Month: April 2013

The Guardian has published a report based on new interviews with British soldiers who witnessed torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees at the US-run prison Camp Nama following the invasion in 2003.

“On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq,” the report says, a number of British personnel who cooperated with US forces and officials at Camp Nama “have come forward to describe the abuses they witnessed,” which include:

• Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels.
• Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks.
• Prisoners being routinely hooded.
• Inmates being taken into a sound-proofed shipping container for interrogation, and emerging in a state of physical distress.

The full extent of the torture and abuse that took place in US-run facilities in Iraq will never be known. Most Americans think the scandal went no farther than a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib, where leaked photographs revealed  blood-streaked floors, detainees on dog collars, sadistic sexual abuse, evidence of homicide and more. But the true scandal was bigger. Much bigger.

The Guardian:

Suspects were brought to the secret prison at Baghdad International airport, known as Camp Nama, for questioning by US military and civilian interrogators. But the methods used were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a US human rights body but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon.

A British serviceman who served at Nama recalled: “I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown on to the truck.”

The abuse at Camp Nama has been reported before. One Army intelligence sergeant “told his commander three members of the counterintelligence team had hit detainees, pulled their hair, tried to asphyxiate them and staged mock executions with pistols pointed at the detainees’ heads,” The Washington Post reported in 2005. In 2006, The New York Times revealed that American interrogators at Camp Nama severely beat detainees and even shot paintball guns at them for target practice, among other cruelties.

“Torture and other abuses against detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq were authorized and routine, even after the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal,” Human Rights Watch found in 2006. According to the report, “detainees were routinely subjected to severe beatings, painful stress positions, severe sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme cold and hot temperatures.”

Many of these reports indicated there was official sanction of this abuse from high up the US chain of command, including full knowledge of it by Stanley McChrystal. The Guardian report adds further weight to this, revealing that UK soldiers had to go through certain procedures because US officials knew they would be in violation of international law.

…[O]ne peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment. British soldiers were almost always accompanied by a lone American soldier, who was then recorded as having captured the prisoner. Members of the SAS and SBS were repeatedly briefed on the importance of this measure.

It was an arrangement that enabled the British government to side-step a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention. And it consigned the prisoners to what some lawyers have described as a legal black hole.

And what failed to stop after Abu Ghraib also did not end with Camp Nama. On May 30, 2006, “a joint US-Iraqi inspection” of an Iraqi detention facility “discovered more than 1,400 detainees in squalid, cramped conditions,” many of whom were illegally detained, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Prisoners “displayed bruising, broken bones, and lash-marks, many claimed to have been hung by handcuffs from a hook in the ceiling and beaten on the soles of their feet and their buttocks.”

The inspectors found a torture contraption where ”a hook…on the ceiling of an empty room at the facility” was “attached [to] a chain-and-pulley system ordinarily used for lifting vehicles” and that “apparent bloodspots stained the floor underneath.” All 41 prisoners interviewed by US inspectors had reported being tortured and 37 juveniles were held illegally.

Also revealed by WikiLeaks cables was the US military order Frago 242, which discouraged US forces from taking note when Iraqi interrogators engaged in torture and abuse.

Many in the media have spent the last three weeks pouring over decisions about the Iraq War, marking the 10th anniversary of the invasion. The strategic and moral case for the war was justifiably the focus of this flood of commentary, with nary a word about the rampant torture and abuse that went on in countless prisons and black cites in Iraq following the invasion. The list of Bush administration atrocities and war crimes, I suppose, is too long to get equal attention.

During the last week of March, more than 30,000 people signed a petition urging the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Bradley Manning. While the numbers continue to mount on the petition website, so do the comments from individual signers.

Thousands have already written personal notes to explain their support for the petition. I hope the Nobel committee reads the comments carefully when the petition arrives in Oslo later this spring.

As a U.S. Army private — seeing massive evidence of official deception, human rights abuses and flagrant killing of civilians — Bradley Manning did not just follow orders. Instead, he became a whistleblower, supplying vast troves of documents to WikiLeaks, exposing duplicity that had enormous impacts from Iraq and Afghanistan to Egypt and Tunisia.

Manning, now 25 years old, could be in prison for the rest of his life. But while the U.S. government tries to crush him, it’s clear that many Americans love him — and would be thrilled to see him win the Nobel Peace Prize. The following samples of comments from petition signers begin to explain why:

“Bradley Manning knowingly risked his freedom in order to bring the true facts of war to the public. The courage and insight of such a young person is worthy of the highest recognition.”  Sheila C., Kings Park, NY

“Manning is a U.S. political prisoner being persecuted for blowing the whistle on war crimes by the powerful, including his own corrupt government. He should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.”  Ruth K., Greenbelt, MD

Continue reading “An Outpouring of Love and Support for Bradley Manning to Receive the Nobel Peace Prize”

Ask your average American or member of Congress what the fundamental characteristic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is and your apt to hear boiler plate explanations of inherent hostilities between Muslims and Jews and catch-phrases like “ensuring Israel’s security in a bad neighborhood.”

