly determined to kill or capture the insurgents, cannot stop to allow for the evacuation of civilians either. Any delay might let the insurgents escape, either disguised as civilians or through windows, backdoors, cellars, or any of the other obvious escape routes urban guerrillas might take. Any attack must be quickly organized and -- if possible -- unexpected.
The Real Rules of Engagement in Iraq
We can gain some perspective on this military strategy by imagining similar rules of engagement for an American police force in some large city. Imagine, for example, a team of criminals in that city fleeing into a nearby apartment building after gunning down a policeman.
It would be unthinkable for the police to simply call in airships to demolish the structure, killing any people -- helpless hostages, neighbors, or even friends of the perpetrators -- who were with or near them.
In fact, the rules of engagement for the police, even in such a situation of extreme provocation, call for them to "hold their fire" -- if necessary allowing the perpetrators to escape -- if there is a risk of injuring civilians.
And this is a reasonable rule... because we value the lives of innocent American citizens over our determination to capture a criminal, even a cop killer.
But in Iraqi cities, our values and priorities are quite differently arranged. The contrast derives from three important principles under which the Iraq war is being fought: that the war should be conducted to absolutely minimize the risk to American troops; that guerrilla fighters should not be allowed to escape if there is any way to capture or kill them; and that Iraqi civilians should not be allowed to harbor or encourage the resistance fighters.
We are familiar with the first principle, the determination to safeguard American soldiers. It is expressed in the elaborate training and equipment they are given, as well as the ongoing effort to make the equipment even more effective in protecting them from attack.
(This was most recently expressed in the release of a Pentagon study showing that improved body armor could have saved as many as 300 American lives since the start of the war.)
It is also expressed in rules of engagement that call for air strikes like the one in Baiji. The alternative to such an air attack (aside from allowing the guerrillas to escape) would, of course, be to use a unit of troops to root out the guerrillas.
Needless to say, without an effective Iraqi military in place, such an operation would be likely to expose American soldiers to considerable risk. The Bush Administration has long shied away from the high casualty counts that would be an almost guaranteed result of such concentrated, close-quarters urban warfare, casualty counts that would surely have a strong negative effect on support in the United States for its war.
(The irony, of course, is that, with air attacks, the U.S. is trading lower American casualties and stronger support domestically for ever lessening Iraqi support and the ever greater hostility such attacks bring in their wake.)
The second principle also was applied in Baiji. Rather than allow the perpetrators to take refuge in a nearby home and then quietly slip away, the U.S. command decided to take out the house, even though they had no guarantee that it was uninhabited (and every reason to believe the opposite).
The paramount goal was to kill or capture the suspected guerrilla fighters, and if this involved the death or injury of multiple Iraqi civilians, the trade-off was clearly considered worth it. That is, annihilating a family of 12 or 14 Iraqis could be justified, if there was a reasonable probability of killing or capturing three individuals who might have been setting a roadside bomb. This is the subtext of Lt. Colonel Johnson's comment.
The third principle behind these attacks is only occasionally expressed by U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, but is nevertheless a foundation of American strategy as applied in Baiji and elsewhere.
Though Bush administration officials and top U.S. military officers often, for propaganda purposes, refer to local residents as innocent victims of insurgent intimidation and terrorism, their disregard for the lives of civilians trapped inside such buildings is symptomatic of a very different belief: that most Sunni Iraqis willingly harbor the guerrillas and support their attacks -- that they are not unwilling shields for the guerrillas, but are actively shielding them.
Moreover, this protection of the guerrillas is seen as a critical obstacle to our military success, requiring drastic punitive action.
As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating."
A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."
This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism -- attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.
Escalating the War Against Iraqi Civilians
Baiji, a loosely settled village, is not typical of the locations where American air power is regularly loosed. In Iraq's densely packed cities, where much fighting takes place, buildings usually house several families with other multiple-occupancy dwellings adjacent.
Moreover, city battles often involve larger units of guerrillas, who ambush U.S. patrols and then disperse into several nearby dwellings, or snipers shooting from several locations. As a consequence, when U.S. F-14s, helicopter gunships, or other types of aircraft arrive, their targets are larger and more dispersed.
Liquidating guerrillas can then require the "precise" leveling of several buildings (with "collateral damage"), or even a whole city block. Instead of 100 cannon rounds and one five hundred pound bomb, such an attack can (and often does) involve several thousand cannon rounds and a combination of 500 and 2000 pound bombs.
Needless to say, the casualties in such attacks are likely to be magnitudes greater, though we hardly read about them in the American press, since reporters working for American newspapers are rarely present before, during, or after the attack.
This has started to change since "Up in the Air," a New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh garnered much attention for outlining a Bush administration draw-down strategy in which air attacks are to be increasingly relied upon.
