Month: March 2004

Salah Hassan, a cameraman for Al Jazeera tells a disturbing story of his arrest by American soldiers in Iraq.

From Baquba, Hassan says he was taken to the military base at Baghdad International Airport, held in a bathroom for two days, then flown hooded and bound to Tikrit. After two more days in another bathroom, he was loaded onto a five-truck convoy of de-tainees and shipped south to Abu Ghraib, a Saddam-built prison that now serves as the American military’s main detention center and holds about 13,000 captives.

Once inside the sprawling prison, Hassan says, he was greeted by US soldiers who sang “Happy Birthday” to him through his tight plastic hood, stripped him naked and addressed him only as “Al Jazeera,” “boy” or “bitch.” He was forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for eleven hours in the bitter autumn night air; when he fell, soldiers kicked his legs to get him up again. In the morning, Hassan says, he was made to wear a dirty red jumpsuit that was covered with someone else’s fresh vomit and interrogated by two Americans in civilian clothes. They made the usual accusations that Hassan and Al Jazeera were in cahoots with “terrorists.”

Hassan’s treatment at the hands of US troops is not unique:

Arabs working for other media outlets have also been harassed by US troops. Mazen Dana of Reuters was shot and killed by an American soldier outside Abu Ghraib prison in August. Then, in January, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed in Falluja jailed and allegedly beat a three-man Arab-language crew, also from Reuters. The news agency immediately lodged a formal complaint with the US military, charging that its journalists had been abused while in detention. A Reuters freelancer told me that one of the journalists was later hospitalized.

Parenti notes that this hostility toward and attempts to silence Al Jazeera extends even to the US trying to compete with Al Jazeera by launching a sattelite station of it’s own:

At the same time that the US military is harassing Al Jazeera reporters, other parts of the US government, including the State Department, are attempting to answer Al Jazeera in its own language and format. On February 14 the United States launched a nominally independent, US-funded Arabic-language satellite channel called Al Hurra, which means “the free one.” The purpose of this effort is to address the lack of popular support for the US occupation in Iraq, as well as the deepening crisis of American legitimacy throughout the Arab world; polls from the region indicate that more and more people hate the United States every day.

Unlike other US-funded forays into Arabic-language media, Al Hurra, with an annual budget of $62 million, could be quite sophisticated and possibly effective in reshaping the beliefs of the politically important and demographically dominant Arab youth scene. The new channel has a stable of proven Arab journalists–one senior producer is a Palestinian who was poached from Al Jazeera, while the channel’s top managers are Lebanese Christians with proven journalistic track records. On the other hand, the channel is based in Virginia, includes Colin Powell on its board of directors and its first broadcast was a pre-recorded interview with George W. Bush–none of which bode well for winning Arab hearts and minds.

For a look at the Arab response to Al Hurra, see “Arabs United in Hating Al-Hurra.” Al Jazeera is also considered an enemy by the IGC which banned the station from covering any Puppet Council activities.

This anti-freedom attitude toward the Arab press on the part of both the American Occupiers and their puppet council does not bode well for the future freedom of the press in Iraq. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no mention of a free press in the new Neocon-midwifed Basic Law. For all the blather emanating from the Bush administration lauding “freedom” and “liberty” in Iraq, there are very few real signs that it exists at all in Iraq, and more disturbingly, it appears that no one really plans for it to exist. You’d think the Americans overseeing the Iraqis writing the law would’ve let them crib a few ideas from their own constitution, which at least managed to slow the tyrants down a little.

Lt. Col. (ret.) Karen Kwiatkowski has ’em, and they’re piling on fast. Why just now? Ms. Kwiatkowski has been issuing indictments of the belligerati like a woman possessed for almost a year now. She appeared in the film Uncovered produced by the infamous MoveOn.org. She writes for Military Week, and has been featured on NPR and in Salon, Mother Jones, and LA Weekly. So how come she has just now become the traitor du jour for Max Boot and the helmet-headed warbot John Gibson?

I dunno, but I think there’s some sort of lesson here about the value of persistence, or the power of new media. Or something.

Brian Doherty soothes our fears about the Bush administration–or does he?

Fears and anxieties about American empire don’t need to be rooted in any perceived fever swamp, where only openly sinister and nakedly pecuniary motives push American foreign policy. Undoubtedly politicians and their friends in the corporate world try to make the best out of circumstances as they evolve, but still, I imagine that the boys behind Bush could have put their heads together and come up with some other way for his administration to line Halliburton’s silken pockets without the huge risks, both geopolitically and in domestic politics, of waging war in Iraq. It is easy enough to believe that the administration’s foreign policy actions are driven by a very sincere belief that the world would be a safer, freer, more orderly place under the suzerainty of the United States government, and that this goal is worth pursuing at almost any cost.

