[lbo-talk] Fisk on torturers and looters

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Apr 17 13:31:13 PDT 2003


http://quicksitebuilder.cnet.com/supfacts/id203.html

<Supporting Facts Gloss>

The indifference of US forces to the human rights crimes committed by

the Hussein regime is further evidence they came to occupy Iraq rather

than liberate it, writes the Independent's Robert Fisk. Fisk visited

locations in Baghdad where Baathist security forces had held Iraqi

dissidents and found the buildings deserted, with instruments of

torture, staff files, victim lists and other evidence scattered about

- demonstrating US intelligence services are not interested in

securing these sites and collecting evidence to prosecute the regime's

secret police. Part of the reason, Fisk suggests, is because the US

needs, and has begun hiring, them for internal security purposes,

particularly against Shia opponents of the US occupation, who have

mobilized more quickly than anticipated.

<end Supporting Facts gloss>

[He also suggests, in conjunction with earlier articles on American art

dealers lobbying against Iraq's "retentionist" cultural legacy laws,

that the museum looters were all but hired.]

This is not liberation

By Robert Fisk

The Independent

April 17 2003

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.



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