[fajg]

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 566 - 31 de mayo de 2004
+ Las cosas claras: EEUU impone a un hombre de la CIA como primer ministro de Iraq y desautoriza al enviado de Naciones Unidas

+ Sinfo Fernández Navarro: 'La privatización de la tortura: Asesinos y 'expertos civiles' al servicio de la ocupación de Iraq'
- Las fuerzas de seguridad y de la inteligencia israelíes operan en las cárceles de la ocupación de Iraq

+ "El Terrorismo" (viñeta de 'Al-Hayat')

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 565 - 28 de mayo de 2004
+ "He participado en una mentira diabólica". Jimmy Massey, ex 'marine' de EEUU, es entrevistado por Paul Rockwell

+ Eman Jamas: Las mujeres iraquíes en las cárceles de la ocupación, objetos e instrumentos de violaciones

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (26-27 de mayo): La resistencia mató el lunes en Bagdad al número dos de la Autoridad de ocupación en el sector petrolífero, un ex alto ejecutivo de 'BP' - 11 militares de EEUU muertos en las últimas 48 horas en ataques de la resistencia - Atacado el convoy de un miembro del CG que regresaba de pactar en Nayaf la retirada de los seguidores de as-Sadr

+ "El poder en Iraq" (viñeta de Amyad Rasim)

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 564 - 26 de mayo de 2004
+ Propuesta de nueva resolución del CS: someter Iraq a la tutela colonial indefinida salvando a EEUU del desastre
- Texto del borrador de la nueva resolución sobre Iraq

+ Concentración en Madrid contra la masacre de Rafah respondida por contra-manifestantes sionistas, que fueron amparados por la policía

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (24-25 de mayo): Decenas de muertos y heridos este martes en los combates en Kufa y Nayaf, donde ha sido alcanzado por un proyectil estadounidense el santuario del imán Alí - Dos nuevas bajas elevan a 46 la cifra de muertos en combate de EEUU en mayo - Excarcelados de prisiones del norte del país denuncian torturas similares a las de Abu Ghraib; al menos 16 iraquíes han muerto durante su detención en estos centros - Un sabotaje a 50 km. de Kirkuk paraliza de nuevo las exportaciones de petróleo iraquí por el oleoducto del norte del país

+ Actualización de la página de la Campaña de identificación y boicot a los productos y empresas israelíes en España

+ Agenda de solidaridad internacionalista: - Madrid: Convocatoria unitaria de solidaridad con Cuba ante la Embajada de EEUU - Buenos Aires: Solidaridad urgente con Palestina - Algeciras: Exposición del CSCA sobre crímenes de guerra contra la población civil de Bagdad

Torture and Abuse
ZNet Commentary
By Doug Dowd

The outrage and horror that spread and deepened after the revelations
concerning Abu Ghraid prison in the spring of 2004 were fully justified,
as was the revulsion at Nicholas Berg's beheading and, earlier, the
killings and mutilation of Fallujah.

Also outrageous, horrifying and repellent, however, were the
innumerable responses from members of Congress and the White House, epitomized in
Bush's "This is not the America I know." Ignorance for most is due to
lack of opportunity; in Bush's case, as with so many others in the USA,
such ignorance is a consequence of arrogance, indifference, disdain,
and even contempt for the plight of others.

However, that the widespead ignorance of the realities of our past and
present is "understandable" does not make it less deplorable or less
tragic in its consequences -- or less dangerous. For all too long, these
traits of Uncle Sam have provided the basis for our virtual addiction
to a double standard for our behavior, both at home and abroad.

Such attitudes and behavior virtually scream out for comment and
condemnation. What follows here is but a truncated noting of examples from
the distant and recent past (see Howard Zinn's A People's History of the
United States for the whole story,)

1. Torture and abuse began when we as a society began, with our arrival
on this continent and our murderous treatment first of "Indians" and
then of slaves. The reference here is not to the major crimes of stealing
the native tribes' lands and "Indian removal" nor to slavery itself,
but only to the accompanying and enduring systematic torture, abuse and
murder, including rampant, institutionalized, and large-scale rape of
girls and women.

What was started in the 17th century in the first colonies had by the
18th century evolved into a raging epidemic that would go on for two
centuries. Today's mistreatment of "Indians" and African-Americans (among
others), however disgraceful, is considerably more subdued and subtler
than earlier; the harm done to its victims now measurable much more in
sociopsychological and economic than in raw physical terms; in the past
it was much more of both.

2. Then there is lynching. It began well before it was so named, most
famously with the "witches of Salem" (and other women and places).
During slavery, the murder of slaves was restrained; after all they were a
vital form of private property; most of the lynching was, so to speak,
indiscriminate.

But after the infamous Compromise of 1877 (which gave the South the
freedom to do what it wished sociopolitically in exchange for the North to
run free economically) lynching became a mania. Both before and after
that, lynching was also all too common for others than blacks, not least
in our venerated "Wild West." It was still going on against the Chinese
in the 20th century in "the city that cares" -- my home town of San
Francisco.

Lynching usually meant being hanged; it almost always meant torture
before and during the murder. Long ago? In some sense, yes; except that
between 1890 and 1940 there were several thousand lynchings, and some
after that -- including the legalized lynching of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg in 1953, the 1955 lynching of 14-year old Emmett Till (accused of
whistling at a girl), and the recent dragging to death behind a car of a
gay man.

