Probably everyone remembers the discovery
of the Jadiriyah detention facility in November 2005. US troops were reported
to have uncovered the prison in their hunt for a missing person, only to
discover some 170 detainees in horrific conditions, many of them clearly the
victims of obscene tortures. Although it was admitted that the facility
belonged to the Interior Ministry and that the detainees were held by a
secretive Interior Ministry force known as the Special Investigations Unit, the
story was quickly shuffled away as yet another example of the work of Shiite
militiamen, in this instance, as was the vogue at that time, the Badr Brigade
[1].
Myriad promises were forthcoming both from the US and Iraqi
governments that investigations would be rapidly carried out and better
supervision would in the future be applied to Iraqi-run detention facilities
(for instance, the Iraqi government assured the world that a ministerial level
investigation would rapidly be carried out, while US officials promised a legal
team to go through the detainees� files and a US embassy spokesman
stated that Justice Department and FBI officers would provide technical
assistance).
Of course, given the scale of the abuse (flayings, burnings,
drillings, etc.) and the proximity of the perpetrators to the Iraqi government
(by dint of working for the Interior Ministry as well as by any possible
Badr-SCIRI links) and to the US occupation which had, after all, established
them (as numerous reports have amply documented, e.g., Knight Ridder,
9 May 2005), such investigations were grossly less than what was urgently
required -- a full and public criminal investigation by independent
international agencies. Even these limited promises came to nothing, as the UN
Human Rights Office in Iraq recently highlighted.
What we have actually seen is neither investigation nor prosecutions, despite
the fact that Jadiriyah lies at the heart of the state of fear that Iraq
undeniably now is.
In October
last year, I had the privilege to interview one of the victims of that terrible
abuse, the distinguished former professor of Pedagogy at Baghdad University,
Tareq Samarree, who had been seized from his home in March 2005 by
plain-clothes Interior Ministry personnel without charge. Professor Samarree,
who provided a horrific first-hand account of the torture that he had suffered
as well as details of others who had died and of the disappearance of his son
within the Iraqi detention system, never had sight of any hint of judicial
process nor any access to the outside world.
What made
Professor Samarree�s story most striking were the details of his release.
Professor Samarree�s physical condition was so bad when the American soldiers
discovered the facility that he, along with around a dozen other detainees, was
instantly taken to a local hospital. Here, he and his companions remained
without access to lawyers, journalists, officials or even a telephone. In fact,
it quickly became clear that these victims of torture were to be returned to
Iraqi detention. Professor Samarree, another of whose sons lives in the United
States, was fortunate to be able to persuade an American solider to take pity
on him and assist him and two of his companions to escape. The last words the
soldier said to Professor Samarree were, �Run, run. Don�t look back!�
Within
days, Professor Samarree had arranged for himself and his family to flee the
country. He is now in Europe, where he is claiming political asylum.
The full
details of Professor Samarree�s story and a detailed account of the US-built
Iraqi intelligence apparatus are contained in the article Ghosts of Jadiriyah,
published by the BRussells Tribunal. It should be noted that
the story was offered on the one-year anniversary of discovery of the Jadiryah
facility to a range of mainstream media publications, including New Yorker, New
Statesman, the Independent, The Big Issue, as well as to the radical left publication
Z Mag. Of them all, only the New Statesmen and Z Mag were courteous enough even
to reply to affirm their rejection. It seemed that Professor Samarree�s
remarkable story and any further interest in Jadiriyah were simply off the
agenda.
But Jadiriyah,
with its ghosts and its horror, will not go away.
