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September 30, 2004
Abu Ghraib?
Abu Ghraib? What? Who? Where?
Posted by zeynep at 11:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
The Fake Debate Organized by the Fake Commission
From an AP report about some irrelevant decision by the Commission on Presidential Debates:
The commission is a nonprofit and nonpartisan corporation that has sponsored all the presidential debates since 1988.
Excuse me? Since when is a front organization for the Democratic and Republican parties, established to ensure nothing important is discussed let alone debated, nonpartisan? Bipartisan, yes, nonpartisan, no.
Posted by zeynep at 07:48 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Scandal: Torturing Outsourced Without Competitive Bidding
Obsidian Wings draws our attention to a very important bill in Congress attempting to override, oh, The UN Convention on Torture, lots of U.S. Federal Laws and general standards of decency in order to legalize outsourcing of torture:
The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. "Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, "We don't kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.”The best known example of this is the case of Maher Arar. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was deported to Syria from JFK airport. In Syria he was beaten with electrical cables for two weeks, and then imprisoned in an underground cell for the better part of a year. Arar is probably innocent of any connection to terrorism.
Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey has introduced a bill that would outlaw this practice of sending people to be tortured in places other than Abu Ghraib. He has very few co-sponsors and it would be very important for everyone to call, visit and write their representatives in the next few days urging them to support Markey's bill and urging them to work against the Republican leadership's shameful attempt to legalize torture as a part of H.R. 10, the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004." That's right, the Republicans have snuck in legalizing outsourcing of torture in a bill about about the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Report.
Even if Hastert & Co withdrew their legalization attempt, it still would be very important to suppork Markey's bill because as things stand, sending people to be tortured is okay as long as the recipient country "assures" us the person won't be tortured. Well, maybe, they'll also claim that they were "merely abusing," not torturing the victim.
On that note, here's an amusing sidestory. Yesterday night, the Washington Post head a story on its website that read "Plan Would Let U.S. Deport Suspects To Nations That Might Abuse Them" -- not sure if this was the exact wording but the term used definitely was abuse. I thought it was funny that abuse now meant torture done by us and and nations doing our bidding. This morning, I find the headline now reads "Plan Would Let U.S. Deport Suspects To Nations That Might Torture Them" So we get to keep our monopoly on abusing while everyone else tortures.
I also want to know if torturing countries will be forced to go through a competitive bidding process, or will no-bid contracts be awarded? We can't waste taxpayer money now. So, call your rep: 1-800-839-5276 or 202-224-3121. Visit their office. Write them a letter. This is just too shameful.
Posted by zeynep at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 29, 2004
So Maybe It's Not That They're Undertrained
You know how we keep hearing the reason Iraqi forces cannot take over "fighting terrorists" is because they haven't been trained sufficiently? We already knew something was wrong with the portrayal -- in Fallujah and in Najaf, Iraqi soldiers refused to fight their countrymen on behalf of the occupiers. Here's a direct acknowledgement of the possibility that this is the real problem:
Reports from Iraq have made one Army staff officer question whether adequate progress is being made there."They keep telling us that Iraqi security forces are the exit strategy, but what I hear from the ground is that they aren't working," he said. "There's a feeling that Iraqi security forces are in cahoots with the insurgents and the general public to get the occupiers out."
Well, how surprising. A nation which does not want to be occupied, who would've thought of that? The above was from a Post article that basically reports the known known about the state of the occupation. There is also a NY Times article out today which is accompanied by a very telling map of the geographic distribution and method of attacks in the last 30 days alone. Take a look. Basically, practically everywhere, they are throwing whatever they can get their hands on at the occupation forces.
Posted by zeynep at 12:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 28, 2004
Coming Soon: Staged Elections (in Iraq, Afghanistan and maybe in the U.S.)
Something’s very wrong in Iraq and administration’s trying desperately to hide this fact from the American people -- in fact, all the political moves by the administration at this point are directed at us, not Iraqis. I think it’s fair to say that there is little to no effort at convincing or winning over people of Iraq: such an effort would at least require stopping the greatly destructive aerial bombing of Baghdad and Fallujah, withdrawing the U.S. military from the streets, spending money on the already-crumbling infrastructure, allowing for real elections....
But none of that will happen anytime soon because we, not the people of Iraq, are the target audience. So, we get Ayad Allawi touring D.C. as part of Bush’s reelection campaign; we get the U.S. military press releases about bombing “safe houses” in Sadr City and Fallujah that nobody in Iraq believes; and we are now witnessing the initial stages of getting us to accept pretend elections as imperfect but real elections.
All this is to placate and misinform the American people. The people in Iraq will know sham elections from real ones, of course. And of course, imperfect elections can be acceptable at certain times in history; however, what they are trying to market are sham, not imperfect, elections.
This propaganda effort reminds me of the story about the cloud cover over German cities the Allied censors did not want reported to the British and American public during World War II. As Walter Cronkite recounts in a Newsweek article, the information wasn’t being withheld from the Germans:
Once in England the censors held up my report that the Eighth Air Force had bombed Germany through a solid cloud cover. This was politically sensitive; our air staff maintained that we were practicing only precision bombing on military targets. But the censors released my story when I pointed out the obvious--Germans on the ground and the Luftwaffe attacking bombers knew the clouds were there. The truth was not being withheld from Germans but Americans.
Just as such, the propaganda system is currently aimed squarely and almost solely at us. (The opinions of people of Iraq have long ago ceased to matter except to the degree they can kill American soldiers. Is that not a horrible incentive system we have set up here?)
Pretend elections are the last leg of the pretense edifice of the war on Iraq. The Weapons of Mass Destruction have turned into Weapons of Mass Destruction Related Program Activities in My Head. Terrorism threat posed by Saddam Hussein has turned into massively-increased actual terrorism threat due to our occupation of Iraq. Reconstruction, it seems, is just another name for transferring Iraq’s oil money to Halliburton. So it’s crucial for the propaganda system that they make us believe that at least --at least-- Iraq and Afghanistan will have real elections.
It was relatively unsurprising to learn that CIA had plans to secretly throw its weight behind candidates favored by the administration. It was also almost predictable that Rummy would lecture us about how a bit of election would be better than none -- which, of course, is true in the abstract but is no excuse when we are one of the main forces behind limiting electoral possibilities. In fact, that’s the last big lie that is gathering some attention: the last thing the administration wants is real elections in either Afghanistan or in Iraq. But, it desperately needs the appearance of some form of elections.
Empire Notes has been covering all this and more about sham elections in detail -- here’s a great piece about sham elections and here’s analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post editorials on the topic. All are must-read. In fact, Empire Notes makes a plea that people mobilize now to try to expose this latest scandal while there is still time to do something about it -- especially with elections scheduled for January in Iraq. I totally agree. For once, I hope, we can try to be ahead of their sleazy curve.
