By OMAR BARGHOUTI

…Whatever you ask, please do not ask why we “hate” you. Putting aside the simplistic and dichotomic nature of such a question — “you’re either with us or against us,” your great leader says — let me give you my straight answer: I don’t.

But, I hate what your government is doing in your name, with your tax money, and with solid support from most of you. I despise the fact that your country is sponsoring Israeli colonial oppression against my people, shielding Israel from the world’s wrath and from the overdue prospect of sanctions for violating every applicable precept of international law in maintaining its military occupation and illegal colonies in the West Bank and Gaza, its racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens and its obdurate rejection of the internationally protected right of our refugees to return to the lands from which Israel had expelled them, and on the ruins of which it had established itself.

I hate the way your mainstream media refers to our innocent victims, whether in Iraq or Palestine, as faceless numbers, as relative humans, as dispensable objects in your empire’s crusade for world domination.

I hate the repugnant hubris of your “elected” lawmakers, who owe their seats and privileges to a few very powerful lobbies controlling your lives and minds, and forming the pillar of American flouting of international law in every field imaginable. It is ironic that lawmakers anywhere can become such an infested breeding ground for lawlessness in international affairs.

I hate the fact that your military, oil and other sinister industries have flourished at the expense of killing, injuring or ruining the livelihood of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America. And I strongly resent the fact that in order to keep prices low at your gas pumps, Arabs have had to suffer under despotic rulers, hand-picked and buttressed by your consecutive governments for decades.

I hate the silence, the apathy — and therefore the implicit approval — that your majority espouses when faced with incriminating evidence of your government’s wrongdoing in our countries. After Falluja, you were silent. After Rafah, you were apathetic. After Guantanamo’s horrors were revealed, you turned your eyes and ears the other way.

Why do most of you hate us, we, people of the south, should ask? Why can’t you accept us as beings who are equally human, who possess a similar sense of pride, who have similar dreams and aspirations, and who value peace and dignified living more than anything else? Why can’t you see that all we need is justice and a chance to develop on our own, without your government’s oppressive exploitation, patronizing intervention, or masterly dictates?
full article

The religious warrior of Abu Ghraib
An evangelical US general played a pivotal role in Iraqi prison reform

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday May 20, 2004
The Guardian

Saving General Boykin seemed like a strange sideshow last October. After it was revealed that the deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence had been regularly appearing at evangelical revivals preaching that the US was in a holy war as a “Christian nation” battling “Satan”, the furore was quickly calmed.

Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, explained that Boykin was exercising his rights as a citizen: “We’re a free people.” President Bush declared that Boykin “doesn’t reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration”. Bush’s commission on public diplomacy had reported that in nine Muslim countries, just 12% believed that “Americans respect Arab/Islamic values”. The Pentagon announced that its inspector general would investigate Boykin, though he has yet to report.

Boykin was not removed or transferred. At that moment, he was at the heart of a secret operation to “Gitmoize” (Guantánamo is known in the US as Gitmo) the Abu Ghraib prison. He had flown to Guantánamo, where he met Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of Camp X-Ray. Boykin ordered Miller to fly to Iraq and extend X-Ray methods to the prison system there, on Rumsfeld’s orders.
full article

Abu Ghraib Detainees’ Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation And Savage Beatings
By Scott Higham and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers

Previously secret sworn statements by detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq describe in raw detail abuse that goes well beyond what has been made public, adding allegations of prisoners being ridden like animals, sexually fondled by female soldiers and forced to retrieve their food from toilets.

The fresh allegations of prison abuse are contained in statements taken from 13 detainees shortly after a soldier reported the incidents to military investigators in mid-January. The detainees said they were savagely beaten and repeatedly humiliated sexually by American soldiers working on the night shift at Tier 1A in Abu Ghraib during the holy month of Ramadan, according to copies of the statements obtained by The Washington Post.

The statements provide the most detailed picture yet of what took place on the cellblock. Some of the detainees described being abused as punishment or discipline after they were caught fighting or with a prohibited item. Some said they were pressed to denounce Islam or were force-fed pork and liquor. Many provided graphic details of how they were sexually humiliated and assaulted, threatened with rape, and forced to masturbate in front of female soldiers.

