Author: Helena

Violence in Iraq

Yankeedoodle is now sharing his duties at Today in Iraq with “Matt”. Between them, they make a truly stellar team and they’ve made TII into even more of a must-read than it already was.
Today, Matt has posted the daily compilation of news there. One of the items is his own quick Google-led survey of the security situation in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces.
His conclusion? That,

    out of eighteen provinces only six can be considered even relatively stable and at least a couple of those suffered major violence less than a year ago. Therefore it is Mr. Bush who is hallucinating, not me.

I’ve also just been reading the account that Virginia reporter Jeremy Redmon wrote of today’s attack on the US Army mess-hall near Mosul that killed 24, mainly US military people.
I’ve been thinking of doing a post here on the relationship between the violence and the election preparations in Iraq. I guess all the more reason now to do it. But it may have to wait till tomorrow.

What the FBI saw at GITMO (and Abu Ghraib)

I wrote my check to the American Civil Liberties Union last week. They’ve been doing a great job pursuing the government’s records re the tortures of detainees. And yesterday they released yet more extremely revealing documents that they’d managed to get the FBI to release.
Go here for the portal to this latest batch of documents.
The ACLU’s own media release focuses on this May 22 email, sent by an FBI person who signed herself/himself off as “On-scene commander–Baghdad” to a bunch of FBI agents in “Div13” and one in “Div10”. The writer noted that some FBI agents present at Abu Ghraib had had clear but indirect evidence that other interrogators there were utilizing,

    techniques beyond the bounds of FBI practice but within the paramters of the Executive Order (e.g. sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music, etc)…
    We emphatically do not equate any of these things our personnel witnessed with the clearly unlawful and sickening abuse at Abu G that has come to light. The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order.

This is probably the most direct evidence we have had to date that the Executive Order that White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez had signed regarding interrogation techniques was in force in Abu Ghraib, perhaps even as late as May 2004 (and almost certainly well after November 2003, when the most-infamous abuses were carried out there.) Also notable: that specificity regarding the content of the Gonzalez-authored Executive Order.
To me, an equally significant document in the new collection is this one, an email sent on August 2, 2004 from [name redacted] to Valerie E. Caproni, in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI. (Maybe she IS the General Counsel? Anyone know?)
The sender writes:

    As requested, here is a brief summary of what I observed at GTMO.
    On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

Interesting that the OGC had asked for all such testimony, huh?

Continue reading “What the FBI saw at GITMO (and Abu Ghraib)”

Women and the WaPo

Item 1: The lede paragraph of a review in last Friday’s WaPo of a new Chinese-made movie:

    The experience of “House of Flying Daggers” isn’t like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon. It doesn’t treat you gently, it ravishes you.

Item 2: Letter I sent to the WaPo later that day:

    Dear friends:
    I was truly disgusted when I read this lead to a movie review on the front page of today’s “Style” section: “The experience of ‘House of Flying Daggers’ isn’t like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon.”
    It didn’t take a genius to guess that the writer, Stephen Hunter, was a man; and I’m assuming that all the editors who signed off on such a simile must have been men, too?
    What on earth were they thinking? That the pages of the WP are a kind of snickery boys’ club where the writers and readers– all of them “guys”– can sit around together and fantasize about the debasement through prostitution of women, girls (and yes, perhaps, young boys as well)?
    How do they imagine the “experience” of “going to” a brothel is for the (overwhelmingly female) people who perforce have to end up working there, providing all that “pleasure” to their male clientele?
    Did they stop for a minute to imagine that the paper’s women readers might read that simile very differently from a large number of– but not all– your male readers? Did they even remember that it’s possible that (gasp!) the paper does indeed have quite a few female readers? What on earth kind of a communication where they trying to send to us with this jejune snickering?
    Please, “guys”, get your act together. Fast. It’s bad enough that the WP’s op-ed pages are almopst totally dominated by contributions from male writers– as though the “wisdom” in the human race is concentrated nearly wholly in male heads… But to make the content of the paper actively hostile to female readers, as well? That’s going ways too far.
    Sincerely,
    Helena Cobban

Item 3: Email I got yesterday from Leslie Yazel, Assignment Editor at the WaPo “Style” section:

Continue reading “Women and the WaPo”

Forward to– a new Dark Age?