I guess my one hope is that having suffered through one stolen election, the American people will be more sensitive to the attempts to deny people of Afghanistan and Iraq a chance at real elections -- especially after they were told that this chance was why they had to endure so much suffering, death and destruction.
Posted by zeynep at 09:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Bridges to Baghdad
Simona Toretta, Simona Pari, Raad Ali Abdul Azziz and Mahnouz Bassam have just been freed. Many questions remain and hopefully some light will be shed on them.
Posted by zeynep at 01:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 27, 2004
You Know the No-Fly List Works
When air marshalls end up on it:
Still, the TSA is learning. It recently acknowledged that a Federal Air Marshall, unable to fly for weeks when his name was mistakenly put on the "no-fly" list, was in fact not a threat, and removed his name from the list.
Posted by zeynep at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 26, 2004
Must-Bomb-Credibility-At-Stake
Here’s a fairly typical rundown of the arguments against withdrawal, from the Week in Review section of the New York Times:
But the counterarguments are also powerful. Withdrawal in the absence of stability would amount to a devastating admission of failure and a blow to America's world leadership. The credibility of the United States, already compromised, would be devastated. More than 1,000 young lives would appear to have been blotted out for naught.
Is this not the definition of insanity? For one thing, it’s abundantly clear that our presence is the primary reason for instability in Iraq. The people of Iraq have little no to no chance at gaining control of their country and bringing about modicum of order as long as we continue to occupy them. Catch the latest numbers from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, obtained by the Knight-Ridder:
Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder. According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said. While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen. Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher. During the same period, 432 American soldiers were killed.
Plus, we are continuing to bomb Fallujah, Baghdad, and other cities -- ostensibly in “surgical strikes” against terrorist “safe houses” but from the ground reports keep indicating many children, women and ordinary residents are getting killed.
Of course, the word “safe house” is just plain old disinformation because it connotes a place used by those hiding from the population, keeping a secret from the residents. As all reporting from Fallujah shows, the resistance is quite popular in that town -- which is relatively unsurprising considering we killed about 1,000 of them through aerial bombing in Spring and who-knows-how-many since then.
As for the credibility and the leadership of the United States, how much worse can it get? Here, the media and the political class seems to have forgotten about Abu Ghraib and the uncovering of systematic torture at U.S.-run detention centers -- but why would the rest of the world? And unlike our media here, the rest of the world’s media does not pretend that we’re in Iraq for a noble cause, supported and wanted by at least a majority the people of Iraq.
I suppose we could subdue the whole country by levelling it but someone should explain how that’s supposed to make us safer.
Of course, there is the “1,000 young lives would appear to have been blotted out for naught” argument -- and, of course tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, but who cares about that. Even considering only American lives, this is the most callous, most insane of the reasons. Will the question get any easier after 2,000 American soldiers die in Iraq?
In sum, none of the stated reasons --stability, democracy, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam-Al Qaeda links -- stand the test of reasoned argument. And the sad truth of the matter is that we knew all this before the war. And sadder still is the fact that the truth gets spoken less now, even after so much death and destruction and such blatant evidence of the falsity of the edifice of pretexts.
This is a political reality caused by the fact that the anti-war movement pretty much disappeared from the political scene after the invasion began and the anti-Bush movement -- at least for a while -- decided to try to run to the right of Bush with the vain hope that they could dislodge some of Bush’s base by appearing more war-mongerer-than-thou.
Alas, it didn’t work that way -- and hard to see how it could given the tight organization and ideological control the Republican party has over its base -- so now we have a bit more of some visible political opposition to the war itself rather than just the conduct of the war. So far it’s too little, and it’s certainly very late.
I suppose the real question is how long we’ll avoid the real questions about this war and how many people will die until then.
Posted by zeynep at 09:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 23, 2004
Casualties in Sadr City
And, here's a little bit of what happens when you bomb a poor, crowded urban slum from warplanes. Meet our newest hearts and minds converts:
Posted by zeynep at 06:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In Case You Missed It
We're bombing Baghdad, from the air, with warplanes. And it's not even news. You won't even notice the story unless you look for it. That's Baghdad, as in Baghdad the capital of Iraq.
And why are we bombing it?
“The intent is to provide security for the people of Thawra so we can get back to the business of reconstruction,” said 1st Cavalry Division commanding general Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli in a Wednesday statement. Thawra is an old name for Sadr City. The district is now named for Muqtada al-Sadr’s father, a revered cleric killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
So far, "U.S. military officers monitoring the fighting" put the Iraqi death toll at 40. All this sacrifice we're making just to get back to the the business of reconstructing the place we won't even call by the name used by the actual residents. Guess they should be grateful we aren't calling it Myanmar.
Posted by zeynep at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2004
We All Scream About Forged Documents
Tom Toles again, from the Washington Post (9/22/04).
Posted by zeynep at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Bribocracy
A university of Chicago professor has calculated how much Wall Street would collect in fees if social security would be partly privatized:
President Bush's push to create individual investment accounts in the Social Security system would hand financial services firms a windfall totaling $940 billion over 75 years, according to a University of Chicago study to be released today.
And, here are Bush’s top 10 donors from this election cycle, according to the Center for Public Integrity:
Pricewaterhouse Coopers $488,600
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. $486,125
Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. $455,904
UBS AG Inc $368,900
Goldman Sachs Group $295,950
Credit Suisse First Boston $271,650
Ernst & Young LLP $267,105
Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. $263,200
MBNA Corp. $251,000
Citigroup $246,645
Yes, all 10 are financial firms. Four of those are also among Kerry’s top 10 donors:
Harvard University $213,045.00
Citigroup $169,254.00
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom $169,225.00
Time Warner $158,506.00
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi $150,250.00
UBS AG Inc $138,700.00
Goldman Sachs Group $127,750.00
Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard, et al $124,152.00
Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, et al $102,051.00
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. $100,204.00
Meanwhile, Tom Delay's top aides have been indicted for illegal corporate fundraising activities -- money which they channeled into the blatantly undemocratic redistricting effort.
Three men with close ties to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay were indicted on Tuesday along with eight companies for illegal fund-raising activities in a political action committee formed by the powerful Texan.Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle told reporters the investigation, not yet finished, had uncovered ominous behavior by the group.
"What has emerged is the outline of an effort to use corporate contributions to control representative democracy in Texas," he said.
Maybe a few people will get a slap on the wrist, maybe they won't. Meanwhile, results of legal and illegal bribery of public officials by corporations will stand. The lack of shame is so obscene that Delay has been asking his corporate donors to pay for his legal fees:
What do you do when it becomes public that you illegally funneled funds from large corrupt corporations into corrupt activities? ...Why, ask for more, of course:
Several weeks ago, DeLay hired two criminal defense attorneys to represent him in the probe. He previously created a fund for corporate donors to help him pay legal bills related to allegations of improper fundraising, and is now considering extending its reach to include the fees for these attorneys.
