The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.
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In March of 2003, Saddam’s Minister of Information was everybody’s favorite inadvertent comedian. Sporting a kicky black beret and delightfully bombastic lexicon, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf appeared on TV daily to predict American failure and deny the Baghdad invasion–sometimes even as U.S. tanks appeared behind him. “He’s great,” President George W. Bush said of Sahaf, admitting that he occasionally interrupted meetings to watch Sahaf’s briefings. “Someone accused us of hiring him and putting him there. He was a classic.”
Sahaf became the subject of T-shirts, mugs, adoring websites, a pop song, and an action figure. Besides adding levity to news cycles otherwise filled with fuzzy green explosions, Sahaf represented everything that made Iraq’s invasion seem not quite like a real war. Wars are serious, and this guy was adorable. Even if you opposed the Iraq invasion, you had to admit it’s hard to respect a government whose official mouthpiece told a reporter, “Shock and awe? It seems that we are the awe on them. They are suffering from the shock and awe, okay?”
“My information was correct, but my interpretations were not,” he explained. But in retrospect, the opposite seems truer.
Sahaf stuck to his post–and his story–until the day before Baghdad fell. Then he surrendered to American forces, was interrogated and promptly released, suggesting a lowly spot on the Ba’ath party totem pole. He surfaced in Abu Dhabi in July of 2003, gave a couple of interviews, and settled into obscurity.
“My information was correct, but my interpretations were not,” he explained.
But in retrospect, the opposite seems truer. Sahaf had bad information, sure, but several of his more ludicrous predictions have since come true–some in the ways he meant, and, more chillingly, some in ways no one (else) could have foreseen.
Send to KindleBy Estelle Shirbon
LONDON (Reuters) – A public inquiry in London into allegations that British soldiers killed, mutilated and tortured Iraqi detainees after a battle in southern Iraq was shown gruesome photographs of bloodied corpses on Monday.
The Al-Sweady Inquiry, ordered by the British government in 2009 to get to the bottom of disputed events in the aftermath of the battle of Danny Boy on May 14, 2004, began oral hearings after three years of exhaustive detective work.
The allegations are that soldiers captured a number of Iraqis during fighting near the Danny Boy checkpoint, about 5 km (three miles) from the town of Majar al-Kabir, and took them to the Camp Abu Naji base, where some were murdered and others tortured.
The military denies any unlawful killings or ill-treatment in the aftermath of the battle.
A decade after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the issues of why the British military got involved and how the war was conducted are still hotly debated in Britain.
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WASHINGTON – A defence contractor whose subsidiary was accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to torture detainees at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has paid $5.28 million to 71 former inmates held there and at other U.S.-run detention sites between 2003 and 2007.
The settlement in the case involving Engility Holdings Inc. of Chantilly, Virginia, marks the first successful effort by lawyers for former prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other detention centres to collect money from a U.S. defence contractor in lawsuits alleging torture. Another contractor, CACI, is expected to go to trial over similar allegations this summer.
The payments were disclosed in a document that Engility filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission two months ago but which has gone essentially unnoticed.
The defendant in the lawsuit, L-3 Services Inc., now an Engility subsidiary, provided translators to the U.S. military in Iraq. In 2006, L-3 Services had more than 6,000 translators in Iraq under a $450 million-a-year contract, an L-3 executive told an investors conference at the time.
On Tuesday, a lawyer for the ex-detainees, Baher Azmy, said that each of the 71 Iraqis received a portion of the settlement. Azmy declined to say how the money was distributed among them. He said there was an agreement to keep details of the settlement confidential.
“Private military contractors played a serious but often under-reported role in the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib,” said Azmy, the legal director at the Center for constitutional Rights. “We are pleased that this settlement provides some accountability for one of those contractors and offers some measure of justice for the victims.”
