Category: War crimes etc

We should be clear about the moral quality of the blood-drenched career of Imad Mughniyeh, the high-level Hizbullah security operative who was assassinated in Damascus on February 12, apparently by Israel. Mughniyeh has been credibly accused of having master-minded a number of acts that have to count as significant atrocities: the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, and then of its annex, in 1983; the bombings of a Jewish community center and an Israeli consular center in Buenes Aires in 1992-94; the kidnappings of western civilians in Beirut, and perhaps the killing of Malcolm Kerr, the president of AUB. (I am not counting here actions taken against military personnel who have after all placed themselves in a position where they have a “right” to kill under certain circumstances and also knowingly accept the risk that they might be killed.)
What should one seek to do with or about a person like Imad Mughniyeh?
My main answer when considering the question of what to do with the perpetrators of atrocities– and let’s face it, gratuitously launching a war of invasion against a foreign country is also an atrocity; and was certainly recognized as such in the operations of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals– is that we, human society in general, clearly need to be protected against the future depredations of such people. We need to be able to credibly and verifiably incapacitate their ability to re-offend.
But, and this is a large “but”, there are many different ways of achieving this. Containing such people, cutting off their access to the networks on which they depend for their depradations, and possibly even reintegrating them into society are all ways that the incapacitation goal can be reached. I have written a lot in this regard about, for example, the case of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Ugandan movement the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), who is credibly accused of masterminding and committing atrocities that were of an (anti-)esthetic order of repugnance far beyond anything Mughniyeh has been accused of doing, and that probably also ended and blighted the lives of many more noncombatants than Mughniyeh ever did.
Mughniyeh was far from the “worst” perpetrator of atrocities in the world, but he gained particular notoriety and attention in the west because so many of his victims were westerners.
Anyway, with regard to Kony, the majority of the Acholi people who provided the greatest number of his victims, though by no means all of them, have argued strongly for an approach to his incapacitation that is centered on his his reintegration into settled society. (That has put them at odds with the Hague-based International Criminal Court, which seeks to arrest and try Kony. But the Acholi and many or most other Ugandans don’t want to do that, since it might drive Kony’s supporters into further acts of retaliatory violence. Thus, the ICC’s indictment has been stuck– and because of it, so has the process of making peace and normalizing people’s livelihoods in broad swathes of Northern Uganda… )
My main point: If you want to incapacitate a perpetrator of heinous acts, there is certainly more than one way to do it. At this point, we can identify three:

(1) assassination;
(2) arrest him and put him on trial; and
(3) reintegration, which can be thought of in a broadly political as well as personal way.

Successive governments of Israel and the US have both, for many years now, been very permissive toward the idea of assassination. Assassination is frequently also called “extra-judicial execution” (EJE); it is good to focus on that adjective “extra-judicial.” Yes, it does mean that such killings are undertaken outside of any process that has any standing at all in international law. International law makes some provision for “hot pursuit” of opponents in a war-time setting. But the EJE’s that Israel and the US have pursued for some years now fall far short of the criteria for those kinds of killings.
Despite the clearly extra-judicial character of assassinations, President Bush and officials in his administration have gone further than any other western leader in using the discourse of “justice” to refer to them. Right after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush (in)famously said, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” That second alternative there is particularly sneaky and bullying/aggressive, and is a direct abuse of the whole concept of justice.
In the aftermath of the Mughniyeh assassination, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, “One way or the other, he was brought to justice.”
The Israelis have used a policy of assassinations, in a relatively limited way, since as far back as the 1970s, when they killed a number of civilian, intellectual leaders in the PLO in retaliation for Black September’s killings of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Even at that time, they went through one renowned episode, in Norway in 1974, when they killed a Moroccan waiter after having mistakenly “identified” him as my one-time neighbor in Beirut, Ali Abu Hassan Salameh. They did kill Abu Hassan himself, along with some passersby, when they targeted him with a car-bomb in the street leading to my home, in 1979.
Later, within the Palestinian community they assassinated Yahya Ayyash and Fathi Shikaki in the mid-1990s. And prior to that, in Lebanon, they had killed Hizbullah leaders Ragheb Harb and Abbas Musawi. (See Uri Avnery’s devastating critique of the counter-productive nature of all those killings, here.)
In 1997, the Mossad tried to kill Khaled Meshaal with a chemical agent, in Jordan. But that was a devastating fiasco for the Netanyahu government, which ended up having to supply the antidote to the Jordanians and also to free Hamas’s spiritual mentor Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and tens of Hamas and other prisoners in order to win the safe return of the two Mossad (= Keystone Cops) operatives involved.
The US took up the policy of assassinations in a big way after 9/11. (Much earlier, of course, there had been numerous CIA and CIA-assisted assassination operations during the Cold War, including against Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and others.)
But the new policy that the Bush administration pursued after 9/11– “we’ll ‘bring justice to’ our enemies”– gave the Israelis very broad new permission to step up their use of ssassinations. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights records that between the start of the Second Intifada on 29 September, 2000 and 23 January, 2008 Israeli assassination operations had succeeded in “liquidating” a staggering total of 475 “targeted persons” along with 227 non-targeted civilians.
Among those snuffed out in this way were Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Abdul-Aziz Rantisi, Saleh Shehadeh, and many others from Hamas’s leadership in Gaza. When Shehadeh was killed– with a heavy bomb dropped from the air– nearly two dozen members of his family, including many children, were also killed. On one occasion when they tried to kill Mahmoud Zahhar, he escaped but one of his sons was killed.
After the most recent killing of Mughniyeh, many westerners rejoiced. They seemed oblivious to two key aspects of the situation:

(1) If past experience is anything to go by, this killing will only further stoke, rather than dampen, the determination of Hizbullah and its allies to confront western plans in the Middle East; and
(2) To cheer at any act of extra-judicial execution is to undermine the whole idea of the rule of law.

The figures on the ease with which today’s Israel has recourse to EJE’s should give everyone pause. There is absolutely no way they can claim that the “process” through which these targets are chosen is defensible. Extra-judicial executions are just that: extra-judicial; outside the purview of law and of civilization. An incident like the Mughniyeh killing does not change that.
Such incidents also, by the way, help ensure that the cycle of violence keeps on turning…

I want to second the judgment that Pat Lang expressed over at his blog today, to the effect that there is no prospect of any independent international investigation into Benazir’s killing.
Hillary Clinton– you remember her, she’s the one who keeps touting her claimed “experience” in governance, including foreign affairs– has been making a big deal on the campaign path of issuing strident calls for just such an investigation. The potent sub-text there being that no-one can believe the credibility of any investigation organized solely by the Pakistani authorities.
Well, yes and no– though the speed and vigor with which Hillary launched her call for an international investigation looked, in itself, highly politicized and confrontational.
But Lang is quite right to say that no such investigation will be convened. Who would do it? The only possible authorizing body with any legitimacy would be the Security Council, and there are four governments with veto power there– perhaps even five– that would almost certainly block any attempt to embarrass Pres. Musharraf at this time.
Which is of course very different from Lebanon, 2005, where Pres. Lahoud had no staunch, veto-wielding supporters to cover his back on the SC.
Lang was quite correct to write,

Bottom Line: Crimes like these are really matters of international politics, and the large countries’ interests still govern. All else is just illusion. International law? A pretty conceit. The strong still are strong.
There will be no effective international investigation into Bhutto’s death.

And while we’re on the subject of internationally launched criminal investigations and other criminal proceedings, let’s: (a) remember that today is the first anniversary of the ghastly travesty of the execution of Saddam Hussein, conducted by a kangaroo court that was convened under the eager and highly politicized auspices of the US military occupation; (b) look at how incredibly divisive, inconclusive, and partisan the SC’s Hariri investigation has turned out to be; and (c) review the record of all the other criminal proceedings the international “community” has launched over the past 14 years…
It is very hard indeed to conclude that these proceedings have had a constructive record, on balance, either in deterring the future commission of atrocities– sometimes in the very same countries where the indicted/convicted miscreants operated– or in institutionalizing norms of accountability and good governance in the countries targeted by them.
All the people in the international community who continue to root for “international” or internationally-launched criminal proceedings that turn out not to be responsible to anything resembling a democratic polity, and not to bring about the promised policy outcomes (as listed above), should reflect carefully on– and seek to learn from– the disastrous record of the Saddam trial.
Especially every year on December 30.

And so, under the new order at the Christian Science Monitor, I do have a new column “occasional contribution” in today’s paper. (It is also here.) It’s on the Charles Taylor case– the trial of the former president of Liberia that is being conducted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone. This trial is being conducted not in the SCSL’s own seat in Freetown, but in one of the ICC’s unused courtrooms in The Hague, instead.
In the piece I write the following text… Be aware, though, that the mark-ups, formating, and hyperlinks in what follows are ** Exclusive to JWN!

In 2002, when the UN was figuring out how to deal with the aftermath of the many atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s civil war, they tried to correct flaws that had become evident during the work of Africa’s oldest war-crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Serious criticisms of the ICTR have been expressed – by myself and others – on five main grounds. Despite the excellent motives of ICTR’s founders and officials, it has been:
1. selective in its choice of cases…
2. disconnected, both geographically and conceptually, from the primary stakeholders whom it seeks to serve, inside Rwanda…
3. very expensive, gobbling up international aid dollars…
4. largely unaccountable, either to the survivors of the Rwandan genocide or to anyone else,
5. [a]nd it has strongly polarized Rwandan politics.

