Author: Helena

A bountiful WaPo

Every so often the WaPo brings out an issue that’s filled with great news (from the journalistic viewpoint that is, meaning “news stories that are well reported and well written”). Like today. Here are some of these stories:
* The Bushadministration has been intensively tapping Mohamed ElBaradei’s phone calls with Iranian diplomats,

    and is scrutinizing them in search of ammunition to oust him as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, according to three U.S. government officials. (Dafna Linzer, p.A1.)

* Baghdad ER doc Luai Rubaie told Anthony Shadid that,

    He sees maybe 100 cases a day, twice as many as before the invasion in March 2003. Back then, he estimated, one in 1,000 was a victim of gunfire. Now half the cases are the consequence of the city’s strife. (pp. A1, A30.)
    “It’s a museeba,” Rubaie said — a disaster.

* It strikes me this is a big story, that I don’t think has received enough attention. It’s in the paper on p.A28. Brad Graham, reporting from Baghdad, tells us that:

    In an effort to reduce the amount of military cargo hauled in vulnerable ground convoys across Iraq, the U.S. Air Force has begun airlifting much larger quantities of materiel to bases around the country…
    Additionally, U.S. cargo aircraft are ferrying more materiel from base to base within Iraq. In the past month, the amount of military items hauled daily by air has jumped from about 350 tons to about 450 tons… according to Col. Mark Ramsay, deputy director of air mobility at the Combined Air Operations Center here…
    So far, the Air Force has been able to handle the extra load without bringing in more than the 60 C-130 cargo planes it already has in the region. This is because some of the burden has been borne by larger C-17 and C-5 planes that fly the long-haul routes from the United States and Europe.
    The bigger planes, which can carry three times or more the load of a C-130, have in the past simply dropped their pallets at one of the major hubs in Iraq and headed back. Now, some of the aircraft are being kept in the region for several days and used for short-haul trips…

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Iraq: KDP urging postponement?

In this post Thursday, I noted it seemed surprising that the two big Kurdish parties hadn’t yet presented their promised joint list for Iraq’s national elections.
Today, from IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor”, I got evidence that Masoud Barzani’s KDP was– as of last Monday– calling for postponing the elections “for several months”.
This came in an email feed from IWPR. (As so often, IWPR has been slow getting this text up onto their website. I guess it might get there soon.)
What they have in the email feed is an editorial from the KDP’s daily Al-Taakhi, from Dec 6 (Mon.), which says:

    The neighboring countries, especially the Arab ones, have not proven their seriousness regarding the help needed to enhance stability in Iraq. The Arab countries have tried to create a political balance in Iraq on certain bases, including a role they imagine for residents of the “opposing triangle”, so to speak. Unfortunately, Iraqi social divisions have become clearer. There is the failure to form a unified list of candidates among the Kurds and their allies. There is also the Shia list. These divisions will lead to catastrophic consequences if there are disagreements over the elections results. Hence, we call for postponing elections several months.

…Juan Cole has a lot of good material up on his site today that gives more texture to the election-preparations story. In particular, he has two or three items making clear that Moqtada Sadr has been speaking out strongly against the current election plan.
But this piece from the Financial Times, that Juan links to, makes clear that some of Sadr’s supporters intend to vote in the elections anyway, disregarding his call that they abstain. The FT piece notes too that some of the “officials” (as they call him) who helped put together Sistani’s UIA list claim that some Sadrists– or possibly, at this point, “former” Sadrists?– have been included in the list…

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Abusing “psychiatry”

Many new stories have come out recently documenting multiple instances of serious mistreatment of detainees by US military personnel both in months considerably before the incidents that happened at Abu Ghraib in November 2003, and in months considerably after the Abu Ghraib abuses become public, in April this year.
Now, from Salon, comes an intriguing story about a Military Intel sergeant, Greg Ford, who,

    (1) directly witnessed serious acts of detainee abuse being carried out by members of his own unit, in June 2003; then
    (2) first tried to get his immediate team leader to stop the abuse; then when that didn’t work Ford decided to report the behavior to his commanding officer, Capt. Victor Artiga;
    at which point
    (3) Artiga initiated an emergency psychiatric intervention against Ford and had him shipped out of Iraq strapped to a gurney.

