Month: May 2004

According to this article in Salon, here’s what the “peace deal” in Najaf looks like:

On Friday morning, the number of armed men on the streets of Najaf did not seem to have diminished, and in places it seemed to have increased. And as of late Friday afternoon, Mahdi army volunteers were still streaming into Najaf, responding to Muqtada’s call for assistance, some coming from other countries. The numbers of militiamen were growing significantly. Pickup trucks full of men with heavy weapons were parked on the street leading to the medina, or old town. Many of the fighters were from out of town. The trucks had been quickly painted over, and the faint image of the blue Iraqi police lettering was still visible.

With the pressure from the United States abated, the Mahdi fighters spent Friday acting as if they had just won a great victory.

Sounds like Fallujah déjà vu.

What’s this game the UN’s Brahimi is playing with the Iraqi Puppet Council? Apparently the Council has “nominated” one of their own, Iyad Allawi, for PM and now reports are coming out that Brahimi “respects” their choice. Reuters has gone out and interviewed some random Iraqis who scoff at the Puppet Council and Allawi.

“What is his political experience? I know nothing about him. He lived abroad as an exile. We need someone who lived here who can pull Iraq out of a crisis,” said a hotel manager who declined to give his name.

“Iraq is the same as it was in the time of Saddam Hussein except now I am afraid of militiamen so I can’t say my name.”
[..]
“I heard he used to play sports. I think he should really go back to playing sports,” said Seif Gharib, a 20-year-old security guard at Iraq’s Ministry of Defense. “Who is Iyad Allawi?

Hassan Ali, a policeman, was also dismissive.

“I reject him,” he said. “Where was he when we suffered under Saddam? Besides I do not recognize the Governing Council.”

Isn’t this exactly what they were supposed to avoid by not involving the Puppets? What happened to Brahimi’s idea of selecting “technocrats?”

Another Reuters story is even more bizarre:

It was unclear how far U.S. officials or Brahimi influenced the choice of a long-time exile known to few Iraqis and whom people in Baghdad said was an outsider they could not trust.

Brahimi and Iraq’s U.S. governor Paul Bremer endorsed the nomination, Governing Council member Mahmoud Othman said: “We had a meeting with Bremer and Brahimi and they both agreed and congratulated him and were happy about it,” Othman told Reuters.

WTF? I thought this was supposed to be Brahimi’s choice. Was Brahimi unable to find anyone but Puppets who would take the job, especially after yesterday’s Hussain Shahristani debacle?

This is a weird story. First, in an article by the Canadian Press mostly about the IGC Puppets “nominating” Iyad Allawi for Prime Minister of Iraq (who asked them what they thought, anyway?) we have a couple of grafs thrown in, separated by other reports on various events in Iraq:

Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers escorting a convoy of buses filled with Abu Ghraib prison inmates on their way to be released came under attack Friday, but there were no reports of casualties. In Kufa, explosions were heard one day after an agreement to end fighting between U.S. forces and Shiite insurgents.

The prisoners had just left the Abu Ghraib facility – the centre of a scandal involving abuse of detainees by American soldiers – when shots were fired from buildings near the freeway. The soldiers hunkered down and the convoy of at least 13 buses stopped. The shooting ended quickly.
[…]
In the attack on the prisoner buses, hundreds of relatives who had been following the convoy also stopped and then swarmed around the vehicles after the shots were fired. Prisoners then got off the buses and went home with their families.

The Guardian just came out with the same story with a bit more detail:

US soldiers escorting a convoy of prisoners released from the Abu Ghraib prison exchanged fire with unknown assailants today after they stopped on a highway outside Baghdad.

More than a dozen buses had just left Abu Ghraib – the prison at the centre of a scandal involving abuse of detainees by American soldiers – when shots were fired from buildings near the freeway, apparently at the convoy.

The US soldiers assumed defensive positions and returned fired. Several tanks arrived after the shooting and monitored the area for an hour, but there was no more fighting. A reporter at the scene did not see casualties.

Before the exchange, US forces in Bradley fighting vehicles had halted the convoy of buses for an unknown reason. Hundreds of relatives parked their cars, blocking traffic in both directions, and rushed to the buses in search of family members.