So in Sierra Leone, the UN located its new war-crimes court inside the country, and, by making it a “joint” court with the national justice system, they tried to maximize the good effects it would have on that system. Also, alongside the court, the UN established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, that could – like its earlier model in South Africa – help build national reconciliation while getting the truth out about earlier atrocities. (The Sierra Leonean TRC finished its work in 2004, leaving a mixed record of achievement.)

Regarding the “selectivity of indictments” at the SCSL, I’ll note that it has indicted Charles Taylor and ten other individuals, with all the others apparently being Sierra Leonians. It has not, however, indicted any representatives of the numerous international shady businesses– arms dealers, etc– whose decisions and support kept the SL civil war going for so many long years. Indeed, in the article I note that one of Charles Taylor’s closest business partners was the US televangelist Pat Robertson. Maybe, to make a truly effective point that these modern-era war-crimes courts will make sure no-one, however well connected, is above the law, the SCSL could have indicted Robertson on a charge of “aiding and abetting”, at the very least?
As it is, though, don’t all these courts– and especially the ICC– look worryingly like European-dominated institutions that seek to haul over the coals some naughty Africans while completely ignoring the role that people of European heritage have played for centuries, and all too often continue to play, in fomenting, enabling, and conniving in the commission of atrocious violence in Africa?
Then, regarding the expense of the SCSL, I did try to do find out the size of its global budget. The best estimate I could come up with, from combining the figures in various annual reports and doing one needed act of interpolation (for FY2003-04), was that for its whole duration, 2002-2009, SCSL will have budgets totaling about $200 million… and that, to try a total of 11 indictees. Which would be a per-case processing cost of around $18 million. This would be a considerable improvement over the ICTR, whose per-case costs were at one point running at about $43 million… But the figure still looks outrageous and excessive.
(Per-case processing costs for the many, often very complex amnesty applications processed by South Africa’s TRC came to just under $4,300– see my Amnesty After Atrocity book, p.193.)
You might also want to take into consideration that in 2004 the GDP per capita in PPP$ for Sierra Leone’s 5.3 million war-battered people was $561, while for Liberians it was literally unmeasurable because of the lengthy perpetuation of post-civil war impoverishment and social breakdown in the country. (In the Netherlands, meanwhile, it was a very comfortable $31,789.) In 2004, Sierra Leone received a total of $359.7 million of overseas aid.
… And now, more news just in from IRIN in Kampala, where Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda told reporters on 4 July that the Ugandan penal code would have to be changed to include in it a provision to use Mato Oput, which is a system of “traditional” justice practised by the Acholi community of northern Uganda.
Big hat-tip to Jonathan for passing on the link to this story, btw!
The Acholi have been the community worst affected by the 11-year war between Lord’s Resistance Army insurgents and the government forces. Both sides in that war have used brutal, extremely inhumane tactics against noncombatants– mainly, but by no means exclusively Acholi– who have been caught in the middle. The Acholi are also the community from which LRA leader Joseph Kony and his main sidekicks all emerged.
Meanwhile, Kony and three of his sidekicks are the subjects of a full 50% of the indictments that ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has issued so far in his four years on the job, and for perhaps understandable institution-building reasons Ocampo has so far remained quite unwilling to withdraw or even suspend those indictments… a fact that has considerably complicated the ability of Uganda’s peace negotiators to complete the task that most Acholis and perhaps most other Ugandans as well want them to achieve, which is to get Kony and his sidekicks out of the bush— a place from where they are able to pose a continuing threat to all the peoples of Northern Uganda.
(Last July I spent a bit of time in Uganda researching this whole situation. You can read a lot of my writings on that if you go to this post on Transitional Justice Forum and follow the links from there.)
The fate of Charles Taylor– offered a safe haven and then later handed over from it to the Americans and the UN for trial in the US-backed SCSL– has been mentioned as an additional complicating factor by people involved in the Northern Uganda peace negotiations.
Here’s a bit more from that IRIN report of the statements from Rugunda– who is also the Kampala government’s main negotiator in the peace talks with the LRA:

Government and LRA delegations to the peace talks in the Southern Sudanese capital of Juba reached an agreement on 29 June on the principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed during the conflict.
“The parties committed themselves to ensuring accountability and reconciliation,” said Rugunda. “This will require all those who committed crimes to admit the crimes they committed. They will be taken through a transparent justice mechanism to be agreed upon.”
Those who confess to war crimes under the Mato Oput mechanism will be required to ask for forgiveness and pay reparations.
Government soldiers accused of human rights abuses will, however, continue to be tried under martial law, the minister said.
Comparing the two justice systems, Ruganda said the national penal code was punitive, while Mato Oput was “restorative [and] hence promotes reconciliation”.
“We agreed to formulate and adopt an alternative justice mechanism which will draw on the strengths of the two justice mechanisms and address the weaknesses of each system,” he said. “By so doing, the question of impunity will be addressed while at the same time reconciliation will be promoted.”