But just because the goals of the imperialists aren’t nakedly evil doesn’t mean their path is wisest for the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the United States’ citizens—you know, those old-fashioned goals for which governments are instituted among men. Immanentizing the Eschaton is not in the current U.S. Constitution, though the Bush men (calling them conservatives or men of the right seems inappropriate) might contemplate adding it by amendment after they are through roadblocking gay marriage.

Solid commentary, well worth your time. Read the whole thing.

By the way, I haven’t been through Iraq’s interim constitution with a magnifying glass yet, but I don’t think it bans gay marriage. What gives?

Brendan O’Neill takes a swing at antiwar legalists:

The focus on the pre-war intelligence and legality suggests that while some in the anti-war camp have technical quibbles about the current war in Iraq, they do not take a principled, political stance against Britain and America’s right to intervene abroad. That many of Blair’s critics have made intelligence failings and legal questions their main focus, rather than the war itself, indicates that their opposition is based more on tactics than principle. It is not that they are politically opposed to the intervention in Iraq, but that they were not convinced by the imminent nature of Saddam’s threat or the urgency of launching a war without first securing a legal ‘yes’ from the United Nations.

On the fundamental issue of intervention many of these critics cannot argue with Blair, because they fully accept the premise of his international mission to cure the world’s ills; they support Western intervention.

Procedural questions are important, if for no other reason than that they undercut all the pious braying about the “rule of law” and “democracy” Bush and Blair claim to be exporting. That said, O’Neill is absolutely right to nail intervention schizoids such as Robin Cook and Clare Short, who supported the Kosovo war, for their lack of principle. And don’t even get me started on John Kerry. What a profoundly dispiriting menu of political options in the great arsenals of democracy!

Jo Wilding’s commentary while traveling inside Iraq creates a brief but valuable glimpse of what is happening inside the country and how the war has affected the lives of Iraq’s people. Here, the circus performers, traveling past minefields, watch the celebrations in Kurdish Erbil on the signing of Iraq’s interim constitution.

Whatever it means for the rest of Iraq, in Kurdistan the interim constitution was celebrated, giving the Kurds a federal state of their own for the first time ever. Drums announced the coming of the parade, men and boys, the red, white and green of the Kurdish flag, with a many-pointed gold star in the middle, the placard featuring Mustafa Barzani, the murdered Kurdish leader. The Kurds have been stateless people in the empires of others more or less forever, ruled by the Ottomans, the British, the puppets of the British and, until 1991, the Baathists. Winston Churchill authorised the crushing of their demand for an independent state in Kurdistan in the 1920s with poison gas.

Sinan and Selim are studying English at Salahudin University in Erbil. It’s a strange thing, but a lot of Kurdish people are unaware that the weapons they talk about, the weapons Saddam used against them, were sold to him by the UK, the US, Germany, France and so on, paid for with funding granted by the US in the full knowledge of what he was doing to the Kurds. We talked about the war, why it happened. Kurdistan wasn’t the target of much bombing and there are no troops on the streets, no house raids, no detentions without charge, no random shootings. People here know as little about what’s going on in Baghdad and the rest of Iraq as people in Jordan do. It’s another country … read more

Be sure to stop by Jo’s photo gallery as well.

What is the Circus2Iraq? In their own words: “A small group of performers and activists currently in Iraq performing and running circus skills workshops for the kids. People are traumatised, tired and worn down by years of war and sanctions and are still without many basic necessities. We are not aid workers. We think the best thing we can do is bring a bit of colour, a bit of normality, a bit of playfulness and make people smile.” Visit the Circus2Iraq website for more information about this great group of caring people.

What happens when you send Republican neocons to oversee writing a “New Constitution” for Free Iraq?

You get stuff like this:

The individual has the right to security, education, health care, and social security. The Iraqi State and its governmental units, including the federal government, the regions, governorates, municipalities, and local administrations, within the limits of their resources and with due regard to other vital needs, shall strive to provide prosperity and employment opportunities to the people.

No kidding, that’s in Article 14.

How about a right to bear arms? Republicans believe in that, right? Apparently not:

It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law.

Wow, how Jeffersonian! That ought to go over big with the Badr Brigades and the Kurdish Peshmerga, not to even mention the fact practically every Iraqi household is armed.