Representative Bribocracy in action.
Posted by zeynep at 09:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 21, 2004
All PowerPoint and No Water
The pretexts for war on Iraq and justifications for our occupation have changed dramatically over the past two years. First it was the non-existing WMD and the bogus Al-Qaeda connection followed by bringing democracy and helping restore the infrastructure we helped destroy. We seem to be left now only with occupation and puppet governments.
The final official steps converting our presence in Iraq to a purely military one are being taken as the State department gets control of the never-spent Iraqi reconstruction money allocated by Congress -- about $3.5 billion is being officially diverted from reconstruction to military spending. Considering we’ve only spent one billion out of the allocated $18 billion in more than one year of occupation, it seems obvious that very little money will ever be spent for improving the water systems, the sewage, the electricity -- the very things Iraqis desparately need:
But the move comes as a grievous disappointment to Iraqi officials who had already seen the billions once promised them tied up for months by American regulations and planning committees, consumed by administrative overhead and set aside for the enormous costs of ensuring safety for the workers and engineers who will actually build the new sewers, water plants and electrical generators. Of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved last fall for Iraq's reconstruction, only about $1 billion has been spent so far."Nobody believes this will benefit Iraq," said Kamil N. Chadirji, deputy minister for administration and financial affairs in the Iraqi Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, which has responsibility for water and sewage projects outside Baghdad.
"For a year we have been talking, with beautiful PowerPoint documents, but without a drop of water," Mr. Chadirji said, waving a colorful printout that he received from American officials.
The decision to shift the money, which had been earmarked for rebuilding everything from roads and bridges to telecommunications and the outdated equipment pumping oil, appears to signal an abandonment of the administration's original plan for putting Iraq back on its feet as a functioning nation.
Of course, partially thanks to a year of mismanagement, corruption and brutality on our part, the security situation is such that a lot of money does need to be spent. However, it’s also clear that there are two things Iraq needs desperately in order to get things under control: withdrawal of the occupying troops and the election of a legitimate government. Increasing our troop presence would hurt, not help, matters. And while a crackdown by a hand-picked, CIA-agent led government can appear to pacify things for short periods of time, it’s clear that short of a massive outbreak of state violence the resistance cannot be crushed by military means.
I think it’s become very clear over the summer -- following on the heels of Abu Ghraib, Najaf and Fallujah -- that an accommodating occupation was not going to be possible. The Bush camp probably only wants to delay whatever will be done in terms of “pacifying” the country until after the U.S. election. The Kerry camp had been attempting to run to the right of the Bush White House, a strategy that has failed spectacularly and one they are perhaps reconsidering.
This is not to say things will become all peaches and cream in Iraq as soon as we leave. That country clearly faces a long, tough road ahead. Our presence, however, is a detriment to possibility of democracy and security in Iraq. The real question on the table is when and how we’ll leave. The later we leave, the more problems we’ll leave behind not to mention more dead people on all sides.
Posted by zeynep at 11:37 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 20, 2004
When will they get tired of being killed?
American Leftist quotes Donald Rumsfeld from a "media availability" in Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo.:
I think that the United States and the coalition countries, of course unlike, other countries we have no desire to stay there or to be there at all other than to help that country get on it’s feet. We’re in the processing of doing that and they’re making good progress politically. They’re making progress economically. The schools are open. The hospitals are open. They have a stock market functioning. They sent some teams to the Olympics. They have a symphony and at the same time, amidst all those good things that are happening, people are being killed. Iraqis are being killed, as they were yesterday and the day before. At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country.
Those pesky natives. When will they get tired of being killed and let us peacefully occupy them?
Posted by zeynep at 01:30 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 19, 2004
Britain reducing troop levels
As the number of bombs, blasts and attacks in Iraq dramatically escalate, the British government is quietly planning a significant reduction in their troop levels:
The British Army is to start pulling troops out of Iraq next month despite the deteriorating security situation in much of the country, The Observer has learnt. The main British combat force in Iraq, about 5,000-strong, will be reduced by around a third by the end of October during a routine rotation of units.The news came amid another day of mayhem in Iraq, which saw a suicide bomber kill at least 23 people and injure 53 in the northern city of Kirkuk. The victims were queueing to join Iraq's National Guard.
More than 200 people were killed last week in one of the bloodiest weeks since last year's invasion, strengthening impressions that the country is spinning out of control.
The news hasn't been publicly announced yet. The British commanders, however, gave some hint of the kind of spin we can expect when the official announcement is made:
Senior officers say the scaling back of the British commitment in Iraq is a sign of their success in keeping order and helping reconstruction.
Posted by zeynep at 01:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2004
The Forgeries
Isn't amazing that the media and the public can seriously pretend that there is any question whether George W. Bush, who is privilege personified, had strings pulled for him to get out of going to Vietnam.
And isn't it even more amazing how many liberal politicos are implying or claiming what Kerry did was honorable because he didn't dodge the draft like Bush? So, what now, these liberals believe the Vietnam war was just and honorable? And why are they then opposed to the war on Iraq? If anything, Iraq is more justifiable since the Vietnamese people aspired to nothing more than national self-determination while Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant and a serious danger to his people and the region.
The truth is Bush's dodging of the draft doesn't qualify as honorable because he was for the war -- he just wanted other people to go kill and die. Kerry's participation in the war doesn't qualify as honorable either because he believed the war to be immoral yet he voluntarily signed up. Risking your life in the service of vice is no virtue.
Meanwhile, as everyone remains occupied with superscripts in old typewriters and such important matters, 54 percent of Americans still believe that "Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the war" and 50 percent believe "Iraq gave substantial support to Al-Qaeda."
Here's Tom Toles from today's post:
Posted by zeynep at 12:56 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
September 15, 2004
You Know You're in the Wrong Country Redux
Dexter Filkins has a rundown of a press conference held by Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, trying to explain why a helicopter fired upon the crowd gathered around an already burning Bradley, killing 13 people -- a journalist and a young girl among them.
The whole thing is sadly predictable. The General claims the pilots attacked only after they took fire from the ground. Except, of course, there is footage this time around.
So, Mr. Filkins explains us the challenge:
General Chiarelli and Colonel McConville addressed those questions in some detail, if not to the satisfaction of everyone present. By so doing, they spelled out the challenges faced by American soldiers in Iraq as they try to carry on in densely populated areas where civilians and insurgents are often impossible to tell apart.
How is that a defense of anything? In fact, that phrase sums up the problem with what we are doing in Iraq. Simply put, if you cannot tell "insurgents" and "civilians" apart then you're in the wrong country. Something is very wrong if the "civilians," "natives," or "non-combatants" --however you want to name the people on whose behalf you claim to be fighting-- are indistguishable from your "enemies.".
