There’s lots happening in the United States’ global detentions gulag. I haven’t had a chance to blog about the Fay/Jones report yet. But there are some under-reported things that have been happening in the important Gitmo branch of the gulag that I want to note.
The “Military Commissions” (quasi-‘trials’) that will make a final disposition on the cases brought before them have finally–more than 30 months into the detention of most of the prisoners in Gitmo–begun this week.
Human Rights Watch’s website has a good page that explains the difference between the “military commissions” and the other two types of quasi-judicial hearing that are now–slowly–happening on Gitmo.
So this week, the first detainees–oops, sorry, make that ‘defendants’; or, on the other hand, maybe not?– have had “their day in court” in the military commission hearing room. It has not so far been an easy week for the people running the commission.
Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First has been observing the proceedings, and HRF has been running her very informative, blog-type journal of what she’s been seeing there. (She’s been running one or two days behind. I sympathize with her. Still, it’s well done and certainly worth reading.)
First up Tuesday was Yemeni national Salim Ahmed Hamdan…
Author: Helena
Transition time in Najaf and all Iraq?
The latest reports from Najaf show a point in Iraq’s history that seems to be a real turning-point. The Greek word for that is “crisis”. It seems the situation still could go either way; and no doubt about it, the stakes are very high.
From here, it could go radically either toward fitna (widespread breakdown) or toward peace.
Sistani, currently sitting on the edge of Najaf, has called for both the Sadrists and the occupation forces to stop fighting and also to evacuate the city. According to Al-Jazeera:
- Minutes before al-Sistani’s arrival, interim Prime Minister Iyyad Allawi said he had ordered his forces to observe a 24-hour ceasefire in Najaf to allow the negotiations to take place.
He also offered an amnesty deal to besieged al-Mahdi Army fighters and safe passage for their leader al-Sadr.
That’s good news. Until now, the Americans have all been pretending that Allawi and his henchmen have been “calling the shots” around Najaf. It would be nice if the US forces participated in the ceasefire and the broader Sistani peace plan, too.
More than nice!
Another Jazeera story notes that while the US forces were still maintaining their potentially offensive posture around the Sadrists in the shrine, it was the UK command that provided the air cover for the Sistani trip to Najaf. There’s doubtless much more of a story to be teased out there. (Including the whole story of who it was who persuaded Sistani that he “needed” to be whisked off to London 18 days ago, in the first place.)
Sistani’s plan also calls for the “Iraqi security forces” to take over security in Najaf. Those forces are a real wild card. They’ve suffered a lot of attrition from (generally, pro-Sadrist) defections, and now seem in many respects to be acting like a lot of deracinated, war-crazed goons. For evidence, see reports like this one (Reuters, 9:30 EST), that:
- At least 10 supporters of Iraq’s top Shi’ite cleric were shot dead in Najaf Thursday when gunmen opened fire at police who were trying to control the crowd, prompting the police to return fire, witnesses said.
Or, the many reports of the forced-attendance “press conference” the local police chief held late Wednesday. Chris Allbritton wrote that “he”–presumably the police chief?– told the forcibly rounded-up journos that:
- The Shrine would be stormed tonight…, and we would be allowed to get on a bus and go visit it tomorrow to see the damage the Mahdi Army had done to it. The Sistani protesters in Kufa were really Mahdi guys and they had to be killed.
Since I’m working so intensively these days on the early-1990s transition to democracy in South Africa, I have to quickly note some possible parallels.
One is the real danger of so-called “third force” activities…
Can Sistani save the situation?
This is the best news I could imagine from Iraq. It’s a Reuters report from Michael Georgy in Najaf, saying that Ayatollah Sistani had already reached Basra from Kuwait in a ground convoy… And Sistani’s asking all Iraqis to join him in a march to Najaf.
It will be so interesting to see (a) how many thousands of Iraqis do this, (b) whether the march will be nonviolent, and (c) how they arrange the logistics of getting into the city through the US lines.
I have seen signs before that Sistani has some interest in the power of nonviolent mass organizing. This project he is launching now could (though we don’t know yet) be a major project in this genre.
Here’s what Georgy writes:
- “We ask all believers to volunteer to go with us to Najaf,” Sistani said in a statement read out on his behalf in Basra by his aide Hayder al-Safi. “I have come for the sake of Najaf and I will stay in Najaf until the crisis ends.”
Sistani’s aides said he would leave for Najaf at 7 a.m. (4 a.m. British time) on Thursday with his supporters. They urged the militia to leave the mosque and U.S. forces not to interfere…
As for the Sadrists:
Schlesinger skewers mainly Sanchez
I have just started reading the Schlesinger report on US detainee operations. Its main thrust, in my reading is to skewer Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, until recently the commander of all the forces in Iraq.
Douglas Jehl, in this piece in Wednesday’s NYT, makes the judgment that the report “drew a line that extended to the defense secretary’s office.” I think that mis-characterizes the report a bit. In the part I’ve read, there are only a few references to any responsibility Rumsfeld or any other Pentagon suits might have had. But there are plenty to Sanchez and quite a few to Gen Myers, the head of Centcom.
The report seems to be a fairly serious piece of work, in the circumstances. (And yes, I write that in the full knowledge that their lenses and worldview are significantly different than mine.) The Commission members laid out a case that responsibility for the abuses should go high up both the military and Penatgon-civilian chains of command. In the Recommendations, however, they pulled their punches, notably not issuing there any explicit call for resignations or further prosecutions.
Elsewhere in the report, though, they do say the existing programs of prosecution should be pursued aggressively and perhaps augmented.
Here are some key passages from the Exec Summary:
Health professionals and U.S. torture
My friend Maureen’s son is a newly graduated medical doctor who paid for
his med school through a U.S. Army-run scheme and as a result is soon going
to be deployed to Iraq. I can barely imagine how worried she is about
the whole situation. Mo, this post is for you (and him).
I guess many JWN readers will have seen reference to
this
article, in the current issue of the premier British medical journal
The Lancet, in which University of Minnesota bioethicist Stephen Miles
pulled together the available evidence about the failures of U.S. military
medical personnel to abide by their professional duty–and the Geneva Conventions–
in their work in detention situations in Iraq (mainly Abu Ghraib), Guantanamo,
and Afghanistan.
As this
excellent editorial in the same issue of The Lancet summarizes
Dr. Miles’s case,
there are now reports
of medical personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq allegedly abusing detainees,
falsifying and delaying death certificates, and covering up homicides. No
unprompted reports of abuses were initiated by medical personnel before
the official investigation into practices at Abu Ghraib. At Guantanamo Bay,
medical records were routinely shared with interrogators in a clear breach
of confidentiality and with the knowledge that such information can be misused
despite objections by the medical team of the International Committee of
the Red Cross, who in protest suspended their medical visits.
I’m glad that a number of global media organizations, including CNN, ABC
News, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, etc have picked up on Miles’s study,
even if only very briefly.
I note, too, that (the US branch of) Physicians for Human Rights has also
paid some good attention to the Miles study, which meshes in well with their
own continuing project to look at
“Dual Loyalty and Human Rights in health professional practise”
. The PHR folks have been carrying out that project in collaboration
with researchers at the University of Cape Town who are only too well aware
of how–during the apartheid era in South Africa–health professionals were routinely
forced by the grossly abusive state to violate their own professional ethics,
especially in situations of conflict against national liberation forces.
Welcome to the dilemmas and “conflicting loyalties” faced by the medical
personnel working with the US military in Iraq…
Pray for peace in Najaf (& new Golden Oldies here)
I just put up two more months’ worth of Golden Oldies onto the sidebar here.
Last November was quite a momentous month for Iraq!
October was a momentous month for our family. My elder daughter got married (and I was pretty busy helping out.)
BUT…. today, further bad news from Najaf. Reuters’ Michael Georgy at 21:38 EST has this:
- U.S. aircraft launched a fresh assault on Shi’ite rebels in the embattled Iraqi city of Najaf early on Sunday after talks on transferring control of the mosque at the centre of a two-week siege ran into trouble.
A U.S. military AC-130 gunship unleashed rapid cannon and howitzer fire on positions held by rebels loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a Reuters witness said.
The attack lit the area with white flashes and was followed by a blast. Smoke drifted over the old city near rebel positions, and flashes were seen on the outskirts of the city. Tracer fire and orange flashes went skyward in reply.
Well, I was planning to go to Quaker meeting tomorrow anyway. I always go if I can. It restores a little space of calm, sanity, peacefulness, and loving-kindness in a world which, God knows, needs every ounce it can get of those qualities.
Now, even more reason to go.
It’s the policies, stupid!
More moaning and handwringing in Washington this week over the everywhere evident lack of success of the US government’s campaign to “sell” the US to the hearts and minds of Muslims around the world. Condi Rice gave a major speech at the US Institute of Peace Thursday on this theme. The next day, the WaPo‘s Robin Wright had a front-page article joining and amplifying the general bemoaning.
“Oh, if only some well-conceived p.r. campaign could come along and just unlock the magic door that would enable the always well-intentioned US government to explain its good intentions to the world’s Muslim masses” …That seems to be the theme.
People like Rice and Wright who harp on it so much either forget completely, or seek to minimize to near-zero, one simply fact:
It’s not the “values” or the “image” of the US that Muslims around the world “hate”.
It’s the policies, stupid!
So one more p.r. push–in a series that is already, let’s face it, very long and thus far completely unsuccessful– just ain’t going to succeed. Here’s my advice to Condi and her minions, and Robin Wright (who should know better) and all her colleagues in the major US media:
Why don’t you quit sitting around agonizing over whether “Radio Sawa” or some slick little new US-funded news magazine in Urdu will finally “do the trick”. And then start looking instead at the policies, the policies, the policies.
If US citizens and our appointed leaders really listen to what the grievances that other people around the world have about the content of the US government’s policies; if we/they engage in serious dialogue about those grievances, and then actually change the policies that are seen–in many cases, rightly–as bullying, imperial, abusive, and just plain unfair… If all that happened, then no slick p.r. campaign would even be needed to “sell” America to the 1.3 billion Muslims and the several billions of other, non-Muslim critics that the US has around the world.
Policies like what, you may ask?
US tanks rampaging in Najaf
Tragic folly. Tragic folly.
Why do the US tanks prowling round Najaf look so like the Israeli tanks prowling round Ramallah? Why do US tanks in Sadr City look like Israeli tanks in Gaza?
(Maybe because they are all embodiments of the same, extremely bullying mindset?)
But why, oh why, does anyone in the US chain of command think that such a naked use of crushing military force could even possibly be a way to build a lasting peace in Iraq?
Indeed, is any actual strategic “thinking” going on, on the American side, at all? Or is it simply that people up and down the chain of command are all just driven by the same childish desire to “put a major hurt” on Sadr’s supporters that was expressed by Marine Maj. Holahan on Tuesday?
That is a distinct possibility. It is also a very scary thought.
Najaf: US command chain broken
Yesterday evening I started to tease apart some of the political stuff that’s been happening in Iraq, over the now-linked issues of Moqtada’s stand-off in Najaf and the National Conference going ahead in Baghdad. Overnight, I started wondering about the decisionmaking on the US-forces side.
Who on the US side had made the decision to start and then maintain the confrontation against Moqtada? I wondered. The answers that are now starting to become available make depressing reading, and portray a command system for the US forces in Iraq that looks seriously broken.
These answers–which are still not totally complete–come in an informative piece in the NYT by Alex Berenson and John F. Burns. Datelined from Najaf, and citing officers in the local commands of the Marines and US Army right there in the city, the two men write:
- Acting without the approval of the Pentagon or senior Iraqi officials, the Marine officers said in recent interviews, they turned a firefight with Mr. Sadr’s forces on Thursday, Aug. 5, into a eight-day pitched battle…
They continue by noting that:
- Fighting here continues, and what the Marines had hoped would be a quick, decisive action has bogged down into a grinding battle that appears to have strengthened the hand of Mr. Sadr, whose stature rises each time he survives a confrontation with the American military. It may have weakened the credibility of the interim Iraqi government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, showing him, many Iraqis say, to be alternately rash and indecisive, as well as ultimately beholden to American overrule on crucial military and political matters.
Actually, I would describe the negative political consequences of that unbelievably rash decision by the local Marines commanders in much stronger terms than Berenson and Burns do.
Compared with the situation back on August 1, before the present round of escalation in Najaf, I think (for the reasons I indicated yesterday, and earlier) it is indubitably the case that Moqtada has become politically stronger inside Iraq, and Allawi weaker.
In addition, the all-important plan to rebuild a viable Iraqi security force has been set back considerably once again. And once again, as in the April round of escalations, the decomposing of a large chunk of the Iraqi security force has been caused by the US Marines going all gung-ho into a quite unnecessary local military confrontation and then–since they require a local Iraqi-force “cover–forcing the still-fragile Iraqi forces to join them and thus forcing the Iraqi forces into an unnecessary and politically challenging battle long before they are militarily or politically ready for any such test.
Is it any wonder that the fledgling Iraqi forces fell apart once again, when faced with such a test? Do the Marines have no learning curve at all, I wonder?
In both cases–April, Fallujah, and August, Najaf–these confrontations came almost immediately after the Marines, deploying to replace US Army units, decided unilaterally to change the “rules of engagement” under which the Army had operated, which in both cases had previously kept the Army units out of the known geographic areas where their presence would be seen as immediately provocative.
So here’s my second question: Why on earth would decisions like changing the existing rules of engagement be left to the local officers, rather than requiring authorization from higher up the chain of command?
The concept of “fire control” is a crucial one in the conduct of any military operations. At the small-unit level, it has to do with using resources efficiantly in order to achieve the objectives. At a larger-unit level it becomes more strategic and political, as well.
Did those escalatory, gung-ho decisions made by the local Marines officers serve or dis-serve the broad strategic objectives of the US in Iraq?
Politics in Iraq
The delegation from Baghdad did not get to meet Moqtada Sadr Tuesday. (I
wonder if that had anything to do with the possibility that the delegates
flew into Najaf on a US Blackhawk chopper, as Jazeera reported?) But
the news is that the delegation will try again Wednesday or Thursday …
Even more importantly, we should all be looking at the many signs there are
that a lively political process is currently underway inside Iraq today
. That, despite all the moves the US forces are constantly making
to try to escalate the military/insecurity situation.
It’s still hard to say how this political process will turn out. Contrary
to what some pro-Allawist people have continued to try to say, Moqtada is
nowhere near being “run out of town on a rail” (in the infelicitous phrasing
of US journo Chris Allbritton.)
Indeed, Moqtada has been doing really well, politically, over the
past ten days. Not least, he has forced the whole 1,300-member
Iraqi “National Conference” to focus almost totally on his issue, rather
than on the planned agenda of signing smoothly off on the election-prep plans
previously cooked up by Allawi and his cronies.
To try to get a reading on the political situation inside the
country, I’ve been doing a little search in “all the usual sources”–mostly in English,
but also Al-Hayat in Arabic. I found some very interesting items,
which I’ll just quickly list here.