One particularly vivid recent account by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer discussed the impact of air power during the American offensive in Western Anbar province last November. Using testimony from medical personnel and local civilians, Knickmeyer reported that 97 civilians were killed in one attack in Husaybah, 40 in another in Qaimone, 18 children (and an unknown number of adults) in Ramadi, and uncounted others in numerous other cities and towns. (The U.S. military typically denied knowledge of these casualties.)
All of these resulted from the same logic and the same rules of engagement as the Baiji attack and in most cases the attacks seem to have been chosen in place of mounting ground assaults. In each case, "precision guided munitions" were used, and -- for the most part, as far as we can tell --
American forces destroyed mainly the targets they intended to hit. In other words, this mayhem was not a matter of dumb munitions, human error, carelessness, or gratuitous brutality. It was policy.
These same principles apply to all engagements undertaken by the U.S. military. There are about 100 violent encounters with guerrillas each day, or about 3,000 engagements each month, most of them triggered by IEDs, sniper fire, or low-level hit-and-run attacks. (Only a relative handful of these -- never more than 100 in a month and recently far fewer -- involve suicide bombers).
The rules of engagement call for the application of overwhelming force in all these situations. The hiding places of the attackers -- houses, commercial shops, even mosques and schools -- essentially become automatic targets for attack.
For the most part, rifles, tanks, and artillery are sufficient to eradicate the enemy, and air power is only called in as a last resort (though with a recent surge in air missions reported, that "last resort" is evidently becoming an ever more ordinary option).
Instead of body counts ranging as high as 100 per incident, only a small minority of these daily engagements produce double-digit mortality rates. Nevertheless, the 3,000 small monthly engagements often involve attacking structures with civilians in them, and the lethality of these battles, combined with the havoc and destruction wrought by the air attacks, does add up to possibly thousands and thousands of civilian deaths each year.
Seymour Hersh's article made the new Bush administration policy of relying on air power public. It involves, in the near future, substituting Iraqi for U.S. foot patrols as often as possible (which means an instant drop in the quality of the soldiering involved); and, since the Iraqi military do not have tanks, artillery, or other heavy weaponry, the U.S. plans to compensate both for weaker fighting outfits and lack of on-the-ground firepower by increasing its use of air strikes.
In other words, in the coming months those 3,000 encounters a month are likely to produce even more victims than the already staggering civilian casualty rates in Iraq. Each incident that previously might have killed a few civilians will now be likely to kill many more.
The Washington Post, along with other major American media outlets, has confirmed that a new military strategy is being put in place and implemented. Quoting military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of 2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November.
The Sunday Times of London reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past that threshold.
Consider then this gruesome arithmetic:
If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.
The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.
A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies.
The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000.
Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.
This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.
One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war.
This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.
Mayhem in Baiji
But the Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and wound many more) during a routine day's work, made up of small skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American foot patrols.
In early January 2006, the New York Times and the Washington Post both reported a relatively small incident (not even worthy of front page coverage) that illustrated perfectly the capacity of the American military to kill uncounted thousands of Iraqi civilians each year.
Here is the Times account of what happened in the small town of Baiji, 150 miles north of Baghdad, on January 3, based on interviews with various unidentified "American officials":
"A pilotless reconnaissance aircraft detected three men planting a roadside bomb about 9 p.m. The men ‘dug a hole following the common pattern of roadside bomb emplacement,' the military said in a statement.
‘The individuals were assessed as posing a threat to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces, and the location of the three men was relayed to close air support pilots.'
"The men were tracked from the road site to a building nearby, which was then bombed with ‘precision guided munitions,' the military said. The statement did not say whether a roadside bomb was later found at the site.
An additional military statement said Navy F-14's had ‘strafed the target with 100 cannon rounds' and dropped one bomb."
Crucial to this report is the phrase "precision guided munitions," an affirmation that U.S. forces used technology less likely than older munitions to accidentally hit the wrong target. It is this precision that allows us to glimpse the callous brutality of American military strategy in Iraq.
The target was a "building nearby," identified by a drone aircraft as an enemy hiding place. According to eyewitness reports given to the Washington Post, the attack effectively demolished the building, and damaged six surrounding buildings.
While in a perfect world, the surrounding buildings would have been unharmed, the reported amount of human damage in them (two people injured) suggests that, in this case at least, the claims of "precision" were at least fairly accurate.
The problem arises with what happened inside the targeted building, a house inhabited by a large Iraqi family. Piecing together the testimony of local residents, the Times reporter concluded that fourteen members of the family were in the house at the time of the attack and nine were killed.