Posted by zeynep at 10:59 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack
September 14, 2004
Money for "security" and "oil industry" and not for sewage, water or electricity
How does this qualify as "rewamping of priorities" since they never spent the money on water, sewage or electricity in the first place?
The Bush administration, revamping its priorities for Iraq's reconstruction, intends to shift $3.46 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress approved for reconstruction efforts, using it instead for security, economic development and oil industry improvements.The funds would come primarily from water, sewage and electricity programs, in which spending would decreased the same total amount of $3.46 billion.
And it's obvious to everyone that U.S. forces are not contributing to the security situation in the country, to say the least. While I'm well aware that there are internal forces that might continue killing Iraqis even after a withdrawal, I don't see how that would justify the continued presence of a force that is constantly bombing and shooting and is utterly unwilling, unable or uninterested in carrying out any kind of policing activity -- which is what Iraq needs right now.
The longer we stay, the worse shape that country is going to be when we do leave. And the longer we stay, the more dead there will be, on all sides.
Some 75 people were killed in two explosions today in Iraq, the deadliest day in six months.
Between the events of last spring and summer, the door on the possibility that the people of Iraq would consent to a U.S. occupation has closed. Only two related questions remain: what will we make them pay in order to stay and what will they try to make us pay to get us to leave. Every passing day adds to the tally of both answers.
Posted by zeynep at 09:38 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 13, 2004
Blowing Up Hearts and Minds
Today's news includes two incidents of U.S. military firing into crowds or residential areas.
A U.S. military helicopter fired into a crowd of civilians in the capital who had surrounded a burning Army armored vehicle, killing 13 people, said Saad Amili, spokesman for the Health Ministry. Among those killed was a Palestinian journalist reporting from the scene for the Arab satellite network al-Arabiya.The U.S. military said it was trying to scatter looters who were attempting to make off with ammunition and pieces of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which had been hit by a car bomb early in the morning on Haifa Street, a troublesome north-south artery west of the Tigris River.
But witnesses, including a Reuters cameraman who was filming the al-Arabiya journalist when he was shot, disputed that account and said the crowd was peaceful, Reuters reported.
...
In Ramadi, a city west of Baghdad, 10 people were killed and 40 were wounded, including women and children, when U.S. tanks and helicopters opened fire in a residential district, Abdel Salam Mohamed, a doctor at Ramadi Hospital, told Reuters. The U.S. military had no immediate comment.
Scare off looters? Off an already burning Bradley? This newfound concern for looters is very touching, but do they think anyone in Iraq believes this? Of course not, and I doubt that anyone expects them to. The only audience that matters, the domestic audience, seems to ready to believe we can do no wrong, ever. Our wars are clean.
The New York Times account has it that "American military commanders said the helicopters were returning fire aimed at them from the ground." Who cares what actual footage or Reuters says about the matter. In fact, who cares if they're dead. (An Al-Arabiya correspondent also killed in the attack, his death was captured on film.)
In all, about 80 Iraqis died yesterday between us shooting at them, suicide bombers blowing themselves up at checkpoints and at Iraqi national guard convoys, and bits and pieces of violence throughout the city.
If this goes on in this manner, the people of Iraq may actually start wishing Saddam was still in power. At which point, of course, we can point out that the whole country is composed of regime-remnants and dead-enders and retroactively justify everything we've done.
Posted by zeynep at 12:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Amariya: What did We Ever Do to Them?
It's amazing how the clock always starts from yesterday whenever the question is "why don't they like us." The answer never seems to be connected to anything we may have ever done. It's all floating out there for no reason except some people just hate us because they hate us, and that's that.
Here's a great reminder from Empire Notes about why there might be so much fighting around Amariya -- and how the past gets "disappeared" by mainstream media.
Or here's a visual reminder for the pictorially inclined:
Posted by zeynep at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 12, 2004
Converting a Kid into a User
There is a new book out by Juliet Schor about the effects of the saturation-marketing directed at kids these day: "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture." Nothing surprising: "Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending... Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them."
This is like a "is smoking bad for you" question. Everyone knows it is. But the corporate interests behind it are so strong that you must prove it beyond reasonable doubt with a lot of research before you're even allowed to make the case even though everyone knew from the beginning what the answer was. And it's hard to isolate and demonstrate the effect of any single cultural experience since we can't perform perfect experiments with children controlling for different variables most of which also interact with each other. For example, kids who watch a lot of television probably also have parents who work a lot -- the TV acts as a babysitter. So, when you point out some correlation between heavy exposure to advertisements and, say, nagging parents for purchases of certain brands, the the advertisers will argue that maybe, just maybe, the cause is the fact that both parents work and not the advertising. You have to find a sample of tv-watchers whose parents aren't working long hours and so on. But then there will be something or other they can claim since social life is indeed complicated.
But the truth is the question on the table isn't about knowledge or science, it's about power. It's about their power to make us deny the obvious, to entertain the ridiculous.
So, it's always great when someone does all this work in order to take away more of their excuses. She has a piece in Post's Outlook section and an interview with her was published recently in Salon.
It really is hard to come to terms with what we allow to be done to children in this society. It's especially shameful because we're so rich. We don't need to send them down mineshafts or make them stitch soccer balls 12 hours a day just to survive. We could let them be children, learn a little, work a little and play a lot. Instead, we let their minds be attacked by sicko, predator adults out to make a buck. These people even attend children's sleepovers, just to figure out how to manipulate them better.
The most interesting part of her work was her interaction with some these marketers. Schor says that she encountered a lot of unprompted expressions of guilt, one marketer told her that she knew she was going to burn in hell. I'd say that's an appropriate feeling for an industry where the jargon includes phrases like ""converting [a kid] into a user," an expression --and sentiment-- borrowed from the drug peddling business, as Schor points out.
Posted by zeynep at 11:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 11, 2004
"I ask peace"
"People ask what, people ask why, people ask where, people ask how, I ask peace," wrote 11-year-old Deora Bodley in her diary which was found a week after she became the youngest passenger --she was just 20 years old-- to die on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Her family is donating the money they were paid for her death to relief projects in Afghanistan.
Deora's family is part of Peaceful Tomorrows, "organization founded by family members of September 11th victims who have united to turn our grief into action for peace."
Deora's dad, Derrill, traveled to Afghanistan in 2002 with other Peaceful Tomorrows families. In Kabul, Derrill played "Steps to Peace," a melody that "just flowed through" when he sat at a piano two days after his daughter's death, to Abdul Basir who had lost his 5-year-old daughter, Nazilla, to an errant U.S. bomb.
Posted by zeynep at 11:20 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 10, 2004
Dick Cheney Can Lie Again and Again and Again...
As I write this, I'm watching MSNBC commentator John Scarborough go on and on about how the documents used by CBS in the context of how privilege got George W. out of the Vietnam and into a cushy guard position may have been forged and how it's the media's sacred duty to expose lies and forgeries wherever they may lurk...