“Progress” comes slowly in the affairs of humankind, and it’s by no means
a unidirectional or linear business. One significant series of steps
forward occurred in the 1860s, when European and a few non-European governments
came together to agree on:

  • firstly, 1863, the creation of the International Committee of the Red
    Cross and the establishment in different nations of national-level Red
    Cross and Red Crescent societies affiliated with each other and with the
    ICRC
  • secondly, 1864, a formal, intergovernmental agreement that for the
    first time formalized codified a portion of the previously merely customary
    “laws of war”; and
  • thirdly, 1869, the first-ever international agreement mandating a total
    ban on using an entire class of weapons (explosive projectiles weighing
    under 400 grams).

It is true that while these states were able to agree these rules
among themselves, they still did not consider most non-European peoples to
be worthy of anything like the same protections as European peoples. Many
of the same states that joined the “humanitarian” conventions
were very happy, in 1885-86, to “carve up”
the whole of sub-Saharan Africa and distribute it amongst themselves. And
most European states as well as Japan continued to run extremely brutal
colonial empires right through to the the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and even–
in the case of Portugal– till 1974-75.

But still, establishing and
formalizing the principles of what came to be known as ‘international humanitarian
law’ (IHL, also known as the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions)
back in the 1860s was a laudable step forward. And gradually, throughout the end of the 19th century and most of the 20th, the protections offered by these conventions came to
be extended to all the rest of the peoples of the world as well. In addition, in 1949, the content of the Geneva Conventions was overhauled and strengthened in the light of the terrible abuses the Nazis (and the Japanese) had perpetrated during their military occupations of numerous other countries…

And now, here we are in yet another new century…. and the most powerful government
in the world is snubbing its nose at many of the provisions of the Geneva
Conventions, while at the same time it seems to be working to undermine
that important body, the ICRC, which is contractually obliged– acting
on behalf of all Geneva Convention signatories, including the United States–
to uphold and further the application of the principles of IHL. We
have heard much news of the Bushies trying to undermine Kofi Annan, and more
recently the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei. But are they now also trying
to discredit the work of the ICRC’s president, Jakob Kellenberger?

Continue reading “Forward to– a new Dark Age?”

Further American aggressions?

Asia Times Online’s incomparable Pepe Escobar has a lengthy piece there today titled “Evildoers, here we come”… Evidently, that’s a reference to how he sees the mindset of the GWB-2 administration.
As Escobar says right up at the front of the piece:

    Iran is very much in the US spotlight at present over concerns that it is developing nuclear weapons, with much talk of “regime change”. Over the next four years … any of a number of countries could come into the crosshairs – Syria, Saudi Arabia and “axis of evil” original North Korea.

(I believe he actually meant to say that “Iran and those other countries” could come into the crosshairs, since that’s the tenor of what he writes thereafter.)
Then, before going through the situation country by country, he presents the considerable amount of evidence there isfor thinking that the 2nd GWB administration will be even more warlike than the first one:

    Vice President Dick Cheney’s concentration of power under Bush II will be even more complete. Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld – despite Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the quagmire in Iraq – remains in place. The CIA under Porter Goss has been through a Soviet-style purge and is being turned into an ersatz Office of Special Plans (OSP), which everyone remembers was a Rumsfeld-sponsored operation that specialized in fabricating false pretexts for the invasion of Iraq. The OSP was directed by neo-conservative Douglas Feith (who now wants the US to attack Iran). The new CIA is Feith’s OSP on steroids. Goss’ job is to make sure the CIA agrees with everything Bush and the neo-conservatives say. Expect more wars.

In my humble opinion, this analysis is all good as far as it goes– But what it notably doesn’t take into sufficient account is the tough strategic/political reality of a situation in which the US military is already considerably bogged down and bleeding badly, in Iraq. At this point, the US commanders will be extremely lucky if they manage to pull the US forces out of Iraq anytime in the next four years without suffering a series of major battlefield debacles due to supply strangulation…

Continue reading “Further American aggressions?”

CSM column on Iran (and CAMERA letter)

The CSM ran my column on Iran in today’s edition. I think it came out pretty well despite some hasty last-minute edits.
In addition, today was the day they finally ran a letter from someone affiliated with ‘CAMERA’, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. It criticized me for writing in my column on Shatila last month that the ugly 1982 massacre there had been “Israeli-orchestrated”. You can see the text of the letter here.
I quite agree– based on my own extensive study of the evidence– with letter author Gilead Ini that the massacre in question “was carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen of the Phalangist party.” (Though I’d tend to put quotes around that adjective “Christian”.)
I also think Mr. Ini is quite entitled to express his judgment–which he bases on his reading of the Israeli government’s own Kahan Commission enquiry into the events– that,

    Far from having orchestrated the massacre, Israel was found by the commission only to be indirectly responsible, since it failed to consider the danger in allowing the Phalangists to enter the camp. Israeli officials were similarly faulted only for indirect responsibility.