It needs adding that the photos from Abu Ghraid showing laughing
abusers are as nothing when set against the numberloss photos of lynchings
attended by laughing and cheering crowds, often jumping with joy, as
black men are hanging and writhing.

3. Then there is the matter of prisons and the death penalty --
overlapping but separable for present purposes. It is striking and shocking
that the USA leads the world in its rate of imprisonment and the use of
the death penalty, jailing "people at eight times the rate of France and
six times the rate of Canada," NYT editorial, 5-17-04), as it does in
the death penalty.

Prisons everywhere and always have provided conditions making torture
and abuse easy and common -- by prison guards and, with the guards'
acquiescence, by prisoners against other prisoners. Violence is a normal
part of life, whether in men's or women's prisons, and rape is pervasive,
systematic, and continuous -- to the point where the victims are driven
insane or are murdered. Rape is not confined to but is especially
practiced mostly against young men and women by their fellow prisoners and
by prison guards. It is joined by other and common forms of mistreatment
that fall under the headings of abuse and even torture -- whether the
prisons are in the East, West, North, or South.

The foregoing says nothing about whether those who are imprisoned have
been justly tried and sentenced. But something must be said about those
who suffer the death penalty. Among the leading countries in the world,
only three use that penalty: ourselves, Russia, and China. (The
European Union will not admit membership to such a nation.)

In all cases it is known (through DNA tests, generally) that a
significant percentage of those sentenced and executed have been innocent of
the charges against them. In the USA this crime in itself has been most
common because of our long and continuing history of racism -- longest
as applied to African and Native Americans and, but also and
increasingly to other minorities; especially, in the Southwest, to Latinos.
(Bush's adopted state of Texas leads the country in executions: one of fifty
states, it presently has more than 20 percent of all those on death
row.)

So what's all the fuss about Abu Ghraid, Mr. And Mrs. America? Doesn't
look good, that's what.

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 563 - 24 de mayo de 2004
+ Entrevista con Abdel Yabar al-Kubaysi, dirigente de la Alianza Patriótica Iraquí: "Naciones Unidas y al-Brahimi son agentes políticos de EEUU"

+ Acta de la reunión preparatoria en Madrid de la movilización del 29 de junio en solidaridad con Iraq y Palestina

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (21-23 de mayo): Cuatro nuevas bajas mortales en combate de EEUU, dos de ellas en una emboscada en Faluya - Los combates de Nayaf y Kerbala se extienden a Medina as-Sadr, en Bagdad, y Kufa; cuatro paramilitares muertos en Baqubah

+ "Cumbre árabe" (viñeta de Hajjaj)

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 562 - 21 de mayo de 2004
+ El movimiento contra la guerra de México rechaza el envío de tropas a Iraq en sustitución de las españolas: Comunicado de Iniciativa Mexicana contra la Guerra Imperialista
- Encuentro internacional contra la "Guerra permanente" en Guadalajara (México)
- Francisco Ortega: Tráfico ilegal de albañiles mexicanos a Iraq
- English: Francisco Ortega: Mexican Workers Illegal Traffic to Iraq

+ 'Informe de la investigación sobre la comisión de supuestos Crímenes de Guerra por las fuerzas de la coalición en la guerra contra Iraq de 2003': La demanda contra el gobierno Blair presentada ante el TPI
- English PDF: 'Report of the Inquiry into the Alleged Commission of War Crimes by Coalition Forces in the Iraq War during 2003'

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (19-21 de mayo): Esta madrugada han abandonado Iraq los últimos efectivos españoles de ocupación, después de que el jueves un enfrentamiento al sur de Diwaniya se saldara con sargento legionario herido y un insurgente muerto - Siete civiles muertos en Kerbala, mientras Reino Unido anuncia que no mandará más tropas a Iraq - 34 empleados de 'Kellog, Brown & Root' han muerto en Iraq en acciones de la resistencia, mientras otras empresas estadounidenses evacuan a su personal - EEUU admite haber atacado la aldea de Makr al-Deeb, donde murieron al menos 42 iraquíes, 15 de ellos menores - Dos nuevas bajas mortales en combate de EEUU en Bagdad y Samarra

+ Agenda: Convocatorias urgentes de solidaridad con Palestina en Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia y Sevilla
- Madrid: Anti M-2004

Will Bush survive Iraq? May 19, 2004
ZNet Commentary

By Boris Kagarlitsky

With American elections approaching, the whole world is waiting.
Americans are voting, but every other country knows that its future in one or
another way will depend on the outcome of this vote. Because G.W. Bush
isn't a problem for Americans, it is a disaster for most of the world.

It is commonly held in Europe that the ever-worsening situation in Iraq
is undermining George W. Bush's chances of re-election. Indeed, there's
no denying that each new report from Iraq is a blow to Bush's
reputation: No WMD have been found; opposition to U.S. forces is growing; the
death toll is rising; stabilization of the country is a long way off; and
all the promises and forecasts of the U.S. administration have proven
untrue or incorrect.

The doomsayers' gloomiest predictions of a "new Vietnam" in Iraq are
coming true. Critics of U.S. muscle-flexing, shamed into silence last
spring, are once more taking heart. And the real war is just getting
started. Washington's main problem has nothing to do with the military,
however. When leaders set an unattainable political goal, even the best
troops and the most advanced hardware are powerless.

