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Recent
Stories
April
15, 2003
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
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Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
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Ali
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Alam
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Shukrallah
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Jones
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The Iraq War's Trashiest Piece of Propaganda
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Cockburn
US has a Lot to Answer For: Violence,
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Perry
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April
12 / 13, 2003
Carol
Lipton
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Madsen
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Brown
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Blum
Our Vulnerable Warmongers' Rush to Justify Devastation
Wallace
Gagne
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Render Unto Cesar
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Perry
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April
11, 2003
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Greed is Rewarded
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Vest
The Corporate War on Iraq
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de Rooij
Propaganda Stinkers: Fresh Samples from the Field
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Foreign Aid: Embezzlement as Public Policy
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Franklin Graham: Spiritual Carpetbagger
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Neumann
Now What?
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Berry
The Neo-Cons Have a Dream
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Oh Freedom
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Website
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10, 2003
Zoltan
Grossman
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The Telltale Signs of Empire
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Before You Become Too Flushed with Victory, Think of Ali Ismaeel
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Jensen
The Unseen War
Geoffrey
Neale
Ashcroft's War on the Constitution:
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Jeffrey
St. Clair
Last Tango in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
Rumors of War
Joseph
Heller
Nately's Old Man
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/10
Website
of the Day
The
Third Page
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9, 2003
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Lindorff
Secret Bechtel Docs Reveal: Yes,
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Doug
Lummis
Saving Private Lynch: Hollywood and
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Susan
Davis
The New York Times and the Peace Movement
David Vest
Smoking Gun? You're Watching It
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America's Sovereign Right to Do
as It Damn Well Pleases
Akiva
Eldar
Gary Bauer and AIPAC: an Unholy Alliance
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Hanania
Suicide Bombers without the Suicide:
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Perry
War Web Log 4/9
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8, 2003
David
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Killing the Messengers: It Doesn't
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Lichtman
Dr. Phil in the Trenches
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Brown
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Terrall
Report from the Oakland Docks: "The
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Jason Leopold
FERC and Wall Street: Conversations
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Conyers Heeds the Call on Perle
Linda Heard
Journalists Die, the Networks Lie, Iraqis Ask "Why?"
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Faruqui
Wallowing in Hypocrisy
Wallace
Gagne
Baghdad Babble
Harry
Browne
Report from the Protests at the Bush/Blair
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Larry Kearney
I Understand There's a Boy in
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Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/8
M. Shahid
Alam
The Israelization of America
April
7, 2003
Todd
Chretien
Wooden Bullets & Grenades: Oakland
Cops Attack Peace Protesters and Dock Workers
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N. Gibbs
Spying, Secrecy and the University:
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Harry Browne
War and Peace Summit a Royal Farce
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Levy
America is Not a Role Model
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A Scene from an Obscene War
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Rabin
Remembering Deir Yassin
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Robert
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The Twisted Language of War
Patrick
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Slaughter on the Road to Dibagah
John
Mackay
War and Art
Seth Sandronsky
Wars and the Color Line
Steve
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War Web Log 4/7
April
5, 2003
Alexander
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The Iraqi Humanitarian Relief is
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Anne
Gwynne
A Drowning in Salem
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Avnery
Roadmap to Nowhere
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Floyd
Hell for Leather: Bombs, Bullets, Bibles and Bush
William
Cook
Would You Have Sent Your Son (or Daughter) Off to War If...
Gila
Svirsky
A Busy Day for Bulldozers
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Back from Baghdad: What Next for the Peace Movement?
Joanne
Mariner
Civilian Deaths and Official Apologies
John Stanton
Bush Takes His Killing Orders
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Romi
Mahajan
Learning to Count the Dead
Aluf Benn
After Iraq, US Vows to Deal with
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Mary
Ellen Peterson
Gay Marine Refuses to Fight
William
MacDougall
Country Music and the Crimes of Patriotism
Ron
Jacobs
War and Occupation
Bernie
Pattison
Aborigines and the Different God
Mark
Engler
Iraq War as Arms Expo
Adam Engel
Li'l Box of Love: a Novelini
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Tripp, Albert, Katz
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flesh and Its Discontents: the Paintings of Lucian Freud
Norman
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Canada and the War
April
4, 2003
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Colin Powell's Shame
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Was Einstein Right About Israel?