So, as he admits, Israel’s own commission had concluded that the Israeli government and its officials did bear a degree of responsibility, even if only “indirect”, for what occurred… Fair enough…

Continue reading “CSM column on Iran (and CAMERA letter)”

Interrogations that trouble even the FBI

Tonight I got some time browse around in the collection of documents relating to US interrogations of detainees around the world that the American Civil Liberties Union has worked hard to get declassified and has recently been putting up on their website.
The ACLU’s own media presentation of the two most recent sets of these docs focused on

    (1) Evidence therein that members of a military Special Ops Task Force threatened some Defense Intel Agency agents who had seen detainee abuse underway and tried to prevent the DIA people from reporting what they had see (release of 12/7/04); and
    (2) Evidence that US Marines undertook mock executions of Iraqi juveniles and engaged in other forms of abuse (released 12/14/04).

Many mainstream newspapers have a done a fairly good job reporting on the ACLU revelations. But I wanted to browse around in the docs myself to get a flavor of them.
My first observation: just how much of the text of these docs was “redacted” (edited out) by the issuing agency before they were turned over to the ACLU under the ACLU’s “freedom of information” request!
My second observation: how strongly the FBI seemed to have objected to many of the interrogation techniques used by the military “under marching orders,” as one FBI officer noted, “from the Sec Def” (i.e. Rumsfeld).
When we’re talking about interrogations that trouble even the FBI, then I think we’re talking about something serious…
In addition, the most recent set of docs released (the top fifteen currently on the ACLU’s single portal to the PDF texts of the docs) concerned a group of nine US Navy medics who all deployed in Iraq with different Marines units in Feburary 2003… They came back with some tales and allegations (that got picked up by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service) about abuses they’d seen or heard about in Iraq.
That investigation led to “no further action”. But along the way there, there were several reports that individual corpsmen had experienced mental-health problems after their deployment; and in this doc, someone–name blanked out– is quoted as advising that, “all of the corpsmen have experienced some form of problem from what they observed in Iraq.”
But anyway, about the FBI…

Continue reading “Interrogations that trouble even the FBI”

Palestinian politics update

I’ve been reading the interview with Abu Mazen that was in yesterday’s Al-Sharq al-Awsat. It’s great that he came out so strongly for the demilitarization of the intifada, as noted in many mainstream media. Another great aspect of what he said was that he called for the continuation of the intifada by other, non-military means.
Here’s the full text of that question and answer:

    Q: You (in the plural) had a clear opinion about the militarization of the intifada, and has that opinion remained only an opinion or have you adopted alternative steps [to the military ones]?
    A: There’s no value in an opinion if it remains only an opinion, and it’s necessary that it should be implemented, and one of the means of such implementation is the imperative of disarming the intifada because the intifada is a legitimate right of the people in order to express its opposition to the occupation by popular and social means. And that’s what happened in the first intifada in the ‘eighties. Therefore the Palestinian people aren’t prevented from pursuing such activities, which express its viewpoint. The use of arms was harmful and it must stop, through working for calming members of the ranks of the Palestinian people.

He did not, unfortunately, spell out any further what he meant by these “popular and social means”. (Readers interested in learning more about Palestinian nonviolence organizations can look here, or here, or here.)
One of the other topics discussed in the interview–which was conducted by Naser Qadih, during Abu Mazen’s trip to Kuwait– was the whole issue of Abu Mazen’s tour around various Arab countries that (like Kuwait) previously were fairly or extremely hostile to the PLO/PA leadership.
It strikes me that this new Palestinian-Arab rapprochement is one of the most significant– but generally, under-noted– consequences of the death of Yasser Arafat.
And let’s face it, as the Stalinists used to say, this is “no accident”. To be precise, one of the greatest of the many dis-services that Yasser Arafat did the Palestinian cause was his record in quite gratuitously and seriously irritating large numbers of Arab leaders…

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Living under foreign military occupation