The Iraqi resistance is now strong and effective because it has been
prepared and provoked by the Americans themselves. Given that the United
States will not alter its policy in the region, this resistance will
continue to spread. The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime liberated the
Iraqis and made spontaneous self-organization possible.

Dissolution of the former army and reorganization of the police created
a power vacuum on the ground that was crucial to the formation of armed
units by the Iraqi people themselves. As the people became increasingly
certain that the Hussein regime was gone for good, they turned their
attention to fighting against U.S. troops. The only thing U.S. commanders
have done right in this war was allowing Hussein to flee Baghdad last
spring.

But when George W. Bush's poll numbers started to sag, he took the
fateful step of ordering Hussein to be taken into custody. By closing one
chapter in the history of modern Iraq, the United States opened another.
With the Baath Party regime disposed of, the people turned against the
U.S. occupying force.

The U.S. attempt to create a puppet administration has had even more
dire consequences for its position in Iraq. Washington insists that the
insurgents are trying to prevent the transfer of power to an Iraqi
government. This is true. But the White House is planning to hand over power
to Iraqis of its own choosing -- unelected leaders who wield no
influence within the country. The creation of an Iraqi administration has not
been linked to the withdrawal of U.S. troops or even to a change in
their status.

The process of forming an "Iraqi" government, more than anything else,
has revealed Bush's statements about bringing freedom and democracy to
the Middle East to be empty rhetoric. Most Iraqis now clearly see that
an occupying army is creating a new government as a prerequisite to a
prolonged stay in the country, not to withdrawal. The Iraqis have been
denied their right to democracy.

When the goal is to restore independence, power is handed over only
after free elections and only to a legitimate government that enjoys the
support of the majority. The U.S. refusal to do so has made abundantly
clear that it intends to turn Iraq into a protectorate. In other words,
it is trying to colonize Iraq.

Bush had no choice in the matter. Having occupied a foreign country, he
is obliged to talk about freedom, all the while doing everything
possible to prevent local residents from exercising their democratic rights
against the occupying force. The longer the occupation continues, the
more likely it becomes that enemies of the United States will set the
tone in a fairly elected Iraqi parliament.

The White House faces an insoluble dilemma: It cannot leave Iraq and it
cannot stay. In chess this quandary is called "zugzwang," when it is
your turn to move, but all possible moves will weaken your position. U.S.
interests would be best served by admitting defeat and getting out now.
For Bush and his clan this would be political suicide, however, and
they don't seem like the kind of people who are willing to sacrifice their
own ambitions for the common good.

Bush will drag out the war, increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq.
This will lead to even greater loss of life on both sides, to animosity
and the growth of Muslim radicalism. If Bush wins a second term in
November, he will spend the next four years helplessly trying to cope with
the problems he has created, and in the end his attempts will lead to
catastrophe. But should the Democrat John Kerry prevail, he will face a
no-win situation. If he sticks to Bush's policy in Iraq, he will rouse
the ire of many of his core supporters. If he decides to pull U.S. troops
out of Iraq, he will be blamed for defeat.

Whatever happens, the outcome will have serious domestic political
consequences for the United States. As for Iraq, a U.S. withdrawal will
quite possibly usher in a period of chaos. This is not an argument in
favor of prolonging the occupation, however. The United States must
withdraw in any case. The longer the war lasts, the harder it will be for
everyone involved to deal with its consequences.

However, will all this help the Democrats in their fight for the White
House? When discussing Bush's falling approval ratings, European
commentators tend to ignore the fact that recent events in Iraq also
highlight the failure of the Democrats' electoral strategy.

John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean in the primaries was a triumph
for the conservative party machine, which managed to stamp out a revolt
by the party grass-roots activists. The "rebels" tried to base their
campaign on antiwar and anti-authoritarian slogans, which for the party
mainstream was too risky. Kerry won out as a moderate candidate, who,
according to the received wisdom, should be able to consolidate a broad
section of the population around himself. Those on the left of the party
will have little choice but to support him on the basis that anyone is
better than Bush.

Party strategists have worked on the assumption that as fall approaches
the Iraq question will fade into the background and problems in the
U.S. economy will become the main issue on which the campaign is fought.
Debates between U.S. politicians on economic problems can create a
strange impression on foreign observers. The opposition candidate paints a
colorful picture of economic crisis in the country, blaming it on the
incumbent president, but then doesn't offer anything radically different
by way of economic policies.

Nevertheless, this type of campaign has already led the Democrats to
victory over Republicans on two occasions: Following the same script,
Jimmy Carter got the better of Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton beat George
Bush senior. The party machine is ready to follow the same scenario a
third time -- in the duel between Kerry and Bush junior.

Alas, it is already apparent that everything may happen in reverse this
time. The economy has not recovered greatly, but it isn't so bad as to
relegate all other issues to the back burner. On the contrary, the war
in Iraq is the hot topic in America at the moment, and it is on this
issue that Kerry's position is weakest.

He is not opposed to the war, is not in favor of withdrawing U.S.
forces and his position does not differ significantly from Bush's. As a
result he cannot mount a powerful attack on the president. His speeches on
this issue only disappoint his potential voters from the ranks of the
left, liberals and pacifists.

