Iraq (1 Viewer)

WMD claims were 'totally implausible'

Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday June 20, 2005
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1510258,00.html

A key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors says today that claims the government made about Iraq's weapons programme were "totally implausible".
He tells the Guardian: "I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too".

Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the UN in New York during the run-up to the invasion, resigned from the FO last year, after giving evidence to the Butler inquiry.

He thought about publishing his testimony because he felt so angry. But he was warned that if he did he might be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act.

"There was a very good alternative to war that was never properly pursued, which was to close down Saddam's sources of illegal revenue", he says.

Mr Ross also says sanctions imposed against Iraq were wrong. "They did immeasurable damage to the Iraqi civilian population. We were conscious of that but we did too little to address it", he says.

Earlier, after the September 11 attacks on the US, Mr Ross spent six weeks in Afghanistan negotiating with warlords. "The allies didn't understand Afghanistan," he says. "They didn't have sufficient forces on the ground, were trapped in their fortified compounds, naive about the the willingness of the warlords to cede power, and were far too optimistic that opium production could be curtailed."

Mr Ross has set up a consultancy and advisory service, Independent Diplomat, and wants to raise awareness about the plight of the Saharawi people, displaced by Morocco from Western Sahara in defiance of the UN security council.

He plans to visit the 150,000 refugees from Western Sahara encamped across the border in northwest Algeria. "British policy is to do nothing because British interests dictate that fairly minuscule trade with Morocco is more important," he said.
 
Just shows you the lawlessness of the country if people from other countries can meet out their own forms of revenge and justice and not be stopped..

HOSTAGE VOWS REVENGE

A Swedish man who was held hostage in Iraq for two months before being released has vowed to take revenge on his kidnappers.

Ulf Hjertstroem, a 63-year-old oil broker, has hired bounty hunters to capture them.


"I want to take them out of the game," he explained.

Mr Hjertstroem shared a cell with another recently released hostage, Australian Douglas Wood.

He said: "I have now put some people to work to find them.

"I have invested about £30,000 so far and we will get them one by one."

Mr Hjertstroem declined to say what fate awaited his kidnappers, but he said two of them had already been captured.

He added: "Vengeance is always important, but that is not my main motive. I want people in Baghdad to be able to walk in the streets again."

Mr Hjertstroem spoke out in the Swedish media about his ordeal.

He described how his captors had killed a number of other prisoners before his eyes. On several occasions they had subjected him to mock executions.
 
blood on our hands too...

We are all complicit in these vile acts of torture - but what can we do about it?

If our government uses information drained out of these creatures, it is we who are holding the whips

by Robert Fisk

06/18/05 "The Independent" - - We are all complicit in these vile acts of torture - but what can we do about it? If our government uses information drained out of these creatures, it is we who are holding the whips.
I still have my notes from a man who knew all about torture, a Druze friend in the 1980s, during the Lebanese war, pleased with himself because he'd just caught two Christian militiamen trying to plant a car bomb on the Beirut seafront. "I saw two Phalangists over there. I knew who they were. They had a bomb in their car. I called the PSP [Walid Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party] and they took them off for questioning." What happened to them? "Well, they knew what would happen to them; they knew there was no hope. They were questioned here for a couple of days and then they were taken up to Beit Eddin."

Ah, Beit Eddin, one of the prettiest villages in Lebanon, the palace of the Emir Bashir the Second, site now of one of the country's finest music festivals - run by Jumblatt's glamorous wife Nora. But Beit Eddin was different in the 1980s. "The guys are always told that they are going to die, that there's no point in suffering - because they are going to be killed when they've talked," my Druze friend told me. "There's a center. They don't survive. There are people there who just press them until they talk. They put things into a man's anus until he screams. Boiling eggs, that sort of thing. They kill them in the end. It's only a few days and it's all over. I don't really like that sort of thing. I really don't. But what can I do?"

