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September 29, 2005
All You Can Be; In Other Words Raped
Some shocking news here: Survey: 6 in 10 Military Women Harassed
WASHINGTON (AP) - Six in 10 women who have served in the National Guard and Reserves say they were sexually harassed or assaulted, but less than one-quarter reported it and many who did were encouraged to drop their complaints, a government survey says.The survey by the Veterans Affairs Department found that nearly half of the women who responded said the incidents occurred while they were on duty.
One in 10 said she was raped, nearly 60 percent said they were verbally harassed, and the rest of the reports were for other types of incidents, according to the survey, which was released by Democratic members of Congress.
In addition, more than 27 percent of male Guard and Reserve veterans said they experienced some type of sexual harassment or assault - most often by other men.
One in ten reported being raped. If this is how the American women in the military are treated, imagine what we do to Iraqis. (Well, perhaps we'll have to imagine a bit less since the judge responding to ACLU's FOIA request ruled that the Pentagon should release more of the Abu Ghraib pictures. Expect more appeals, delays, red tape and obstruction. The Pentagon argues that releasing the pictures will incite more violence. Hmmm, is the Defense Department arguing that these terrorists react to our policies -- instead of being out to get us no matter what? Seems so.)
Posted by zeynep at 07:43 PM | Comments (1)
September 28, 2005
Looks Like Black People Don't Rape Babies at First Opportunity
Remember all the reports of how babies were being raped in the Dome and the Convention center, and how some conservative commentators were arguing that the "The swiftness of New Orleans' descent from chaos into barbarism" was an indicator in favor of a Hobbesian view of human nature -war of all against all?
Well, guess what? Turns out black people don't turn around and murder each other and rape babies as soon as the po-lice disappear.
Reports of Anarchy at the Superdome OverstatedAs floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: People firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people murdered for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center.
Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members killing and raping people" inside the Dome. Other unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, overwhelmingly African-American masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. The mayor told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of murdered bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines assert that, while anarchy reigned at times and people suffered indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
In fact, history is clear on this point. The aftermath of most natural disasters is similar: incredible acts generosity, cooperation and selflessness, punctuated by rarer ugly acts of opportunity and cruelty. And yes, if help does not arrive, things do become more chaotic with time.
I'm not arguing that nothing happened. In fact there was one confirmed murder at the Dome. Maybe a few more will surface with time. And yes, rape is very much underreported so I am sure there were some rapes, as there always are where there are men. But raping babies? In the middle of tens of thousands of people, succeeding in pulling children from their parents and raping them? Please.
Only about black people could we believe such outrageous claims. And as a demonstration of how much they are part of this culture, many black leaders and black victims of Katrina echoed these sentiments.
I would think the Black Congressional Caucus would do much better if they stopped worrying whether referring to people taking refuge from Hurricane Katrina as refugees signified that black people were not seen as part of this country, but rather started worrying about how much black America is part of this country, even internalizing the racism that permeates our culture.
Posted by zeynep at 12:08 AM | Comments (4)
September 24, 2005
War Porn
A site has been noted in couple of blogs, a site where soldiers post their own war porn, pictures of Iraqis they killed, in order to get access to conventional porn. Billmon has a long post explaining how this site has basically convinced him we must withdraw immediately -- notwithstanding all the qualms one may have about what will become of Iraq...
The site was first written up in the Nation. Don't click on it if you don't want to see what blown up heads and charred bodies really look like -- with smiling U.S. soldiers posing next to them and with comments like "where's the barbecue sauce?" It's basically a porn site that promised access for free to soldiers who posted pictures proving who they were. And so they posted these pictures, their war trophies, their porn. (It's really hard to look at. At least read the Nation article first and if you do look, I'd advise not being in a hurry. It's not easy to recover from, if recover is the right word. Let me rephrase: it takes some effort to breathe again.)
I just came back from the D.C. rally where the main slogan was "Support the Troops." There were more than a few references to the torture and the killing done us but the overwhelming majority of the posters were simply: "support the troops, bring them home." At this point in history, I'm for any reason, anything that stops what we are inflicting on that country.
But must we all be so blind to the nature of our actions in Iraq? Lots of people argue "we" have some obligation to Iraq, "we" must not withdraw so quickly, "we" must first set things right at least a bit.
(Let's for the moment ignoring the imperialist assumptions underlying those comments: "we" somehow have a duty to be somewhere where we are not wanted at all.)
Well, if the "we" in question was composed of the people who put forth these statements in earnest maybe there'd be something to talk about. But, at this point in history, all those arguments put forth by the bleeding-hearts-unite-for-Iraqis crowd are effectively blind to the imperial, murderous nature of what the real we, our troops, are doing over there. Whether they are blind out of naivete or out of imperialist ideological assumptions does not really matter, not at this point in history anyway.