Of course, antiwar and human rights activists will in any case get out
and vote, if not for Kerry, then against Bush. But will they actively
campaign for the Democratic candidate?

>From the very outset, it has been clear that the coalition that has
united around Kerry will disintegrate the moment Bush is out of office.
But as the United States gets increasingly bogged down in the Iraqi
quagmire, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the coalition is
cracking. It can be patched up cosmetically, but the more effort that is
expended on patching things up, the less energy will be left for battling
the Republicans.

In any country, the opposition depends on the enthusiasm of its
supporters to carry it to victory. But Kerry's indistinct political stance
will hardly galvanize opponents of the war; rather, it will help to
consolidate supporters of the war and waverers around Bush. After all, if
there is no alternative to a military resolution, then why change the
country's leadership?

Russian statesmen love the proverb "one shouldn't switch horses
midstream." And that is probably why our country is permanently in passage
across a boundless political bog. It is entirely possible that this time
the same logic will prevail in the United States. The first signs are
already visible. Contrary to expectations in Europe, after the uprising
began in Iraq, Bush, who was lagging behind Kerry, retook the lead in
the race for the White House.

Bush junior is often compared to his father, but it is possible that
their political fates will play out in reverse: Bush senior won his war
in the Middle East, but lost the election; Bush junior will undoubtedly
lose his war, but he may still win the election.

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 560 - 18 de mayo de 2004
+ Denuncian que EEUU estaba introduciendo en Iraq armas de destrucción masiva desde marzo
- Sobre el supuesto 'hallazgo' de gas sarín en Iraq: ¿justificar la invasión en un momento de extrema crisis de la ocupación?

+ English: Final Statement of the Foundational National Conference Iraqi

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
New Yorker magazine - Issue of 2004-05-24

The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal
inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last
year
by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret
operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the
interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the
American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite
combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.

According to interviews with several past and present American
intelligence
officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence
community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged
physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort
to
generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior
C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said
that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest
control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the
C.I.A.

Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about
Abu
Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret
matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he
was
telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, "Any
suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened,
and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding." The
senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of
Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, "Some people
think you can bullshit anyone."

The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11,
2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the
start, the Administration's search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone,
and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major
command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda
targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On
October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft
tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed,
contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at
the
United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to
authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out
of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating
hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer
described him to me that fall as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking
doors." In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten
times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al
Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in
time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout
the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly
against
suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local
American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.

Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the
establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance
approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value"
targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access
program, or sap-subject to the Defense Department's most stringent
level of security-was set up, with an office in a secure area of the
Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary
equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps.
America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had
been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater
cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air
Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called "black" programs had one
element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to
conclude
that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough
security.

"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a
high-value target-a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level
intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together-the
C.I.A. and the N.S.A.-to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code
word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld
and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush
was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence
official said.

The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former
intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited,
after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from
America's élite forces-Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the
C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions:
"Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need
dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some
special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress."

In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond
immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders
without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too
important
for transfer to the military's facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They
carried out instant interrogations-using force if necessary-at secret
C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence
would
be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and
sifted for those pieces of information critical to the "white," or
overt, world.

Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were
"completely read into the program," the former intelligence official
said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. "We're not going to
read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness," he said.
"The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"

One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen
Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in
March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's
reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and
civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he
had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he
had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that
warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He
was
known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. "Remember Henry II-'Who
will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" the senior C.I.A. official
said to me, with a laugh, last week. "Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says,
Cambone will do ten times that much."

Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's
disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing
them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s
inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein
harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military assistant, Army
Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last
fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a
speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.

Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the
Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access
programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which
had
been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by
Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence
programs.
Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon.
Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, "I will not
discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his
position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7,
2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding
interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else."

In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as
one
of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active
program," the former intelligence official told me. "It's been the
most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If
we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an
existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States-and do so
without visibility." Some of its methods were troubling and could not
bear close scrutiny, however.

By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some
assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American
Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein
and-without success-for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they
weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency.

In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides
still
had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the
work of Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists
who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in
the
war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members
of the old regime-reproduced on playing cards-had been captured. Then,
in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy,
killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing
twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the
U.N.
mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld
acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that "the
dead-enders are still with us." He went on, "There are some today who
are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they
suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the
Coalition. But this is not the case." Rumsfeld compared the insurgents
with those true believers who "fought on during and after the defeat of
the Nazi regime in Germany." A few weeks later-and five months after
the fall of Baghdad-the Defense Secretary declared,"It is, in my view,
better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States."

Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was
going
badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was
telling
reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal
to
Saddam Hussein. "When you understand that they're organized in a
cellular structure," General John Abizaid, the head of the Central
Command, declared, "that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a
lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are."

The American military and intelligence communities were having little
success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for
the
U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the
insurgents'"strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be
quite good." According to the study:

Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular
individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and
reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells
about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with
coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi
Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi
ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the
CPA's so-called Green Zone.

The study concluded, "Politically, the U.S. has failed to date.
Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them
in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has
been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government,
and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but
unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council"-the
Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.-"as the legitimate authority.
Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA."

By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's
political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld's
"dead-enders" now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures
as well-thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of
prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general
amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made
them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, "We'd killed
and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to
'pray and spray'"-that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best.
"They weren't really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by
wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency." In many cases, the
paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The
analyst
said that the insurgents "spent three or four months figuring out how we
operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting
up
a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops
responded, they'd do it." Then, the analyst said, "the clever ones
began to get in on the action."