It's a good question again now. What can we do? What can we do when an American president dispatches "suspects" to third countries where they will be stripped, wired up, electrocuted, ripped open and tortured until they wish they had never been born? What can we do with a prime minister - ours - who believes that information from torture victims may be of use to us and may be collected by us? How can we clean our hands when we know that men are being subject to "rendition" through our own airports? Doesn't a policeman have the right to go aboard these CIA contract jets that touch down in Britain and take a look at the victim inside and - if he believes the man may be tortured - take him off the plane?

I started thinking about this more seriously in the beautiful little town of Listowel in Co Kerry - not far, by chance, from Shannon airport - where I went to give a talk at the recent writers' festival. I was handed a flyer by a bearded man in the audience. "Who was on board the CIA-chartered plane Reg No N313P that landed in Shannon on 15 December 2003 en route from Iraq?" it asks.

Now, a little fact-checking suggests that the Tralee anti-war group got the details right. And planes have also gone in the other direction - to Uzbekistan and Egypt and other countries where Geneva Conventions - already disregarded by the lads and lassies in charge of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib - are used as lavatory paper. In Uzbekistan, they boil "suspects" in fat. They take out their nails. In Egypt, they whip prisoners and sometimes sodomize them. In one Egyptian prison complex a local human rights group found that guards forced prisoners to rape each other. But no friendly Garda walks up to find out who's aboard at Shannon. The Irish government will not investigate these sinister flights. Outside, Irish eyes may be smiling. But they won't be allowed a peek into these revolting aircraft.

It's not difficult to trace our journey to this perdition. First, we had Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara, who in November 2003 was ranting away at a joint press conference with George Bush, that "in the face of this terrorism, there must be no holding back, no compromise, no hesitation in confronting this menace". No holding back? In tandem with this drivel, we had writers such as David Brooks at the New York Times perniciously asking readers what would happen to "the national mood" when "the news programs start broadcasting images of brutal measures our own troops will (sic) have to adopt... The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action..." Indeed.

Already there's an infamous case in Canada of a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was transiting the United States, who was arrested and put on a plane to Damascus where he was duly tortured until the Syrians decided he had nothing to tell them. Then he came back to Canada - only to find that the Canadian authorities might have tipped off the US spooks that he was a wanted man. Now I'm quite an expert on Syrian torture. A beating is about the best you can expect. But there exists in one of their "mukhabarat" basements an instrument known as the German chair, installed long ago by the now defunct German Democratic Republic. The victim is strapped down and the back then moves inwards until the prisoner's spine is snapped. A home-made version - the Syrian chair - was nastier. It broke prisoners' backs more slowly.

And as we all know - and Saddam's torture boys were also experts at this - prisoners' families can be brought to prisons to be beaten, raped and sodomized if the inmate still refuses to talk. With all this are we now complicit. As long as we send men off to this physical hell, we have the electrodes in our hands; we are the torturers. As long as our government accepts information drained out of these emasculated creatures, it is we who are pulling out the fingernails; it is we who are holding the whips.

Mind you, our American friends are already, it seems, dab hands at smearing prisoners with excrement and beating them and - given the evidence I've heard from a prisoner who was at Bagram in Afghanistan - sticking brooms up men's anuses, and, of course, just killing them. Thirty prisoners have now died in US custody. I don't believe in the few bad apples line. It's happened on far too great a scale. And how do we excuse all this filth? How do we excuse ourselves for this immorality? Why, we say Saddam was worse than us.

Saddam had women raped; he shot them down into mass graves. He was much worse. But if Saddam's wickedness has to be the tuning fork against which all our own iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? If Saddam's regime is to be the moral compass to define our actions, how bad - how iniquitous - does that allow us to be?

Saddam tortured and executed women in Abu Ghraib. We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects at Bagram and subjected them to inhuman treatment in Guantanamo and sent others off to be boiled and fried and killed off by our "friends" without the embarrassment of being present. Saddam was much worse. And thus it became inevitable that the symbol of Saddam's shame - Abu Ghraib - subsequently became the symbol of our shame too.