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Krieger
The Meaning of Victory
Tom
Gorman
The Mantra of the Troops: Support
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Adam
Federman
The Absence of War
Vijay
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There Are No More Arguments
Tom
Stephens
The End of the Innocence
Mickey
Z.
Makes Me Sic (Sic): Copy Editing
Bush Speak
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Tristam
War Coverage: a Dishonest Reality
Show
Hammond
Guthrie
The Deadly Mihrab
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 04/04
April
3, 2003
Uri
Avnery
A Crooked Mirror: Presstitution and
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David
Vest
Can You Hear the Silence?
Anthony
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Colin Powell Telemarketer
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Lindorff
Takoma: the Dolphin Who Refused
to Fight
Michael
Roberts
War, Debts and Deficits
Ramzy
Baroud
Now That Iraqis Are Being Killed Is Israel Any More Secure?
Jo Wilding
From Baghdad with Tears
Anton
Antonowicz
Cluster Bombs on Babylon
Alison
Weir
Israel, We Won't Forget Rachel Corrie
Bruce
Jackson
Hating Wolf Blitzer's Voice
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War's First Week
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War Web Log 04/03
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April 17,
2003
Something is
Going Terribly Wrong
The Army of Occupation
by
ROBERT FISK
It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have
imagined. The army of "liberation" has already turned
into the army of occupation. The Shias are threatening to fight
the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation".
At night on every one of the Shia Muslim
barricades in Sadr City, there are 14 men with automatic rifles.
Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of the insults being
flung at them. "Go away! Get out of my face!" an American
soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire
surrounding an infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched
the man's face suffuse with rage. "God is Great! God is
Great!" the Iraqi retorted.
"Fuck you!"
The Americans have now issued a "Message
to the Citizens of Baghdad", a document as colonial in spirit
as it is insensitive in tone. "Please avoid leaving your
homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before
the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of the
city. "During this time, terrorist forces associated with
the former regime of Saddam Hussein, as well as various criminal
elements, are known to move through the area ... please do not
leave your homes during this time. During all hours, please approach
Coalition military positions with extreme caution ..."
So now--with neither electricity nor
running water--the millions of Iraqis here are ordered to stay
in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. It's a form of imprisonment.
In their own  country. Written by the command of the
1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.
"If I was an Iraqi and I read that,"
an Arab woman shouted at me, "I would become a suicide bomber."
And all across Baghdad you hear the same thing, from Shia Muslim
clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come only
for oil, and that soon--very soon--a guerrilla resistance must
start. No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are
"remnants" of Saddam's regime or "criminal elements".
But that will not be the case.
Marine officers in Baghdad were holding
talks yesterday with a Shia militant cleric from Najaf to avert
an outbreak of fighting around the holy city. I met the prelate
before the negotiations began and he told me that "history
is being repeated". He was talking of the British invasion
of Iraq in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British.
Everywhere are the signs of collapse.
And everywhere the signs that America's promises of "freedom"
and "democracy" are not to be honoured.
Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United
States allow the entire Iraqi cabinet to escape? And they're
right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay
and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Deputy
Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr A K
Hashimi, the ministers of defence, health, the economy, trade,
even Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who,
long ago, in the days before journalists cosied up to him, was
the official who read out the list of executed "brothers"
in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution--relatives of
prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each Sahaf appearance.
Here's what Baghdadis are noticing--and
what Iraqis are noticing in all the main cities of the country.
Take the vast security apparatus with which Saddam surrounded
himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy that was
its foundation. President Bush promised that America was campaigning
for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals,
would be brought to trial. The 60 secret police headquarters
in Baghdad are empty, even the three-square-mile compound headquarters
of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.
I have been to many of them. But there
is no evidence even that a single British or US forensic officer
has visited the sites to sift the wealth of documents lying there
or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former places
of torment. Is this idleness. Or is this wilful?
Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside
the river Tigris. It's a pleasant villa--once owned by an Iranian-born
Iraqi who was deported to Iran in the 1980s. There's a little
lawn and a shrubbery and at first you don't notice the three
big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the fact that big sheets
of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted over
the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the
floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place
of suffering. They show, for example, that the head of the torture
centre was Hashem al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid
al-Nababy.