Umm, yeah. How about some "documents" "from" "Niger" that could have benefited from such scrutiny?
Or how about today?
"[Saddam Hussein]provided safe harbor and sanctuary to terrorists for years … and had provided safe harbor and sanctuary as well for Al Qaeda."
"The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was 'no credible evidence' that Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda target the United States."
Cheney, denying that oil was a factor in the war decisions, replied: "Anybody who'd suggest oil" was the reason for the military action was missing the challenges the administration faced, in Afghanistan — which Cheney pointed out has no oil — and in Iraq.He used the question to reiterate what has become his litany of reasons for the war: The refusal of Hussein to obey U.N. Security Council resolutions, the former Iraqi leader's use of chemical weapons against Iraqis, his waging of war against Iran and Kuwait, and the sanctuary the vice president said Hussein had given to Palestinian and Al Qaeda terrorists.
"We don't want to stay a day longer than necessary," he said of the U.S. deployment in Iraq.
How about that, not one of the stated reasons are true. Let's go over them.
1-The refusal of Hussein to obey U.N. Security Council resolutions,
2-The former Iraqi leader's use of chemical weapons against Iraqis
3-His waging of war against Iran and Kuwait, and the sanctuary
4-Hussein had given to Palestinian and Al Qaeda terrorists.
Now (1) is obviously false because Saddam Hussein no longer had the dreaded Weapons of Mass Destruction, so he had indeed complied with the resolution -- in spite of the fact that the resolution was written in a way that was almost impossible to comply with. That's why the inspections were cut short by George W. Bush to make way for the bombing, they were about to remove the pretext. Points (2) and (3) are certainly true, and those are certainly big crimes, but we supported and helped Saddam Hussein throughout that period -- and Dick Cheney was a major architect of that policy. And point (4) is false except one point: Saddam Hussein did give money to families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Is Dick Cheney saying tens of thousands of Iraqis and more than a thousand Americans have died to stop Saddam Hussein from giving money to families of suicide bombers? (Besides it doesn't take a genius to understand that suicide bombers are already extremely motivated, beyond anything promise of money could achieve.)
Well, Cheney's black-is-white worldview does provide some important clues, though. What's the only thing Dick Cheney denies as a reason for the war: control over oil supplies. Just that should almost settle the case, no?
But who's going to bother about these trivial questions: who really has WMD, how does Al Qaeda actually work, what's the truth about current oil consumption levels and remaining global reserves... Please. Save those for your "Far Left Trivial Pursuit"(R) games. Let's find out if typewriters in the seventies had superscript capability and proportional fonts.
Posted by zeynep at 09:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 09, 2004
The Taliban are women! They're bitches!
The loudspeakers atop the Humvee crackle to life: "The Taliban are women! They're bitches! If they were real men, they'd stop hiding under their burqas and they'd come out and fight!"
This, apparently, is how the U.S. army is trying to lure the Taliban out into the open in Afghanistan. I know, it looks like a parody.
Posted by zeynep at 10:27 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
The CPA doesn't want this to be done
Spurred on by the 1,000 American casualty, The Associated Press does a story on the number of Iraqi dead, which confirms that this number is a known unknown:
No official, reliable figures exist for the whole country, but private estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000 killed since the United States invaded in March 2003
So how did we get here? Pretty simple, actually. The CPA ordered Iraq's Health Ministry, which was counting, to stop counting and further banned the statisticians from releasing whatever preliminary information they had collected. Here's the story from December 2003, re-highlighted by Yahoo's full coverage section on Iraq, about how Iraq's Health Ministry came to stop the count:
Iraq's Health Ministry has ordered a halt to a count of civilians killed during the war and told its statistics department not to release figures compiled so far, the official who oversaw the count told The Associated Press on Wednesday.The health minister, Dr. Khodeir Abbas, denied in an email that he had anything to do with the order, saying he didn't even know about the study.
Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department, said the order was relayed to her by the ministry's director of planning, Dr. Nazar Shabandar, who said it came on behalf of Abbas. She said the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which oversees the ministry, also wanted the counting to stop.
"We have stopped the collection of this information because our minister didn't agree with it," she said, adding: "The CPA doesn't want this to be done."
The U.S.-appointed Health Minister denied the charge. The Minister even added that the Health Ministry had never started counting civilian deaths, so how could he have ordered them to stop?
Abbas, whose secretary said he was out of the country, sent an email denying the charge."I have no knowledge of a civilian war casualty survey even being started by the Ministry of Health, much less stopping it," he wrote. "The CPA did not direct me to stop any such survey either."
"Plain and simple, this is false information," he added.
There was one little problem with this story, though. Not only had they been counting the civilian deaths, they had already released figures to the media:
Despite Abbas' comments, the health ministry's civilian death toll count had been reported by news media as early as August, and the count was widely anticipated by human rights organizations. The ministry issued a preliminary figure of 1,764 deaths during the summer.
The Minister further claimed that somehow such a study couldn't be done because one couldn't distinguish between deaths resulting from military action and deaths resulting from Saddam's brutal regime:
Abbas, the minister, said he had nothing to do with the order, and suggested the study wouldn't be feasible anyway."It would be almost impossible to conduct such a survey, because hospitals cannot distinguish between deaths that resulted from the coalition's efforts in the war, common crime among Iraqis, or deaths resulting from Saddam's brutal regime," he wrote.
Got that? We can't distinguish between someone who died because he was blown up by a bomb or hit by a bullet and someone who died from Saddam's brutal regime ... which had been out of power for nine months by that time. So did Saddam have Matrix-style slow-motion bullets that take nine months to hit their target?
The CPA, unsurprisingly, had nothing to add:
A spokesman for the CPA said it had nothing to add to Abbas' response, which came after the CPA reached him by telephone.
I guess this fits with this administration's tendencies. Don't count votes, don't count the dead, don't count pollution emissions, don't count overtime, don't count anything if you can help it.
Dr. Nagham Mohsen, the head of the ministry's statistics department quoted earlier, insisted that she could carry out the study if only she were allowed:
Mohsen insisted that despite communications that remain poor and incomplete record-keeping by some hospitals, the statistics she received indicated that a significant count could have been completed."I could do it if the CPA and our minister agree that I can," she said in an interview in English.
But, of course not. So now we don't know if 10,000 or 30,000 Iraqis have died as a result of our military occupation because the CPA ordered Iraqi statisticians to stop counting.
Now imagine yourself an Iraqi, watching the U.S. media identify, count and mourn every single American death while you aren't even allowed to be accurate to the thousandth. What do you conclude? And how many times have you heard about how much we value human life, every human life, while their culture doesn't?