© 2005 Independent Newspapers, Ltd.
 
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9A38BF76-A9C0-47F6-8491-D988BC278487.htm

two and a half years on water shortages,electricity and food still a fixture of daily life in the capital. I wonder how long post war berlin for example was feeling the pinch of war for after hostilities ended? am I comparing apples and pears here or wha? you get the picture. the place is bollixed and seems like it will be for a long time to come..a second front seems to be opening up in afghanistan now too. THis must really be smarting the US administration ..like an old wound that you thought had healed reopening. Imagine how many people were swayed in their voting habits at the election in the states with the thought "well..we did get the taliban out of afghanistan" only to see it rising again.It is a pity that the election wasn't a couple of months later..I would reckon that dubya and pals wouldn't have had a hope. Shame.
 
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/902BA6B8-D34F-440A-BF7A-D17117D42044.htm

article about the resistance fighters naming one spokesman for the two major groups. A step towards even greater actions perhaps? wonder where they are taking their cues from ..Hammas? muslim brotherhood in Egypt? I.R.A.? ETA? If history tell us anything it will be that even if and when there is "peace" in Iraq, the seeds have been sown for these guys(and remember they weren't around up to a year ago) to be a terrorist organisation for years and years to come. Nice one Mr Bush!
 
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/08611249-6240-41B1-825F-2742C248494A.htm

us has launched a new offensive in Iraq. remember bush saying major combat operations are over right?



"The US army says it has launched a fourth major offensive in Iraq in less than a month, this time near Falluja.



The army said on Saturday that about 600 US Marines and Iraqi soldiers were participating in a major counter operation near Falluja.

Operation Scimitar started on Thursday with targeted raids in the village of Zaidan, 30km southeast of Falluja."

assholes.
 
West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work
From James Hider in Baghdad July 07, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1683578,00.html


IRAQI security forces, set up by American and British troops, torture detainees by pulling out their fingernails, burning them with hot irons or giving them electric shocks, Iraqi officials say. Cases have also been recorded of bound prisoners being beaten to death by police.
In their haste to put police on the streets to counter the brutal insurgency, Iraqi and US authorities have enlisted men trained under Saddam Hussein’s regime and versed in torture and abuse, the officials told The Times. They said that recruits were also being drawn from the ranks of outlawed Shia militias.



Counter-insurgencies are rarely clean fights, but Iraq’s dirty war is being waged under the noses of US and British troops whose mission is to end the abuses of the former dictatorship. Instead, they appear to have turned a blind eye to the constant reports of torture from Iraq’s prisons.

Among the worst offenders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.

“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”

“This”, said Saad Sultan, the Human Rights Ministry official in charge of monitoring Iraq’s prisons, includes random arrests, sometimes without a warrant, hanging people from ceilings and beating them, attaching electrodes to ears, hands, feet and genitals, and holding hot irons to flesh.

Four of his 22 monitors have already quit their jobs, leaving a handful of lawyers to inspect scores of prisons.

“Two months ago I could go into a prison and more than 50 per cent of the people had been ill-treated,” Mr Sultan said. Six months ago the situation had been even worse.

Reports of torture and abuse are commonplace. Omar, a 22-year-old student, said that he was picked up in a night raid on his home in Baghdad by police commandos, who dragged him away from his family to a detention facility. No one told him where he was or what he was accused of, he said. As he was marched into prison, policemen lined up to beat him and his fellow detainees. The prisoners’ handcuffs were tightened until the men screamed.

The next day, he and his neighbour were blindfolded and transported to another facility, where his neighbour collapsed unconscious during a beating. He was then led into an interrogation room, where a policeman attached electrodes to his thumbs and toes. “I immediately asked what they wanted and he said something like, ‘You have been targeting police and national guardsmen’. Without waiting for my response, he switched on the electricity, then kept on turning it off and on until I could hardly breathe.