All power to the peace negotiators there, I say! I am still haunted by the round-circle discussion I had with a group of camp leaders in Unyama IDP camp last July… and how the residents in that bleak, dusty camp could only look out at the green hillsides where the ruins of their homesteads were, since the ongoing state of war and the government’s regs still kept them cooped up in the camp… and how wistfully one of them said the thing he really hoped for most was that peace could be achieved before the next planting season.
Didn’t happen. Let’s hope that now no more planting seasons will pass before peace can be achieved and these people are allowed to return to their homes and farms. I hope the very urbane Mr. Ocampo is capable of understanding the importance of that.

Great news from Juba, Southern Sudan, where on May 2nd negotiators from the Government of Uganda and the once violently oppositionist group the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) signed an agreement that goes considerably beyond a ceasefire and starts to sketch out the political contours of a final settlement.
This settlement will include the return of the LRA’s fighters to Ugandan society, the much-longed-for return to their lands and farmsteads of 1.5 million or so Ugandans– mainly but not exclusively ethnic Acholis– from the north of their country whom the government has held penned up in strategic hamlets (“IDP camps”) for the past ten years, and some re-ordering of power relations within Ugandan society to increase the real inclusion of those communities into national society.
The Acholis have been the main (but not the only) targets of LRA violence and are also the community from which he and most LRA fighters come and in whose name they claim to speak.
The latest accord was signed by Henry Oryem Okello (perhaps himself an ethnic Acholi?) on behalf of the government and by Martin Ojul, the LRA’s peace delegation chairman. The Daily Monitor notes that the signing was was witnessed not only by the two delegations’ host there in Juba, the Vice-President of Southern Sudan and chief mediator Riek Machar, but also by observers from Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania.
That indicates significant African-state buy-in and support for the agreement.
That report from The Daily Monitor gives these further details:

The agreement on comprehensive solutions handles issues of participation in national politics, system of government, inclusiveness in participation in the government, ensuring equal opportunities, participation in state institutions, the judiciary, security organs, Internally Displaced Persons, reconstruction of Northern Uganda, land and restocking of cattle in the war affected areas.
“The parties agree that members of the LRA who are willing and qualify shall be integrated into the national armed forces and other security agencies in accordance with subsequent agreements between the parties” the draft copy obtained by Daily Monitor indicates.
The two parties also agreed that the children of the departed LRA combatants shall benefit alongside other conflict-affected children from the Universal Primary Education and Universal Post-Primary Education and Training.
On land, the parties agreed that fair and equitable compensation shall be payable in case of expropriation of land.
“No expropriation shall be allowed except in the public interest and in accordance with the law” the agreement reads.
It states that land owners whose land has been used for settlement of IDPs or establishment of barracks and detaches, will be entitled to repossess their land or to receive fair and just compensation.
“The government shall strengthen and fast track re-stocking programmes in the affected areas by committing additional resources to mitigate the effect of losses of livestock taking into account individual losses and the need to improve the quality of livestock in the affected areas,” the draft copy of the agreement said.
“The parties affirm the principle of proportional representation and agree to adopt security measures.
On the system of governance, the parties agreed that government shall, through the Equal Opportunities Commission, review and assess the nature and extent of any regional or ethnic imbalances and disparities in participation in central government institutions and shall take all necessary steps to remedy any anomalies.

Hat-tip to Jonathan Edelstein for having posted about this agreement on Headheeb.
He concludes with this:

The talks have now adjourned to May 11 to address amnesty from the international war crimes charges against five key LRA leaders. This has proven an obstacle on a number of past occasions necause the Internatonal Criminal Court prosecutor’s office, which is the sole body authorized to withdraw the indictments, has declared that it won’t honor any amnesty agreed by the Ugandan government. With peace so close, and with a Ugandan accord potentially critical to other peacemaking efforts in the region, now is the time for the ICC to change its mind and, if necessary, participate directly in the Juba talks. Whatever the LRA’s atrocities, and they are both real and extreme, the international community’s abstract need to punish them does not outweigh what may be millions of central Africans’ best chance for peace and stability.

In connection with the ICC issue, I see that Elise Keppler and Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch have recently been in Uganda. They have an article in The Monitor in which they argue:

the warring parties and the mediators cannot bargain away prosecution of the LRA leaders who have been charged with grave crimes. Simply put, a solution that avoids meaningful justice will undercut the prospects for a durable peace.