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Britain has paid out $22.7m to Iraqis who accused UK troops of illegally detaining and torturing them following the 2003 invasion.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) on Thursday confirmed a report in the Guardian newspaper which revealed that the government had given compensation to 205 complainants over the last five years, with more than 700 claims expected next year.
| “We will compensate victims of abuse where it is right to do so and seek to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice“- MoD spokesperson |
Some $13.4m was paid to 162 Iraqis this year, with the average settlement being $113,500 plus costs.
The claims stem back to the five-year occupation of the southeast of the country and have mostly been brought by male civilians who claim they were beaten, threatened and deprived of sleep before being interrogated by British troops.
The ministry confirmed the payouts but defended Britain’s record in Iraq.
“Over 120,000 British troops have served in Iraq and the vast majority have conducted themselves with the highest standards of integrity and professionalism,” said a spokesperson.
“All allegations of abuse will always be investigated thoroughly. We will compensate victims of abuse where it is right to do so and seek to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”
In 2010, the ministry set up the the Iraq Historical Allegations Team (IHAT), which is examining the possibility of criminal charges related to the abuse allegations.
IHAT has paid particular attention to the actions of a military intelligence unit called the Joint Forward Interrogation Team (JFIT).
JFIT interrogators filmed themselves threatening and abusing detainees, who appeared in footage to be bruised too tired to stand up. IHAT referred three soldiers to the Service Prosecuting Authority but prosecutors judged that that the incidents did not warrant war-crimes charges.
They ruled that one interrogator had committed offences, but that they were “in accordance with the training that they had been given” and warned against prosecution. A former JFIT guard told the Guardian that he was ordered to drag blindfolded prisoners around assault courses where they could not be filmed.
“[Rather than] a small number of mis-behaving individuals, rights groups say it was a systematic and systemic problem,” said Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands, reporting from London.
“They say the training that troops had been put through led to these problems, [creating] the kind of environment where abuse might happen … that it was not just a few bad apples.”
Send to KindleBAGHDAD – A Lebanese Hezbollah commander allegedly responsible for killing four U.S. soldiers in Iraq will be prosecuted for a lesser charge of illegal entry with a forged passport, Iraqi officials said Saturday.
Ali Musa Daqduq was the last American prisoner in Iraq and was handed over to Iraqi authorities on Friday.
On Saturday, two Iraqi officials said Daqduq will be prosecuted for illegal entry with a forged passport — the only Iraqi charge against him. The charge generally carries a sentence of just over five years in prison. But the officials say an investigative judge will consider U.S. allegations against him. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
U.S. officials have long feared that the Iraqis would release Daqduq once he had been transferred from American control and U.S. troops left the country. But his case was complicated by issues of international diplomacy and the American political debate over how best to prosecute suspected terrorists.
Under former President George W. Bush, prosecutors had planned to charge Daqduq in a U.S. criminal court. But those plans were scrapped after President Barack Obama took office and lawmakers began restricting his ability to bring terrorist suspects into the United States for trial.
Send to KindleBy Muhanad Mohammed
(Reuters) – Iraqi security forces have arrested 16 suspected al Qaeda members accused of being behind more than 100 killings in the capital, a senior security official said Sunday.
General Ahmed Abu Ragheef, the Interior Ministry’s head of internal affairs, accused the men of carrying out the high-profile assassination in May of Ali al-Lami, a senior Iraqi politician who helped purge members of Saddam Hussein’s banned Baath party from politics after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Militants have stepped up attacks, specifically targeting police and army officers, to try to destabilise the government as U.S. troops prepare to leave by the end of December, more than eight years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
“We managed to arrest the terrorist group that was responsible for the recent assassinations in Baghdad,” Ragheef told reporters at a news conference.
Ragheef said the entire operation to arrest the 16 men, including the cell’s leader, had taken security forces 20 days.
Send to Kindle An Iraqi detainee sits with his head covered by a sand bag while an American soldier covers another detainee’s eyes with tape during a raid in Ramadi, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad, Iraq, Saturday, Feb. 4, 2006. |
With the release of documents by the U. S. Army to the American Civil Liberties Union and according to Paul Wolf Human Rights lawyer and frequent Press TV contributor, who has analyzed this information, the American military has detained several persons for a short period of time and then killed them before they were brought into a prison. This is in addition to abuse reports concerning Iraqi and Afghan prisoners held in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and Bagram.