“I screamed under torture,” Omar said. “It’s not a place to prove your courage. These guys are trying to kill you for nothing.” He was released without charge after 12 days.

The abuse has not gone unnoticed by the coalition, but little has been done to address it. A US State Department report in February stated that Iraqi authorities had been accused of “arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions — particularly in pre-trial detention facilities — and arbitrary arrest and detention.” A Human Rights Watch report also noted that “unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace”.

Evidence of extra-judicial killings by the security forces has also come to light. Mr Sultan is investigating the case of three members of the Badr Corps, the paramilitary wing of one of the main Shia parties in government, who were arrested by police, handcuffed and beaten to death.

An Iraqi official said that the Iraqi National Guard, the US-trained paramilitary police, regularly disposed of the corpses of its victims by throwing them in the river. “The problem is that some people have still got that training from the past,” he said. “You have ten or twelve of them in the same unit working, and if they seize terrorists they will torture or kill them.”

He added that while the de facto death squads were not part of government policy, little was being done to counteract them. “These are exceptional times. It’s an emergency.”

General Adnan Thabet, the commandos’ commander and a special adviser to the Interior Minister, was a senior officer under Saddam. He was sentenced to death for plotting against the former dictator and was tortured after his sentence was commuted.

He denied any allegation of torture, but admitted: “This is a dirty war. We are the only ones with the nerves to fight it.”
 
from guardian newsblog...

http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P2212
Antiwar Soldier Arrested in Iraq
Leonard Clark, who is currently serving as a member of the 860th MP Company of the Arizona National Guard patrolling the streets of Baghdad, has been arrested. Clark is a vocal opponent of the Iraq war, and this is clearly retaliation for expressing his views. Here's the text of an e-mail from one of his fellow soldiers:

"I’ve just learned today that Leonard Clark was arrested for campaigning for the Senate! Well, it looks as if they could not muzzle him according to military law (the attorney said he had a right to speak his opinion), so they found another excuse! Apparently they can arrest him for campaigning for office. There’s just one thing wrong with that—Leonard Clark had not actually campaigned in the sense that we recognize campaigning (raising funds, soliciting campaign workers, etc.) All he has said is that he opposes the reasons for being in Iraq because he is there to see the truth and that he hopes he makes it back so he can run against Kyl. This is NOT in my view an actual campaign at this point. His papers have not even yet been filed! So how can he be accused of campaigning and arrested under this outrageous pretext? This is so shameful we should all be furious enough to write to as many government officials as we feel can help and copy as much media as possible!"

The next time some neocon fool writes me and says: "Our troops in Iraq are fighting so that morons like you can express your traitorous views" I'm going to refer them to Guardsman Clark.

This is a perfect story for the supposedly "liberal" media -- so where the heck are they?

Support our troops -- free Leonard Clark!

UPDATE: One of the great things about this blog is that I get responses from my readers pretty quickly, sometimes minutes after posting. Here's one:

"I first learned about Leonard Clark's arrest listening to Thom Hartmann's radio program today and then googled and located your posting.

I called my Congresswoman (Zoe Lofgren) and 2 Senators (Boxer and Feinstein) and asked that they look into this outrage. The people that I spoke with were not aware of Clark nor his arrest. Lofgren's office sounded intent on following up and I believe Boxer's office will as well. As usual, I hold out no hope that Feinstein will do the right thing. Also, I called the San Jose Mercury News and left a voice mail message for the national news desk with a plea that the paper investigate and cover the story."

Ok, folks, let's follow this reader's good example and get on those phones! What's up with arrest Leonard Clark?