But these are not what the conflict boils down to. The defining element in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that one group of people decided to colonize a land that already belonged to another people. Even in the most propagandized framing of the conflict, this central component cannot be glossed over, which is why it is so amazing it is entirely absent from American commentary.

In a political sense, the most straightforward explanation for why there is still no peace is that Israel (with crucial US support) has blocked the widely accepted two-state settlement because it insists on continuing its campaign of colonization in what is left of historic Palestine (namely, the West Bank). A two-state solution is unacceptable to Israel because the land truly belongs to the Jews, or so goes the thinking. So, Israel maintains the military occupation of the West Bank (or, as Israelis deliberately refer to it, Judea and Samaria) and continues to bulldoze Palestinian homes, seize control of the water resources, and subsidize Israelis to live in newly constructed Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

The post-1967 status quo, as Rashid Khalidi documents in his new book Brokers of Deceit: How the US has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, is based on the stipulations laid down by Israel’s right-wing Likud Prime Minister from 1977-1982, Menachem Begin. In the Likud Party’s 1977 platform, it was declared that “the right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal and indisputable,” and “[t]herefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed over to any foreign administration. Between the sea and the Jordan River there will be only Israeli sovereignty.”

“This is clear as well from Begin’s handwritten notes sketching out his ideas for Palestinian autonomy prepared around the time of the Camp David summit in 1978,” writes Khalidi. In those notes, Begin wrote, “Under no circumstances will Israel permit the establishment in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district of a ‘Palestinian state.'”

And here we have our insurmountable conflict. This has been official Israeli policy ever since, as has been especially demonstrated during Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure, with the settler population vastly increasing, the subjugation of Palestinians intensifying, and explicit threats being made to physically isolate Palestinian East Jerusalem from the West Bank and bisect all of Palestinian territory (making a contiguous state impossible). Despite American and Israeli  rhetoric of “peace talks” and “two states for two peoples,” Israel quite clearly has no plans to allow any Palestinian sovereignty west of the Jordan River.

Israel’s intransigence on this central point is not insuperable, as it happens. They are empowered by unmatched US support in the economic, military, and diplomatic realm. Plainly, they would be unable to deny Palestinian rights to statehood – the same rights Israelis insist on for themselves – without US support. Until and unless that support is withdrawn, the conflict will continue to be stalemated and the slow ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began in the early 20th century will continue.

Obama’s speech in Israel last week was thought to be strong in its advocacy of Palestinian rights. “Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer,” he said. But he made clear he would never use America’s leverage over Israel to pressure it to stop pursuing the goal of Greater Israel. That’s not only a gloomy picture for Palestinians, but it helps ensure the continued absence in America of any real understanding of what the conflict is actually about.

As has been widely known and reported, the CIA is facilitating the delivery of weapons to Syrian rebels from countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Jordan. While these regimes have plenty of their own weapons on hand to send into Syria, they’ve also received some from Croatia, presumably for purposes of deniability.

As The New York Times reported, “From offices at secret locations, American intelligence officers have helped the Arab governments shop for weapons, including a large procurement from Croatia…”

Croatia has denied these allegations. But the evidence is becoming pretty clear. John Reed at Foreign Policy:

Remember how Croatia denied it had any involvement in shipping weapons to the Syrian rebels? (Despite photos of Jordanian military-owned transport planes loading up at Croatian airports.)

Well, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has used UN trade statistics to claim that Croatia conducted the largest transfer of arms in the tiny nation’s history. In December 2012, Jordan purchased 230 tons of rocket or grenade launchers, howitzers, mortars, and plenty of ammunition from Croatia for $6.5 million. Prior to this, the Balkan nation’s largest-ever shipment of arms was 15 pistols in 2001, according to the OCCRP.

While Croatia denies any involvement in what The New York Times reports to be a CIA-facilitated, multinational arms pipeline to the Syrian rebels, numerous Yugoslav-designed weapons have appeared for weeks now in the hands of purported Syrian rebels on YouTube videos.

“Within weeks of the trade,” according to OCCRP, “powerful new weapons began appearing among Syrian rebel fighters” that “match the categories listed in the Croatian export records.”

Arms smuggling is a dirty (and often illegal) business, so it’s no wonder Croatia denies it, Arab governments are mum, and the CIA is handling this secretly. What gets lost in all this illicit trafficking and secrecy is whether or not the policy is a good idea.

There are of course two main problems with arming the rebels: (1) it amounts to support for Islamic jihadists with ties to al-Qaeda that have committed war crimes, and (2) it is not only failing to improve the situation on the ground, it is making it worse by ensuring a perpetual stalemate.