US cited for ‘systematic’ war crimes in Iraq

Compiled by Bud Howell

May 12(AGR) — The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal that broke last week with the release of photographs showing the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, has become a major inquiry into widespread accounts of rape, murder, and US complicity in international war crimes.

On May 7, Congress attended a closed-door viewing of previously unreleased photos and videos of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of US military personnel. Following the viewing, several senators spoke of the images’ alarming content, which included images of fatal beatings, sexual humiliation, and rape.

“We’re not just talking about giving people a humiliating experience; we’re talking about rape and murder,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said this week it warned American officials of prisoner abuse in Iraq more than a year ago, and that cases of mistreatment were “not individual acts.” Commenting from Geneva on the torture of Iraqis detained ­ many without a charge or reason for their capture — by US military personnel, Pierre Kraehenbuehl, operations director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, said “There was a pattern and a system.”

Military intelligence officers “confirmed that it was part of the military intelligence process... to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion,” said the Red Cross. This treatment included “beatings with hard objects including pistols and rifles” and prisoners being “paraded naked outside cells... sometimes hooded or with women’s underwear over their heads.”

The Red Cross’s probe was made public as Amnesty International called upon the US to fully investigate the abuse of Iraqi prisoners. In a letter to President Bush, the London-based human rights group expressed its outrage at the abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Calling many situations of abuse “war crimes”, the letter urged Washington “to bring to justice those responsible for war crimes and other violations,” whether they were directly involved in abusing prisoners or whether they were higher up the chain of command. “The world is watching as your administration responds to the most recent evidence of torture and degrading treatment of Iraqis at the hands of US personnel,” the letter prefaced.

The official plea for action went on to read: “In this regard, your Government’s record in the context of ‘war on terror’ detentions gives cause for concern, as fundamental principles of law and human rights continue to be violated despite the administrations stated commitment to these principles.”

The London-based rights group also recalled that it had sent the US Government a report in July 2003, four months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, which included allegations of torture and ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees by US and coalition troops.

The Red Cross also reported that military intelligence officers estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the 43,000 Iraqis detained over the past year were innocent. The Red Cross study also concluded that the US prison practices were prohibited under International Humanitarian Law. In addition to the prison conditions, Iraqi attorneys have criticized the entire judicial process the US has set up in Iraq. Malik Dohan, the president of the Iraqi Bar Association told the Washington Post, “The system is not fair at all. Aside from the question of torture, people are being held for long periods of time without having their cases reviewed by a court.”

Complimenting the Red Cross probe are recent statements from a former US interrogator at Abu Ghraib, who says that many of its prisoners currently detained by the US-led coalition are innocent Iraqis picked up at random by US troops and questioned by underqualified intelligence officers. Torin Nelson, who served as a contractor at Abu Ghraib last year, said on May 7 that many of the detainees at the prison were “innocent of any acts against the coalition”.

“I’ve read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, ‘the target was not at home. The neighbor came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him,’” Nelson said.

Among the probable youngest-known Iraqi citizens illegally imprisoned and eventually brutalized by Pentagon-backed soldiers is a 12 year-old Iraqi girl. The US military has said it will investigate claims by a former inmate of Abu Ghraib that the girl was stripped and beaten by military personnel.

Suhaib al-Baz, a journalist for the al-Jazeera television network, claims to have been tortured at the prison, based west of Baghdad, while held there for 54 days. Al-Baz was arrested when reporting clashes between insurgents and coalition forces in November. He said: “They brought a 12-year-old girl into our cellblock late at night. Her brother was a prisoner in the other cells. She was naked and screaming and calling out to him as they beat her. Her brother was helpless and could only hear her cries. This affected all of us because she was just a child.”

The allegations cannot be verified independently but al-Baz maintains psychological and physical violence were commonplace in the jail. Kifah Talah, 44, an engineer, claims his injuries from being abused by US-led coalition occupiers were so severe that he suffered renal failure. He said he and six other detainees were made to hold out their arms horizontally and were beaten when they failed to do so for more than a few minutes.

He also reports that a father and his 15-year-old son were tortured in front of his cell: “They made the son carry two jerry cans full of water. An American soldier had a stick and when he stopped, he would beat him. “He collapsed so they stripped him and poured cold water over him.”

They brought in a man who was wearing a hood. They pulled it off. The son was shocked to see it was his father and collapsed.

Al-Baz claims the guards at the prison were keen to take photographs of the abuse and turned it into a competition. “They were enjoying taking photographs of the torture. There was a daily competition to see who could take the most gruesome picture. The winner’s photo would be stuck on a wall and also put on their laptop computers as a screensaver.

“I had a good opinion of the Americans but since my time in prison, I’ve changed my mind. In Iraq we still have no freedom or democracy. They are so cruel to us.”