Many relatives ignored warnings from the US troops, who pointed their rifles and yelled at them to stay back. In previous releases, detainees were escorted all the way to their home towns.

Today, those detainees headed for Baghdad got out of the bus and transferred to the hundreds of cars that had raced after the buses when they left the prison gates.

OK, so a bunch of busses full of people being released from Abu Ghraib got stopped (mysteriously? Right…), came under fire and then “hundreds” of cars that had been following the busses parked willy-nilly all over the highway in both directions, while prisoners swarmed off the busses and into the waiting cars and took off. Both of these articles make a nod to what I think is American BS about how they were taking people to their “hometowns.” If you believe that, consider this other report on how the Americans release people from Abu Ghraib: Iraqis released from Abu Ghraib taken on a bizarre journey and dumped. That convoy of busses took these people to an old quarry 70 miles north of Baghdad and dumped them out.

Why are “hundreds” of cars following these bus convoys? Because they know the US is likely to just dump them out somewhere in the middle of nowhere, that’s why. Take the story of Tu’amaa Mola Hassan Sabeeh, a 67 year-old man with Alzheimer’s reported by Dahr Jamail:

Yet another horrible story is that of Tu’amaa Mola Hassan Sabeeh, a 67 year-old man with Alzheimer’s, who had wandered from his home in Baghdad on June 29, 2003, and has been missing ever since.

His son, Rassem, standing in front of the checkpoint of Abu Ghraib, said, “We searched all of Iraq for him and couldn’t find him. Then three weeks ago someone who was released told us he was here.”

Now the family members take turns coming out and waiting for his release. “We have not been allowed to see him, and if he is released, he can’t remember where to go, so we need to come here everyday to wait for him in case he is released.”

He said the entire family is affected, as the time away from their jobs is draining them financially. He added, “We’re all crying now. All our time is spent waiting. We don’t know his number, since they use numbers instead of names in there. So we know he’s there, but we cannot contact him. Where is the justice?”

How would this man find his way home after the US dumped him in a quarry, far from home? How would they even know where to take him if he can’t tell them where he lives?

I would like somebody in charge of these convoys to explain why the families can’t just pick their loved ones up at the gates of Abu Ghraib. Why can’t the US do one decent thing and just let these people go with dignity?

Oh, so this is why the US has been stuffing everyone they can lay hands on in Iraq into prison. They really do want to teach the Iraqis how to be free, just like in America.

Link swiped from Libertarian Jackass.

zeyad at Healing Iraq has a bitter comment about the American version of justice in Iraq.

If you’ve never heard zeyad’s story about the death of his cousin at the hands of American soldiers, it is here.

Instamonger calls this “misconduct,” but because zeyad is generally pro-invasion he generously allows that perhaps a reprimand is not sufficient for murdering an Iraqi by making him jump off Tharthar dam into the Tigris in January.

The only new idea in Duhbya’s latest speech is being rejected by the Iraqi Puppet Council as a “waste of resources.”

“We must not be sentimental,” Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer told reporters. “As the Governing Council, we do not agree with demolishing it and the matter will be left for the transitional government,” which is scheduled to take office June 30.

He called the idea of destroying the prison “a waste of resources.”

Really, the best idea for what to do with the tainted Abu Ghraib torture facility I’ve seen is William Lind’s:

Colonel John Boyd said that the greatest weakness a person or a nation can have at the highest level of war, the moral level, is a contradiction between what they say and what they do. From that I think follows the basic definition of psyops in Fourth Generation war: psyops are not what you say, but what you do.

If we look at the war in Iraq through that lens, we quickly see a number of psyops we could have undertaken, but did not. For example, what if instead locating the CPA in Saddam’s old palace in Baghdad and putting Iraqi prisoners in his notorious Abu Ghraib prison, we had located the CPA in Abu Ghraib and put the prisoners in Saddam’s palace? That would have sent a powerful message.

How about Abu Ghraib as the new American Embassy? That new castle they’re building in downtown Baghdad (Lounsbury describes it in the linked post) could be the new torture detention facility.