By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition
forces knew little about the insurgency: "Human intelligence is poor or
lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The
intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are
involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to
the
troops in the field in a timely manner." The success of the war was at
risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.

The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was
to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were
suspected
of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the
commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who
had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation
procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by
Major
General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the
commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in
charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that
"detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation."

Miller's concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to
"Gitmoize" the prison system in Iraq-to make it more focussed on
interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the
interrogation methods used in Cuba-methods that could, with special
approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and
heat,
and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonizing lengths of
time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and
other
captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal
combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva
Conventions.)

Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope
of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The
commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male
prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.

"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in
Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing
that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this
thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command.
I've got this apparatus set up-the black special-access program-and
I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins
flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the
insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world.
We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets"-prisoners in
Iraqi jails-"than people who can handle them."

Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence
official told me: not only would he bring the sap's rules into the
prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers
working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap'sauspices. "So here are
fundamentally good soldiers-military-intelligence guys-being told that
no rules apply," the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the
special-access programs, added. "And, as far as they're concerned, this
is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Department
channels."

The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included
"recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." He was referring to
members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company
are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. "How
are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve
doesn't know what it's doing."

Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib-whether military police or military
intelligence-was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core
special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison.
The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but
many
others-military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A.
officers, and the men from the special-access program-wore civilian
clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis
Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and
the
officer ostensibly in charge. "I thought most of the civilians there were
interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know,"
Karpinski told me. "I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen
them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later.
They were nice-they'd always call out to me and say, 'Hey, remember
me? How are you doing?'" The mysterious civilians, she said, were
"always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect
somebody going out." Karpinski added that she had no idea who was
operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski's
leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)

By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior
leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed
up for the core program in Afghanistan-pre-approved for operations
against high-value terrorist targets-and now you want to use it for
cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets'"-the
sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. "The C.I.A.'s legal
people objected," and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib,
the former official said.

The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence
community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to
the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been,
before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This was stupidity," a
government consultant told me. "You're taking a program that was
operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror
group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or
later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a
conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand
soldiers."

The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib
disaster. "There's nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon
civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without
dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk," he
told me. "What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of
logistical planners?" The only difficulty, the former official added, is
that, "as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight
capability of experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a
case where a special-access program went sour-and this goes back to the
Cold War."

In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his
career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame.
"The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon
subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but
Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program." When it came to the
interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details
to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added,
"but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that,
since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and
created conditions where the ends justify the means."

Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist
Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he
claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse
had
they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any
trial,
however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them
from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that
was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation
became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the
months
before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently
cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology,
first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who
taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died
in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex,
depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The
segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other
minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have
the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,"
Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual
leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any
publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai
book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab
behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged-"one,
that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of
Arabs is shame and humiliation."

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in
the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It
was thought that some prisoners would do anything-including spying on
their associates-to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family
and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose
of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could
insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated
by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency
action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency
continued to grow.

"This shit has been brewing for months," the Pentagon consultant who
has dealt with saps told me. "You don't keep prisoners naked in their
cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant
explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on
active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard
dogs inside Abu Ghraib. "We don't raise kids to do things like that.
When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the
authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another."

In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva
Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior
military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (jag) Corps to
pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then
chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on
International Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush
Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,"
Horton told me. "They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very
loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that
conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur." The military
officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors
in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. "They said there was an
atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy
decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were
being
cut out of the policy formulation process." They told him that, with the
war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva
Conventions had come to an end.

The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby,
a
young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing
to
the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD
full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald
Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.

The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be
allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. "You can't
cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the
reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the
special-access program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away." The
Pentagon's attitude last January, he said, was "Somebody got caught
with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of it." Rumsfeld's
explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring:
"'We've got a glitch in the program. We'll prosecute it.' The
cover story was that some kids got out of control."

In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone
struggled to convince the legislators that Miller's visit to Baghdad in
late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to
assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between
Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in
Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's
recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he
said,
was mainly to insure that the "flow of intelligence back to the
commands" was "efficient and effective." He added that Miller's
goal was "to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports
the expeditious collection of intelligence."

It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed
the essential question facing the senators:

If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the
purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it
is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report
[on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's
arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those
MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for
one don't believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and
the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller's orders were .
.. . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his
arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred
afterward.

Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former
intelligence official told me, Miller was "read in"-that is,
briefed-on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to
Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with
its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and
international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison
system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. "His job is to
save what he can," the former official said. "He's there to protect
the program while limiting any loss of core capability." As for Antonio
Taguba, the former intelligence official added, "He goes into it not
knowing shit. And then: 'Holy cow! What's going on?'"

If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like
Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the
special-access program. "If you give away the fact that a special-access
program exists,"the former intelligence official told me, "you blow the
whole quick-reaction program."

One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld's account of his initial reaction to news
of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of
curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many
previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights
Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them
with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had
not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he
read the specific charges. "You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You
see these photographs and it's just unbelievable. . . . It wasn't
three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. It was quite a
different thing." The former intelligence official said that, in his
view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the
photographs because "they thought what was in there was permitted under
the rules of engagement," as applied to the sap. "The photos," he
added, "turned out to be the result of the program run amok."