The Washington Post, which reported twelve killed, offered a chilling description of the scene:
"The dead included women and children whose bodies were recovered in the nightclothes and blankets in which they had apparently been sleeping. A Washington Post special correspondent watched as the corpses of three women and three boys who appeared to be younger than 10 were removed Tuesday from the house."
Because in this case -- unlike in so many others in which American air power utilizes "precisely guided munitions" -- there was on-the-spot reporting for an American newspaper, the U.S. military command was required to explain these casualties.
Without conceding that the deaths actually occurred, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, director of the Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad, commented: "We continue to see terrorists and insurgents using civilians in an attempt to shield themselves."
Notice that Lt. Col. Johnson (while not admitting that civilians had actually died) did assert U.S. policy: If suspected guerrillas use any building as a refuge, a full-scale attack on that structure is justified, even if the insurgents attempt to use civilians to "shield themselves."
These are, in other words, essential U.S. rules of engagement. The attack should be "precise" only in the sense that planes and/or helicopter gunships should seek as best they can to avoid demolishing surrounding structures. Put another way, it is more important to stop the insurgents than protect the innocent.
And notice that the military, single-mindedly determined to kill or capture the insurgents, cannot stop to allow for the evacuation of civilians either. Any delay might let the insurgents escape, either disguised as civilians or through windows, backdoors, cellars, or any of the other obvious escape routes urban guerrillas might take. Any attack must be quickly organized and -- if possible -- unexpected.
The Real Rules of Engagement in Iraq
We can gain some perspective on this military strategy by imagining similar rules of engagement for an American police force in some large city. Imagine, for example, a team of criminals in that city fleeing into a nearby apartment building after gunning down a policeman.
It would be unthinkable for the police to simply call in airships to demolish the structure, killing any people -- helpless hostages, neighbors, or even friends of the perpetrators -- who were with or near them.
In fact, the rules of engagement for the police, even in such a situation of extreme provocation, call for them to "hold their fire" -- if necessary allowing the perpetrators to escape -- if there is a risk of injuring civilians.
And this is a reasonable rule... because we value the lives of innocent American citizens over our determination to capture a criminal, even a cop killer.
But in Iraqi cities, our values and priorities are quite differently arranged. The contrast derives from three important principles under which the Iraq war is being fought: that the war should be conducted to absolutely minimize the risk to American troops; that guerrilla fighters should not be allowed to escape if there is any way to capture or kill them; and that Iraqi civilians should not be allowed to harbor or encourage the resistance fighters.
We are familiar with the first principle, the determination to safeguard American soldiers. It is expressed in the elaborate training and equipment they are given, as well as the ongoing effort to make the equipment even more effective in protecting them from attack.
(This was most recently expressed in the release of a Pentagon study showing that improved body armor could have saved as many as 300 American lives since the start of the war.)
It is also expressed in rules of engagement that call for air strikes like the one in Baiji. The alternative to such an air attack (aside from allowing the guerrillas to escape) would, of course, be to use a unit of troops to root out the guerrillas.
Needless to say, without an effective Iraqi military in place, such an operation would be likely to expose American soldiers to considerable risk. The Bush Administration has long shied away from the high casualty counts that would be an almost guaranteed result of such concentrated, close-quarters urban warfare, casualty counts that would surely have a strong negative effect on support in the United States for its war.
(The irony, of course, is that, with air attacks, the U.S. is trading lower American casualties and stronger support domestically for ever lessening Iraqi support and the ever greater hostility such attacks bring in their wake.)
The second principle also was applied in Baiji. Rather than allow the perpetrators to take refuge in a nearby home and then quietly slip away, the U.S. command decided to take out the house, even though they had no guarantee that it was uninhabited (and every reason to believe the opposite).
The paramount goal was to kill or capture the suspected guerrilla fighters, and if this involved the death or injury of multiple Iraqi civilians, the trade-off was clearly considered worth it. That is, annihilating a family of 12 or 14 Iraqis could be justified, if there was a reasonable probability of killing or capturing three individuals who might have been setting a roadside bomb. This is the subtext of Lt. Colonel Johnson's comment.
The third principle behind these attacks is only occasionally expressed by U.S. military and diplomatic personnel, but is nevertheless a foundation of American strategy as applied in Baiji and elsewhere.
Though Bush administration officials and top U.S. military officers often, for propaganda purposes, refer to local residents as innocent victims of insurgent intimidation and terrorism, their disregard for the lives of civilians trapped inside such buildings is symptomatic of a very different belief: that most Sunni Iraqis willingly harbor the guerrillas and support their attacks -- that they are not unwilling shields for the guerrillas, but are actively shielding them.
Moreover, this protection of the guerrillas is seen as a critical obstacle to our military success, requiring drastic punitive action.