And yes, support the troops in this sense: we must recognize what is happening to hundreds and thousands of men and women so that we may react to it appropriately rather than pat them on the back and thank them for "serving." Many have obviously become deeply dehumanized, and have carried a racist, callous culture to its outmost conclusion. They kill, they take pictures, they smile for the camera.
Is it their fault they were sent there, in this war based on lies and deception? Let's just say no to that, even though we must also honor the concscientious objectors who showed that one can say no. We can simply acknowledge that most of them didn't join thinking they'd get to blow up people -- although we must also acknowledge some did.
But there they are, murdering and torturing. There is no getting around that fact, because getting around that means not seeing the people of Iraq as people. Not seeing what they are doing means participating the the imperial supremacy --which is more complicated than racism simply based on skin color-- which allows men to kill, and sometimes smile.
And they are killing and torturing, often just for sport, and not because they are "undertrained" or because it's policy or because they are trying to extract some intelligence. Torture, simply put, seems to release tension for these soldiers. from the latest report from the Human Rights Watch, which is worth many posts on its own:
Soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals, a U.S. rights group alleges in a new report.The Human Rights Watch report, issued Friday, was compiled from interviews with a captain and two sergeants who served in a battalion of the 82nd Airborne that was stationed at a military base called Mercury near Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold retaken by U.S. forces last year.
The soldiers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the abuse took place almost daily and often came under orders. Anything short of causing an inmate's death was allowed, they said.
The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base ''the Murderous Maniacs,'' New York-based Human Rights Watch said. ''The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.''
It said soldiers in the elite 82nd Airborne deprived detainees of sleep, food and water, subjected them to extreme heat and cold, stacked prisoners in human pyramids, kicked them in the face, and put chemicals on exposed skin and eyes.
One of the sergeants allegedly told the group that military intelligence personnel, eager for information, often instructed soldiers to ''smoke'' detainees -- called Persons Under Control or PUCs -- during questioning, the report said. ''Smoking'' prisoners meant physically abusing them until they lost consciousness.
But the motive was not always to gain intelligence, one sergeant was quoted as saying.
''Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport,'' he reportedly said.
''One day (another sergeant) shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger, a metal bat.''
The soldier said anything short of death was acceptable.
So, yes, we must support the troops in the sense we must help them come to terms with what they are doing, what they have become. We must examine why and how our culture produces the racist, imperial ideological base which "blooms" into something so horrible. We must realize something is broken in their humanity, and something is broken in ours. We must do lots of things.
But first we must stop them. We must stop them from killing and torturing more people. The only way to do that is to bring them back here, now.
I also hope someone archives that site. I bet they will pull it. I don't have the know-how to archive a discussion forum. As hard as it is to look at, it is the harshest, most truthful mirror of what this war really looks like.
Posted by zeynep at 09:05 PM | Comments (5)
site back up
Hello all -- site was down for a few days. Those who tried to post comments got an error message and I could not log on at all. Seems to be back to normal, spontaneously. Some sort of cybermagic for sure.
Posted by zeynep at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)
September 20, 2005
We Shoot and Leave
Al Jazeera has some more info on the British reasoning which goes like this: the occupation forces have full immunity and impunity and that's that.
Declining to comment on why two armed British nationals disguised as Iraqis would be in Basra, the Ministry of Defence told Aljazeera.net it didn't matter if both men were out of uniform with no identification."Iraqi law requires any coalition force members to be handed back - once it was established they were foreign soldiers, they should have been handed over.
"There was even an order from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior that both men should have been released," the spokesman dded.
...
Asked whether the raid suggested that using force in Iraq to achieve an objective was acceptable, the defence official said the "vast majority of Iraqis in Basra are law-abiding".
Read between the lines: the British do not have to be law-abiding. Also, the British keep saying things like they simply broke a single wall, as if that would be okay. It's not even the truth.
Unfortunately they weren't released and we became concerned for their safety. As a result a Warrior infantry fighting vehicle broke down the perimeter wall in one place.
Umm, okay. Except this time there are some pictures. (I know, I know they are doctored. Would the British government ever lie?)
Again, remember, these British citizens shot at people and at least one person, a police officer, is dead. As many as four might have died during the British raid. But those are minor details. To make news in Iraq, the number dead has to be in there digits or one foreigner has to have bandages in his head.
Posted by zeynep at 09:23 AM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
You Know You Are Occupied When...