The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging
that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But,
he
said, "it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and
there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses."

This official went on, "The black guys"-those in the Pentagon's
secret program-"say we've got to accept the prosecution. They're
vaccinated from the reality." The sap is still active, and "the United
States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they
protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?" The program
was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know
of
its existence. "If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black
program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances," the
former official said. "Nobody will talk. So the only people left to
prosecute are those who are undefended-the poor kids at the end of the
food chain."

The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. "The Pentagon is trying
now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know how to do it," the former
intelligence official said.

Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many
conservatives, defended the Administration's continued secrecy about the
special-access program in Abu Ghraib. "Why keep it black?" the
consultant asked. "Because the process is unpleasant. It's like making
sausage-you like the result but you don't want to know how it was made.
Also, you don't want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know.
Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing
you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in
prison."

The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the
disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of
legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered
from
the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as "a
tumor" on the war on terror. He said, "As long as it's benign and
contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without
jeopardizing
the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose
it-it becomes a malignant tumor."

The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors,
the consultant said, "created the conditions that allowed transgressions
to take place. And now we're going to end up with another Church
Commission"-the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by
Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during
the
previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon
leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. "When the shit
hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?" the
consultant asked. "You do it selectively and with intelligence."

"Congress is going to get to the bottom of this," the Pentagon
consultant said. "You have to demonstrate that there are checks and
balances in the system." He added, "When you live in a world of gray
zones, you have to have very clear red lines."

Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, "If this is true, it certainly
increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I
will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other
allegations."

"In an odd way," Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights
Watch, said, "the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for
the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is
authorized." Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has
systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees.
"Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment
will come back and haunt us in the next war," Roth told me. "We're
giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions.
Rumsfeld has lowered the bar."

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 559 - 17 de mayo de 2004
+ Muere en atentado de la resistencia en la mañana del lunes el presidente de turno del Consejo colaboracionista iraquí

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (10-16 de mayo): Mueren 10 militares de EEUU en el transcurso de la semana, mientras la media diaria de ataques contra los ocupantes se eleva a 50 - Los combates en Naseriyah y Kerbala se saldan con un soldado italiano muerto y más de una docena de iraquíes; una veintena de muertos en los bombardeos de Medina as-Sadr - Atacada por dos días consecutivos y durante el día la "Zona verde" de la APC en Bagdad - Una veintena de insurgentes muertos en tres ataques coordinados contra tropas británicas al sur de Amara el viernes; cuatro civiles muertos el domingo en un ataque fallido en Basora - La mitad de los trabajadores filipinos de 'Camp Anaconda' abandonan Iraq tras el mortífero ataque del miércoles

+ Comienza en Jordania la reunión del Foro de Davos, marcada por el fracaso de la ocupación de Iraq - Movilizaciones en Jordania contra el Foro de Davos y la inserción capitalista de la región árabe

+ "Rumsfeld en la cárcel de Abu Ghraib" (viñeta de 'al-Nahar', Líbano)

Out Now
ZNet Commentary
Out Now May 16, 2004
By Anthony Arnove

Recent developments in Iraq -- from the exposure of torture and murder
of Iraqi detainees to the killing of hundreds of civilians in Falluja
-- underline a simple point: the United States has no business occupying
Iraq and should leave immediately.

Not after a transitional period, not after sending even more troops to
die (as presidential candidate and Democratic Party front-runner John
Kerry has advocated), and not after waiting to install a puppet regime
with United Nations approval.

The U.S. military is not bringing "stability" to Iraq. It is the source
of the chaos that in classic colonial fashion it claims it must
intervene to prevent.

The U.S. occupation is distorting every aspect of Iraqi society, and is
based on brutality and the daily humiliation of the Iraqi people.

Nor is the U.S. presence needed to prevent a civil war, as many have
claimed (including some who at first opposed the invasion of Iraq).

In fact, the U.S. is making civil war more likely. U.S. planners are
consciously sowing divisions between various Shia groups, between Sunni
and Shia, between Kurds and Muslims, and between sections of the former
Baath party.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, Max Boot, a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations, laid out the logic for the U.S. military
fomenting civil war in Iraq.

Praising the brutal Operation Phoenix counter-insurgency program from
the Vietnam War as a model for how to wage counter-insurgency efforts in
Iraq, he explained, "We need better intelligence to identify and
neutralize Iraqi insurgents, as in [Operation] Phoenix. We might even want to
recruit Baathists and induce them to turn against their erstwhile
comrades."

Boot notes the charges of "excesses" in Operation Phoenix, but then
assures us that "far more cadres were captured (33,000) or induced to
defect under Phoenix (22,000) than were killed (26,000)."

The advantage of pitting Iraqi against Iraqi, Boot writes, is that
"Iraqis would be able to try some of the strong-arm tactics that our own
scrupulously legalistic armed forces shy away from."

Boot might want to ask Hayder Sabbar Abd about the scrupulous legalism
observed by his torturers at Abu Ghraib prison (notorious as a torture
center from the time of the Hussein regime), where "he and six other
inmates were beaten, stripped naked (a particularly deep humiliation in
the Arab world), forced to pile on top of one another, to straddle one
another's backs naked, to simulate oral sex" (New York Times).

