U.S. occupation responsible for killings, torture in Iraq

In just the first four days of April, 16 U.S. occupation troops in Iraq, mostly Marines and including two helicopter pilots, have been reported dead or missing.

U.S. officials and journalists had noted as March ended that there was an “upside” to the massacre of over 1,000 Iraqi civilians that month following the Feb. 23 bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra. During March, only 32 U.S. troops died, the lowest monthly body count since early 2004. But the April numbers indicate that the March figures may have been just a blip in a long campaign.

Iraqis, both police and army members but also civilians, are still being killed in firefights, bombings and executions, some of them targeted by U.S. troops. Mean while, Secretary of State Condo leezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw have been pressuring the Iraqi occupation government to get rid of its designated Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jafari, and form a new government.

Under this pressure, the alliance set to govern Iraq, composed of seven parties of which three are the most powerful Shiite-based parties—SCIRI, Dawa and the Mehdi Army—has pulled back in its support for al-Jafari. Four of these parties have said they would no longer back him. Al-Jafari has said he has no plans to withdraw. (Washington Post, April 3)

After Rice and Straw left, Mehdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr criticized their “meddling in Iraqi affairs” as undermining Iraqi sovereignty. While some people blame the Mehdi Army for the sectarian killing of Sunni Iraqis, others in the active Iraqi resistance still look to Muqtada’s Mehdi Army as the most likely of the Shiite forces to join the struggle to kick out the U.S. occupation.

Iraqi academics killed

According to a report from Abu Tamam published on Uruknet, on March 30 U.S. occupation soldiers shot and killed a 72-year-old professor, Qais Husameldeen Juma’a, as he left the Agriculture College of the University of Baghdad and passed their check point. The professor had returned from Australia to supervise a few Ph.D. students at the college.

If this news is confirmed, Juma’a would be only the latest of hundreds of Iraqi intellectuals assassinated since the beginning of the U.S.-led occupation. For all these killings, whether or not the occupying troops pulled the triggers, they have legal responsibility according to international rules of occupation.

To investigate this problem further and to publicize these atrocities, anti-occupation organizations in Spain, Belgium and the United States have organized a seminar for April 22 in Madrid. The meeting is called “A War Launched to Erase both the Culture and Future of the Iraqi People—International Seminar on the Assassin a tion of Iraqi Academics and Health Professionals.”

The Spanish Campaign against the Occupation and for the Sovereignty of Iraq (CEOSI), The BRussells Tribunal and the International Action Center are calling for the international seminar. These groups’ news release states that the following day, April 23, “there will be an international meeting of both European and U.S. organizations with the purpose of encouraging international solidarity with Iraq.”

“Four relevant Iraqi guests-activists, academics and medical doctors-will participate in the public session. They are currently documenting the dirty war in Iraq: Eman A. Khamas, Dr. Ali Abdulah, Dr Sami Wasfi (there was an assassination attempt on his life) and Dr Ghazwan Al-Mukhtar.” Experts and activists from the Spanish state, Belgium and the U.S., among others, will address the seminar.

The Association of Iraqi Academics estimates that more than 180 academics and an additional 311 primary and secondary teachers of both sexes have been killed in Iraq during the last four months alone. Also, workers attached to the National Iraqi Medicare System are being targeted for a mass campaign of extortion, threats and murders, and “Iraqi hospitals and clinics are being attacked and systematically raided by U.S. occupation forces.”

One, two, many proofs of torture

In mid-March the web magazine Salon raised questions as to whether the Iraqi known as Haj Ali was really the man shown in the infamous photograph of a prisoner, wearing a hood, standing on boxes in Abu Ghraib prison with electrodes attached to his limbs. In subsequent newspaper articles Haj Ali said he might not be the one in that particular picture but that he was tortured and photographed like that. Most of these articles gave the false impression that the discrepancy somehow invalidated his story.

To set the record straight, Haj Ali spoke to two reporters in Amman, Jordan on March 21, the article published on the web site of the Anti-Imperialist Camp. Haj Ali told the reporters: “The truth to this is that I was not the only one who was tortured in this barbaric fashion. Almost all prisoners in the part of the prison that I was familiar with were tortured in this way.

“That doesn’t change the fact that I was one of those who had to stand on that cardboard box, with a black hood placed over my head and electrical wires attached to my hands. As an Iraqi person who has gone through Abu Ghraib, I represent all those tormented people.

“First they denied ever having tortured people in this way. Then they claimed those were just isolated cases. Now they admit that they have tortured many, many people in that way. They do so to discredit us, but on the other hand, it also means that this form of torture was not an isolated case. It has been made public. That is a result of our campaign work.

“Since my release and the founding of our Association of Victims of American Occupation Prisons, we have had 1,300 activities to protest the occupation and especially the private torture companies whose services are employed by the U.S. military. Nobody could imagine that our small association would have been able to do all that, without any official financial assistance. By dogged perseverance, donations and help from friends and some media, we have achieved something, even in the United States. We raised our voices and the Pentagon doesn’t like that.”

Told that the New York Times reports that the man on the photograph is in fact Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, Haj Ali said, “I know that man. There are also photos of Said Saleh Shain from Mosul. They gave him the nickname “Joker,” and he was tortured in the same way. There was also someone called Saddam Rawi. They attached the electrical wires to his ears. Still today, he has neurological problems, and he has brought suit at the United Nations.”

Haj Ali described some legal action his group is taking: “The lawsuit we filed is definitely one reason for the current smear campaign. We are an independent NGO. Many have tried to buy us, without success. The suit was brought a year and a half ago in the U.S. Two hundred cases were filed as a class-action lawsuit.

“Now we have brought 50 more former prisoners, among them several women, from Iraq to Jordan. And we have published a comprehensive documentation about the abducted and tortured, the victims of American policies.

“Our campaign is directed especially against Titan Group [Titan Corp., San Diego]. They are a private company conducting interrogations in the prisons. … We are well aware that the United States is run with the mentality of a corporation. Important motives for the war against Iraq were the interests of those corporations: first of all Halliburton, which is directly owned by Dick Cheney, and all the companies associated with the Bush family.

“The United States cannot accept that their companies are targeted. It is a capitalist regime based on corporate profits, and complete disregard for the needs of human beings.”