I strongly disagree. First of all, these two– like so many other activists within the western-based human rights movement– seem to be completely conflating the concept of “justice” with the idea of the orderly working of a western-style criminal court (though goodness knows, even in the west there are numerous other ways in which the concept of “justice” is understood.) Secondly, the history of the world has been full of peace settlements in which perpetrators of even extremely grave conflict-era atrocities were not all prosecuted; and many of those peace agreements have proven remarkably durable over time. (Perhaps if Keppler and Dicker really want to hold perpetrators of very serious conflict-era atrocities to account in a criminal court, they might start closer to HRW’s home and start agitating for the prosecution of the US’s very own ‘shock and awe” campaigns around the world??)
Keppler and Dicker write that they did go visit some of the members of the IDP communities in northern Uganda. And they write this about what they learned and heard there:

Nearly all those we met in displaced camps expressed an intense desire to return to their homes. A number conveyed real concern that prosecution of LRA leaders could further delay their departure and therefore saw the ICC as an obstacle. A distinct vocal minority, however, declared a desire to see those most responsible brought to trial, although they questioned how the ICC could arrest those it had charged.

I read this as them clearly conceding that most of the people they heard from in the camps saw the ICC as an obstacle– which tracks exactly with my own findings when I was in northern Uganda last summer. But Keppler and Dicker– no doubt writing after their own return either to the comforts of a decent hotel in Kampala, or perhaps after a return to their comfortable homes and well-equipped offices in New York– blithely assume that they know what’s best for these people! (It would be nice if they had written a little more about the extremely bleak, comfortless, and often actually lethal conditions inside the IDP camps there.)
It is also faintly hilarious when they write: “A peace worth having cannot rest on impunity. It is up to key players such as the UN Secretary-General’s special envoy, former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano to convey this message loud and clear at the Juba talks.”
Chissano, after all, was the far-sighted leader of Mozambique’s Frelimo government who intitiated and then concluded a peace agreement with the Renamo insurgents that was based precisely on the approach of using a blanket amnesty for all perpetrators of conflict-era violence (of which there had been considerable amounts), and on traditional healing and sociopolitical reconstruction.
Keppler and Dicker are notably silent about the inspiring achievements that Chissano and his country registered in building a stable and rule-of-law-based peace on the basis of this approach. If you want to read my own reflections on the contribution that war crimes amnesties made to building a sustainable peace in post-civil war Mozambique and post-apartheid South Africa, you can do so here. (And if you want to read the whole book of which that is the concluding paragraph, you can get it from the publishers.)
But anyway, the main message of this post is: a big congratulations to all the negotiators for the work they’ve done so far! And let’s hope they can finish the rest of the work on the agreement soon, and get implementation off to a successful start before the next planting season.

The iconic “hooded man” in those shocking pictures from Abu Ghraib was also a man, not just an icon; and at least one of the men subjected to that form of torture is a very brave man, too. His name is Ali Sh. Abbas, and Faiza al-Araji has today posted on her blog his sworn testimony regarding the treatment he received while he was in US detention in Iraq in late 2003, including what happened to him in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib.
I say he is brave because I know from my extensive work on issues of torture that (1) The intention of torturers is most often to break the independent personality of their victims, and that certainly appears to be the case in this instance; and (2) The specifics of many of the means of torture used in Abu Ghraib– as elsewhere in the long, sorry history of torture– were designed to humiliate the victim both at the time and subsequent to any possible later release, in order to make it much harder for that individual later to be bring him/herself to be able to speak openly about what had happened.
(See, for example, the recent case of bus driver Imad al-Kabir, in Egypt.)
That is why I say Mr. Abbas seems to be a brave man, because for a while now he has gone publicly on the record with his account of the extremely humiliating treatment he received, which included numerous acts of rape, enforced nudity, etc, in addition to the electrocuting– which he says did occur, though I believe the US military people charged in connection with the case had claimed that wiring up the prisoners was only a “show” for them, to make them talk…
The author of the affidavit on Faiza’s site seems to be the same person as the man in this NYT story from March 11, 2006, Ali Shalal Qaissi, who at that point claimed to be “the” iconic hooded prisoner from Abu Ghraib. I believe he is the same person– look at the photos in this Feb 7, 2007 blog post from the recent “Criminalizing War” conference held in Malaysia, which also features the testimony from Mr. Ali Sh. Abbas, and indeed reveals that that text was sworn as testimony in front of a Malaysian Commissioner of Oaths on, apparently, February 8, 2007. (I see a problem re the dating there? However, knowing the way that names get differently recorded in many Arab countries, I see no particular problem with the apparent “slipperiness” of this person’s name in various versions.)
I note that a few days after that March 2006 NYT story, the NYT ran a follow-up stating that “Military investigators had identified the man on the box as a different detainee who had described the episode in a sworn statement immediately after the photographs were discovered in January 2004, but then the man seemed to go silent.” In that story, Mr. Qaissi (Mr.Abbas) was reported as acknowledging that he was not the man in the specific, Penatgon-released photograph he had held up in a portrait that had accompanied the earlier NYT article. “But he and his lawyers maintain that he was photographed in a similar position and shocked with wires.”
The Pentagon maintains only one detainee was subjected to this treatment. Mr. Abbas claims that there was more than one.
The whole of Mr. Abbas’s sworn affidavit as posted on Faiza’s site should be read as widely as possible. (Be aware that some of the details he testifies to are extremely disturbing. You may need to think of a prayer of other self-care mechanism to help you during and after the reading.)
Many people in the human-rights community have been pushing for further prosecutions, including of people further up the chain of command, for the war crimes committed at Abu Ghraib. However I think it is equally important to pay attention to the victims/survivors of all such crimes and to do whatever we can to reinstate their humanity– including by listening and paying close attention to their testimony.
I therefore suggest that now that Mr. Abbas has shown himself willing to go as very publicly on the record as he did in Malaysia, the members of the U.S. Senate and House Armed Services Committees should be urged to contact him and any and other survivors of Abu Ghraib they can locate, with the following goals in mind:

A. to find a way to hear their testimony face-to-face or by videolink, whether in Jordan or elsewhere;
B. to probe any portions of that testimony further if they choose to do so (but to do this with the respect and sensitivity we should accord to any survivor of violent acts);
C. to use such testimonies to build a much fuller picture of what occurred in Abu Ghraib than the existing, very circumscribed record of court proceedings has allowed us; and
D. to start to design and run a program to provide compensation and post-trauma rehabiliation to all certified survivors of the torture rooms of Abu Ghraib and the other torture centers run by US government agencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Anyway, here are some of the important parts of Mr. Abbas’s testimony:
He was arrested on October 13, 2003, and was transferred to Abu Ghraib two days later. Immediately, he was subjected to humiliation treatment:

The first thing they did to me was to make a physical examination of my body and abused me. [Sounds like an invasive rectal examination? ~HC] Together with other detainees, we were made to sit on the floor and were dragged to the interrogation room. This so called room is in fact a toilet (approximately 2m by 2m) and was flooded with water and human waste up to my heel level. I was asked to sit in the filthy water while the American interrogator stood outside the door, with the translator.
8. After the interrogation, I would be removed from the toilet, and before the next detainee is put into the toilet, the guards would urinate into the filthy water in front of the other detainees.

And then, note what the first question was:

9. The first question they asked me was, “Are you a Sunni or Shiia?” I answered that this is the first time I have been asked this question in my life. I was surprised by this question, as in Iraq there is no such distinction or difference. The American interrogator replied that I must answer directly the questions and not to reply outside the question. He then said that in Iraq there are Sunnis, Shiias and Kurds.

I find that intriguing. There are a number of possible (not mutually exclusive) motivations behind the interrogators’ insistence on that question. First, very likely, they did not even know the answer from the get-go; but being determined to categorize all Iraqi detainees according to their own evolving means of categorization they want to get this item clear on their records. Second, maybe they were also trying deliberately to strengthen the detainees’ degree of self-identification according to those categories?
Here is what then ensued:

11. When I answered that I am an Iraqi Muslim, the interrogator refused to accept my answer and charged me for the following offence:
(a) That I am anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.
(b) I supported the resistance
(c) I instigated the people to oppose the occupation
(d) That I knew the location of Osama bin Ladin
I protested and said that Muslims and Jews descended from the same historical family. I said that I could not be in the resistance because I am a disabled person and have an injured hand.
12. The interrogator accused me that I had injured my hand while attacking the American soldiers.

Now, when the person who translated this affidavit wrote “charged me for the following offenses”, I am assuming these were not formal charges, but rather accusations made in the context of the interrogation. But look at that first accusation there. What on earth relationship does being “anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic” have to the confrontation between the US and the Iraqis inside Iraq?
Then we have this:

14. When I did not cooperate, the interrogator asked me whether I considered the American army as “liberator” or “occupier”. When I replied that they were occupiers, he lost his temper and threatened me. He told me that I would be sent to Guantanamo Bay where even animals would not be able to survive.