As someone over on Yankeedoodle’s Comments board remarked, “Which was the last world power that abused psychiatry to try to stifle dissent?”
The Salon story, written by a fellow counter-intel agent, David DeBatto, indicates that Ford was not the only potential abuse-whistleblower to be given this “treatment”.
Ford got flown out of Iraq to Kuwait. He was kept under guard there, and then flown to the big US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. There, he was examined by a Col. C. Tsai who– like all the other mental-health professionals along the way who examined him found him basically to be of sound mind. (One of the early shrinks who examined, however, got browbeaten by Capt. Artiga into going along with the medevac order.)
DeBatto writes that Landstuhl’s Col. Tsai,

    told a film crew for Spiegel Television that he was “not surprised” at Ford’s diagnosis. Tsai told Spiegel that he had treated “three or four” other U.S. soldiers from Iraq that were also sent to Landstuhl for psychological evaluations or “combat stress counseling” after they reported incidents of detainee abuse or other wrongdoing by American soldiers.

Significant, too, was the fact that the unit that Ford worked in was commanded, as was the unit later made infamous by the Abu Ghraib scandal, by Col. Thomas Pappas.
Here is DeBatto’s account of the abuse that Ford witnessed being committed, in Samarra in June 2003:

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‘Cleaning up’ in Fallujah

In connection with military operations, there are two distinct kinds of “cleaning up” that go on. One is the “mopping up” operations that the advancing armies themselves do to secure the areas they’ve taken (a phase that can segue over into “ethnic cleansing”.) Personally I hate all these uses of household-management terminology in connection with what is almost always a very brutal phase of the fighting.
And then, there’s the real “cleaning up” that needs to be done in the battlefield, once the armies have finished their business.
A small team from the ICRC was able to get into Fallujah yesterday– many days after the hostilities there supposedly ended. According to a Reuters report from Geneva, on Friday morning ICRC spokesman Florian Westphal,

    expressed concern about civilians in Falluja, where sewage is flowing in the streets and hundreds of bodies apparently lie in a warehouse since a U.S. assault.

I don’t know if there are still bodies in the streets in Fallujah. I imagine there are still, certainly, bodies in many of the destroyed or not-destroyed houses that US troops have busted into over the past month.
Dahr Jamail has an extraordinary, and extremely upsetting, album of photos of bodies in Fallujah. Absolutely sit down and say a prayer before you look at it.
Here’s what he says about these photos:

    Two weeks ago someone was allowed into Fallujah by the military to help bury bodies. They were allowed to take photographs of 75 bodies, in order to show pictures to relatives so that they might be identified before they were buried. These pictures are from a book of these photos. They are being circulated publicly around small villages near Fallujah where many refugees are staying.

There are 58 photos. I haven’t looked at them all yet. The first one is titled “Dead boy holding a white surrender flag”, and it goes on from there. Some of the bodies appear to be in houses, some in streets. Quite a number have had the flesh of the extremities already eaten by dogs. At least one of the pics shows a body with the feet sawn off by something (possibly a tank?)

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Shi-ite-led list unveiled

At a press conference in Baghdad a couple of hours ago Hussain al-Shahristani, the Iraqi Shi-ite pol (and former nuclear scientist) who was tipped for the “interim PM” post that Allawi finally got last June, unveiled the electoral list of the United Iraqi Alliance, that he and Ayatollah Sistani have worked at putting together.
Reuters and AP both have reports on Shahristani’s press conference. They are significantly different, so I just decided to archive both accounts together.
JWN readers are no doubt aware that the election is for a constitutional assembly – cum- parliament that will have 275 members, one-third of whom must be women. There’s a single-constituency, p.r. system for voting, similar to Israel’s. In other words, voters vote for a single party (or coalition) list, and then the seats are divided among the lists according to how many votes each receives. Obviously, it’s better for a candidate to be placed near the top of the relevant list as he or she then gets a better chance of being voted in.
So a lot of the jockeying in list-formation goes on around the position of each named candidate on the list. I think each of the lists presented has to have a woman in each third place.
The UIA list presented by Shahristani today contains the names of 228 candidates, indicating that its architects are hoping to win as many as that number of seats in the assembly.
On the crucial issue of Moqtada al-Sadr’s relationship with this list, the Reuters and AP accounts differ significantly. AP reported that,