You cannot arrest people who shoot at your policemen, and keep them under arrest. A foreign army bulldozes the walls of your prison, takes away their countrymen, allowing about 150 other prisoners to escape.
In a dramatic show of force, British soldiers used tanks to break down the walls of the central jail in this southern city Monday and freed two Britons, allegedly undercover commandos arrested on charges of shooting two Iraqi policemen, witnesses said....
About 150 Iraqi prisoners also fled as British commandos stormed inside and rescued their comrades, said Aquil Jabbar, an Iraqi television cameraman who lives across the street from the jail. Earlier Monday, demonstrators hurled stones and Molotov cocktails at British tanks, and at least four people were killed.
The fighting in the oil city of Basra, 340 miles south of the capital, erupted after British armor encircled the jail where the two Britons were being held. During the melee one British soldier could be seen in a photograph scrambling for his life from a burning tank and the rock-throwing mob.
Oh, I'm sure someone will say that Iraqi justice system is not fair, not reliable, people cannot be left in their hands, etc. All of that may well be true and I certainly am not one to somehow think if someone is under arrest, that's that and nothing can be questioned. But that does not answer for those alleged British soldiers under arrest: after all they were not abducted from Britain while they were minding their own business. They were in Iraq, armed, "undercover," shooting at people in the street.
According to Iraqi authorities, these men fired at Iraqi policeman at a checkpoint, and that sounds very feasible to me. After all, which Iraqi has the right to ask the western Man to stop at a checkpoint? None, of course, and if they are so bold as to make such a demand, you must shoot back.
Of course, these men were apparently also undercover, dressed in Arabic garb.
In a statement released in London, Reid did not say why the two had been taken into custody. But the Iraqi official, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, said their arrests stemmed from an incident earlier in the day.The official said two unknown gunmen in full Arabic dress began firing on civilians in central Basra, wounding several, including a traffic police officer. There were no fatalities, the official said.
The two gunmen fled the scene but were captured and taken in for questioning, admitting they were British marines carrying out a "special security task," the official said.
But, still the Iraqis on the scene should have just sensed that these were Western Military Man on a "special security task" and stayed cleared of them. Don't they know better, these natives?
Posted by zeynep at 09:09 PM | Comments (1)
September 17, 2005
Amazing Restraint
A few days ago, it was day laborers. Yesterday, a bomb went outside a Shiite mosque killing dozens. Today a bomb in a market in the poor Shiite part of town, killing at least 30.
A car bomb ripped through a market in a poor Shiite Muslim neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Baghdad at sunset Saturday, killing at least 30 people and wounding 38, police said....
Interior Ministry police Maj. Falah al-Mhamadawi said an explosives-packed car was parked in front of fruit and vegetable stands in the market at Nahrawan, about 20 miles east of Baghdad, a poor suburb heavily populated by Shiites.
He said at least 30 people were killed and 38 wounded.
I'm losing count but the death toll in last week seems to be closing in on five hundred. There have lately been some attempts by the Sunni clerics to try distance themselves from this vicious campaign. But, overall, I must say that I am surprised by the restraint that the Shiite clergy has been able to impose upon their community.
Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant who claims to lead Al Qaeda in Iraq, has taken responsibility for some of the worst violence. He declared war on Shiites in retaliation for a joint Iraqi and American offensive on the northern city of Tall Afar.The declaration so shocked Iraqis that even the Muslim Scholars Assn., an organization of hard-line Sunni clerics with alleged ties to the insurgency, demanded in a statement issued today that Zarqawi "retract these threats" because it hurts the Sunni Arab cause.
"It harms the image of jihad, obstructs the success of the resistance in Iraq, and leads to more innocent Iraqi bloodshed," the statement said.
Iraq's Shiites have grown increasingly angry about the violence directed at them. But in Najaf, prayer leader Sadr din Qubanichi of the Imam Ali shrine, the most revered holy site in Iraq, asked followers to turn the other cheek.
"Submitting to one's passion and confusion will bring us to domestic sedition and eventually lead us to failure," Qubanichi, a disciple of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, told worshippers. "We must go forward, be patient and carry on building the new Iraq."
This point was also reported by the Post:
Shiite preachers addressed the violence in their Friday sermons.In Sadr City, Abdul Zahra Swaiedi condemned "the mass killings and explosions that target innocents all over Iraq," saying they were meant to distort the image of Islam. Swaiedi accused American forces of supporting the attacks to justify the U.S. occupation. "No to terrorism, no to terrorism," Shiite worshipers chanted in response.
There was no call for retaliation. In Baghdad's Buratha mosque, which is linked to Iraq's main Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Dhia Edeen Ahmadi urged restraint in his sermon.