On 7
February 2007, another former inmate from Jadiriyah, Abbas Z Abid, presented
his sworn testimony
at the international peace conference in Kuala Lumpur. Like Professor Samarree�s,
his description of the torture that he and others underwent is almost too
harrowing to bear. What sets his testimony apart and completes our
understanding of the grim world of Iraq�s secret prisons are the dates of his
incarceration. Mr Abid, an electrical engineer from Fallujah who was the Chief
Engineer in Baghdad�s Science and Technology Ministry, was arrested in August
2005, but was not released until October 2006. That means that Mr Abid, like Dr
Samarree, was held when the American soldiers raided the facility, but his
ordeal did not end there. In fact, not only does Mr Abid describe the ongoing
tortures that he was repeatedly subjected to after the US intervention, as well
as describing the tortures that continued to be inflicted on fellow inmates,
including the use of Black and Decker drills and other power tools (Mr Abid
names eight fellow detainees who died from their injuries), but Mr Abid states
that �American troops have visited the prison many times and therefore cannot
deny the existence of such a prison.�
The implications of these two testimonies as well as the
absence of independent and public scrutiny are obvious. The Occupation has done
nothing at all to halt abuse at the Interior Ministry�s network
of secret prisons or curtail in any way the culture of impunity in which
they exist. And lets be absolutely clear what we are talking about here. This
is as close as we can get to the tide of sectarian violence sweeping Iraq,
whose victims are almost invariably arrested by Interior Ministry personnel,
who are then horribly tortured within Interior Ministry prisons and whose
bodies finally surface in abandoned lots, are dredged from rivers, are buried
in shallow graves in the desert or left as human detritus around sewage works.
(Former human rights chief in Iraq John Pace stated that the majority of
killings were being carried out by groups under the control of the Interior
Ministry, Independent,
26 February 2006, while the Iraqi Organisation for
Follow-up and Monitoring in Iraq found that in 92 percent of some 3,498
cases of extrajudicial killing, the victims had been arrested by Interior
Ministry forces). Such would undoubtedly have been the final fate of Professor
Samarree and Mr Abid�s hapless fellow detainees.
Of course the Americans have always been aware of the
existence of this and other horrific dungeons within Interior Ministry
facilities. How could they not be? They set them up and continue to operate
from the same facilities! And for any who would question the validity of Mr
Abid�s testimony that American forces were regular visitors, his story is
confirmed by Solomon Moore writing in the Los
Angeles Times (9 July 2006), who stated that the US military had been
at the facility before the November raid! And the same happened in Basra. After
it was revealed by the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that British trained policemen
had tortured
prisoners to death with drills, we discovered, through the New
York Times (!!), that American intelligence officers had been working
alongside them at the Jamiyat police station, where they passed on names of
suspects knowing that those suspects would end up as the victims of death
squads. That is their modus operandi and it is duplicated by British military
intelligence units, like the Joint Support Group, who brought their nefarious
experience from Northern Ireland (where, as Chris Floyd has recently
documented, they orchestrated
sectarian murder through the Ulster Defence Association) straight to Iraq.
Thus in Basra we find a paramilitary death squad outfit called the Revenge of
God (Thar Allah) nurtured and protected by the British, linked to police
intelligence and given control of nightly curfews, despite its boasts of
killing members of the former state (see Ghosts of Jadiriyah
for a more complete account)!
Since the
mainstream Western media will not hear such voices as Professor Samarree and Mr
Abid, it is absolutely beholden on every decent-minded individual as well as
every organisation that opposes the illegal occupation of Iraq to demand the
truth and bring an end to this monstrous culture of impunity.
Jean Paul
Sartre noted that the American assault on Vietnam was not only an attack
against that nation, but an act of violence directed against the whole of
humanity. If we are to have any hope of rescuing our own collective humanity,
we must raise our voices to bring an end to the screaming from Iraq.
Two important notes:
Note 1: On sectarianism
The
cherished Western mainstream media notion, undoubtedly nurtured by false flag
covert warfare and so-called psyops, that Iraq has fragmented into a state of
intercommunal sectarian civil war is the biggest single impediment to
understanding the role of the Anglo-US Occupation in the thousands upon
thousands of extrajudicial killings taking place in Iraq.