"It was humiliating," Abd recounts. "We did not think that we would
survive. All of us believed we would be killed and not get out alive."

This the reality of the U.S. occupation. The torture and humiliation of
Iraqis is not some aberration, but the logical extension of the state
terrorism needed to impose U.S. authority in Iraq.

Far from encouraging steps toward Iraqi democracy, U.S. planners are
doing everything in their power to prevent Iraqis from determining their
own fate.

The reason is simple. If Iraqis could vote, the occupation would end
tomorrow. Iraqis would control their own oil. U.S. troops would be
compelled to leave immediately. And opportunists liked Ahmed Chalabi and
other hand-picked quislings of the U.S. government, who have no legitimacy
in Iraq, would never be elected.

Instead, the Bush administration announced that at least 138,000 troops
will remain in Iraq, "until the end of 2005," the Financial Times
reported, May 5, noting that "the announcement of troop levels ... comes
before a new Iraqi governing authority has been established."

"[O]ur folks are there and are going to stay there," Donald Rumsfeld
proclaimed early in May.

It has already become clear that the June 30 "transfer" will only
represent a shift of limited authority from one group of hand-picked leaders
to another (slightly larger) group of hand-picked leaders, intended as
a public relations move for a badly embattled U.S. occupation.

On April 30, Colin Powell told Reuters that "It's important to let the
multi-national force be able to operate under its own command," not
Iraqi command, "and for us to provide that help, we have to be able to
operate freely, which, in some ways, infringes on what some would call
'full sovereignty.'"

Measures have also been taken to keep Iraqis from controlling the
income from their own oil sales. Instead, these funds will continue to be
managed by the United Nations and the occupying powers, and will be used
as a leverage to influence the transition to power in Iraq.

Control over Middle Eastern oil is the real prize, and exposes all the
other arguments used to sell the invasion: weapons of mass destruction
(a lie), human rights (a hypocritical lie), Iraq's connections to
al-Qaeda (a lie even the liars can't believe), and "democratizing the Middle
East" (perhaps the biggest lie of all).

The U.S does not want democracy in Iraq, which could mean losing
control over the world's second largest reserve of oil in the world (in a
region with two-thirds the world's oil).

It wants "stability," that is, a "pro-Western" regime that will do its
bidding.

The Iraqi people have every right to resist this project, and those of
us who support genuine democracy and freedom in Iraq should too.

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 557 - 12 de mayo de 2004
+ 'Ningún juramento os excusará de los actos criminales contra gente inocente': Llamamiento a los soldados estadounidenses de la Red de Apoyo por un Sindicato de las Fuerzas Armadas para desobedecer las órdenes militares de la ocupación

+ La Administración Bush lo sabía: Informe del Ejército de EEUU sobre abusos cometidos contra prisioneros iraquíes. Las presas de Abu Ghraib sometidas a violaciones y vejaciones
- English PDF: Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (10-11 de mayo): El sabotaje contra un oleoducto en Fao reduce las exportaciones de crudo iraquí a la mitad del nivel previo a la invasión - Comienza la retirada del contingente hondureño de Nayaf - Nuevas amenazas y ataques contra empresas y trabajadores extranjeros en Iraq - Dos nuevas bajas en combate de EEUU en Mosul y al-Anbar, y un sargento del contingente holandés muerto en Samawah

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 558 - 14 de mayo de 2004
+ 30 de junio: 'Transferencia de poder' a un gobierno títere en Iraq:
- Declaración de la CEOSI: 'Contra el fraude del proceso de 'transferencia de poder' en Iraq: Movilicémonos con motivo del 30 de junio'
- English: Against the fraud of the "power transfer" process in Iraq. Let's mobilize against 30th June

+ Declaración Final de la Conferencia Nacional Fundacional Iraquí

+ Agenda de solidaridad internacionalista: Acto lúdico-festivo en Barcelona contra la ocupación el 15 de mayo y XIX Marcha a la Base de Rota el 16 de mayo

+ Viñeta de Hajjaj

People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/29/04

Message From An Iraqi Mother
by Susan Webb

Last week, a bomb fell 12 feet from Huda Al-Jazairy’s house in Baghdad. Fortunately, she said, it fell on open ground and no one was hurt. The blast broke windows in surrounding houses. Al-Jazairy was out of her house at the time, and neighbors told her not to go back. “There is no security. All the people are afraid to go out,” she told the World, speaking by phone from Baghdad, April 27. “We live in an army camp. We hear fighters over our heads, and bombs everywhere.”

Anytime a bomb or rocket goes off, “if American soldiers are near, they shoot everybody, anybody in the streets,” she said.

Al-Jazairy, 41, mother of a 4-year-old son, sees fear in the soldiers’ faces. “The soldiers are so afraid, so stressed. So any bomb near them, they shoot in any direction.” “I don’t take my boy anywhere,” said Al-Jazairy. “Every day I go to work, I worry that I will never come back.” She works in the ministry of trade, near the U.S. occupation headquarters ­ a “very dangerous” place. “Every day there are rockets.” Many children have stopped going to schools in the area because they are afraid.

Who is firing the rockets? “There are so many groups ­ we don’t know,” she said. “If you ask anybody in the street, it was better before the U.S. invasion. Before, there was security. Nobody fought each other.”