Posted by zeynep at 12:17 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 08, 2004
Iraqis Killed in Iraq, Who's Counting? (As Americans killed in Iraq passes the 1,000 mark)
So, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq passes into the four digit realm. Meanwhile, Iraq Body Count has the number of Iraqi civilians "reported killed by military intervention in Iraq" as somewhere between 11,790 and 13,082. Note that just the margin of error on number of Iraqi civilians killed by the military intervention is more than twice the number of American soldiers killed. That's how concerned, how precise we are with their dead. And even that is thanks to the independent, non-governmental, singular effort of the folks at www.iraqbodycount.net.
Also, this is our soldiers against their civilians, not exactly an equal count. Who knows how many soldiers or insurgents were killed on their side? Is anyone counting? Just today Rumsfeld was talking about having killed a few thousand in the last month alone:
Rumsfeld: ... in the last month the Iraqi forces and the coalition forces have probably killed 1,500, 2,000, 2,500 former regime elements, criminals, terrorists. Now is that a lot? Yes. Does that hurt them? Yes. Is it a lot out of 25 million people in a country? No.
Can you imagine anyone making the same point about us? Can you imagine how we'd react to someone who said, well, the United States, they are almost 300 million there so what's 30,000 to them? (Scalewise, that's how Rumsfeld's definition of "not a lot" translates into the U.S. population numbers.) Also, use that number as a guide for the scale of the insurgency: the number of people who died fighting us just last month would scale into 30,000 American lives if the situations were reversed. That's more than half the number of American soldiers who died in Vietnam. That's the kind of damage we're inflicting and they're still fighting. That number alone should tell you something about the nature of this sordid war.
Posted by zeynep at 12:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
September 07, 2004
We will Stop Spending the Money We Never Started Spending on You, You Hear!
This from an article making the larger point that the United States forces are withdrawing from more and more cities in Iraq. Actually, the point of the article is very misleading because withdrawal doesn’t mean disengagement. We keep bombing Fallujah and other places from afar -- just last week a few dozen people were killed in Fallujah alone as a result of our bombs; as usual some of them were regime-remnant, terrorist children.
But, here’s what they can stop expecting:
"Not one dime of American taxpayers’ money will come into your city until you help us drive out the terrorists," Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste said in his base in Tikrit, tapping the table to make sure he was understood.
Well, that will be a surprise to residents there I suppose, because, as I and others have pointed out to no end and to no result, there has been almost no American taxpayers’ money spent for the welfare of Iraqis -- unless you want to count the heavy artillery that keeps landing on them. Now, that is actually paid by American taxpeyers. In fact, the flow may well be in the opposite direction. Iraqi money has been used for no-bid contracts to American corporations who, sometimes, do pay taxes to the U.S. government. If anything, Iraqis have been subsidizing us.
And since we have insisted on providing the contracts to costly, bulky, hated American contractors instead of the cheap, available and local Iraqis, more and more of what will get spent on ends up as “security.” Water and sewage, infrastructure that is responsible for great deal of misery and deaths, that we helped destroy through our bombing and the sanctions, on the other hand will have to wait for another spring:
The officials said that under a proposal submitted last week by the ambassador, John D. Negroponte, more than $3.3 billion in aid that had been set aside for improvements in Iraq's utilities, electricity, water and sewage needed to be spent for other purposes to show quickly results that could be seen by discontented Iraqis....
Of the $18 billion appropriated by Congress following the end of major combat, only about $600 million had actually been spent on contracts with companies hired to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure.
There was a period of about six to eight months after the initial invasion that, had proper steps been taken, might have resulted in the kind of Iraq that the neo-imperialists envisioned. It would have involved rapidly spending a good chunk the money allocated by Congress to alleviate some of the immediate problems with infrastructure, holding back the most aggressive practices of the military and allowing for local elections. After decades of Saddam Hussein, the standard to beat wasn’t that high. Given a bit of dignity and a bit of breathing room, the people of Iraq would have likely voluntarily acquiesced with the most important strategic prize for the United States: a permanent sizable military presence in Iraq.
I think the lesson here is that imperialism is not omnipotent, able to do what it wishes to do just because it’s so powerful. It still has to work within constraints due to its own greed and cronyism, the nature of the military, the arrogance that accompanies the imperial stance and some plain old incompetence.
Posted by zeynep at 07:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Families of Chechen Rebels Taken Hostage by Russia During the Beslan Siege
L.A. Times reports that Russian soldiers held family members of former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov and Chechen separatist leader Shamil Basayev as hostages during the siege.
One day into the seizure of more than 1,000 hostages by suspected Chechen separatists in the town of Beslan, Russia now had its own hostages. Altogether, an estimated 40 family members of senior Chechen rebel leaders were assembled at Khankala from Thursday, a day after the hostage seizure in Beslan, until Saturday, the day after it ended.
According to the report, the hostages included many children and a five-month old baby. The Russian government claimed this was done to guarantee their safety. The family members, unsurprisingly, did not feel safer at a Russian army base with sacks pulled over their heads, and thought that it was "clear that the arrests were a message to the rebel commanders: We know where your families are."
On the other hand, it seems this is the first time the Maskhadov extended family met the Basayev extended family. "It was interesting after all this time to get to know them," said Khavazh Semiyev, Aslan Maskhadov's father-in-law.
So, what was the plan: swap baby for baby, infant for infant? You kill one, we kill one?
Posted by zeynep at 12:20 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 06, 2004
Previous Incidents as Children as Hostages?
Do readers of this blog know of previous political cases of children being deliberately attacked or held as hostages instead of adults as in Beslan? Some of the reports I'm reading have testimonies from adults who were taken hostage along with their kids, and who begged to have their children released while they stayed. The hostage-takers chose to release the adult, but not the child. In other words, they could have had the same number of hostages but of a different composition but they specifically prefered children.
Children are more manageable as hostages than adults but somehow the sheer number of hostages they chose to keep --exceeding a thousand-- makes me believe that managing the hostages was not a priority here. They wanted to inflict the maximal psychological pain.
Is this the worst hostage-taking incident by an aggrieved side? I went around some pro-Chechen independence websites last night and the mood was a curious mixture of shame and indignation. Some argued it couldn't have been Chechens or Muslims who did this deed, somewhat similar to denials about 9/11 being the work of Muslims that were heard in many quarters in the Middle East, especially before Bin Ladin came out to claim the attack. Many mentioned the lack of tears of over Chechen children over the past decade, which is unfortunately very true.
In any case, if you know of previous incidents of political targeting of children, please leave a comment or send me an email at z -at- underthesamesun.org. I'm trying to also differentiate between actions between the stronger, oppressor side and the weaker oppressed party. In some sense, the oppresors have often targeted children especially in case of colonization where the whole aim is to wipe out the next genereation of resistance. It's just that the oppressed have always been, well, more decent, more humane. Have we now entered a new era where the military targets are so well protected, where the firepower is so uneven and, to top it all, the publics on the aggressor side so uncaring to the plight of the victims that unleashing ferocious cruelty appears like the only path left?
