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The ugly truth of America’s Camp Cropper
By Robert Fisk
Now here’s a story to shame us all. It’s about
America’s shameful prison camps in Iraq. It’s about the beating
of prisoners during interrogation.
“Sources” may be a dubious word in journalism right now, but
the sources for the beatings in Iraq are impeccable. This story is also
about the gunning down of three prisoners in Baghdad, two of them “while
trying to escape.”
But most of all, it’s about Qais Mohamed al-Salman. Qais al-Salman
is just the sort of guy the US ambassador Paul Bremer and his dead-end
assistants need now. He hated Saddam, fled Iraq in 1976, then returned
after the “liberation” with a briefcase literally full of plans
to help in the restoration of his country’s infrastructure and water
purification system.
He’s an engineer who has worked in Africa, Asia, and Europe. He is
a Danish citizen. He speaks good English. He even likes America. Or did
until June 6 this year.
That day he was traveling on Abu Nawas Street when his car came under
American fire. He says he never saw a checkpoint. Bullets hit the tires
and his driver and another passenger ran for their lives. Qais al-Salman
stood meekly beside the vehicle. He was carrying his Danish passport,
Danish driving license, and medical records.
But let him tell his own story. “A civilian car came up with American
soldiers in it. Then more soldiers in military vehicles. I told them I
didn’t understand what had happened, that I was a scientific researcher.
But they made me lie down in the street, tied my arms behind me with plastic-and-steel
cuffs, and tied up my feet and put me in one of their vehicles.”
The next bit of his story carries implications for our own journalistic
profession. “After ten minutes in the vehicle, I was taken out again.
There were journalists with cameras. The Americans untied me, then made
me lie on the road again. Then, in front of the cameras, they tied my
hands and feet all over again and put me back in the vehicle.”
If this wasn’t a common story in Baghdad today — if the gross
injustices meted out to ordinary Iraqis and the equally gross mistreatment
in America’s prison camps here was not so common — then Qais
al-Salman’s story would not be so important.
Amnesty International turned up in Baghdad to investigate, as well as
Saddam’s monstrous crimes, the mass detention center run by the Americans
at Baghdad international airport in which up to 2,000 prisoners live in
hot, airless tents. The makeshift jail is called Camp Cropper and there
have already been two attempted breakouts.
Both would-be escapees, needless to say, were swiftly shot dead by their
American captors. Amnesty was forbidden permission to visit Camp Cropper.
This is where the Americans took Qais Al-Salman on June 6.
He was put in Tent B, a vast canvas room containing up to 130 prisoners.
“There were different classes of people there,” Qais al-Salman
says.
“There were people of high culture, doctors and university people,
and there were the most dirty, animal people, thieves and criminals the
like of which I never saw before.
“In the morning, I was taken for interrogation before an American
military intelligence officer. I showed him letters involving me in US
aid projects. He pinned a label on my shirt. It read, ‘Suspected
Assassin’.”
Now there probably are some assassins in Camp Cropper. The good, the bad,
and the ugly have been incarcerated there: old Baathists, possible Iraqi
torturers, looters, and just about anyone who has got in the way of the
American military. Only “selected” prisoners are beaten during
interrogation. Again, I repeat, the source is impeccable, and Western.
Qais Al-Salman was given no water to wash in, and after trying to explain
his innocence to a second interrogator, he went on hunger strike. No formal
charges were made against him. There were no rules for the American jailers.
“Some soldiers drove me back to Baghdad after 33 days in that camp,”
Qais al-Salman says. “They dropped me in Rashid Street and gave me
back my documents and Danish passport and they said, ‘Sorry’.”
Qais al-Salman went home to his grief-stricken mother who had long believed
her son was dead. No American had contacted her despite her desperate
requests to the US authorities for help. Not one of the Americans had
bothered to tell the Danish government they had imprisoned one of its
citizens. Just as in Saddam’s day, a man had simply been “disappeared”
off the streets of Baghdad.