As one American officer explained to New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins, the willingness to sacrifice local civilians is part of a larger strategy in which U.S. military power is used to "punish not only the guerrillas, but also make clear to ordinary Iraqis the cost of not cooperating."
A Marine calling-in to a radio talk show recently stated the argument more precisely: "You know why those people get killed? It's because they're letting insurgents hide in their house."
This is, by the way, the textbook definition of terrorism -- attacking a civilian population to get it to withdraw support from the enemy. What this strategic orientation, applied wherever American troops fight the Iraqi resistance, represents is an embrace of terrorism as a principle tactic for subduing Iraq's insurgency.
Escalating the War Against Iraqi Civilians
Baiji, a loosely settled village, is not typical of the locations where American air power is regularly loosed. In Iraq's densely packed cities, where much fighting takes place, buildings usually house several families with other multiple-occupancy dwellings adjacent.
Moreover, city battles often involve larger units of guerrillas, who ambush U.S. patrols and then disperse into several nearby dwellings, or snipers shooting from several locations. As a consequence, when U.S. F-14s, helicopter gunships, or other types of aircraft arrive, their targets are larger and more dispersed.
Liquidating guerrillas can then require the "precise" leveling of several buildings (with "collateral damage"), or even a whole city block. Instead of 100 cannon rounds and one five hundred pound bomb, such an attack can (and often does) involve several thousand cannon rounds and a combination of 500 and 2000 pound bombs.
Needless to say, the casualties in such attacks are likely to be magnitudes greater, though we hardly read about them in the American press, since reporters working for American newspapers are rarely present before, during, or after the attack.
This has started to change since "Up in the Air," a New Yorker piece by Seymour Hersh garnered much attention for outlining a Bush administration draw-down strategy in which air attacks are to be increasingly relied upon.
One particularly vivid recent account by Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer discussed the impact of air power during the American offensive in Western Anbar province last November. Using testimony from medical personnel and local civilians, Knickmeyer reported that 97 civilians were killed in one attack in Husaybah, 40 in another in Qaimone, 18 children (and an unknown number of adults) in Ramadi, and uncounted others in numerous other cities and towns. (The U.S. military typically denied knowledge of these casualties.)
All of these resulted from the same logic and the same rules of engagement as the Baiji attack and in most cases the attacks seem to have been chosen in place of mounting ground assaults. In each case, "precision guided munitions" were used, and -- for the most part, as far as we can tell --
American forces destroyed mainly the targets they intended to hit. In other words, this mayhem was not a matter of dumb munitions, human error, carelessness, or gratuitous brutality. It was policy.
These same principles apply to all engagements undertaken by the U.S. military. There are about 100 violent encounters with guerrillas each day, or about 3,000 engagements each month, most of them triggered by IEDs, sniper fire, or low-level hit-and-run attacks. (Only a relative handful of these -- never more than 100 in a month and recently far fewer -- involve suicide bombers).
The rules of engagement call for the application of overwhelming force in all these situations. The hiding places of the attackers -- houses, commercial shops, even mosques and schools -- essentially become automatic targets for attack.
For the most part, rifles, tanks, and artillery are sufficient to eradicate the enemy, and air power is only called in as a last resort (though with a recent surge in air missions reported, that "last resort" is evidently becoming an ever more ordinary option).
Instead of body counts ranging as high as 100 per incident, only a small minority of these daily engagements produce double-digit mortality rates. Nevertheless, the 3,000 small monthly engagements often involve attacking structures with civilians in them, and the lethality of these battles, combined with the havoc and destruction wrought by the air attacks, does add up to possibly thousands and thousands of civilian deaths each year.
Seymour Hersh's article made the new Bush administration policy of relying on air power public. It involves, in the near future, substituting Iraqi for U.S. foot patrols as often as possible (which means an instant drop in the quality of the soldiering involved); and, since the Iraqi military do not have tanks, artillery, or other heavy weaponry, the U.S. plans to compensate both for weaker fighting outfits and lack of on-the-ground firepower by increasing its use of air strikes.
In other words, in the coming months those 3,000 encounters a month are likely to produce even more victims than the already staggering civilian casualty rates in Iraq. Each incident that previously might have killed a few civilians will now be likely to kill many more.
The Washington Post, along with other major American media outlets, has confirmed that a new military strategy is being put in place and implemented. Quoting military sources, the Post reported that the number of U.S. air strikes increased from an average of 25 per month during the Summer of 2005, to 62 in September, 122 in October, and 120 in November.
The Sunday Times of London reports that, in the near future, these are expected to increase to at least 150 per month and that the numbers will continue to climb past that threshold.
Consider then this gruesome arithmetic:
If the U.S. fulfills its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.
The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.
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