Shaking, he added: “One terrible game played involved kick-boxing. The soldiers would surround us and compete as to who could kick-box one of us furthest. The idea was to try and make us crash into the wall.” The statement, part of an action being brought on behalf of the families of 13 Iraqis allegedly killed by British troops, describes how the men were covered with hoods and had freezing water poured over them.

Military police reservist Savbrina Harman, who was recently charged with abusing detainees at Abu Gihraib, said she was never schooled in the Geneva Conventions’ rules on prisoner treatment.

“The Geneva Convention was never posted, and none of us remember taking a class to review it,” Harman said, adding that the first time she read it was after being charged. “I read the entire thing highlighting everything the prison is in violation of. There’s a lot,” she said. In the Army report on conditions at the prison, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba said “soldiers were poorly prepared and untrained to conduct I/R operations prior to deployment, at the mobilization site, upon arrival in theater and throughout their mission.”

“The US administration has shown a consistent disregard for the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of law, human rights and decency,” said Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary general. “This has created a climate in which U.S. soldiers feel they can dehumanize and degrade prisoners with impunity. What we now see in Iraq is the logical consequence of the relentless pursuit of the ‘war on terror’ regardless of the costs to human rights and the rules of war.”

Nelson also said prison abuses were partly a result of an over-reliance on private firms so eager to meet demand for their services that they sent staff ill-prepared to deal with intelligence work. “They’re under so much pressure to fill slots quickly... if you’re in such a hurry to get bodies, you end up with cooks and truck drivers doing intelligence work,” he said, adding that the innocence of some detainees made them more likely to be abused because interrogators refused to believe they had been rounded up arbitrarily and regarded them as “tough targets” to be broken. Nelson resigned from his job in February and is now reportedly listed as a witness in the official military report into the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.

Nelson’s confession came as evidence continues to surface that a group of former Israeli Defense Force and General Security Service members were hired by the Pentagon through a top-secret sub-contract to brutally interrogate Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. According to US intelligence sources, the recruited interrogators included a number of Arabic-speaking Israelis. Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command, said there were 37 contract interrogators used in the Abu Ghraib prison.

Two contractors, CACI and Titan, have close ties to the Israeli military and technology communities. CACI has received grants from US-Israeli bi-national foundations. Titan also has had close connections to Israeli interests. After his stint as CIA Director, James Woolsey served as a Titan’s director. Woolsey is an architect of America’s Iraq policy and the chief proponent of and lobbyist for Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. An adviser to the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Freedom House, and Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Woolsey is close to Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a key person in the chain of command who would have not only known about the torture tactics used by US and Israeli interrogators in Iraq but who would have also approved them.

CACI, (referred to as “Khaki” in military circles) was formed in the 1960s by Harry Markowitz and Herbert Karr. Markowitz won a Nobel prize in economics in 1990 for his research on stock portfolio diversification.

The company’s first federal contracts were for custom-written computer languages that could be used to build battlefield simulation programs.

Today CACI, like most military industry players, boasts a roster of former soldiers and spies, including board members Michael Bayer (former Vice Chairman of the Pentagon’s Business Board, and advisor to the Air Force, Army, U.S. Naval War College, and Sandia National Laboratory), Barbara McNamara (ex-Deputy Director of the National Security Agency), Arthur Money (former assistant Secretary of Defense), and Larry Welch, (an ex-Air Force General who served on the joint chiefs of staff during the first Bush adminstration).

One year before the US invasion of Iraq, then-Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White informed a trio of top-level Department of Defense officials that the army lacked the basic information required to effectively manage its burgeoning force of private contractors. In a memorandum dated Mar. 8, 2002, White warned the under secretaries responsible for army contracting, personnel and finances that reductions in the service’s civilian and military work force, carried out over the previous 11 years, had been accompanied by an increased reliance on private contractors—a personnel shift, he noted, apparently done without adequate analysis.

“Contractors have become a necessity in the performance of the most sensitive public work,” adds Guttman, an expert in government contracting and procurement processes, who also serves as a consultant to the Center for Public Integrity. “In reviewing the use of contractors in Iraq, the big picture is the current and admitted inadequacy of official resources to account for the contractor work force.”

“Currently,” White admitted, “Army planners and programmers lack visibility at the Departmental level into the labor and costs associated with the contract work force and of the organizations and missions supported by them.”

While the investigation of abuses by CACI International continues, it is important to understand the political relationships that the company has developed with powerful politicians. In 2003, more than two-thirds of CACI International’s total revenues of $843 million came from contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. Overall, over 92% of the company’s revenues come from contracts with the federal government, including with the DoD, Department of Justice, and State Department. These taxpayer-financed contracts helped the company enjoy after-tax profits of $45 million in 2003.

Sources: AFP, AP, Boston Herald, CorpWatch, Guardian (UK), Reuters, Washington Post, Mirror (UK), Times of India, OneWorld.net

Pakistanis gunned down to impress America

By Greg Bearup

May 8 — The gaudy mansions of those who’ve “made it” look out of place in a sea of poverty, surrounded by dull, red-brick huts, wallowing buffalo and the stench of open sewers. Fatima Bibi is a sweeper in one of these houses, working not for money, but for a bowl of rice or some flour.