“They forced us to walk like dogs on our hands and knees,” said Hiadar Sabar Abed Miktub al-Aboodi, detainee No. 13077. “And we had to bark like a dog, and if we didn’t do that they started hitting us hard on our face and chest with no mercy. After that, they took us to our cells, took the mattresses out and dropped water on the floor and they made us sleep on our stomachs on the floor with the bags on our head and they took pictures of everything.”
full article

Abuse of Reuters Staffers in Iraq

photos

by Stan Goff and Anthony Fenton
May 19, 2004

In late March, the International Action Centre [http://www.iacenter.org] organized a delegation to the Dominican Republic to investigate the US role on the February 29th, 2004 coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas government. The Haitian “rebels” are known to have trained and in and entered Haiti from the neighbouring Dominican Republic. 
Retired US Army Master Sergeant and author of Hideous Dream and Full Spectrum Disorder, Stan Goff, was one of the investigators.

Fenton: So these “rebels” were definitely trained and probably armed by the United States and the Dominican Republic, dating back to 2000. What are these “rebels” doing now and where does this information fit in to the context of the recent coup?

Goff:From all the reports we’re hearing right now, these FRAPH paramilitaries are now basically running around doing anything they want, anywhere they want, in Haiti. The same people who were guilty of all these crimes against humanity from 1991-1994; these right-wing paramilitary death squads are now traveling around, armed, and not being interfered with in the least by French, Canadian, or American troops, and basically taking over town after town after town, and basically imposing themselves as local governments. In fact there’s a contingent of French foreign legions in Cap Haitien right now. The last we heard Chamblain was with all his guys was drinking beer in the Mt. Jolie hotel, with their uniforms on. That’s kind of the situation.

This is a situation that nobody really understands right now. It was a coup that had been planned and facilitated for the last four and a half years by the United States government, clearly, and explicity, and demonstrably done by the US government, if you look at the millions of dollars that’s been funneled by the NED and IRI to this fake political opposition that created the “political crisis”. It was the United States that also compounded that with an economic crisis by withholding almost a half a billion dollars in loans and entitlements to the Haitian government in order to make sure that Aristide’s government could not deliver on any of its political promises.

And then [they] followed up by a security crisis that was created by this invasion of Haitian paramilitaries coming directly from the Dominican Republic, and with the knowledge and probably the complicity of the US Embassy there as well. Because it’s important to understand that the Dominican government does not do anything militarily that the United States does not allow it to do.   The Dominican government is a colonial government, and nothing else, because they would suffer incredible and punitive economic sanctions of they bucked the Washington Consensus. This is a context that a lot of people don’t understand when looking at what’s going on over there. None of this could have happened without the complicity of the United States, without the facilitation by the United States, without the funding  and support of the United States, and the icing on the cake is the fact that at the last minute, American military personnel, with weapons, enter the Presidential residence and tell the President – the democraticaslly elected President of Haiti, elected with 92% of the vote, that he has to leave. Not that ‘we’re here top proptect you because there’s paramilitaries marching here coming to get you right now’, but that ‘the paramilitaries are on their way: they’re going to kill you and your family. Your option is to stay here and die, or to leave with us on an airplane, to god knows where’. For Colin Powell and some of the other Administration Servants to sit there and say that this constitutes a voluntary departure or not coercion….it defies belief. That’s sort of the nutshell version.
full article

This Time in Haiti

U.S. tax dollars. U.S. support. Abu Ghraib is ‘not who we are.’ Is this?

May 19, 2004
Palestinians Say Blast at Protest Kills at Least 10
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israeli forces fired a missile and a tank shell Wednesday near a large crowd of Palestinians demonstrating against the invasion of a neighboring refugee camp, Israeli security officials said. At least 10 Palestinians were killed, all of them younger than 18, and 36 were in critical condition, Palestinian hospital officials said.

Palestinian witnesses saw a missile land in the middle of the crowd, and TV footage showed a smoke and debris flying as large explosion rocked the packed area.

Dr. Moawiya Hassanain, a senior Palestinian Health Ministry official, said at least 10 people were killed and 50 wounded. Of the wounded, 23 were critically hurt and 13 were in “hopeless” condition.” He said most of the wounded were children.

Between 3,000 and 4,000 demonstrators were marching down the busy main street of Rafah town. When the crowd was about a half-mile from the besieged refugee camp, the helicopter and tank began firing, witnesses said.

Israeli military sources said a helicopter and a tank fired one round each close to the crowd after soldiers felt under threat. Palestinian witnesses said four missiles and four tank shells were fired, and that they also heard machine gun fire from tanks.