The reason I'm asking these questions is that I'm working on an article about Beslan and assymetrical warfare. My feeling is that we have turned another sad corner.
Posted by zeynep at 04:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
September 05, 2004
Harleys, Hooters and Missing Hands and Legs
So I hear an ad in the radio for September 11 remembrance with, who else, Harley Davidson, Hooters and "U.S. Angels" calendar girls and soldiers wounded in Iraq. Proceeds to benefit Walter Reed Fisher House fund. The jarring mixture prompted my curiosity.
So, here it is. If you've lost both your legs and your left arm in a war supposedly to disable weapons of mass destruction and instead turned out to involve pounding cities with helicopter gunships and being thoroughly unpopular with the actual people of the country, where can your parents stay while you ponder your future with your now badly broken body? That's Fisher House, a place for families to stay close to the wounded soldiers. And I didn't make the example up:
There is no better example for the need for Fisher Houses than Hilario Bermanis.The young soldier was hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades in Iraq. He lost both legs and his left arm, and he suffered various other wounds.
Bermanis is from the State of Pohnpei - a part of the Federated States of Micronesia. When he was wounded, the military notified his family. His father and mother flew to his side, first in Germany and then here at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
His parents have stayed at the Fisher House on the grounds of Walter Reed for almost a year as they help him get better. They could not have stayed by their son's side without the Fisher House facility
While I was pondering the appropriateness of Harleys and Hooters for 9/11 commemorations, I checked out the "U.S. Angels" calendars. They wear hot pink shorts and pose for this calendar under the slogan "what more could a soldier want?" Golly, how about his right arm and both his legs?
What to make of this culture: a kid from our faithful ally at the United Nations, Micronesia has single limb remaining. Labor day weekend is about shopping to spend the money we now work for longer than any other industrialized nation. Hooters joins 9/11 commemorations except the commemorations are about soldiers wounded in Iraq which has what do to with 9/11 again, except serving as a convenient pretext? And how is it that a motorcycle manufacturer build a brand identity around pretending to be Rambo's first choice for transportation? (Note the ever-present POW/MIA silhouette flag in their ads). Oh, wait, Rambo was just Slyvester Stallone pretending to be a brave warrior. (Did you know oh-so-tough guy Slyvester Stallone couldn't brave going to the Cannes Film Festival for fear of terrorists?)
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe I should stop listening to classic rock stations; it's a very schizoid experience. The best songs are from the sixties and seventies; naturally many are very anti-war and anti-establishment. Unfortunately, the ad demographic is males 19-35 which is why the ads are all about Harleys, Hooters, a variety of cars and trucks, hair growth products and such. Plus, many of these stations are owned by Clear Channel which loves these historical genre formats that give readily to pre-prepared playlists. So you get "One Tin Soldier" followed by "Fortunate Son," followed by a promo for Clear Channel that features some lame soundbite by George W. and a radio announcer "pledging allegiance to the flag," followed by an ad for a strip joint and a no money down truck blowout sale, with some legalese fineprint read so rapidly that the only word you understand is "restrictions."
So, we're at war without decorum, a war where your duty is to vote for the king and reach for your wallet. Something happened three years ago this month but we won't really talk about it except the television channels will have these faux-documentaries where we will see the buildings fall but not really feel it between commercials for weight-loss products, beer, and kitchen cabinets. And only Citibank will say stuff like "People make money. Not the other way around."
It is just me or is this all crazy?
Posted by zeynep at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 03, 2004
The Russian School Siege
I don't know what to say. Taking hundreds of children hostage, not giving them water or food for three days while they are kept in in a packed gym in stifling heat, hanging explosives all around the gym which finally do go off and collapse the roof on top of the children -- and then shooting on the fleeing children? More than 500 people have been hospitalized; more than half are children. About a hundred remain in grave condition.
This all makes blowing up random houses, airplanes or buses look mild.
Probably a lot of people are thinking that it's just so far away. What could possibly be the repercussions of events in Beslan, Russia where this unfortunate school was located, or the war in Chechnya where tens of thousands have died and hundreds thousands displaced as Russia tries to keep control over a people who clearly desire independence? Yes, it is all far away. So was Afghanistan at one time.
This is now a world where methods, weapons and cruelty quickly travel and boomerang around the globe. We pay no attention at own peril.
Posted by zeynep at 09:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
September 02, 2004
A Cruel Journey from Kathmandu to Iraq
I write a lot about the wrongs and atrocities committed by the U.S. military because our government is accountable to us and it’s within our direct power to change its behaviour. I also write a lot about the actions of the U.S. government because it is the single biggest power in the world, anyway you slice it. It has the most influence over the world’s economy both through the sheer size of its economy and its hold over many international institutions. Plus, we have invaded Iraq -- not the other way around. You know, if someone breaks into your house the standards of behavior are different for you and the burglar. You get to punch him, not the other way around. Of course, this obvious standard is not applied to us in Iraq: U.S. military can ask Moqtada’s militia “to renounce violence” while they pound away at Najaf and Fallujah with helicopter gunships -- and the media can report all this without a hint that something’s wrong with this picture.
However, one side’s atrocities do not make the other side’s okay. And some of the recent acts committed by factions in Iraq claiming to fight against the occupation are so outrageous, so viciously callous and cruel that I feel like I have to draw attention to them, especially when the victims belong to categories that do not seem to excite either the western media or the general public.
Alas, the slaying of the 12 Nepalese cooks and cleaners passed without that much comment last week. Yes, it was reported and covered but it was at the minimal level one could address a mass slaying. Just imagine if they had killed even two Americans, let alone two Americans who were dirt-poor migrants smuggled to Iraq under false pretenses to try to earn a bit of money to send home to their poverty-stricken family.
Take Ramesh Khadka, whose family had taken a loan of more than 2,000 dollars to pay for him to go to Jordan where they thought he would be a cook. Nepal’s per capita GDP is $238. Do the math: this poor family was so desperate that they borrowed a decade’s worth of earnings to send their son into the global grind of transnational migration.
Here’s Ramesh’s parents Jit Bahadur Khadka, 55, left, and Radha Khadka, 52, right, in front of their village hut in Lele, near Kathmandu. This is a picture taken on August 24, so they do not know that their son will been soon be shot in cold blood, execution style, by a bunch of murderers:
Referring to the Nepalese hostages, this group had earlier released a statement saying that they had taken captive 12 “infidels,” “affiliated with a Nepalese company” that had been helping “U.S. crusader forces fight Islam.” After they murdered these unarmed, wretchedly-poor cooks and cleaners who posed such a threat to Iraqi liberation, the group's statement declared: "We have carried out the sentence of God against 12 Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians... Our brothers, do not feel any mercy or pity for these nasty and spiteful people ... They have left their homes and their countries and crossed thousands of kilometres to work for the American crusader forces and to support their war against Islam and the mujahideen.” Perhaps they should send a messenger to explain all this to Ramesh's father, who broke down after learning of his 19 year old son's death, crying "Oh God, why have you kept me alive."