The testimonies
of Professor Samarree and Mr Abid shed some futher light on just how far we can
see sectarianism as a factor in Iraq�s violence. Both accounts describe hearing
a language that they believe to be Farsi, as well as, variously, images of
Shiite saints and mobile ring tones with Iranian songs. Dr Samarree even states
with a high degree of confidence that the head of the Badr Organisation, Hadi
al-Amery, attended one of his interrogation sessions. [2]
There is no
reason to doubt their testimonies. In fact, as newspapers have revealed,
and I have documented on multiple occasions, the Badr Brigade/Organisation was
among the major political parties in exile from whom the CIA recruited the core
of the new intelligence apparatus, an organisation which started out with the
innocuous title of the Collection Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), a
title which masked the fact that in reality it was producing what amounted to
death lists to be targeted by its paramilitary wing in conjunction with US (and
UK) special forces (See Ghosts of Jadiriyah
for a detailed discussion).
That such
parties are running at least some of the worst detention facilities (others are
undoubtedly run by Kurdish groups in the north of Iraq) is, therefore, not
surprising and, of course, their members at every level of responsibility
should face justice. But more instructive are their demonstrable links with the
Occupation, which I have sought to document. It is this intellectual authorship
of extrajudicial killing that the Western anti-occupation movement needs to
focus on. If the torturers and killers in Jadiriyah were indeed taking their
instruction from Iran, as some would hold, then they not only need to prove
that, but in the face of concrete evidence that such forces work in close
conjunction with the US (see also Diyala: a Laboratory of
Civil War?), they also need to prove that the US state is working hand in
hand with the Iranian state.
In fact, as
Kurt Nimmo has highlighted, we know that the Iranian state is being stitched up
in Iraq over fabricated
charges of supplying weapons to Shiite groups. As anyone who remembers
anything about similar US charges in other theatres of war (such as the Nicaraguan Migs, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, etc., etc.) will
remember, they were all made up! As modern military theorists hold, the major
part of contemporary warfare is informational -- or better stated,
disinformational.
Note 2: On genocide
The distinguished dissident academic Edward Herman recently
wrote a paper, entitled Iraq: the
Genocide Option, in which he argued that the US war in Iraq threatened to become
genocidal. He was quite right to point to genocide. With credible figures of over one million Iraqi
casualties, another 3 to 4 million displaced internally and externally, the
total collapse of civic infrastructure and the imminent threat of political
disintegration, there must already be a very real question as to whether Iraq
continues to exist as a viable nation. To fully substantiate the charge, the
only question technically remains establishing intent, although I believe that,
too, is perfectly possible when we consider the statements on partition made by
the likes of Leslie Gelb (New York Times 25
November 2003, 1 May 2006).
To make his
argument, Herman drew upon two analogies: El Salvador and Vietnam. Whilst
explicitly acknowledging the existence of the so-called Salvador Option in
Iraq, Herman�s argument was that genocide had occurred in Vietnam though the
direct application of US force with its implementation of weapons of massive
destruction, whereas, in El Salvador, where the US had had to resort to more
lightly equipped proxy armies, only mass murder had occurred, which he compared
with the Phoenix Programme in Vietnam. With the greatest respect, however, I
believe that Herman is understating the terrible impact of the Phoenix
Programme, the brutal US-sponsored war in El Salvador and the ongoing Salvador
Option in Iraq.
First of
all, Herman compares El Salvador�s estimated death toll of some 100,000 (which
Noam Chomsky describes as the crucifixion of the country) with the several
(commonly around three) million estimated victims in Vietnam. Whilst one should
not doubt the scale of the horror brought to Vietnam and its tragic ongoing
legacy, it should be pointed out that to compare these figures is somewhat
misleading. El Salvador has a population of some five million, compared to
around 10 times as many in Vietnam. Thus it would not be unreasonable to
suggest that had El Salvador�s Salvador Option been carried out in a country as
populous as Vietnam, the direct casualties would have totalled around one
million, bringing it instantly into the same order of magnitude as Vietnam. In
fact, something very much like this under US auspices did take place in
Indonesia. Thus, we can see that with an arsenal of much lighter weapons,
including a plentiful array of improvised torture devices, a multitude of human
lives can be extinguished. In El Salvador this slaughter was meticulously
organised by the US through the training and provision of its armed forces,
through control of its intelligence departments and through strategically
placed advisors at every level of the Salvadoran Armed Forces.