Mohammed Aish Jassem, an ex-prisoner,
showed me how he was suspended from the ceiling by Captain Amar
al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of the religious Dawa
party. "They put my hands behind my back like this and tied
them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists,"
he told me. "They used a little generator to lift me up,
right up to the ceiling, then they'd release the rope in the
hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell."
The hooks in the ceiling are just in
front of Captain Isawi's desk. I understood what this meant.
There wasn't a separate torture chamber and office for documentation.
The torture chamber was the office. While the man or woman shrieked
in agony above him, Captain Isawi would sign papers, take telephone
calls and--given the contents of his bin--smoke many cigarettes
while he waited for the information he sought from his prisoners.
Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are
they sought by the Americans? No. Are they now working for the
Americans? Yes, quite possibly--indeed some of them may well
be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every morning
outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by
the US Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.
The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh
torture centre in Baghdad are in papers lying on the floor. They
were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Moham-med
Fayad. But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. So
Messrs Alawi, Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply to
work for them.
There are prisoner identification papers
on the desks and in the cupboards. What happened to Wahid Mohamed,
Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud?A lady in a black chador
approached the old torture centre. Four of her brothers had been
taken there and, later, when she went to ask what happened, she
was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to leave.
She never saw or buried their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that
there is a mass grave in the Khedeer desert, but no one--least
of all Baghdad's new occupiers--are interested in finding it.
And the men who suffered under Saddam?
What did they have to say? "We committed no sin," one
of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison duties had included
the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and faeces after
each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did
they do this to us?
"America, yes, it got rid of Saddam.
But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil belongs to us. We will keep our
nationality. It will stay Iraq. The Americans must go."
If the Americans and the British want
to understand the nature of the religious opposition here, they
have only to consult the files of Saddam's secret service archives.
I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24 February this year on the
conflict between Sheikh Mohammed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada Sadr,
the 22-year-old grandson of Mohammed Sadr, who was executed on
Saddam's orders more than two decades ago.
The dispute showed the passion and the
determination with which the Shia religious leaders fight even
each other. But of course, no one has bothered to read this material
or even look for it.
At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking
British and US intelligence officers hoovered up every document
in the thousands of Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western
Germany. The Russians did the same in their zone. In Iraq, however,
the British and Americans have simply ignored the evidence.
There's an even more terrible place for
the Americans to visit in Baghdad--the headquarters of the whole
intelligence apparatus, a massive grey-painted block that was
bombed by the US and a series of villas and office buildings
that are stashed with files, papers and card indexes. It was
here that Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for
vicious interrogation--electricity being an essential part of
this--and it was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent,
was brought for questioning before his dispatch to the hangman.
It's also graced with delicately shaded
laneways, a creche--for the families of the torturers--and a
school in which one pupil had written an essay in English on
(suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. There's also
a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street"
and flowerbeds and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in
all of Iraq.
I met--extraordinarily--an Iraqi nuclear
scientist walking around the compound, a colleague of the former
head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr Sharistani. "This is the
last place I ever wanted to see and I will never return to it,"
he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in all
the world."
The top security men in Saddam's regime
were busy in the last hours, shredding millions of documents.
I found a great pile of black plastic rubbish bags at the back
of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of thousands of papers.
Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and reconstituted
to learn their secrets?
Even the unshredded files contain a wealth
of information. But again, the Americans have not bothered--or
do not want--to search through these papers. If they did, they
would find the names of dozens of senior intelligence men, many
of them identified in congratulatory letters they insisted on
sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now,
for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi,
Captain Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid
Ahmed and scores of others? We may never know. Or perhaps we
are not supposed to know.
Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans
don't search for this information, just as they are right to
demand to know why the entire Saddam cabinet--every man jack
of them--got away. The capture by the Americans of Saddam's half-brother
and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu Abbas, whose last violent
act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation for this.
Now here's another question the Iraqis
are asking--and to which I cannot provide an answer. On 8 April,
three weeks into the invasion, the Americans dropped four 2,000lb
bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. They claimed
they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill
civilians because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a
"risk free venture" (sic). So they dropped their bombs
and killed 14 civilians in Mansur, most of them members of a
Christian family.
The Americans said they couldn't be sure
they had killed Saddam until they could carry out forensic tests
at the site. But this turns out to have been a lie. I went there
two days ago. Not a single US or British official had bothered
to visit the bomb craters. Indeed, when I arrived, there was
a putrefying smell and families pulled the remains of a baby
from the rubble.