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CSM column on Syria

Today’s CSM has the column I wrote for them about (and from) Syria.
Again, I’m not really happy with the title they chose. Plus, in the CSM’s own version of the piece, they annoyingly misspelled my name.
I’m generally, though not completely, happy with the way the text came out. I wrote it really fast, on Tuesday, while battling jetlag and continuing to pester Air France for news of our four lost bags.
(Three of the bags got delivered yesterday evening, completely gone-through by Customs and repacked in a shockingly shoddy way. The fourth one was “impounded” by Customs for a while, but an officer in the Customs office at Philadelphia Int’l Airport assured Bill yesterday that it was being released back to Air France for onward delivery to us. Right, so now I’m expecting another three-day wait from AF’s less-than-efficient baggage-forwarding service… Why d’you think it got impounded? Maybe something to do with the nice sticky candy from Qom, Iran that was in there? Or the book in Arabic on the history of Hizbullah? I guess we’ll have to wait and see what contents it still has when it gets here…)
On a broader note, what with having now published a bunch these past few weeks about Palestinians, Syria, and– still to come!– Iran, and then Lebanon’s Hizbullah, do you think I’ll make it onto CAMERA’s watchlist of individual journos??

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Jordan; Iraqi exile ballots; Orwell

Tuesday, that well-known “democrat” Jordan’s King Abdullah (not!) railed vociferously against Iranian influence in the upcoming Iraqi elections. Yesterday (or so), the Iraqi newspaper Ad-dustour reported that

    Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has decided to make the Jordanian capital Amman the place to sort out the absentee ballots of Iraqi expatriate voters. Hence, ballot boxes will be transported to Amman for this purpose.

I got this latter nugget of news from today’s email feed from IWPR’s “Iraqi Press Monitor”. For some reason they haven’t posted today’s IPM content on their website yet. I guess it’ll happen soon.
My question is, “Why should anyone particularly trust this process of conveying all the Iraqi exiles’ votes to Amman and then counting them there?”
Btw, I’m finding it frustratingly difficult to find precise info on how, exactly, the promised provisions for including Iraqi exiles in the voting process will actually be implemented– apart from the above.
For example, in how many different places around the world can they cast their votes? (In South Africa’s landmark 1994 election, exiles could vote through their local SA consulates.) What are the rules for determining their eligibility? Roughly how many people might we be talking about?
Anyone who could point me to any answers there, please do so…

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CSM column on Shatila

With all my travels I failed to post anything here before now about the column I had in the CSM November 29, under the title Revisiting the gritty symbol of Palestinian survival – Shatila.
Well, I wouldn’t have given it that title since the whole way the story was written was so that the name of the camp wouldn’t be disclosed till about one-third the way down.
Ever since the column came out, the near-rabid “watchdog” group CAMERA has been snapping at the heels of my editors at the CSM, focusing on where I described the terrible 1982 massacre in the camp as “Israeli-orchestrated”.
The CSM is one of 14 “print media” outlets that CAMERA has on its watchlist, according to this page on their website. They also have a lengthy watchlist of individual journos, too. Shucks, I didn’t make that one!
You can get a good idea of how this operation, CAMERA, works if you check their website out a bit. For example, on one page there they have a so-called Dictionary of Bias.
I suppose their intent in calling it that is to show their “activists” how to identify what CAMERA judges to be anti-Israeli bias? But what they recommend there, in terms of “acceptable” terminology, would embody a high degree of pro-Likud bias… So yes, you could indeed say it is a “Dictionary of Bias”.
(See in particular what they have to say about the terms “occupied territories”, “settlements”, etc… )
Oh well. I think my editors are trying to fight the good fight. At least, I hope so.

