Month: April 2004

The general in charge of the US-run prison system in Iraq has been suspended and put under investigation over the alleged abuse of Iraqi detainees by US soldiers.

A senior US military spokesman says Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was suspended from her duties in late January after six US soldiers were indicted for mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

Gen Karpinski and another six officers are under administrative investigation that could result in letters of reprimand.

The US Army confirmed the suspension after American network CBS broadcast images of US troops mistreating Iraqi prisoners.

Photographs aired by the network on 60 Minutes II include one showing a prisoner standing on a box with a hood over his head and wires coming from his hands.

The network says he was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off.

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UPDATE: Rahul Mahajan at Empire Notes makes an interesting post on this topic. Rahul:

April 28, 11:30 am EST. Late start blogging this morning because I was on MSNBC News in a “debate” about the shocking (but not surprising) degradation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison committed by U.S. personnel.

Read the rest, including shocking quotes from one of the indicted soldiers’ emails home.

The Independent is reporting that the 36th battalion, composed of Iraqi Arab and Kurdish peshmerga militia , has mutinied. The battalion has been fighting alongside the Marines in the siege of Fallujah. The Independent reports that the Marines separated out those who would fight from those who wouldn’t.

The battalion may have split along ethnic lines. Its soldiers were recruited from the militiamen of the Iraqi political parties which belong to the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, and about half were Kurdish soldiers, known as peshmerga. The Kurds were prepared to fight but Iraqi Arab soldiers said they had had enough. Those who refused to fight were withdrawn from the battlefield for retraining.

The speculation about the peshmerga fighting against the Arabs alongside the Americans is confirmed repeatedly.

From an interesting article by Charles Paul Freund on images of war dead:

The struggle for war-image control began when a camera was first aimed at soldiers in Crimea, but that struggle is hardly founded on the absolutes implied by arguments like the one over the war coffins. The simple version of this and similar debates—that the state must hide its dead or risk growing opposition to its war—is a pointless simplification of a complex phenomenon. Yet both the state, which wants to limit these images’ exposure, and war critics, who want them disseminated, are acting as if the reaction to such images is necessarily Pavlovian.

Freund is correct to write that reactions to war images are not always what one would expect them to be. (For a more in-depth study of this phenomenon, read David Perlmutter’s Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crises, which I hope to discuss in greater detail at some point.) I know plenty of yahoos whose response to photos of dead American soldiers would be something akin to, “Let’s go nuke all those ragheads!” As far as I’m concerned, the point in showing uncensored images from the war is not that they will automatically turn everyone against it. I don’t believe they will. I do believe, first, that state censorship is inherently un-American, and, second, that showing such images (of soldiers and civilians) would finally give this war the unchallenged attention it deserves. A photo of a dismembered Iraqi child might not turn a majority of the country against the war, but imagine showing one on the nightly news just once a month and then tell me that we would still be duking it out over gay marriage or Janet Jackson’s bosom. That’s why the U.S. government and its cheerleaders suppress these images–they don’t want anyone, especially the great, apathetic middle of kinda-pros and kinda-antis, to think too hard about what’s happening.

International Blog Roundup

I thought it might be interesting to some AntiWar readers if I put together a post of links to some good blogs written from interesting places that you might not have discovered yet. These are all active blogs that are worth checking daily.

• De Spectaculis – This blog is written by Martial, an American in Kabul, Afghanistan.
• wildfirejo – Written by a British woman in Baghdad, who is a performer in Circus2Iraq. Jo is also involved in many humanitarian efforts in Iraq and recently helped take medical supplies to Fallujah.
• Beyond Northern Iraq – Written by Stuart Hughes, a journalist who lost his leg (Mr. Stumpy) to a landmine in April, 2003 during the Iraq invasion. Stuart is a BBC reporter now in London, but he blogs from everywhere.
• Raed in the Middle – Written by Raed Jarrar who originally blogged on Salam Pax’s blog Where is Raed? Raed blogs from Amman, Jordan and Baghdad, where his family lives.
• The Religious Policeman – Yes, there is actually brave blogger writing from Saudi Arabia. Alhamedi Alanezi amazingly blogs from Riyadh. He even has a FAQ, in which he explains how he manages to be critical of the Saudi government.
• The Angry Arab – Written by As`ad AbuKhalil, who is from Beirut, Lebanon, but has lived in the US since the early eighties and is now professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley.

Of course there are quite a few other bloggers out there telling their stories, and more come online all the time but I listed these because they are frequently updated and often have unique insights that can’t be found in the mainstream media.

“Son, all I’ve ever asked of my readers is for them to treat Bush’s ramblings as if they were the word of God.” Whoa, it’s getting a bit chilly up in Canada, eh?

Al Jazeera reports that the “Islamic resistance in Iraq” is offering a bounty for Rumsfeld, Sanchez and Kimmitt. This flyer is reported to have been distributed in Fallujah:

It says 15 000 000 $ as a reward who bring one of these three heads. It doesn’t say anything about the body being attached.