Category: War crimes etc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Interrogations that trouble even the FBI”

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:

Continue reading “Abusing “psychiatry””

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?)

Continue reading “‘Cleaning up’ in Fallujah”

The Boston Globe‘s Anne Barnard was embedded with a task force from the Army’s 1st Infantry Division throughout much of the battle of Fallujah. She had an account of her experiences in yesterday’s paper that provides excellent, firsthand evidence of the issuing of commands that seem clearly to contravene the Geneva Conventions, especially in regard to the use of grossly disproportionate violence inside the city.
I note that UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Canada’s Louise Arbour, has already expressed her concern about the level of violence used by the US in Fallujah. I can’t remember if she also said she’d like some form of action to be taken on this? Frankly, I don’t know what form such action might take. The US is, as we know, not a signatory of the ICC. The only other forms of legal-type action that could be taken would be a case brought by another state in the ICJ (but which state would do it? “Iraq”?? Ha-ha-ha) — or, a prosecution from within the US military for contraventions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is supposed to include all the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
I guess political action inside the US is the only thing, at this point, that can rein these guys in.
Anyway, I’ll just quickly take from Barnard’s excellent account the four clearest points–most of them taken from before-action briefings that she attended– where I see the laws of war apparently being contravened:

(1) To avoid booby traps and ambushes, battalion leaders told the men to fire at houses and buildings before entering them. That made for a trail of destruction. There was no way to know for sure if they were hurting noncombatants, even in a city where most residents had fled.
[Commanders are under an obligation to take positive steps to avoid inflicting harm on noncombatants. Such steps studiously avoided here. ~HC]

Continue reading “Fallujah war crimes evidence”

The Swiss daily Le Temps yesterday (11/24) had an
article (purchase reqd) about the dilemmas the International Committee of the Red Cross
has been facing in Iraq. The piece is by Richard Werly, one of the few
Swiss journos who have been able to work in Iraq in recent weeks.

Ominously, the piece is titled, “After two weeks of fighting, Falludjah
is still closed to the ICRC convoys”.

Alert JWN readers will of course be aware that the ICRC is not “just another”
international humanitarian aid organization, but it’s the international body
that is charged by the world’s governments with guarding the integrity of,
and supervising the implementation of, nearly the whole body of the international
“laws of war” — Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, etc etc.

So when the ICRC gets systematically stymied in its work, this is a serious development in international affairs, and could mark a continuation of the desire of many in the Pentagon to “roll back” the entire structure of the laws of war.

(My big thanks to the JWN reader who supplied the translation here.)

Here’s how Werly starts:

Can the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) still
work in Iraq? The question comes back more bluntly after the bloody battle
of Falludjah, the Sunni insurgents’ stronghold retaken by the US Marines
and their Iraqi allies. Two weeks after the assault was launched on the 8th
of November and while sporadic fightings are still going on, neither a crew
nor a humanitarian convoy of the ICRC have been able to enter in this city
of about 200 000 inhabitants…

Continue reading “Anguish in ICRC over Iraq”

Kevin has written an open letter to the Marines in the unit he was working with Fallujah. Here is an excerpt:

Continue reading “Yet more on Kevin Sites”

The International Committee for the Red Cross, which is the global guarantor and depository for the laws of war, yesterday issued another of its strong statements about the actions of the combatants (including American combatants) in Iraq.
Since the situation is so grave, and the ICRC statement so precise and well-crafted,I’m going to copy the whole text of it into this post. After that, I have a few reflections of my own.
Here’s the statement:

As hostilities continue in Falluja and elsewhere, every day seems to bring news of yet another act of utter contempt for the most basic tenet of humanity: the obligation to protect human life and dignity. This week it was the killing of a wounded fighter and of yet another hostage

I want to write three things in this post:

(1) A question: If a Marines unit with an embedded press photographer traveling with it acts in the way described by NBC photog Kevin Sites — then how do you think the many, many units that don’t have a press person embedded with them are acting??
(More on Sites’ testimony, below)
(2) A strong concern: After the very damaging battles Israel waged against the Jenin refugee camp, in spring 2002, the main concern of the Israeli authorities was to prevent for as long as possible any entry into the camp by anyone who could classify as an independent observer of the carnage within.
Bassically, they want to be able to “clean up” as many of the signs of carnage within the battle-zone as possible before such observers got any chance to see it. (Also, who knows? Maybe to plant a few bits of apparently incriminating “evidence” here and there.)
Those kept out of Jenin camp– for some 12 agonizing days after the end of the battle there, as I recall– included press people, residents of the camp who, earlier having fled their homes, were desperate to return to them and to their loved ones left behind–
Plus, crucially, it included all local and international humanitarian aid organizations. That delay prevented the provision of adequate lifesaving services to the people still inside the camp and caused additional deaths and suffering.
I am extremely worried that, having played by “Jenin rules” for so long during the war in Iraq, the US authorities will also try to apply “Jenin rules” on this question of humanitarian access to Fallujah, too.
(Update: This Al-Jazeera report seems to indicate that “Jenin rules” are already in operation. In it, Asma Khamis al-Muhannadi, an assistant doctor who witnessed the US and Iraqi National Guard assault on Falluja hospital, is reported as saying that, “the medical staff received threats from the interim Iraqi health minister who said if anyone disclosed information about the raid, they would be arrested or dismissed from their jobs.” Read the rest of her chilling report there, too.)
(3) A suggestion: This issue of humanitarian access to Fallujah (and all other Iraqi cities that the US forces are now “bombing in order to save them”) is one that concerned people around the world–and especially inside the US– should focus activities on. It is a way that, if we can bring enough pressure to bear, we can actually hope to save lives.
I realize that “humanitarian access now!” may not be a very snappy slogan. But something like: “Fallujah! Let the Red Cross in!” could work well.
JWN commenter “Susan in NC” helpfully gave us the “comment line” numbers for the White House: (202) 456-1112 and (202) 456-1111. Call up and leave your message there. Write to your Congress-person and Senators. Get out on the streets in peace demonstrations. Write to local and national media.
Focusing on this point (and on the broader point of the need to abide by the laws of war) is, I think, really important right now. At the same time, “Bring the toops home” or “Support the troops– bring them home” is still the best larger theme.

Anyway, now I want to go back to the content of Kevin Sites’ recollection of what he saw. Here it is:

Continue reading “Fallujah war crimes”

With all the continuing, terrible news about Iraq it was good to hear of one small but significant achievement for the global human rights movement.
Namely, Monday’s decision by Judge James Robertson of the US Federal Court in Washington DC, in the case of long-time Gitmo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, inwhich he judged that:

* The Geneva Conventions applied to the conflict in Afghanistan and to all people in the conflict;
* The combatant status review tribunal (established by the Pentagon after the Supreme Court