"The aim of this criminal wave of killing is to draw us into a sectarian war, but that shall not succeed," Ahmadi said.
He urged Shiites to stay focused on national elections on Oct. 15 and Dec. 15, when Iraqis are to vote first on a new constitution and then a new government. Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of Iraq's population, have strong hopes of seeing their aims prevail in the balloting.
"We know who they are. They are the thugs of the Saddam regime who are trying to avenge their loss after losing power and the nice, affluent life they had," Ahmadi said of the insurgents, referring to the decades when Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party. "But history will not go back. This is our destiny, and no matter how many are killed, whether hundreds or thousands, we shall not turn back."
Pretty amazing, if you ask me. Yes, obviously, they are making the correct calculation both politically and morally that drowning the country in blood will not help anyone. Still, how many instances have we seen where the majority group manages to hold back a campaign of fury and vengeance for so long, while their people get killed in places of worship, markets, neighborhoods, schools, just going about their business.
Posted by zeynep at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 14, 2005
... a suicide bomber lured a crowd of day laborers gathering for work to his minivan and then blew it up...
At least a hundred are dead today in Baghdad, most of them in Shiite neighborhoods.
The attacks began when a suicide bomber lured a crowd of day laborers gathering for work to his minivan and then blew it up just before 7 a.m., killing at least 80 people and wounding 160 in Kadhimiya, a Shiite neighborhood.
Think about this. If the account is to be believed, this person lured day laborers --poor, hungry for work with only the crime of being Shiite-- into his van and then blew it up.
I don't think we have understood that this too is a large part of what is going on in Iraq. I believe our occupation is making the situation worse, much worse without providing any security for the population. But our occupation is not the only grave problem in Iraq right now -- and it's all tangled up in a very ugly way.
Posted by zeynep at 07:49 AM | Comments (2)
September 13, 2005
Hurricane Katrina Finds its Own Lynndie England and Charles Graner
As usual, the guilty will be charged and tried if and only if they are small-scale operators:
The owners of a nursing home where 34 people were found dead after Hurricane Katrina have been arrested and charged with 34 counts of negligent homicide for not evacuating those patients, the Louisiana attorney general's office said on Tuesday.Mable Mangano and Salvador Mangano Sr. surrendered to Medicaid fraud investigators in Baton Rouge late Tuesday afternoon and were being held in a parish prison.
Well, take it from Charles Graner and Lynndie England. Small-timers get time. If you want to get away with murder, well, letting only 34 people under your care die won't do.
Posted by zeynep at 07:49 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2005
Don't Blame Me, Ever
It's the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Many commentators were noting that Bush got a boost out of his 9/11 performance. He did not deserve it; yelling through a bullhorn is not necessarily a noble act. In fact, there is a similarity between that disaster Katrina. In both cases, the handling of the situation was both incompetent, manipulative and callous towards large populations of people: in Iraq, Afghanistan, lower Manhattan, and in New Orleans.
Both times people lost, Halliburton and Bechtel won. In both times, this administration did not pull the trigger, but laid the ground for events that pretty much ensured disastrous consequences through a mix of acts of omission and comission.
But, don't blame the administration. No. Never. They only hold the executive power, the military, the purse strings, the legislative branch, and are moving steadily towards taking over the judicial branch. What makes you think it's all their doing?
Posted by zeynep at 07:42 PM | Comments (1)
September 07, 2005
War on Hurricanes
Brilliant analysis of what our war on Hurricanes would look like, from Billmon:
Dead or AliveTime's Matt Cooper notes that Katrina was the anti-9/11 for George W. Bush in more ways than one:
But last week offered no New York bullhorn moment. He can't threaten to get Katrina "dead or alive."I guess Karl isn't returning Matt's phone calls any more.If you think about it, it's probably just as well that Katrina wasn't a terrorist. Because if she was, she'd probably still be hiding out in the North Atlantic, periodically smuggling out bombastic videotapes ("Death to puny mammals and their infidel cave hives!") and occasionally sending violent thunderstorms to blow down train stations and beach resorts outside the United States.
And then the Cheney administration would have to go find some other tropical storm -- somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably -- to declare war on. And that would trigger a long, tedious debate about whether the Indian Ocean had anything to do with the flooding of New Orleans, or whether Cyclone Saddam (or whatever) was secretly storing up lighting bolts in the Bay of Bengal for a sneak attack that would electrocute millions of Americans in their sleep.
Then the neocons would have to cook up some phony intelligence reports showing that tornados spawned by Saddam and Katrina met secretly over the Prague Airport and plotted to blow away Biloxi. And Condi Rice would have to go before the UN Security Council and recite a CIA fantasy script about the Indian Ocean's secret thunderbolts of death, and the chemical weapons trailers hidden in the eye of Cyclone Saddam.
