Month: May 2004

Thomas Hamill wandered up to an American patrol in Balad, between Baghdad and Tikrit today. The press accounts are calling it an “apparent escape” though the demand by the mujahiden originally was for the Marines to end the siege of Fallujah, so I expect that it will come out that he was released after the Marine withdrawal in much the same manner as the POWs held by the Iraqis during the invasion. They also wandered up to the American soldiers on patrol in the same area after their release.

With world attention fixed on the Abu Ghraib prison torture outrage, an important story from Saudi Arabia is going under the radar.

I first saw mention of the more exotic aspects of this story on Raed Jarrar’s blog where he wrote:

The thing no one said about the incident of Yanbu that the dead naked bodies of killed foreigners were dragged over the small town for over an hour, the same way they were dragged around Falluja one month ago, (and maybe as a reaction for the pictures of the naked Iraqi men at Abu Greib prison yesterday).

the four attackers were brothers.

I heard that from two differen individuals from Saudi Arabia, one of them was on SAWA (the voice of america in arabic)

Bush: Kimmitt…
Frog: YES! SIR
Bush: take your soldiers, kill some hundreds of Saudis, arrest some thousands and piss on them, Blair is really creative.
frog: PISS! SIR

Finally some reporters are actually catching up with blogs in figuring out what really happened in Yanbu, though they can be somewhat excused in the case of getting the story out of the Police State of Saudi Arabia. Here’s Adnan Malik, writing for the AP:

Militants sprayed gunfire inside an oil contractor’s office, killing at least six people — including two Americans and three other Westerners — and tying one of their victims to the bumper of a car and dragging it past horrified students at a high school in this western Saudi industrial town.

Police killed the four gunmen in a shootout after a car chase. One of the attackers was reported to be on the Saudi kingdom’s list of most-wanted terrorists, many of them suspects in 2003 suicide attacks on foreign housing compounds in the capital, Riyadh. The two attacks were blamed on al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s terror network.

Students told The Associated Press Sunday that bearded men drove a car into the Ibn Hayyan Secondary Boys School parking lot as classes began Saturday, the start of the school week. They fired into the air to attract students’ attention, then urged the boys to go to an Iraqi city where U.S. troops are battling insurgents.

“God is great! God is great! Come join your brothers in Fallujah,” they shouted. Pointing to the bloodied and badly damaged corpse, his clothes shredded, they screamed: “This is the president of America.”

Now, if the War Party were consistent, which they are not, they would have to surround Yanbu with 3,000 Marines and bomb the crap out of everyone in revenge for this dreadful event, but as Raed points out in his Kimmitt the Frog dialogue, the Saudis won’t get the Fallujah Treatment.

Oh, and in their tradition of not giving in to “terrorists” the Americans are urging the evacuation all private citizens from Saudi Arabia and engineering and oil services group ABB Ltd said it is pulling out all staff from the Saudi Arabian port of Yanbu.

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UPDATE: Good grief:

Three of the terrorist gunmen who killed an Australian and four of his colleagues had been working with their victims at the same company in Saudi Arabia – and used their security passes to launch the gun attack.

Saudi terror killings an inside job

The brilliant Oxyconservative Rush Limbaugh, as brought to my attention by Arthur Silber. Well, my objection is a bit pedantic, viz., when have we gone 20 years without war?

Oh, now I get it.

Iraqi force to provide security for first convoy to Fallujah

“In a few days we will have our first convoy go through the centre of Fallujah,” said General James Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.

The US commander said that he expect the new leader of Fallujah Protective Army (FPA), Major General Jassem Mohammed Saleh, to provide security for the convoy.

So, the deal is that the Marines pull out of the town and in exchange they get a guarantee of safe passage for their convoys. I was wondering what the convoy situation was and this is a clue. You might remember that 8 soldiers were killed and 4 wounded in a convoy attack 2 days ago. Just this morning another US soldier was killed in a convoy attack. For those willing to piece together the scattered bits of information on convoy attacks, it seemed clear that, as I wrote recently, the American military has a severe logistics problem.

Could this be at least part of the reason for the astonishingly abrupt about-face of the commanders in the field, who went from saying “Submit or die” to installing an ex-Republican Guard General to run Fallujah, and pulling out?

I guess the question now is whether or not this General and his compadres in the Fallujah resistance – and make no mistake, this guy is intimately tied to the resistance, being a member of the largest tribe in Fallujah – will keep their part of the bargain, or will they turn on the Americans? It will be interesting to watch this Fallujah Protective Army. Will the Americans provide them with weapons and protective body armor and all the other superior equipment American troops have, and turn them into a real force or is this just a face saving sham deal?