“Calm” in Palestine?

Today, both the NYT and the WaPo had short reports of yesterday’s incident in Gaza in which a Hamas unit apparently lured an Israeli unit into an ambush and one Israeli soldier was killed.
In both reports, this incident was presented as an out-of-the-blue operation undertaken by Hamas that broke what was reported as (NYT) “a relatively calm spell that had followed Mr. Arafat’s death”, or (WaPo) “three weeks of relative calm in Gaza “.
Relative calm???
Who the heck do they think they’re kidding?
Check, for example, this report from the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which tells us that during the week of Nov 25 – Dec 1:

    * 7 Palestinians, including a mentally handicapped man and a physician, were killed by Israeli troops. [Four of these were killed in Gaza; three in the West Bank.]
    * Israeli troops conducted a series of incursions into Palestinian areas in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
    * 8 houses were destroyed in Rafah [Gaza]
    * 35 donums[1] of agricultural land were razed in the Khan Yunis [Gaza]
    * 3 houses were destroyed in the West Bank in the context of retaliatory measures against families of Palestinian activists
    * Houses were raided and dozens of Palestinian civilians were arrested in the West Bank
    * Continued shelling of residential areas and civilian facilities, especially in Rafah where 13 Palestinian civilians were injured…

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Notes on Iran

I can’t pretend to have gathered anything like a satisfactory picture of
the forces at work in today’s Iran from a visit that lasted only 60 hours
and was anyway not designed primarily to be any kind of a “journalistic” enquiry.
Still, I’m really glad I got the chance to go there. I had some
intriguing glimpses into a few small slivers of the country’s life; and I
met some really interesting people. If (or rather, when) I go
back there, I’ll try to prepare for the trip more systematically, and it
won’t be so much like jumping in at the deep end. This little trip
I’ve just had feels more like an appetite-whetter.

From my one previous trip to Teheran, to do a “quickie” piece on the story
of mounting unrest there, for the London Sunday Times back in 1977,
I remember mainly the monochrome, yellowy-gray coloration of the city; the
complexity of the political story there; and the difficulty of covering it.
I didn’t leave the capital. I forget who exactly I talked to that time–
it was the “usual suspects”: some government people, some local journalists,
some professors, some diplomats… I certainly didn’t feel I had anything
like the same kind of the story there that I had, at that time, in Beirut
or Cairo, or even Amman.

This time, the city was exactly the same color as it was 27 years ago. The Alborz Mountains that ring the north side of it were capped with snow, but their view was obscured by a miasma of yellow-ish pollution, just as I remembered.

Most of the city slopes down from the north to the south, and beside the strees there are open water-runways down which gurgled plentiful runoff from the snow.

We
spent a lot of time driving around the city, or more accurately sitting in the
traffic jams that plague it today, just as they did in 1977. It seems
that nowadays it has a metro, though we didn’t ride on it. (I gather
it has sex-segregated cars.) There also seemed to be an extensive municipal
bus system; and in all the buses that I saw, women had to ride at the back.
Lots of things are sex-segregated in Iran that wouldn’t be in most western
countries: for example, there were completely separate security-check lines
for men and women at the airport.

I’m writing this on the flight back to the US, having had a plane-change
in De Gaulle airport in Paris. As I got onto this plane, I was picked
out of the line filing through the jetway and subjected to a very thorough
and very intimate pat-down– by a woman- but right there in the jetway with
everyone walking right past. It felt a little humiliating, yes.

On the other hand, in Iran, I also saw men and women working alongside
each other in a number of different service occupations. There were
women and men immigration officers staffing the desks in the airport. (The
female officers wore loose black chadors over baggy dark-green uniforms.)
Women and men were working together behind the counter in the “fast-food”
restaurant we went to Thursday. At a more formal restaurant we went
to in Teheran Tuesday, there was a female “host”, and women were running
the cash registers, though all the waiters were male…

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