Source: Independent (UK)
Call it what it really is: sick
By Douglas Valentine
What do you call it when George W. Bush, without provocation and based
on false pretenses, sends an army to invade a foreign nation; and then,
without any attempt to negotiate a surrender, effect an arrest, or put
this nation’s leaders on trial and present evidence of their crimes,
instead puts multimillion dollar bounties on their heads, relies on collaborators
and spies to track them down, and then corners them and blows them away
in their homes, in their own country?
Do you call it what the Israelis, who lately have done it hundreds of
times, call it? A targeted kill?
What would you call it if Saddam Hussein hunted down and killed George
Bush’s daughters in Texas? Cold-blooded murder?
How about calling this sort of behavior assassination?
Why call it anything? A rose by any other name, right?
And don’t even ask if targeted kills, cold blooded murders, and assassinations
are legal or moral. Who the hell cares?
They’re popular. It’s so much fun, you can even find death cards
on the internet, naming the people that Bush plans to kill in Iraq. It’s
like a videogame, or that old Steve McQueen show, Wanted Dead or Alive.
Bush really gets into it too; “Bring ‘em on,” he said,
playing the role of Paladin in Have Gun Will Travel; and since then a
couple of GIs have gotten killed every day. But what the hell, it’s
a volunteer army, and it isn’t you or me. So they die for Bush’s
vainglory. Who cares? It’s the vicarious thrill that counts.
Back when the CIA was assassinating foreign leaders all over the world,
in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, they secretly liked to call it
Executive Action. Those were the bad old days, when the CIA had to secretly
go about its dirty business of mass murder. Back then they had to resort
to euphemisms to get the job done.
In the Republic of Vietnam, first the CIA called the mass murder of its
enemies, in their own country, elimination. But that sounded too harsh,
so it changed the term to neutralize.
In 1967 the CIA created the infamous Phoenix Program to neutralize —
which meant to hunt down through informants and then kill, capture, torture,
and detain indefinitely — a revolving annual door of some 70,000
members of Communist and Nationalist insurgents, and anyone supporting
them politically or administratively, in their own country.
The United States government admits that the CIA killed some 25,000 people
through the Phoenix Program. It did successfully and gleefully neutralize
some hundreds of thousands altogether. They know how to do it and they’re
ready to cast the Phoenix spell worldwide.
Now we have it from Richard Perle — one of the corrupt cabal that
rules the White House, and makes Israeli policy American policy in cahoots
with the Bush oil régime, whose loyalty lies not to the American
public but to its own self-enrichment — that America will not leave
Iraq as long as some 30,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath
Party, in Perle’s words, remain active.
So now maybe they’re gonna change the term to inactivating?
By inactivating, Bush, Perle, Wolfowitz, and the other members of their
criminal régime mean the planned mass murder of some 30,000 Iraqis
in Iraq. If they do it the way they did it in Vietnam, just like Bob Kerrey’s
little mission in Thanh Phong, they also plan to inactivate the families
and friends of these 30,000 people.
You can’t terrorize insurgents into submission unless you do it this
way, as the Israelis have taught us so well. You have to terrorize everyone.
Just like the Israelis terrorized the Palestinians into a state of submission.
The newspaper and TV commentators applaud this Iraqi experiment in targeted
kills and mass murder as boosting the morale of the American occupation
army.
Just today the headlines hailed the inactivating of Saddam Hussein’s
sons as a righteous act that was more than merely morally justifiable,
but something akin to Divine justice.
And no one is astounded, because the vast majority of Americans were ethically
inactivated a long time ago, through 50 years of government propaganda.
In order to enjoy their SUVs and cell phones, they will rejoice while
George W. Bush, in his role as God Almighty, cuts a swath of righteous
savagery through the world, mass murdering everyone he and the cabal designate
as their personal enemies —just like George W. Bush, all by his little
lonesome, tried, convicted, and sentenced Saddam Hussein and his family
to death, and then went out and killed them.
From now on, Bush alone chooses who lives or dies, and no one can stop
him. It is the one Commandment that the American empire is based upon.
And that’s how we have become a nation of assassins, void of conscience.
Call it Apotheosis by the Divine Right of Execution. Or call it what it
really is: sick.
Source: CounterPunch
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