And the
results of the US war in El Salvador were the economic subjugation of the
country, including dollarisation, with an uncounted human toll in terms of
blocked social reform and the entrenchment of poverty. In the sense that the
hopes and dreams of emancipation from economic slavery of the poor majority
were drowned in rivers of blood, this too was a genocide.
It also
seems unduly dismissive to describe the Phoenix Program as only accounting for
the deaths of around 40,000 Vietnamese. The point of the Phoenix Programme was
that it was a systematic campaign of targeted killing in South Vietnam designed
to destroy the leadership of the resistance movements (including the leaders of
the unarmed social resistance) and terrorise the population into obedience (as
in El Salvador). As such it formed an important tactical contribution to what
amounted to a genocidal attack against the Vietnamese, whose aim was to
extinguish that people�s hope of national development. Nor should the value of
the eventual exposure of the Phoenix Program be regarded as insignificant. The
effect of this exposure was to give the necessary impetus to closing down the
Office of Public Safety (Supplying Repression, Institute for
Policy Studies, 1981), whose
various programmes contributed to the implementation of repressive security
apparatuses around the world and certainly added to growing pressure for US
withdrawal from Vietnam. We will never know what effect its earlier exposre
might have had if more people had been prepared to break the silence.
In his
address to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Vietnam, Jean Paul Sartre
specifically addressed the question of genocide. Sartre argued that the US
could conduct genocide in Vietnam not because it had the means, but because its
lack of significant economic interests meant that there was nothing to lose and
the salutary effect of this lesson in apocalypse would not be lost on other
nations bidding for independence.
In Iraq
(with its much smaller population) the US has already matched in scale the
violence perpetrated on Vietnam and the war goes on, although there is little
indication that it has given up its economic interests. Undoubtedly a very
great part of this violence is conducted directly by US forces (the extremely
credible Lancet
study suggests from 30-40 percent), but, despite surges, that proportion
appears to be falling. That leaves perhaps as many as 500,000 violent deaths
unattributed to Coalition military action. Herman states that some of these
would belong to the Salvador Option, while the bulk of the others would fall
into the pattern that he explicitly describes as large-scale communal civil war
manipulated by the US. I think it is vital that we all remember that this
intercommunal sectarian warfare still
consists of anonymous bombs that target the Shia and which most Iraqis for
good reason believe are the work of the Occupation and sectarian killings of
Sunnis by members of the security forces -- along with academics, engineers,
lawyers, trade unionists, imams, doctors, teachers and other state
functionaries by paramilitary forces operating from the Ministry of the
Interior [3]. This is indeed the application of the Salvador Option and it
contributes an essential part of the ongoing genocide in Iraq.
Endnotes:
1. The
charge that the Badr Brigade was responsible for most of acts of sectarian violence
through its alleged infiltration of the Interior Ministry Police Commandos was revised
almost overnight following the bombing of the Samarra Mosque in February
2006. From that moment on, the majority of complaints against Shiite militiamen
were levelled against the so-called Mehdi Army associated with Muqtada al Sadr.
No explanation has ever been provided as to how such a switch could have come about,
especially perplexing given that it was explicitly
clear that police units were the primary culprits prior to Samarra.
2. The very
fact that Mr Abid is able to describe the special attention given to Sunni
detainees demonstrates that there were Shiites among the detainees, a fact
commonly glossed over. In addition, Mr Abid was neither detained by the Badr
Brigade nor the Mehdi Army but by US and Iraqi forces (the Muthana Brigade,
which, despite reported reverence for Muqtada al Sadr, continues to host US
advisors), before being handed over to the Special Investigation Unit.
3. In
each of the high profile accounts of supposed sectarian attacks and massacres
that have taken place within the last year, a detailed examination of the
evidence demonstrates that the violence specifically occurred within the
context of security operations and/or directly under the noses of Occupation
forces. Examples include Operation Knockout in Baquba, the
assault on the Adhamiya
district of Baghdad, the massacre in the Jihad district of
Baghdad, the massacre in Balad
and the mass abduction from the Ministry of
Education.