Here is a clear attempt at mind control and the destruction of Mr. Abbas’s freedom of thought and analysis, and therefore of his independent personality.
He was then taken to another part of Abu Ghraib called “Fiji Land”,:

Each sector had five tents and surrounded by barb wires. When I was removed from the truck, the soldiers marked my forehead with the words “Big Fish” in red. All the detainees in this camp are considered “Big Fish”. I was located in camp “B”.
18. The living conditions in the camp were very bad. Each tent would have 45 to 50 detainees and the space for each detainee measured only 30cm by 30cm. We had to wait for 2 to 3 hours just to go to the toilets. There was very little water. Each tent was given only 60 litres of water daily to be shared by the detainees. This water was used for drinking and washing and cleaning the wounds after the torture sessions. They would also make us to stand for long hours.
19. Sometimes, as a punishment, no food is given to us. When food is given, breakfast is at 5.00 am, lunch is at 8.00 am and dinner at 1.00 pm. During Ramadhan, they bring food twice daily, first at 12.00 midnight and the second is given during fasting time to make the detainees break the religious duty of fasting.
20. During my captivity in the camp, I was interrogated and tortured twice. Each time I was threatened that I would be sent to Guantanamo Bay prison. During this period, I heard from my fellow detainees that they were tortured by cigarette burns, injected with hallucinating chemicals and had their rectum inserted with various types of instruments, such as wooden sticks and pipes. They would return to the camp, bleeding profusely. Some had their bones broken.
21. In my camp, I saw detainees brought over from a secret prison which I came to know later as being housed in the “Arabian Oil Institute” building, situated in the north of Baghdad. These detainees were badly injured.

So he stayed a month in those conditions… Then this:

22. After one month and just before sunset my number was called and they put a bag over my head and my hands were tied behind my back. My legs were also tied. They then transferred me to a cell.
23. When I was brought to the cell, they asked me in Arabic to strip but when I refused, they tore my clothes and tied me up again. They then dragged me up a flight of stairs and when I could not move, they beat me repeatedly. When I reached the top of the stairs, they tied me to some steel bars. They then threw at me human waste and urinated on me.
24. Next, they put a gun to my head and said that they would execute me there. Another soldier would use a megaphone to shout at me using abusive words and to humiliate me. During this time, I could hear the screams of other detainees being tortured. This went on till the next morning.
25. In the morning, an Israeli stood in front of me and took the bag from my head and told me in Arabic that he was an Israeli had interrogated and tortured detainees in Palestine. He told me that when detainees would not cooperate, they would be killed. He asked me repeatedly for names of resistance fighters. I told him that I do not know any resistance fighters but he would not believe me, and continued to beat me.
26. This Israeli dressed in civilian clothes tortured me by inserting in turn first with a jagged wooden stick into my rectum and then with the barrel of a rifle. I was cut inside and bled profusely. During this time, when any guard walked past me, they would beat me. I had no food for 36 hours.
27. The next morning, the Israeli interrogator came to my cell and tied me to the grill of the cell and he then played the pop song, “By the Rivers of Babylon” by Pop Group Boney M, continuously until the next morning. The effect on me was that I lost my hearing, and I lost my mind. It was very painful and I lost consciousness. I only woke up when the Israeli guard poured water on my head and face. When I regain consciousness, he started beating me again and demanded that I tell him of the names of resistance fighters and what activities that I did against the American soldiers. When I told him that I did not know any resistance fighters, he kicked me many times.
28. I was kept in the cell without clothes for two weeks. During this time, an American guard by the name of “Grainer” accompanied by a Moroccan Jew called Idel Palm ( also known as Abu Hamid) came to my cell and asked me about my bandaged hand which was injured before I was arrested. I told him that I had an operation. He then pulled the bandage which stained with blood from my hand and in doing so, tore the skin and flesh from my hands. I was in great pain and when I asked him for some pain killers, he stepped on my hands and said “this is American pain killer” and laughed at me.
29. On the 15th day of detention, I was given a blanket. I was relieved that some comfort was given to me. As I had no clothes, I made a hole in the centre of the blanket by rubbing the blanket against the wall, and I was able to cover my body. This is how all the prisoners cover their bodies when they were given a blanket.
30. One day, a prisoner walked past my cell and told me that the interrogators want to speed up their investigation and would use more brutal methods of torture to get answers that they want from the prisoners. I was brought to the investigation room, after they put a bag over my head. When I entered the investigation room, they remove the bag from my head to let me see the electrical wires which was attached to an electrical wall socket. [It is a common interrogation technique to make victims see, understand, and dread what is about to come to them. ~HC]
31. Present in the room was the Moroccan Jew, Idel Palm, the Israeli interrogator, two Americans one known as “Davies” and the other “Federick” and two others. They all wore civilian clothes, except the Americans who wore army uniforms. Idel Palm told me in Arabic that unless I cooperated, this would be my last chance to stay alive. I told him that I do not know anything about the resistance. The bag was then placed over my head again, and left alone for a long time. During this time, I heard several screams and cries from detainees who were being tortured.
32. The interrogators returned and forcefully placed me on top of a carton box containing can food. They then connected the wires to my fingers and ordered me to stretch my hand out horizontally, and switched on the electric power. As the electric current entered my whole body, I felt as if my eyes were being forced out and sparks flying out. My teeth were clattering violently and my legs shaking violently as well. My whole body was shaking all over.
33. I was electrocuted on three separate sessions. On the first two sessions, I was electrocuted twice, each time lasting few minutes. On the last session, as I was being electrocuted, I accidentally bit my tongue and was bleeding from the mouth. They stop the electrocution and a doctor was called to attend to me. I was lying down on the floor. The doctor poured some water into my mouth and used his feet to force open my mouth. He then remarked, “There is nothing serious, continue!” Then he left the room. However, the guard stopped the electrocution as I was bleeding profusely from my mouth and blood was all over my blanket and body. But they continued to beat me. After some time, they stopped beating me and took me back to my cell.
34. Throughout the time of my torture, the interrogators would take photographs.
35. I was then left alone in my cell for 49 days. During this period of detention, they stopped torturing me. At the end of the 49th day, I was transferred back to the camp, in tent C and remained there for another 45 days. I was informed by a prisoner that he over heard some guards saying that I was wrongly arrested and that I would be released.
36. I was released in the beginning of March 2004. I was put into a truck and taken to a highway and then thrown out. A passing car stopped and took me home.