Then Dick Cheney would have to go on Meet the Press and promise Tim Russert that Operation Cyclone Liberation would be a piece of cake, because the waves in the Indian Ocean would greet us as liberators, allowing our troops to walk on water. And then we'd have to have another big argument about how many meterologists it would take to occupy a cyclone, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would say 500,000 and the neocons would say 5 -- until Bush fired the head of NOAA and give his job to an intern from the American Enterprise Institute.
Then the boys at the National Security Council would have to draft a whole new national security strategy, claiming an exclusive U.S. right to preemptively invade any ocean that might conceivably produce a Category 3 or above hurricane, and convert it into a peaceful, ripple-free lake of democratic capitalism.
Then Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton would have to line up and explain that they, too, are in favor of invading every ocean in the world -- but only if Bush agrees to quadruple the size of the U.S. Navy and equip every Marine with an armored aqualung. And Tom Friedman would have to write a column for the New York Times arguing that it is both possible and desirable to create peaceful, pro-Western cyclones that will accept Israel's right to exist, because the oceans are flat.
But worst of all, we'd have to listen to Shrub strut and shout about how he's going to "smoke Katrina out of her seahole," and "bring the evildoer to justice" -- only to turn around a few months later and explain that he isn't really concerned about hurricanes any more, now that the entire U.S. miltary is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Then John Kerry would make a big stink about how the administration is ignoring the real weather war, and Bush would get all pissy and defensive the way he does, and deny he ever said any such thing.
Then Kerry would get pissy and demand that Bush dump even more troops into the Indian Ocean, and Bush would get even more defensive, and babble some feeble lie about how he relies on his generals to tell him how many troops they need to dump into the Indian Ocean in order to make sure we fight the cyclones there instead of in New Orleans. And then media would bend itself over backwards pretending that Shrub actually has a freaking clue about what's going on outside his own head.
We've already been through that kind of insanity once, and I don't think anyone -- least of all Bush -- wants to go through it again. So I guess we should be relieved that Katrina was just a storm. Hurricanes we can deal with, sort of. But a Global War Against Hurricanes (or, alternatively, a Struggle Against Weather Extremism) could easily be our national undoing.
Posted by zeynep at 07:28 AM | Comments (1)
September 05, 2005
People Still Trapped
There is so much to say about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Still, I thought I'd point out something. There are still people trapped, unrescued, dying. Yes the Superdome and the Convention center have been evacuated, so the most striking media images are gone, but there are who-knows-how-many people trapped in attics, upper floors and roofs.
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) -- Time is running out for thousands of people awaiting rescue six days after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, rescuers say.Officials say they do not have the manpower, the resources or enough time to save everyone.
"My guys are coming back and telling me, 'Sir, I went into a house, and there are three elderly people in their beds, and they're gasping, and they're dying,' " Coast Guard Capt. Bruce Jones said.
"And we got calls today, 'We need you ... to go to a place in St. Bernard Parish. It's a hospice, ... and there are 10 dead and there are 10 dying.' But those people were probably alive yesterday or the day before."
How can there still not be enough resources to airlift everyone out of there? It's been a whole week. Seven days.
Posted by zeynep at 12:29 PM | Comments (1)
September 01, 2005
Insurance Fraud on My Mind
Tens of thousands of people have been abandoned, in the face of predictable situation, packed into a superstadium without enough water or food, without sanitation, and worst of all, without the kind of organization that is necessary to keep tens of thousands of people at least safe, if not comfortable.
And what does President Bush warn us about? Insurance fraud. Yes, insurance fraud. And gas prices.
The president urged a crackdown on the lawlessness."I think there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this — whether it be looting, or price gouging at the gasoline pump, or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud," Bush said. "And I've made that clear to our attorney general. The citizens ought to be working together."
I am so appalled by the conditions down there, it's hard to express. Why wasn't water and food airlifted as soon as Hurricane Katrina moved on? Isn't there anyone in FEMA who has thought for a minute about what happens if tens of thousands of people are placed for days into a structure built to house them for a few hours? How can there not be enough water stacked beforehand? Why aren't there portable toilets by the hundreds, which are quite easy to set up? Why aren't hundreds of doctors and nurses housed with these people?
How can the richest country on earth be unable to take care of a few cities in trouble -- one that was predicted days in advance? And how can insurance fraud really be what moves our president to words at this point in time?
It's almost as if our foreign policy has been turned inward.
Posted by zeynep at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)