No American officers have apologised
for this appalling killing. And I can promise them that the baby
I saw being placed under a sheet of black plastic was very definitely
not Saddam Hussein. Had they bothered to look at this place--as
they claimed they would--they would at least have found the baby.
Now the craters are a place of pilgrimage for the people of Baghdad.
Then there's the fires that have consumed
every one of the city's ministries--save, of course, for the
Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil--as well as UN offices,
embassies and shopping malls. I have counted a total of 35 ministries
now gutted by fire and the number goes on rising.
Yesterday I found myself at the Ministry
of Oil, assiduously guarded by US troops, some of whom were holding
clothes over their mouths because of the clouds of smoke swirling
down on them from the neighbouring Ministry of Agricultural Irrigation.
Hard to believe, isn't it, that they were unaware that someone
was setting fire to the next building?
Then I spotted another fire, three kilometres
away. I drove to the scene to find flames curling out of all
the windows of the Ministry of Higher Education's Department
of Computer Science. And right next to it, perched on a wall,
was a US Marine, who said he was guarding a neighbouring hospital
and didn't know who had lit the next door fire because "you
can't look everywhere at once".
Now I'm sure the marine was not being
facetious or dishonest--should the Americans not believe this
story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd Regiment, 4th Marines
and, yes, I called his fiancée, Jessica, in the States
for him to pass on his love--but something is terribly wrong
when US soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast ministries
being burnt by mobs and do nothing about it.
Because there is also something dangerous--and
deeply disturbing--about the crowds setting light to the buildings
of Baghdad, including the great libraries and state archives.
For they are not looters. The looters come first. The arsonists
turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses. I followed one
after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire and
it sped out of town.
The official US line on all this is that
the looting is revenge--an explanation that is growing very thin--and
that the fires are started by "remnants of Saddam's regime",
the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who feature
in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe
Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires. And neither
do I.
The looters make money from their rampages
but the arsonists have to be paid. The passengers in those buses
are clearly being directed to their targets. If Saddam had pre-paid
them, they wouldn't start the fires. The moment he disappeared,
they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the whole project.
So who are they, this army of arsonists?
I recognised one the other day, a middle-aged, unshaven man in
a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me he pointed a Kalashnikov
at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he working for? In
whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical infrastructure
of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the Americans
stop this?
As I said, something is going terribly
wrong in Baghdad and something is going on which demands that
serious questions be asked of the United States government. Why,
for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defence, claim
last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction
in Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it?
The Americans say they don't have enough
troops to control the fires. This is also untrue. If they don't,
what are the hundreds of soldiers deployed in the gardens of
the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the hundreds
camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?
So the people of Baghdad are asking who
is behind the destruction of their cultural heritage: the looting
of the archaeological treasures from the national museum; the
burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State archives; the
Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation we
claim we are going to create for them.
Why, they ask, do they still have no
electricity and no water? In whose interest is it for Iraq to
be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, destroyed? Why
are they issued with orders for a curfew by their so-called liberators?
And it's not just the people of Baghdad,
but the Shias of the city of Najaf and of Nasiriyah--where 20,000
protested at America's first attempt to put together a puppet
government on Wednesday--who are asking these questions. Now
there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly set fire
to the pro-American governor's car after he promised US help
in restoring electricity.
It's easy for a reporter to predict doom,
especially after a brutal war that lacked all international legitimacy.
But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East,
especially for false optimists who invade oil-rich nations with
ideological excuses and high-flown moral claims and accusations,
such as weapons of mass destruction, which are still unproved.
So I'll make an awful prediction. That America's war of "liberation"
is over. Iraq's war of liberation from the Americans is about
to begin. In other words, the real and frightening story starts
now.
Today's
Features
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Robert
Jensen
Self-Determination in Iraq? Then the
US Must Leave
Dr.
Susan Block
The Rape of Iraq
Ron Jacobs
Aiming at Syria: Stop Them Before They Kill Again
Robert
Fisk
The Final Sacking of Baghdad
Col. Dan
Smith
Post-War Iraq: Asking the Right Questions
Ali
Abunimah and Hussein Ibish
A Cycle of Chaos and Confrontation: Misadventures of the NeoCons
Steve
Perry
War Web Log 4/15
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