Seymour Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, has an extremely detailed account of the hideous torture inflicted by American soldiers on detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.

There was stunning evidence to support the allegations, Taguba added—“detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence.” Photographs and videos taken by the soldiers as the abuses were happening were not included in his report, Taguba said, because of their “extremely sensitive nature.”

Also, see Juan Cole’s comments:

I really wonder whether, with the emergence of these photos, the game isn’t over for the Americans in Iraq. Is it realistic, after the bloody siege of Fallujah and the Shiite uprising of early April, and in the wake of these revelations, to think that the US can still win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi Arab public?

And Steve Gilliard:

The thing about the pictures of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated is that it is the result of braindead management and racism.

The whole culture of Abu Gharib was designed to control and humiliate Iraqi detainees. The photos come from a fairly wide culture of contempt. These are not the first prisoners to be abused by Americans or the first courtmartial to happen over this kind of treatment.

What is incindiary are the pictures of a woman humilating Arab men and dogs being sicced on them. These are gross violations of Arab culture and sure to assist the resistance in killing Americans. The idea of a woman humiliating men will go down poorly in the Arab world, as will the idea of dogs being used on prisoners.

Saddam didn’t take pictures of the people he tortured, and more importantly, he didn’t humiliate them for pleasure. Iraqis kept their torture secret.

The fact that the prison officials allowed contract interrogators to have supervisory roles with the prison guards is even more revolting.

Now, why did these things happen? Why would American, and now British, soldiers, seek to abuse, humiliate and then record their acts?

Because that is what you do when you have a racist contempt for those in your charge

I’ll let Riverbend tell you what she, as an Iraqi, thinks of those disgusting photos taken at Abu Ghraib prison, from her blog Baghdad Burning:

Those Pictures…
The pictures are horrific. I felt a multitude of things as I saw them… the most prominent feeling was rage, of course. I had this incredible desire to break something- like that would make things somehow better or ease the anger and humiliation. We’ve been hearing terrible stories about Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad for a while now, but those pictures somehow spoke like no words could.

Seeing those naked, helpless, hooded men was like being slapped in the face with an ice cold hand. I felt ashamed looking at them- like I was seeing something I shouldn’t be seeing and all I could think was, “I might know one of those faceless men…” I might have passed him in the street or worked with him. I might have bought groceries from one of them or sat through a lecture they gave in college… any of them might be a teacher, gas station attendant or engineer… any one of them might be a father or grandfather… each and every one of them is a son and possibly a brother. And people wonder at what happened in Falloojeh a few weeks ago when those Americans were killed and dragged through the streets…

All anyone can talk about today are those pictures… those terrible pictures. There is so much rage and frustration. I know the dozens of emails I’m going to get claiming that this is an ‘isolated incident’ and that they are ‘ashamed of the people who did this’ but does it matter? What about those people in Abu Ghraib? What about their families and the lives that have been forever damaged by the experience in Abu Ghraib? I know the messages that I’m going to get- the ones that say, “But this happened under Saddam…” Like somehow, that makes what happens now OK… like whatever was suffered in the past should make any mass graves, detentions and torture only minor inconveniences now. I keep thinking of M. and how she was ‘lucky’ indeed. And you know what? You won’t hear half of the atrocities and stories because Iraqis are proud, indignant people and sexual abuse is not a subject anyone is willing to come forward with. The atrocities in Abu Ghraib and other places will be hidden away and buried under all the other dirt the occupation brought with it…

It’s beyond depressing and humiliating… my blood boils at the thought of what must be happening to the female prisoners. To see those smiling soldiers with the Iraqi prisoners is horrible. I hope they are made to suffer… somehow I know they won’t be punished. They’ll be discharged from the army, at best, and made to go back home and join families and cronies who will drink to the pictures and the way “America’s finest” treated those “Dumb I-raki terrorists”. That horrible excuse of a human, Janis Karpinski, will then write a book about how her father molested her as a child and her mother drank herself into an early death- that’s why she did what she did in Abu Ghraib. It makes me sick.

Where is the Governing Council? Where are they hiding now?

I want something done about it and I want it done publicly. I want those horrible soldiers who were responsible for this to be publicly punished and humiliated. I want them to be condemned and identified as the horrible people they are. I want their children and their children’s children to carry on the story of what was done for a long time- as long as those prisoners will carry along with them the humiliation and pain of what was done and as long as the memory of those pictures remains in Iraqi hearts and minds…