Such cases include the murders of Ahmed Hamid, Nahad Hamid, Zyad Hamid, and Jasim Komar-Abdullah in various locations around Samara, Tikrit and Baghdad by sixteen members of the 101st Airborne Division of the U. S. Army during Operation Iron Triangle conducted in May of 2006.
The detainees, two adult men and two boys, were taken captive, blindfolded, put in “flex cuffs,” and then executed. According to the released reports, one of the American soldiers, whose name was withheld, tore the blindfold off of one of the detainees and put his boot on the dead man’s head, as he posed for what the reports call a “hero photos.” The reports also refer to the soldiers, bringing a “throw down weapon” to try to portray these acts of premeditated murder as legitimate self defense.
According to U. S. military investigators, at the time of detention the victims were not positively identified as threats and they were not armed.
This incident bears a striking resemblance to recent news reports in Der Spiegel and Rolling Stone about another kill team apprehended last year, who also took hero photos of each other with the remains of dead Afghan civilians, and also planted “throw down weapons” to portray the civilians they killed as insurgents.
It could not be determined from the reports whether anyone was punished for the murders committed by the 101st Airborne Division in 2006.
Send to KindleMusings On Iraq On April 19, 2010 the Los Angeles Times broke the news about a secret prison at the Muthanna airport in Baghdad. 431 prisoners were being held there, around half of which had been tortured. Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry investigated the matter, leading to the facility being shut down, and most of the prisoners being transferred to the Justice Ministry. This was just the latest example of the systematic abuse that occurs in Iraq’s jails and prisons. It not only happens to those accused of terrorism, but common criminals as well. Since the Iraqi justice system is based upon confessions, beating one out of a suspect is usual procedure.
After the prison was exposed, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that he was against torture, but he and other officials have issued statements since then showing little effort will be made to actually end it. First, Maliki said that if there were any torture in Iraqi prison it was due to his political rivals. He also said that secret prisons were necessary to secure the country. After Human Rights Watch interviewed some of the prisoners to record their abuses, Maliki then claimed that their stories were faked. He said, “They had given themselves scars by rubbing matches on some of their body parts,” and that “These are lies, a smear campaign by some foreign embassies and the media. There are no secret pr,isons in Iraq at all.” He went on to state that the United States used tough measures at Abu Ghraib to deal with the insurgency, and that the Iraqi government was now doing the same so what was the problem. A week later, the head of the Federal Relations Committee in parliament denied that there were any secret prisons in Iraq, and that although the detainees at Muthanna had no specific charges against them, the Defense Ministry had evidence against all of them.
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Two former soldiers from the Army unit responsible for the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” incident have written an open-letter of “Reconciliation and Responsibility” to those injured in the July 2007 attack, in which U.S. forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees.
Ethan Mccord and Josh Stieber deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16 in 2007. Ethan was on the ground at the scene of the shooting, and is seen on the video rushing one of the injured children to a U.S. Vehicle; “When I saw those kids, all I could picture was my kids back home”. Ethan applied for mental health support following this incident and was denied by his commanding officer.
Josh Stieber was not at the scene of the shooting but says similar incidents happened throughout his 14-month tour; “The acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war.”? Josh states that these casualties demonstrate the impact of U.S. military policy on both the civilians and the soldiers on the ground.
Ethan and Josh claim that though their unit was following the Rules of Engagement that day, they are taking responsibility for their role in the incident and initiating a dialogue around it; “Though we have acted with cold hearts far too many times, we have not forgotten our actions towards you. Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.”
The letter, which they hope to get to the family who lost their father and whose children were injured in the attack, states that they “are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us.”
Ethan and Josh are available for interviews.
AN OPEN LETTER OF RECONCILIATION & RESPONSIBILITY TO THE IRAQI PEOPLE
From Current and Former Members of the U.S. Military
Peace be with you.
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