So: four and a half months’ detention, some of the most brutal and humiliating treatment one could imagine– and at the end of it all they judged he had been “wrongly arrested” and he was released without a word??
Can you imagine the treatment he would have been given if they had decided he had indeed been some kind of a ringleader?
This is how he ends:

37. As a result of this experience, I decided to establish an association to assist all torture victims, with the help of twelve other tortured victims.
38. I feel very sad that I have to remember and relive this horrible experience again and again, and I hope that the people will answer our call for help. God willing.
And I make this solemn declaration conscientiously believing the same to be true and by virtue of the provisions of the Statutory Declarations Act 1960 [of Malaysia].

Just a few last points from me. First, I believe it is very important to do some further probing into the role that Mr. Abbas alleges was played in his interrogation by all the other actors whom he identifies as present during the worst of the encounters, but especially by these three: the “Israeli interrogator”, the “Moroccan Jew”, and the “doctor.”
Was there really an Israeli interrogator participating in all those interrogations– or was this a ploy of deceit engaged in as a way to further terrorize the detainees? The citizens of both the US and Israel deserve to know this. (It is entirely possible it was one of the many US citizens who also carry Israeli citizenship and who may well have served in the Israeli security services.)
Was the Moroccan Jerw a citizen of Morocco and participating “on secondment” to the Americans from the Moroccan security services– services that, goodness only knows, have a long experience in doing torture? (Or maybe he was on secondment from the Israeli services?)
And the doctor??? What on earth kind of a doctor would agree to play that role of, essentially, assisting torture by helping to establish “medical” parameters for it? What kind of a doctor would behave in the way Mr. Abbas alleges that doctor acted?
Was it really a doctor, I wonder, i.e., someone who has taken an oath to “do no harm”? (There are a couple of other interesting, medical-related points in the testimony too, including the offers to “condition” treatment of Mr. Abbas’s hand on his provision of the information the interrogators sought.)
Secondly, I want to link back to this post I put up on JWN back in August 2005, in which I commented on the extremely important account that the pro-Algerian-independence French Communist Henri Alleg had written about his torture at the hands of the French Army in Algeria in 1957. That testimony was published as a little book, under the title “The Question“. I urged then that the existing English-language version of that book should be republished in full. Today I repeat that plea! In that JWN post I also copied out some of the introduction that Jean-Paul Sartre had written for Alleg’s book.
Alleg’s testimony of what he himself had suffered– including electrocution and a version of water-boarding– was bad enough. But he made sure to write that the treatment given to his fellow-detainees who did not have the “benefit” of French citizenship but were Algerian-Muslim indigenes of the country was far, far worse. (He also wrote very movingly about the degree of care his Muslim fellow-detainees would give to him after each of his torture sessions.)
Anyway, go read those portions of the Sartre text that I put in that post…
Thirdly, I want to thank Mr. Abbas for having agreed to put this testimony on the record, and to thank Faiza for getting it up onto the web. Mr. Abbas, Faiza, the organizers of the “Criminalizing War” conference in Malaysia, and any of the rest of us who seek to work further on this case should know that we may all be subjected to damaging personal attacks for any role we play in continuing to get this testimony better heard. I judge, however, that this testimony has a great degree of prima-facie credibility and deserves to be fully engaged with.
Including– directly– by members of the US Congress.