Al-Jazairy is a Shiite from Najaf. Her husband, a Sunni, is from Tikrit, in the so-called “Sunni triangle.” Sunni-Shia marriages are “very ordinary” in Iraq, she said. “In my family we think there is no difference between Shia and Sunni.” She blamed the media for promoting discord. “In my office, we are Sunni, Shia, Kurdish and Turkmen,” she said. “My supervisor is Turkmen. I have two co-workers from Kurdistan, one from Ramadi [a Sunni area], two from Najaf [Shiite]. We don’t feel that we are different. We discuss the situation in Iraq as Iraqi people, not Kurds or Sunni or Shia.”

Al-Jazairy has a friend from Falluja, where the U.S. is waging a military “show of force” in a densely populated city of 300,000. Many Falluja families have sent women and children to Baghdad for safety, but the men stay behind simply because they are afraid their homes will be ransacked, Al-Jazairy said.

U.S. warplanes and artillery pounded crowded residential neighborhoods in Falluja this week. News services reported gunfire and mortar blasts reverberating for hours, with “thunderous explosions” shaking the area.

A delegation from Falluja’s town council traveled to Amman, Jordan, to deliver an appeal to the United Nations to intervene, the Al-Jazeera news service reported. The delegation’s leader said, “We are facing what can be called ... war crimes, and the situation can no longer bear the actions of the occupation forces who are behaving outside all international laws.” He asked UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to intervene “personally to stop the bloodbath.” “The human rights violations that happened in Falluja are very serious and the massacres that happened there are unprecedented,” he said.

In Huda Al-Jazairy’s view, “Falluja has become a center of resistance from all directions.” Some foreigners came, and there are supporters of Saddam Hussein, she says. But the “real reason,” she believes, is that the Americans trampled on Fallujans’ strong religious beliefs and culture. “In Fallujah especially,” she said, “they are afraid of any strangers coming to their houses and looking at their women.” From the beginning, she said, they told this to the U.S. Army. But over the past year, as many news reports have shown, U.S. troops repeatedly conducted house-to-house searches in Falluja, pushing into bedrooms, humiliating men in front of their families.

Many point to an incident one year ago in Falluja, in which U.S. soldiers killed and wounded dozens when they fired on a group of rock-throwing demonstrators.

Nevertheless, Huda Al-Jazairy emphasized her sympathy for the American soldiers. “I am sure they are forced to do that,” she repeated several times. Last week, she saw a news photo of a U.S. soldier returning home to his family. “I saw the tears in their eyes,” she said. “I was very sad. I feel sorry for all the American mothers.” “We felt the same when Saddam Hussein sent our soldiers to Iran and Kuwait. They were our husbands, fathers and sons. They were forced to do that.” She said she wants to tell U.S. families, “We are very sad when we see the American soldiers. But it’s not our responsibility. The responsibility is on the American government for forcing this hard war.”

The author can be reached at suewebb@pww.org.

This article is from http://www.pww.org/article/view/5162

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 556 - 10 de mayo de 2004
+ Nota de Loles Oliván: Celebrada en Bagdad la Conferencia Nacional Iraquí contra la Ocupación

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (7-9 de mayo): Medio centenar de iraquíes muertos en enfrentamientos entre fuerzas de ocupación y milicianos iraquíes en el centro y sur del país - La muerte de tres militares de EEUU por acciones de la resistencia en la capital y Mosul, y de dos miembros de la Guardia Nacional heridos con anterioridad eleva a 24 las bajas en combate estadounidenses de este mes - Un ciudadano malayo y otro neozelandés muertos a tiros en Kirkuk el lunes, mientras el domingo estalla una bomba en un hotel en Bagdad frecuentado por mercenarios

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 555 - 7 de mayo de 2004
+ Munir al-Yaludi: La vida de un iraquí "vale" 2.500 dólares

+ Mercenarios en Iraq: 'Sinfo Fernández Navarro: El mantenimiento de la ocupación en Iraq depende cada vez más de la seguridad privada'

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (5-6 de mayo): Cuatros soldados estadounidenses mueren en combates en la zona centro-sur del país y en un atentado en Bagdad - Al menos 15 iraquíes muertos en los enfrentamientos en Diwaniya y Karbala

+ Hana Ibrahim: Las mujeres iraquíes, objetivo de los ocupantes. La experiencia de Faluya
- Conferencia "La Voluntad de las Mujeres" (Bagdad, mayo de 2004)

Novedades en CSCAweb - nº 553 - 3 de mayo de 2004
+ Las imágenes de las torturas a presos iraquíes en la cárcel de Abu Ghraib
- Munir al-Yaloudi: No es difícil torturar a presos para quien bombardea las casas de los civiles y mata niños y mujeres

+ Diario de la resistencia iraquí (30 de abril y 1-3 de mayo): Comienza la retirada de los 'marines' de Faluya en un clima de victoria de la resistencia - Mayo se inicia con 13 militares estadounidenses muertos en ataques en todo Iraq - 126 bajas en combate y 1.360 iraquíes muertos, balance del mes de abril, el más sangriento para EEUU y la población iraquí - Reino Unido _evalúa enviar a Nayaf 4.000 soldados más tras la retirada del contingente español 'Plus Ultra' - Dos mercenarios muertos y cinco más heridos en un ataque en Mosul