Posted by: Justin Raimondo on Jul 11, 05 | 12:34 pm | Comments? | link
 
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FD16D408-BC11-4D6B-924F-CD69FBBD81AF.htm

Blasts in the "green zone"

I was listening to the radio last night and the head journalist from the BBc that is living in Iraq since 2002 wss being interviewed. He was aked is there any normality to life there at all and he replied none,none at all. Everytime they move outside the compound they have to have a backup vehicle in case theirs breaks down. Even getting supplies is a logistical nightmare.The local people cannot go out without fear of bombings yet they have to try and earn a living, most daughters have not seen the light of day for a year for fear of kidnappings,so in effect women have even less freedom than under sadam.Local unemployment is up to 60%,local murders occur and old vendettas are settled by violence and murder and effective wild west style justice is meeted out to anyone caught breaking the law.On top of all this they have seen the rise of Islamic preachers and vigilantes roaming the streets before cufew(yes curfew is still ineffect in some parts of the county) they are ensuring that no one is drinking or having illegal sex. How is any of this "making progress" Mr Bush?
 
silenced.

No 10 blocks envoy's book on Iraq

Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont
Sunday July 17, 2005
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1530311,00.html

A controversial fly-on-the wall account of the Iraq war by one of Britain's most senior former diplomats has been blocked by Downing Street and the Foreign Office.
Publication of The Costs of War by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the build-up to the 2003 war and the Prime Minister's special envoy to Iraq in its aftermath, has been halted. In an extract seen by The Observer, Greenstock describes the American decision to go to war as 'politically illegitimate' and says that UN negotiations 'never rose over the level of awkward diversion for the US administration'. Although he admits that 'honourable decisions' were made to remove the threat of Saddam, the opportunities of the post-conflict period were 'dissipated in poor policy analysis and narrow-minded execution'.

Regarded as a career diplomat of impeccable integrity, during his time in post-invasion Iraq, Greenstock became disillusioned with the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Paul Bremer. Their relationship had deteriorated by the time Greenstock returned to Britain.

The decision to block the book until Greenstock removes substantial passages will be interpreted as an attempt by ministers to avoid further embarrassing disclosures over the conduct of the war and its aftermath from a highly credible source.

Officials who have seen the book are understood to have been 'deeply shocked' over the way in which Greenstock has quoted widely from 'privileged' private conversations with Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and from the private deliberations of the UN Security Council.

Greenstock has been asked to remove all these sections before the book can be cleared for publication. 'I think some people are really quite surprised that someone like Sir Jeremy has done this,' said one source. 'In particular the way he has quoted private conversations with the Prime Minister.' Greenstock is also thought to be scathing about Bremer and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Greenstock's British publishers, Random House, were remaining tight-lipped but it is thought that the book is almost certain not to be published in the autumn as planned. It was also to be serialised in a British newspaper.

Greenstock, now director of the foreign policy think tank, the Ditchley Foundation, was set to give a series of public appearances, including one at next month's Edinburgh Book Festival. The Foreign Office last night issued a statement: 'Civil Service regulations which apply to all members of the diplomatic service require that any retired official must obtain clearance in respect of any publication relating to their service. Sir Jeremy Greenstock's proposed book is being dealt with under this procedure.'
 
New posts

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Activity
So far there's no one here
Old Thread: Hello . There have been no replies in this thread for 365 days.
Content in this thread may no longer be relevant.
Perhaps it would be better to start a new thread instead.

21 Day Calendar

Vinnie
Fixity/Meabh McKenna/Black Coral
Bello Bar
Portobello Harbour, Saint Kevin's, Dublin, Ireland

Similar threads

rettucs
Getting rid of vinyls
2
Replies
27
Views
1K
rettucs
rettucs
shidheat
ew... gross
Replies
17
Views
821
David Kronenbourg
David Kronenbourg
Unicron
The Azerbaijani *something* of Nagorno Karabakh
Replies
18
Views
1K
Scientician 0.8
Scientician 0.8
chris d
PS Vita
Replies
3
Views
347
chris d
chris d
dudley
  • Question
Apple Music vs Spotify question
2
Replies
31
Views
2K
pete
pete

Support thumped.com

Support thumped.com and upgrade your account

Upgrade your account now to disable all ads...

Upgrade now

Latest threads

Latest Activity

Loading…
Back
Top