I suppose the first explanation that comes to mind is their anti-Muslim bigotry I think that’s only part of the sordid picture. Turkish and Pakistani truck drivers have also been taken hostage and killed in the recent past -- not only did neither country send troops to Iraq, there was enormous sympathy among the public in both countries towards the people of Iraq and animosity against the occupation. Four Iraqi cleaning woman were gunned down a few months back because they took the only jobs they could find to feed their families, working for the coalition. Don’t forget the Ashura and Basra bombings, which killed hundreds of Shiite worshippers in the former and scores of people including kids in a school bus in the latter.
I’m not sure if it’s the same “they” that carries out all these attacks. It’s possible the car bombs are carried out by groups very different than those that have been taking hostages and killing them. Whoever the “they” might be, it’s clear that something very disturbing is rapidly expanding it’s influence in Iraq. That does not portend well at all, not for Iraq, not for us, not the world.
The signs of the subsequent cruelty were there from the first incident of this kind, the videotaped beheading of Nicholas Berg, a 26 year-old man who had previously spent time in Africa helping poor villagers learn how to build bricks and who had returned emaciated because he had given away all his food. I had hoped that the outcry in Iraq would enough to discourage these groups from repeating such brutality. There was indeed an outcry and a flurry of condemnations but it’s not even clear that if some these groups care about Iraqi public opinion. It’s not even clear who they are. Some, like Zarqawi, seem to hate the majority Shiite population with a vengeance. There probably are indeed some "foreign fighters" **(CLARIFICATION: I mean, besides the Americans who obviously constitute the largest group of "foreign fighters." Thanks to reader Brian Kwoba for reminding me not to carelessly use an occupier's framework and terminology)**. Also, most Iraqis are squeezed into a very tight existence: between a brutal occupation and a resistance with unaccountable and cruel elements meshed in with popularly supported leaders, trying survive as the infrastructure continues to crumble and the economy remains barren -- all the while most of the public in the country that is occupying them seems indifferent -to say the least- to their plight and their suffering.
It would be a very sad day indeed if the world does not compete for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi kids growing up with the message that you will receive attention only when you kill, and not when you die.
Posted by zeynep at 09:35 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
September 01, 2004
"Torture" versus "Abuse"
Of course, if you'd like to let New York Times know what you think of their selective use of the word torture, click here to send them an email.
I don't mean to single out the New York Times, I picked it because it's representative. Almost all other major journalistic outlets practice the same slanted language, so here's FAIR's list of contact info for some of them.
Posted by zeynep at 04:15 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
It's Torture in Saddam's Abu Ghraib, Chile, Equatorial Guinea but "Abuse" in Our Abu Ghraib
A New York Times article about Dr. Hussain Shahristani's efforts to establish an Iraqi National Academy of Sciences:
In Iraq, a Quest to Rebuild One More Broken Edifice: ScienceAugust 31, 2004
He came within a hair's breadth of being named prime minister of Iraq last spring. He was tortured by Saddam Hussein's government for refusing to work on an atomic bomb and spent 12 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, before escaping during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Another New York Times article about Kissinger's lack of concern about rampant torture under Argentina's military dictators:
Papers Show No Protest by Kissinger on ArgentinaAugust 27, 2004
Also at the meeting were William Rogers, then under secretary for economic affairs, and Luigi Einaudi, the current assistant secretary general of the Organization of American States, who took notes at the meeting. Both men have previously denied that Mr. Kissinger privately gave any "green light" to political repression and torture in Latin America, as has Mr. Kissinger himself.
John McCain's convention speech criticizing opponents of the war for ignoring the reality of Iraq's horror's under Saddam:
Text of Sen. John McCain's RNC SpeechAugust 31, 2004
And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.
Reuters sourced NY Times article about Chile's Supreme Court's blessed decision to finally strip Pinochet of immunity for his crimes:
Chile's Top Court Strips Pinochet of ImmunityAugust 27, 2004
The ruling is the latest in six years of back-and-forth court decisions in hundreds of human rights cases in which General Pinochet has been accused of ordering the secret police to kidnap, torture and kill leftists.
An Associated Press sourced NY Times story about Mark Thatcher's involvement in a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea:
Coup Charges Cap Mark Thatcher's CareerAugust 31, 2004
Equatorial Guinea wants Thatcher and his alleged co-conspirators extradited for allegedly plotting to overthrow Teodoro Obiang, the president for a quarter century of the tiny but oil-rich nation. Media reports have accused Obiang of cannibalism and torture, in addition to the theft of his nation's oil wealth.
Now, let's move a little closer home. A NY Times story about Rumsfeld's claim, plainly contradicted by the reports published by the Army itself and later retracted by Rumsfeld, that the "abuses" had not occurred during interrogations:
Rumsfeld Denies Abuses Occurred at InterrogationsAugust 27, 2004
In his first comments on the two major investigative reports issued this week at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Thursday mischaracterized one of their central findings about the American military's treatment of Iraqi prisoners by saying there was no evidence that prisoners had been abused during interrogations.
...
While the abuses that first came to light - depicted in photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison - were not the ones involving interrogations, the subsequent investigations have shown that, among other abuses, prisoners were kept in harsh isolation, beaten, kept naked and threatened by dogs as part of the interrogation process there. Mr. Rumsfeld has condemned the prisoner abuses, and did so again in his public appearances on Thursday in Arizona. But he has also hewed to the line that a small band of rogue military police were largely responsible for the beatings, sexual humiliating poses and other abuses, especially those depicted in a notorious set of photographs that became public in April.
An AP sourced NY Times article about how some generals may pay the awesome price of cushy retirement with full pay and benefits for their role in "abuse":
Generals May Pay a Price for Iraq AbuseAugust 31, 2004
The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal could effectively end the careers of four Army generals who are linked indirectly to the misconduct but face no criminal charges.
The four are singled out for varying degrees of criticism -- mixed with instances of praise -- in two comprehensive investigative reports released last week. The investigators conclude that the generals are partly responsible, but not legally culpable, for the abuse last fall.
A New York Times article about how the "alleged abuses" in Iraq may be traced to practices first developed in Afghanistan:
Some Abu Ghraib Abuses Are Traced to AfghanistanAugust 26, 2004
Intelligence officials said the C.I.A.'s inspector general was already carrying out a series of investigations of the agency's involvement in alleged abuses in Iraq, including the handling of the "ghost detainees."
You get my drift... They torture, we merely abuse. Remember, what has happened is far beyond a few sexually humiliating pictures. People were beaten to death, shackled in extremely painful positions for extended periods of time, sleep-deprived for many days, threatened with murder of their families, attacked and bitten by dogs, and worst, children were raped and taken hostage to make their parents break.
Posted by zeynep at 12:11 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack