Author: Helena

Virginia native killed in Iraq

This report from Abingdon, Virginia, a great little town in the Appalachian southwest of the state.

    Staff Sgt. Greg Pennington, 37, had been living with his Army unit in one of Saddam Hussein’s daughter’s castles, said his father, Aulbin Pennington of Konnarock.
    The elder Pennington had received a Father’s Day call from his son on Sunday morning…
    Monday morning, his daughter-in-law, Janet, called from Fort Hood, Texas, and told him Greg had been killed in action…
    Pennington was stationed at Fort Hood. His father said his son and Janet had been married for five years and had no children. He had been in the Army 12 years and in Iraq for more than three months.

Thanks to Yankeedoodle of Today in Iraq for the attention he pays to presenting the state-by-state reports on US casualties.

How Hiiiiiigh can you go?

I admit I’m really enjoying seeing this whole war-crimes prosecution unfolding regarding the Abu Ghraib guards.
As I predicted, the first bunch of indictees there who are actually (unlike Sivits) contesting their cases, are building a defense of “I was following orders”. Quite rightly, the Nuremberg Principles spell out that–in any situation where, as in the case of the Abu Ghraib guards, the individuals concerned have the possibility of exercizing moral choice— the “following orders” claim cannot provide a complete defense. But it can still, certainly, be a relavant factor in any trial of a person lower down the chain of command…
And along the way there, we’ll get more and more and more information about just how high up the chain of command the orders and directives encouraging those cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatments came from.
This could all last for months– especially if further indictments, further and further up the chain of command, get handed out. As they certainly should. Given what we already know, from the leaked memos, from the record of Geoffrey Miller being transferred from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, etc., etc., this whole detainee-abuse issue is going to be bubbling and rattling away there on a front- or medium burner, news-wise, right through next November 2.
Excellent.
I’ve just been reading through the WaPo‘s piece on the bundle of documents that the the White House, Justice Dept etc released today on detainee-treatment issues…

Continue reading “How Hiiiiiigh can you go?”

Israelis in Iraq

I have been shocked–“shocked!”– to read in Sy Hersh’s latest piece in the New Yorker that Israelis, including Mossad operatives, have been all over Iraqi Kurdistan in the past 18 months.
Look, it’s always been perfectly clear that this whole administration is completely riddled with Israeli infiltration at every decisionmaking and operational level. I always simply assumed the US occupation forces throughout the whole of Iraq were just a continuation of that picture.
And indeed, when I was in DC last week, an old friend of mine who is retired from but still well connected to high US diplomatic and military circles confirmed to me that, “Yes, the Israelis have been all over Iraq ever since the start of the occupation… And certainly, they’ve been advising the ‘interrogation’ systems inside all the prisons there.”
In Sy’s piece, he tries to portray what he’s writing as something breathlessly new and unknown. (Prime example right there in the first graf: “In July 2003 … Israeli intelligence assets in Iraq were reporting that the insurgents had the support of Iranian intelligence operatives and other foreign fighters, who were crossing the unprotected border between Iran and Iraq at will. ” Duh. Everyone could see that the border was quite unprotected, and being raversed at will by all sorts of people from Iran. But the Bushites simply didn’t want to send in the manpower–American, or anyone else’s–that it would have taken to seal it.)

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Mainly about China

Yesterday, I drove to DC for two great reasons: to launch our 19-year-old
toward her summer job in Philadelphia, and to attend the wedding of an old
friend. Mazel tov, Lorna, Anne and Karl!

Today, I got back into some serious writing about Rwanda. I totally
have to get my book on violence in Africa written before the end of summer.

Last Thursday, the second of my columns reflecting on last month’s visit
to China,
China’s growing influence is hardly Communist expansion
, ran in the CSM. The main thrust of the piece
was to try to describe the role of the “Communist” Party in Chinese society
today.

Tell me any reactions you have.

(My editor there cut it ways too much! Grrr. She told me she needed to shoe-horn
an extra piece onto the page, for some reason.)

Today, in Asia Times Online, I saw
a great piece
by Ian Williams on the subject of the fears many US
citizens and lawmakers harbor regarding China’s continually amazing economic
growth. Ian, like me, is a Brit transplanted to these US shores, and
he certainly brings a very British and wryly declinist perspective to this
piece.

About the latest annual report presented to Congress June 15 by the “US China
Economic and Security Review Commission” he writes
that it,

read uncannily like the reports of the British
House of Commons on the upstart economy of the German
empire at the end of the Victorian era. It certainly
belies the complacent Panglossian optimism of the
administration of President George W Bush about the
present and future of the US economy.

He goes on to note a few key differences between the Victorian British and
current American situations–including the fact that back in those previous
days of imperial decline, the Germans did not hold a huge chunk of British
debt , as China holds US debt today…

Continue reading “Mainly about China”

The youngest of the 2,081

If you go to this site, you will find the results of the survey that Raed Jarrar and his team from CIVIC have done, that identified and listed 2,081 Iraqi civilian casualties from the first four months of the US government’s attacks against Iraq, March 21 – July 31, 2003.
Big thanks to Riverbend, who sent me to Raed’s site–and who has a new post of her own up on her blog, too.
Profound thanks and appreciation to Raed and all the 150 volunteers on the CIVIC team for their work. Doing the careful counting and evaluation was really important, as was their success in starting to put names and biographical details to many of the casualties.
Raed says about the civilian casualties:

    Two thousand killed, Four thousand injured.
    Each one of these thousands has a life, memories, hopes. Each one had his moments of sadness, moments of joy and moments of love.
    In respect to their sacred memory, I would appreciate it if you could spend some minutes reading the database file: read their names, and their personal details, and think about them as human beings, friends, and relatives — not mere figures and numbers.

He adds the following definitions:

    Civilian: anyone killed outside the battlefield, even if his original job was military (e.g. a soldier killed in his house is a civilian). Military: anyone killed while fighting in a battle, even if his original job was a civic one (e.g. an engineer killed while fighting as a Fidaee). We had primitive and simple tools of research, yet I believe our survey is credible and accountable.

I wanted to provide here some of the flavor of the tables in which he presents his data, which give important details like the occupation, monthly income, and number of dependents for each of those killed. (Maybe for the wounded, too. I didn’t check yet.)
However, I found I couldn’t ‘copy and paste’ any data from the form the way it was presented. (Is there a trick there that someone can tell me?) But what I did instead was type into my handy Palm Pilot the listing below, which gives all the names the teams gathered of children under one year of age who were killed in the US attacks.

Continue reading “The youngest of the 2,081”

Paul Johnson, R.I.P.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the life, the terror-stricken captivity, and outrageous death of Paul Johnson, and certainly thinking about the grief of the loving family members he left behind him.
It is horrifying to think that people there in Saudi Arabia kidnapped him and quite arrogantly “sentenced” him to death, and then killed him, on the grounds that he allegedly did technical work on the Kingdom’s fleet of Apache helicopters.
It does not diminish these feelings I have about Johnson’s treatment to point also to the distressingly large number of Palestinian people–more than 200* of them–who have been arrogantly “sentenced” to death, and then killed, on the basis of quite unproven allegations that they were involved in planning or supporting acts of anti-Israeli killing.
Or, to point to the number of Iraqis, Afghans, and others who have been either intentionally or unintentionally killed as a result of the US forces’ excessive recourse to violence since October 2001. (For example, the 22 people killed in Fallujah, Iraq, today by a US air strike. US commander Mark Kimmitt claimed the house they targeted was used by fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqaw, though the US military also admitted here was no sign Zarqawi himself was there when it was destroyed. Reuters reported from Fallujah that, “Furious Iraqis said the dead included women and children.”)
Each and every one one of these lives snuffed out was a life that carried it with the possibility–and in many cases, the actuality– of hope, grace, and love. How coarsened have we become if we cannot understand the simple fact that every human life is infinitely precious?

Continue reading “Paul Johnson, R.I.P.”

Passaro indictment: why him?

You’ve probably read about David Passaro, the 38-year-old former contract employee for the CIA in Afghanistan who was charged Thursday with assaulting a prisoner during three days of interrogation there and the prisoner then died…
Have you asked yourself why David Passaro, of all the possible number of people involved in just such incidents in Afghanistan–where the number of deaths under interrogation goes into, I believe, at least the double digits–gets indicted?
Today, an excellently researched and reported story in the WaPo by Susan Schmidt and Dana Priest gives one possible answer.
You see, the person killed in that incident was a man called Abdul Wali who last June 21 voluntarily gave himself up for questioning at the CIA/Special Forces base at Asadabad–and he had been accompanied to the base by the Hyder Akbar, the 18-year-old, US-eduacted son of a nearby, US-installed provincial governor, Sayed Fazl Akbar.
Schmidt and Priest explain further that:

    Portions of a tape-recorded diary that Hyder Akbar kept during a visit with his father were played Dec. 12 on National Public Radio.
    Sayed Fazl Akbar, speaking into his son’s tape recorder, said he asked the Americans to hold off using military force to capture Wali, who he said “had been on the Americans’ and the coalition force’s most-wanted list for cooperating with terrorists or being a terrorist.” Wali was deeply fearful of turning himself in to the Americans, said the elder Akbar, so Akbar sent his son to go with him “as a sign of trust.”
    Said Hyder Akbar: “So I took him to the Americans. And, like, they’re asking him where he was 14 days ago on the night of the three rockets. And this guy, like, don’t have calendars, you know? . . . I just put my hand on his shoulder and I let him know: ‘Just say the truth. Nothing is going to happen if you just say the truth.’ And he was absolutely petrified, and he could barely whisper the okay.”
    Three days later, Hyder Akbar and his father returned to Asadabad to check on Wali. A translator named Steve and another American named Dave sat down with them, according to Hyder Akbar, and said, “Unfortunately, Abdul Wali passed away.” Hyder Akbar said: “My jaw dropped. It’s like ‘Oh, my God.’ . . .

Okay, I just went to the NPR website and dropped $4.95 to download the text of the segment of ‘Morning Edition’ that featured “Hyder Akbar’s audio diary”. And I’ll give you some (strictly ‘fair use’!) excerpts from it later on.
But it does certainly occur to me that, given the domestic-Afghan political angle on this whole story, the administration may well have felt virtually obliged–in this case, given Abdul Wali’s relationship with provincial governor Akbar–to take some action against his killers.
Another interesting question occurs to me, too:

Continue reading “Passaro indictment: why him?”

And now, the disappeared

First, Rumsfeld confesses that it was indeed he who ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi terrorism suspect held for more than seven months near Baghdad without notifying the Red Cross.
Reuters’ Charles Aldinger reports today that:

    Rumsfeld told reporters CIA Director George Tenet asked him last November “to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam”…
    “And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual (with the International Committee of the Red Cross). And we did that,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing hours after U.S. President George W. Bush again voiced support for the beleaguered Pentagon chief.

I don’t know why, but it just burns me up, the way that in the aftermath of every additional horrifying revelation about the misdeeds of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Bush always goes to these extraordinary lengths to tell us that Bombs-Away Don is just a “fabulous Defense Secretary.”
It’s so tasteless. It’s so hideous. It’s so inane. (End of rant.)
Aldinger added to his Reuters account that,

    Rumsfeld said the man’s case was unique, but he was vague when reporters asked whether the United States was holding other “ghost” prisoners without Red Cross knowledge in Iraq.

Gee, I wonder why he was “vague”?
Maybe because he knew that the organization Human Rights First (that used to be called Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights) was coming out–also today–with an important new report titled Ending Secret detention that sketches out the scope of the US military’s globe-circling network of detention facilities?
A press release from HRF tells us that,

Continue reading “And now, the disappeared”

Saudi implosion?

How worried should we all be about the implosion of state authority in Saudi Arabia? Personally, I think we should all be very worried indeed:

  • The Saudi authorities have been trying since last Saturday to locate kidnaped American helicopter technician Paul Johnson, without success. On Tuesday, his kidnappers issued that grisly video showing him quaking in fear while his captors spelled out their intention to murder him Friday if the Saudi authorities don’t release a list of Qaeda prisoners.
  • This, coming in the wake of the past two months’ bombings against residential compounds housing foreign contractors, and other anti-foreigner actions in the Kingdom
  • Not surprisingly, foreign contract workers have been leaving the Kingdom in droves. In an evident vicious-cycle effect, this exodus is itself impacting the Kingdom’s ability to provide/ensure basic public security, given the large role foreign contractors play in supervising essential elements of the internal-security system.

Regarding the role of foreign contractors in the Kingdom’s security system, the Global Security website has a November 2003 analysis of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), the component of the Saudi security system long headed by and loyal to the country’s effective ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz. This analysis spells out that:

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Sen. Durbin’s amendment to prohibit torture

I’ve been really happy to see that Senator Dick Durbin (Democrat from Illinois) has taken the lead in seeking to attach to this year’s Defense Appropriations Bill an Amendment to enact a PROHIBITION ON TORTURE OR CRUEL, INHUMAN, OR DEGRADING TREATMENT OR PUNISHMENT.
Moveon.org has a good little email campaign urging people to call their Senators to urge them to support the Durbin Amendment. I think the Amerndment will be voted on today.
I just called both my Senators– one of them is the powerful Sen. John Warner. The people I spoke to in Warner’s and George Allen’s offices both said their bosses “had not yet decided which way to vote” on the Durbin Amendment.
Let’s hope that (a) they get a large number of very persuasive calls urging support of Durbin, and (b) they are open to persuasion on this.
I looked quickly through the text of the Durbin Amendment as provided by Moveon. It is drafted in a pretty compelling way.
In the operative part, it states:

    No person in the custody or under the physical control of the United States shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment that is prohibited by the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.

It also requires the Secretary of Defense to report back to the congressional defense committees regarding what he has done to implement this, and to continue sending,

    on a timely basis and not less than twice each year, a report to Congress on the circumstances surrounding any investigation of a possible violation of the prohibition … by a member of the Armed Forces or by a person providing services to the Department of Defense on a contract basis.

The Amendment prefaces all that operational language with references to a number of the existing laws against torture and other abuse that are already in both in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and other portions of domestic law and in international treaties that have been ratified by the Senate.
It also highlights the following very significant quote from George W. Bush, that I confess I hadn’t seen before:

Continue reading “Sen. Durbin’s amendment to prohibit torture”