New cables

Cables: Iraqi Detainees Were Tortured, Beaten, Raped

Antriwar.com reports (September 12^th): Iraqi detainees were severely tortured, beaten, and raped in an Iraqi National Police detention complex in 2006, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks. Discovery by US officials of the abuse did not lead to criminal investigations of the perpetrators and much of the mistreatment was permitted to continue.

On May 30, 2006, “a joint US-Iraqi inspection” of an Iraqi detention facility “discovered more than 1,400 detainees in squalid, cramped conditions,” many of whom were illegally detained. Prisoners “displayed bruising, broken bones, and lash-marks, many claimed to have been hung by handcuffs from a hook in the ceiling and beaten on the soles of their feet and their buttocks.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2011/09/12/cables-iraqi-detainees-were-tortured-beaten-raped/

Massive U.S. Embassy In Iraq Will Expand Further As Soldiers Leave

Huffington Post reports (September 16^th): American combat troops in Iraq may be heading to the exits -- or not -- but the U.S. government's enormously expensive intervention there is hardly coming to an end.

In a telling sign of how dangerous and chaotic Iraq remains more than eight years after President George W. Bush launched the war against Saddam Hussein, U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other officials are planning to fall back to the gargantuan embassy in Baghdad -- a heavily fortified, self-contained compound the size of Vatican City.

The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/16/us-embassy-iraq-state-department-plan_n_965945.html

New protests

Iraqis mourn slain journalist amid protests

Al-Jazeera reports (September 9^th): Hundreds of people turned out to mourn Hadi al-Mehdi, an Iraqi radio personality who was shot dead in Baghdad on the eve of a major anti-government protest.
Mourners marched with a symbolic coffin draped in an Iraqi flag from al-Mehdi's home in Karrada in central Baghdad to the city's Tahrir Square, where thousands of people had gathered for a rally calling for improved public services, a cause that al-Mehdi had supported.

Al-Mehdi was one of the leading public critics of the Iraqi authorities' corruption and incompetence, said Al Jazeera's Jane Arraf, reporting from Baghdad.

About 750 people also demonstrated in Hilla in central Iraq, chanting slogans including "These jobless people are against the failed regime".
And about 100 people protested in the central shrine city of Najaf, chanting slogans including "No, no to corruption!"
Human Rights Watch condemned Mehdi's killing in a statement: "Iraqi authorities should conduct an immediate, full and transparent investigation into the September 8, 2011, killing of Hadi al-Mehdi ... and prosecute those responsible".
Amnesty International also condemned the murder, saying authorities are not doing enough to protect journalists.

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/09/20119910839180756.html

Robert Fisk: It's not the brutality that is 'systematic'. It's the lying about it

It was Baha Mousa's dad I will always remember. On an oppressively scorching day in Basra, Daoud Mousa first spoke of his son's death, telling me how the boy's wife had died of cancer just six months earlier, how Baha's children were now orphans, how – not long after the British Army had arrested Baha Mousa and beaten him to death, for that is what happened – a British officer had come to his home and stared at the floor and offered cash by way of saying sorry.

"What do you think I should do?" Daoud asked me. Get a lawyer, I said. Tell Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. Let me write about it. When I called at the British base at Basra airport, one officer laughed at me. "Call the Ministry of Defence," he said dismissively. He didn't care.

I had spent years in Belfast, listening to the same kind of arrogant, vicious, indifferent reaction to the Army's brutality. It was always the same. Terrorists. Terrorist propaganda. The extraordinary discipline of British squaddies under enormous pressure, etc, etc, etc. Then – when the game was up and the evidence too fresh and too overwhelming – I used to get what we would today call the "Abu Ghraib response". A "few bad apples". Always a "few bad apples".http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-its-not-the-brutality-that-is-systematic-its-the-lying-about-it-2351634.html

See also:

Army suspends Baha Mousa soldiers as more prosecutions are considered

The Guardian reports (September 9^th): The army has suspended a number of soldiers after the publication of a damning report into the "violent and cowardly abuse" by servicemen that led to the death of an Iraqi detainee in British military custody.

There have been widespread calls for further prosecutions and the defence secretary, Liam Fox, disclosed that Ministry of Defence inquiries "are revealing evidence of some concern" in other Iraqi abuse cases.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/08/army-suspends-baha-mousa-soldiers

Baha Mousa inquiry criticises the British troops' 'lack of moral courage'

The Guardian reports (September 8^th): British soldiers indulged in an "appalling episode of serious, gratuitous violence" on a number of Iraqi civilian detainees leading to the death of the 26-year-old Basra hotel worker, Baha Mousa, and the abuse of nine others.

Mousa, the father of two children, was "subjected to violent and cowardly abuse and assaults by British servicemen whose job it was to guard him and treat him humanely".

Sir William Gage, a retired appeal court judge who presided over the two-year inquiry, paints a devastating picture of military culture in general and in particular a group of soldiers of 1st Battalion Queen's Lancashire Regiment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/08/baha-mousa-inquiry-british-troops

Life in occupied Iraq

Three stories from the last few says:

Female Trafficking Soars in Iraq 

IPS reports (August 27^th): Prostitution and sex trafficking are epidemic in Iraq, where the violence of military occupation and sectarian strife have smashed national institutions, impoverished the population and torn apart families and neighbourhoods. Over 100,000 civilians have been killed and an estimated 4.4 million Iraqis displaced since 2003. 

"Wars and conflicts, wherever they are fought, invariably usher in sickeningly high level of violence against women and girls," Amnesty International states. 

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104911

Trafficked to Baghdad’s Green Zone

IPS reports (August 25^th): Ukrainian and Bulgarian workers are currently camped out on a construction site of half-built luxury villas in Baghdad’s elite "Green Zone" – a vast security enclave housing government offices, embassies and international NGOs - demanding their salaries before being shipped back home.

35 workers have stayed on, desperate to receive their unpaid wages. Crowded into a rudimentary hall where they live and sleep, they have no legal working papers and little food and water in Iraq’s intense summer heat. 

Their handmade signs posted on the construction site fence a couple weeks ago begged attention. "Please help we are in trouble", said one, while another pleaded: "SOS Ukrainian Workers". 

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=104893

The US military is making Iraqi children sick

News from the Middle East reports (August 27^th): We have a catastrophic situation in Haweeja, near Kirkuk. There is an American munitions training centre in the province and the local people are suffering from living near the weapons testing. 412 children are suffering from radiation sickness. The FWCUI recently participated in a delegation organised by the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) to meet local residents and discuss the issues. There are hundreds of people with illnesses, including cancer. People cannot afford proper medical treatment; FWCUI and OWFI are demanding that the weapons testing stops, that the site is cleaned up and that people are given access to the medical treatment they need.

http://www.newsfrommiddleeast.com/?new=80864

Panetta says:we're staying - Iraq disagrees

Politicos report (August 19^th): Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Iraq’s government has agreed to extend the U.S. military presence in the country beyond 2011 — but Iraq quickly rejected the claim.

The word from Panetta, during an interview with Stars & Stripes, was the first official indication that any of the 46,000 American troops will remain in Iraq beyond the country’s Dec. 31 deadline for U.S. forces to leave.

“My view is that they finally did say, ‘Yes,’” Panetta told the military’s official newspaper.

But shortly after Panetta’s interview hit the Internet, a spokesman for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Agence-France Presse that no deal is in place.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0811/61731.html

Iraq foots the bill for its own destruction

By Murtaza Hussain

When considering the premise of reparation being paid for the Iraq War it would be natural to assume that the party to whom such payments would be made would be the Iraqi civilian population, the ordinary people who suffered the brunt of the devastation from the fighting. Fought on the false pretence of capturing Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the war resulted in massive indiscriminate suffering for Iraqi civilians which continues to this day. Estimates of the number of dead and wounded range from the hundreds of thousands into the millions, and additional millions of refugees remain been forcibly separated from their homes, livelihoods and families. Billions of dollars in reparations are indeed being paid for the Iraq War, but not to Iraqis who lost loved ones or property as a result of the conflict, and who, despite their nation’s oil wealth, are still suffering the effects of an utterly destroyed economy. "Reparations payments" are being made by Iraq to Americans and others for the suffering which those parties experienced as a result of the past two decades of conflict with Iraq.

Iraq today is a shattered society still picking up the pieces after decades of war and crippling sanctions. Prior to its conflict with the United States, the Iraqi healthcare and education systems were the envy of the Middle East, and despite the brutalities and crimes of the Ba’ath regime there still managed to exist a thriving middle class of ordinary Iraqis, something conspicuously absent from today’s "free Iraq." In light of the continued suffering of Iraqi civilians, the agreement by the al-Maliki government to pay enormous sums of money to the people who destroyed the country is unconscionable and further discredits the absurd claim that the invasion was fought to "liberate" the Iraqi people.

In addition to making hundreds of millions of dollars in reparation payments to the United States, Iraq has been paying similarly huge sums to corporations whose business suffered as a result of the actions of Saddam Hussein. While millions of ordinary Iraqis continue to lack even reliable access to drinking water, their free and representative government has been paying damages to corporations such as Pepsi, Philip Morris and Sheraton; ostensibly for the terrible hardships their shareholders endured due to the disruption in the business environment resulting from the Gulf War. When viewed against the backdrop ofmassive privatization of Iraqi natural resources, the image that takes shape is that of corporate pillaging of a destroyed country made possible by military force.

Despite the billions of dollars already paid in damages to foreign countries and corporations additional billions are still being sought and are directly threatening funds set aside for the rebuilding of the country; something which 8 years after the invasion has yet to occur for the vast majority of Iraqis. While politicians and media figures in the U.S. make provocative calls for Iraq to "pay back" the United States for the costs incurred in giving Iraq the beautiful gift of democracy, it is worth noting that Iraq is indeed already being pillaged of its resources to the detriment of its long suffering civilian population.

The perverse notion that an utterly destroyed country must pay reparations to the parties who maliciously planned and facilitated its destruction is the grim reality today for the people Iraq. That there are those who actually bemoan the lack of Iraqi gratitude for the invasion of their country and who still cling to the pathetic notion that the unfathomable devastation they unleashed upon Iraqi civilians was some sort of "liberation" speaks powerfully to the capacity for human self-delusion. The systematic destruction and pillaging of Iraq is a war crime for which none of its perpetrators have yet been held to account (though history often takes[though history often takes time to be fully written] time to be fully written), and of which the extraction of reparation payments is but one component.

Murtaza Hussain blogs at Revolution by the Book and is on Twitter at@MazMHussain.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/12/iraq_hussain