Month: August 2004

FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — An Army investigator testified Tuesday that Pfc. Lynndie England and other members of her unit told him that photos of naked Iraqi prisoners piled in pyramids and other humiliating poses were taken “just for fun.”

As a military hearing started to determine if England should be court-martialed for her actions at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Paul D. Arthur testified that when he interviewed her, three months before the prison photos became public in April, she told him the shots were taken while “they were joking around, having some fun, working the night shift.”

Arthur said he believed the reservists from the 372nd Military Police Company, based on Cresaptown, Md., were responding to the stress of being in a war zone.

“It was just for fun, kind of venting their frustration,” Arthur testified.

UPDATE: See Arthur Silber’s post at his Light of Reason blog for a proper rant on the amoral callousness of the US Army being revealed at this hearing.

This chapter covers the various actors in al-Qaeda before 9/11. Much of the information, the report warns, comes from interrogations of captured terrorists. (page 146)

First, the report covers Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the “mastermind” behind the attacks on 9/11. Rather than hating America because it is capitalist democracy, KSM’s

“…animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.” (page 147)

This theme repeatedly pops up throughout the report. KSM intended to use terrorism to influence American foreign policy by “targeting the country’s economy.” (page 153).

Named the “planes operation,” the 9/11 plot took years of planning and training. One of the first plans, later rejected, involved the hijacking of ten planes:

KSM himself was to land the tenth plane at a U.S. airport and, after killing all adult male passengers on board and alerting the media, deliver a speech excoriating U.S. support for Israel, the Phillippines, and repressive governments of the Arab world. (page 154)

The chapter continues to detail the growth of the group of 19 hijackers. Here we are introduced to the infamous “20th hijacker”, Mohammed Atta. He ends up a part of the “Hamburg contingent,” the core of the 19 hijackers.

Financing

The esimated cost of the 9/11 attacks range from $400,000 to $500,000. This money did not come from bin Ladin’s riches:

Instead, al Qaeda reled primarily on a fund-raising network developed over time. The CIA now estimates that it cost al Qaeda about $30 million per year to sustain activities before 9/11 and that this money was raised almost entirely through donations. (page 169)

Also, state sponsors were lacking:

It does not appear that any government other than the Taliban financially supported al Qaeda before 9/11, although some governments may have contained al Qaeda sympathizers who turned a blind eye to al Qaeda’s fundraising activities. Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of al Qaeda funding, but we have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.(page 171)

Finally, despite the federal government’s insistence, the drug trade does not support al Qaeda:

While the drug trade was a source of income for the Taliban, it did not serve the same purpose for al Qaeda, and there is no reliable evidence that Bin Ladin was involved in or made his money through drug trafficking. (page 171)

Amy Mina sends this report from her recent visit to Bethlehem:

The Prison of Bethlehem
July 2004

This weekend I went to prison. Imposing grey towers stare out of their opaque black roving eyes at the transparent sky above, and the prisoners below. I listened to prison stories and prisoner hopelessness told through sacrastic humour.

We drove between the white stone villas of bethlehem with their inviting balconies (where no one sits), their red tiled roofs and their withering gardens. The lanes were narrow and silent under the scorching sun. The distance to the prison wall was short. It stood erect, regular, silent, bisecting the prison from the world outside. The distance between the prison wall and the house did not exceed 5 metres. I imagined a child, inside the house, watching the prison wall rise permanently deleting the view of the child’s fields and flowers from all but the child’s memories. Instead, the guard tower now stares directly into the child’s room. A tall cinderella tower of soul-less grey topped with its grey hat above the evil eye. This is what the child sees from his bedroom every day. This is what the child imagines from his bedroom everyday: is the soldier looking down at me? Is the soldier pointing his gun at me? This is the child’s question when he wakes up: Where did our fields go? When I grow up, where can I work? When I marry, where can I live? There are no answers to any of these questions.

We drove back down the lane and around the houses that silently speak of past wealth to the other side of the lane. Through some twisted logic, the arichtect of the prison wall had decided on curves rather than straight lines. The curves hug the houses creating an artistic fluidity, pushing closer and closer to the centre, re-aligning itself to join the much deeper cut on the other side of the main road, leaving thousands of those olive trees outside the prison. I wondered what price the trees’ freedom was going to cost them? Without their owners, the trees would soon wither and die. Probably the bulldozers will help them first. The prison wall is nearly complete. In the refugee camp, it defied the dying light of day. The children threw stones at it. Prison walls don’t feel the pain. Children do.

Amy Mina

George Paine at Warblogging finds a good reason to long for the days of Victory Gardens and Private Ryan:

An in-depth study recently released into the public domain shows that in World War II — this nation’s “good war” or “best war” — only about 15% of American combat soldiers actually tried to kill someone. Those thousands upon thousands of Americans under combat arms, they could not bring themselves to kill other human beings — even Nazis, even Imperial Japanese soldiers willing to kill themselves to kill Americans.

Chris Floyd has written in the Moscow Times that this has changed. When the Pentagon learned that so many of its soldiers failed to fire at the enemy it saw this as a problem to be solved… and solved it. Now the mantra “Kill, kill, kill, kill…” is ingrained in young Americans in Basic Training. Eighteen and nineteen year olds are taught rhymes like “This is my weapon, this is my gun…” Now 95% of soldiers fire at the enemy.

Floyd writes:

“Today, in the quagmire of occupied Iraq, the brutalizing beat goes on. ‘Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, it’s like it pounds in my brain,’ a U.S. soldier told the Los Angeles Times last week. Another shrugged at the sight of freshly killed bodies. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said. ‘I’m a warrior.’ Said a third: ‘We talk about killing all the time. I never used to be this way … but it’s like I can’t stop. I’m worried what I’ll be like when I get home.’ A few military officials are beginning to worry, too, noting the high rates of suicide, mental damage and emotional torment among combat veterans.”

Back here on the Home Front we hear of Iraqi families being eviscerated at checkpoints. We hear stories from people like Lamea Hassan, a 36-year-old pregnant mother. “I saw the heads of my two little girls come off… My girls – I watched their heads come off their bodies. My son is dead,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Read it. It’s enough to make a cynical young punk like me indulge in Greatest Generation nostalgia.

Booby-trapped car bombs exploded outside an Armenian church and a Catholic church in Baghdad’s Karada neighborhood minutes apart from one another. One American soldier was killed and two others wounded in a roadside bomb explosion near Samarra. A car bomb targeting a police station in Mosul killed 5 people, 3 of them Iraqi police and wounded 30 bystanders. The US military bombed Fallujah again after a firefight with Iraqi guerillas. 12 Iraqis were killed. Marines in Ramadi are getting attacked by the Iraqi National Guard. The warmongers can add Turkey to the list of countries they accuse of “appeasing terrorists” as two Turkish trucking companies who service the US military say they will pull out to save the lives of two of their drivers who were taken hostage.

Kerry announces that his plan for Iraq is to personally charm other countries’ governments into sending their people to die in Iraq instead of Americans. The fact that in all the countries who have the kinds of troops that Kerry wants the populations overwhelmingly opposed the invasion and oppose involvement is apparently irrelevant. Kerry didn’t mention why he thinks these countries would go into Iraq in spite of public opposition nor did he offer any reason to think that these extra troops would end the guerilla war now engulfing Iraq.

UPDATE: Now it is four churches blown up, two in Baghdad and two in Mosul.