Ever since I came to live in the US in 1982, I’ve done a fair amount of public speaking around the country, especially on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Over the years, it became increasingly clear that many of the concepts that people who’re “experts” on the Middle East toss around so easily in our discussions– “occupation”, “settlements”, “resolution 242”, etc– are not readily understood by the general public here… So I’d try to back up, and give a thumbnail explanation of what each such concept meant.
Take “occupation”. In the pre-November 2001 world, few Americans had any direct experience with this particular– and intrinsically anti-democratic— form of rule. I think in much of Europe, where there are more vivid folk-memories of what happened to countries that came under Nazi military occupation and then under (less malevolent) Allied military occupation for a number of years, there’s generally much more understanding of the concept.
Then, too, many American citizens seem to have little ability even to exercize an empathetic imagination and really think through what it must be to live in a society that is– as all non-US societies are– very different from their/our own. You could call this moral laziness, or just (more charitably) a general lack of awareness.
Since November 2001, Americans have no excuse whatsoever for such moral laziness on the issue of rule by “foreign military occupation”– to give this form of government the full name it has in international law. That was the month that a US-led but UN-sanctioned coalition toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and started running an FMO in that country.
Seventeen months later, in April 2003, a US-led (and never UN-sanctioned) military force toppled Saddam Hussein in Iraq. And since then, the US and its paltry band of allies have been running an FMO in that country, too.
The juridical situation in Afghanistan changed somewhat earlier this month when Hamid Karzai was sworn in as the country’s first “popularly elected” leader. I am, however, unfamiliar with the exact content of the extensive “security agreements” that are still in force between Krazai’s administration and the US-led force, so I can’t say for sure whether the rule-by-US-diktat actually has ended there or not. (I strongly suspect not.)
Regarding Iraq, however, the occupation as such most certainly still continues… And likely will continue for many months even after next month’s election to a transitional assembly.
So what is it like to actually live under a foreign military occupation?

Continue reading “Living under foreign military occupation”

Two honest men

Last night, I watched an interesting tape of Zbig Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft appearing earlier in the day on Wolf Blitzer’s “Late Edition” on CNN.
These two old guys, respectively the National Security Advisors to Jimmy Carter and to George Bush I, evidently don’t feel they need to kowtow to the pro-Likud lobby any more, so they speak straightforwardly about how–from the perspective of their incontestably long experience in US national-security decisionmaking– they see the US-Israeli relationship, and the forces at work in today’s Bush administration…
At one point, Blitzer (whom I met a couple times back when he worked for the Jerusalem Post) said,

    now it’s apparen… that Saddam Hussein was plotting this insurgency all along, anticipating a U.S. assault. That would seem to be another intelligence blunder of huge import, and as a result a lot of Americans and others are dying.

Zbig replied,

    Well, it’s not just an intelligence blunder. It’s a question of the mindset. There was such fervor to go to war against Iraq. And it was propounded with such intensity and, I’m sorry to say, demagoguery by a bunch of fanatics that it was quite natural for them also to argue that it’s going to be very easy, that we’d be welcomed as liberators, that the aftermath would be very simple.
    I think we’re dealing here with a problem which goes beyond intelligence. It’s a fundamental misjudgment, and it’s a consequence of a decision-making process in which skeptics, questioners, people who disagreed really didn’t play much of a role.
    BLITZER: Well, you use a tough word, “fanatics.” Who do you mean, when you say fanatics, talking about fanatics?
    BRZEZINSKI: I’m not going to mention names, but people who, either for religious or strategic reasons, have a very one-sided view of Iraq and of the Middle East and what needs to be done in the area.
    BLITZER: When you say “religious reasons” — I’m pressing you, because these are strong words that you’re throwing out, and you’re a man of very precise language.
    BRZEZINSKI: Well, I think we all know that in American politics, particularly in recent times, there has been an intensified linkage between extreme religious views and politics. And there are a number of people who have very, very intense feelings about the Middle East. And I think that has colored our approach to Iraq and has colored our assessments of what would happen.
    BLITZER: Well, maybe I’m missing something. Are you talking about fundamentalist Christians? Are you talking about Jews? Specifically, what are you trying…
    BRZEZINSKI: I’m talking about all of them. I’m talking about all of them: people who approach this issue with a very strong religious fervor or a kind of strategic fanaticism, the kind of fanaticism that leads some people currently, for example, to argue that we should attack Iran, that we should bomb Iran.
    BLITZER: And is this related to support for Israel is coloring their…

Continue reading “Two honest men”