[pjnews] Iraq: The Devastation
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/ The Salvador Option: The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq - http://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2109 Iraq: The Devastation By Dahr Jamail The devastation of Iraq? Where do I start? After working 7 of the last 12 months in Iraq, I'm still overwhelmed by even the thought of trying to describe this. The illegal war and occupation of Iraq was waged for three reasons, according to the Bush administration. First for weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found. Second, because the regime of Saddam Hussein had links to al-Qaeda, which Mr. Bush has personally admitted have never been proven. The third reason -- embedded in the very name of the invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom -- was to liberate the Iraqi people. So Iraq is now a liberated country. I've been in liberated Baghdad and environs on and off for 12 months, including being inside Fallujah during the April siege and having warning shots fired over my head more than once by soldiers. I've traveled in the south, north, and extensively around central Iraq. What I saw in the first months of 2004, however, when it was easier for a foreign reporter to travel the country, offered a powerful -- even predictive -- taste of the horrors to come in the rest of the year (and undoubtedly in 2005 as well). It's worth returning to the now forgotten first half of last year and remembering just how terrible things were for Iraqis even relatively early in our occupation of their country. Then, as now, for Iraqis, our invasion and occupation was a case of liberation from -- from human rights (think: the atrocities committed in Abu Ghraib which are still occurring daily there and elsewhere); liberation from functioning infrastructure (think: the malfunctioning electric system, the many-mile long gas lines, the raw sewage in the streets); liberation from an entire city to live in (think: Fallujah, most of which has by now been flattened by aerial bombardment and other means). Iraqis were then already bitter, confused, and existing amid a desolation that came from myriads of Bush administration broken promises. Quite literally every liberated Iraqi I've gotten to know from my earliest days in the country has either had a family member or a friend killed by U.S. soldiers or from the effects of the war/occupation. These include such everyday facts of life as not having enough money for food or fuel due to massive unemployment and soaring energy prices, or any of the countless other horrors caused by the aforementioned. The broken promises, broken infrastructure, and broken cities of Iraq were plainly visible in those early months of 2004 -- and the sad thing is that the devastation I saw then has only grown worse since. The life Iraqis were living a year ago, horrendous as it was, was but a prelude to what was to come under the U.S. occupation. The warning signs were clear from a shattered infrastructure, to all the torturing, to a burgeoning, violent resistance. Broken Promises It was quickly apparent, even to a journalistic newcomer, even in those first months of last year that the real nature of the liberation we brought to Iraq was no news to Iraqis. Long before the American media decided it was time to report on the horrendous actions occurring inside Abu Ghraib prison, most Iraqis already knew that the liberators of their country were torturing and humiliating their countrymen. In December 2003, for instance, a man in Baghdad, speaking of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, said to me, Why do they use these actions? Even Saddam Hussein did not do that! This is not good behavior. They are not coming to liberate Iraq! And by then the bleak jokes of the beleaguered had already begun to circulate. In the dark humor that has become so popular in Baghdad these days, one recently released Abu Ghraib detainee I interviewed said, The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house! Sadiq Zoman is fairly typical of what I've seen. Taken from his home in Kirkuk in July, 2003, he was held in a military detention facility near Tikrit before being dropped off comatose at the Salahadin General Hospital by U.S. forces one month later. While the medical report accompanying him, signed by Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, stated that Mr. Zoman was comatose due to a heart attack brought on by heat stroke, it failed to mention that his head had been bludgeoned, or to note the electrical burn marks that scorched his penis and the bottoms of his feet, or the bruises and whip-like marks up and down his body. I visited his wife Hashmiya and eight daughters in a nearly empty home in Baghdad. Its belongings had largely been sold on the black market to keep them all afloat. A fan twirled slowly over the bed as Zoman stared blankly at the
[pjnews] Robert Fisk: A Routine Tale of Our Times
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/printer_010905F.shtml#2 A Routine Tale of Our Times: Abuse, Beatings, Imprisonment and Injustice By Robert Fisk The Independent U.K. Saturday 08 January 2005 After two months, and 15 interrogations, Mustafa says one of his American questioners told him he believed he was innocent. I travelled down to Zarqa on Christmas Eve - Zarqa as in Zarqawi, for it is indeed the home town of the latest of America's bogeymen, a grey, dirt-poor, windy town south of Amman. The man I went to see was palpably innocent of any crime - indeed, he even has a document from the American military to prove it - but he spent almost two years of his life locked up in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. Hussein Abdelkader Youssef Mustafa's story tells you a lot about the war on terror and about the abuses that go with it. Mustafa is a thin, ascetic man with a long pepper-and-salt beard, and he sat on the concrete floor of his brother's home dressed in a long cloak and a black woollen hat and frameless spectacles. He is a Palestinian by birth but had been a resident in Pakistan since 1985, working in a school near Peshawar, teaching Afghans who had fled the 1980 Soviet invasion, visiting Afghanistan just once, in 1988, to teach at a school near Mazar-e-Sharif. Then on 25 May 2002, Pakistani soldiers and plain-clothes police stormed into his home, tied Mustafa up, led him out of the house past two Westerners, a man and a woman in civilian clothes - he assumes they were American FBI agents - and dumped him in the old Khaibar prison for 10 days. He was interrogated there by a blond, Arabic-speaking American and then taken to Peshawar airport where he was freighted off with 34 other Arabs - illegally under international law - to the large American base at Bagram in Afghanistan. We had been hooded in the plane, and when we arrived they stripped us naked and gave us overalls with numbers on. I was 171 and then I spent two months under interrogation, Mustafa told me. They were Americans, usually in uniform but without names. They wanted to know about my life, about what Afghans I'd met, about where false passports came from. I knew nothing about this. I told them all about myself. I said I was innocent. They made me stand on one leg in the sun. They wouldn't let me sleep for more than two hours. We had only a barrel for a toilet and had to use it in front of everyone. In the hours to come, I will learn that the Jordanian authorities have told Mustafa not to talk any more about his experiences - no doubt, the Americans told the Jordanians to shut him up. But he would admit later: My torture was even less than what they did to others. A broomstick was inserted in my backside and I was beaten severely and water was thrown on me before facing an air conditioner. And why did he think the Americans did this to him? If a prisoner did not comply and cooperate in details in Bagram, he would be abused according to how convinced the interrogator thought he was guilty; and to reach the stage of 'not guilty' in the eyes of the interrogator, one went through a long period of being physically abused. After two months, and 15 interrogations, Mustafa says one of his American questioners told him he believed he was innocent. He said to me: 'Have you seen Cuba on the television? I'm going to make you one of the prisoners there. I'm very sorry, it's out of our hands. Your names are in Washington now. You have to go to Cuba.' We were tied up, blindfolded, handcuffed and chains were attached to us. They put dark eyeglasses on us so we couldn't see. They covered our ears and nose and mouth so I could hardly breathe. On the plane, they pushed three or four pills into my mouth, drugs. I felt all the time I was between sleeping and waking. It took 24 hours to reach Cuba and we stopped once on the way and changed planes about four hours after leaving Bagram. Diego Garcia? Was this the mystery airbase? Were these chained, hooded, drugged Muslims taken via our very own and very British Diego Garcia? Mustafa says he was less harshly treated at Guantánamo Bay. One of his interrogators was an American Iraqi. I was shut up first in isolation in a room made all of metal. Even the floor was metal. There was just a small slit in the door. They kept going through my background papers, asking me the same questions over and over. Why was I a teacher in Pakistan? Why had I gone to Afghanistan? Sometimes in the showers, the American women soldiers could see us naked. They shaved off our beards. If we didn't obey orders quickly, they sprayed mace in our faces. In Bagram, they beat the men with sticks. Here they didn't do that. But many men tried to commit suicide in Guantánamo. I remember at least 30. We'd see them hanging themselves and shout: Soldiers! Quickly!, and the Americans would