Her employers in this small Punjabi village were once poor too, just like her. Now they live in relative luxury, with a satellite dish and a new fridge, because their son went “to New York to drive taxis.”

But Fatima’s son wasn’t so lucky. When 20-year-old Ijaz set off for Europe early in 2002 he carried the hopes of his family. Ijaz was the second youngest of the widow’s nine children. He ended up “collateral damage” in the war on terror, gunned down by police in the Balkan state of Macedonia, who claimed that he and six others killed were terrorists.

Last week Macedonian officials admitted that this was a lie, and that the shooting was a staged murder, part of a clumsy plot to try to impress the US.

“My son, my beautiful son,” wailed Fatima, clutching a photograph of Ijaz. “He was a good boy who just wanted to make things better for his family. How could they shoot him down, like a dog? He was a good Muslim, but he had no time for politics.” This week in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, warrants were issued for the arrest of the former interior minister, Ljube Boskovski, in relation to the shooting of Ijaz and the six others.

Several senior police officers have been charged with murder. After a lengthy investigation, the Mace-donian authorities have admitted that the six Pakistanis and one Indian were simply illegal immigrants, trying to get to Greece to find work on the Olympic sites, or anywhere else. “This was the act of a sick mind,” Mirjana Konteska, a Macedonian official, said. “They lost their lives in a stage murder [so the police and officials] could present themselves as participants in the war against terror.”

The seven were picked up as they entered Macedonia through Bulgaria. They were detained for several days before being driven to a spot en route to the US embassy. Then they were shot.

Boskovski claimed that his forces had foiled a major terrorist attack on the US embassy, and that bags of guns and uniforms were found on the “mojahedin fighters.”

There were inconsistencies in the story from the start. The police originally said they had been ambushed, but could not explain why seven heavily armed terrorists were killed, while the police received no injuries. They then changed their version of events to say that they had ambushed the terrorists to prevent them attacking the American embassy. But the inquiry found otherwise. The men were shot dead in cold blood. To cover their tracks, the police placed bags filled with guns and uniforms next to the bodies.

“I told him not to go,” Fatima said, her last words to her son. “But he was determined, and we’d sold our house to pay the smuggling agent.”

As she kissed her son goodbye she slipped two plastic copies of Koranic verses into the pocket of his coat. One was the Surah Yaseen, to keep him safe while traveling, and the other was the Naat De Ali, to give him courage -- just as Catholic mothers would give their departing sons a symbol of St. Christopher. Some of the other mothers had done the same. The Macedonian police would later claim the items were terrorist literature.

The deal with the smuggler was that 125,000 rupees ($2,000) would be paid when Ijaz made it to Turkey, and the remaining money (about $400) when he arrived in Greece. Ijaz, with the other young men, had valid documents for Iran, but fakes for the trip from there through Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia and on to Greece.

Ijaz’s family was already heavily in debt because he had made the journey the year before, only to be deported from Greece. But they thought he would be safe and, at worst, deported again.

The family rattled off the names of boys from the village who had made it: Ansar had a good job in a Milan factory, Mudassar was cleaning fish in Canada. Almost every family in the district has, or has attempted, to send someone to the west. “We are very poor,” Fatima said. “The education our children get is not good enough to get a job. The only way is to leave. Life is good for the ones who have children in Europe and America. They have big houses and cars. They have money to marry their daughters, and then weddings like emperors. My husband died not long after my last child was born [her ninth]. My life has been very hard. Ijaz was so happy to be going to Europe. He would tell me how much money he was going to send home. He would say I would not have to sweep floors again.”

A Pakistani human rights lawyer, Ansar Burney, raised money which allowed the six families to pay off their debts, and he fought a long battle with the Macedonian authorities to have the bodies returned to Pakistan. He has now lodged a claim with the international court of justice in The Hague for $2 million compensation for each of the six families. He said he would also act for the family of the Indian worker killed in the attack.

“Who knows what other atrocities have been committed in the name of the war on terror,” Burney told the Guardian. “This whole affair has just been so incredibly evil.” A spokesman from his office said the Pakistani government had been “unhelpful” when they first tried to get the bodies back from Macedonia. “Once they heard the word ‘terrorist’ they ran a mile. They didn’t want to do anything that would upset the Americans.”

In another village, not far from Fatima’s, there are still more grieving families. “I have four daughters and only one of them is married,” cried Rizia Bibi. Her son, Umar Farooq, 20, was killed. Rizwan Nawed, the brother of 22-year-old Subtain Nawed, who was also killed, said he had a cousin who made it to Greece more than 10 years ago and is now a shopkeeper. “His family has bought more land and a tractor and they can afford to send their children to schools that will get them to university,” he said. “One person can change the life of all the people - it only takes one to get out and the future is paved with gold.”

Source: Guardian (UK)