“We are still checking the event, this is a combat zone filled with explosives devices and it is premature to know exactly what happened this afternoon in Rafah,” said an army spokeswoman Maj. Sharon Feingold.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told The Associated Press the attack was “a terrorist massacre and a terrorist war crime.” He said the Palestinians were considering bringing their grievances before an international criminal court.

Associated Press Television News footage showed a large explosion going off in a crowd of demonstrators, followed by Palestinians carrying the injured — among them several children — from the scene. full article

Rafah Today website

A Policy of Silence Amid Slaughter

This article outlines a ‘black ops’ plan approved by Rumsfeld to use sexual humiliation to ‘break’ Arab prisoners. The military has its spin-doctors too of course, and the picture painted of the U.S. military here is quite ridiculous. But still…

by Seymour Hersch

Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it One of the questions that will be explored at any trial however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was “The Arab Mind,” a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, “or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.” The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—“one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything—including spying on their associates—to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.” The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.

“This shit has been brewing for months,” the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. “You don’t keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick.” The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. “We don’t raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that’s one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don’t know the rules, that’s another.”

In 2003, Rumsfeld’s apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General’s (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights. “They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation,” Horton told me. “They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it’s going to occur.” The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. “They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process.” They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
full article

By Soren Ambrose
50 Years Is Enough Network

We have heard a lot about fundamentalism in recent years. Usually it’s
religious fundamentalism we hear about, especially when, as in the case of
Christian, Islamic, Jewish, or Hindu fundamentalism, it has become a factor in
global politics. In general, religious fundamentalism is characterized by a
strong belief in a well-defined set of beliefs set out in well-established written
texts (though there are disputes within each). It is prescriptive, in that it
asserts, often quite boldly, a comprehensive view of the world including moral
guidelines for behavior. It fosters an assertiveness on the part of its believers,
and usually includes a claim on political and territorial control. And, just as
importantly, it tends to reject compromise with alternative points of view.

The economic prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank are sometimes called – by critics — market fundamentalism. The
differences between an economic ideology and a religious and cultural belief
system are obvious enough; the power of the comparison lies in the light it
sheds on the grip a simple theory of economics has achieved on economists,
policy-makers, consumers, and entire countries. Privatization, cuts in public
services and subsidies, trade and investment deregulation, mass layoffs,
hikes in interest rates: all because, as John Mihevc of Kairos Canada put it in
a ground-breaking study comparing the two kinds of fundamentalism, “the
market tells them so.” The fact that these measures almost never deliver any
of the benefits promised, and instead exacerbate the gap between the
wealthy and impoverished, often provokes activists to refer to the old fable:
“The emperor has no clothes!” But the power of belief in a body of rules that
has been endlessly repeated and attested to by authority figures from
professors to politicians blinds many to what is plainly before the eyes.
full article

Teachers Placed on Leave for Berg Video

VILLA PARK, Calif. (AP) – At least three teachers have been placed on paid leave following complaints they showed students the videotaped beheading of American Nicholas Berg in Iraq.

Villa Park High School English teacher Stephen Arcudi allowed students to use his classroom computer to see video footage of Berg being executed, school officials said.

“Because of our concern over his judgment and the way he handled the situation, we have put him on leave while we continue to investigate,” said Orange Unified School District Assistant Superintendent Cheryl Cohen.

Two other teachers were put on leave by the Grossmont Union High School District near San Diego.

Cohen said both a parent and a student complained.

Arcudi, 46, said he discouraged a student from trying to find the Berg video on the Web. But his students said Arcudi gave out the Web address where the video could be found.

“He said: `This is the enemy we’re up against and these are the things you don’t get to see,”’ said Naim Dujak, 17. “He did not force anyone to watch it.”
article

by Arundhati Roy

…In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of imperialism and the need for a strong empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to “debate” the issue on “neutral” platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It’s a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn’t a country on God’s earth that is not caught in the cross-hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. Argentina’s the model if you want to be the poster boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you’re the black sheep. Poor countries that are geopolitically of strategic value to Empire, or have a “market” of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, God forbid, natural resources of value–oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal–must do as they’re told or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented or war will be waged.
full article
(more…)

Oh well, all right then. The CIA did a ‘technical analysis’ and determined that Al-Zarqawi (i.e. al Qaeda) is busy in Iraq. How convenient. Osama and his buds are nothing if not convenient. Made to order, I would say. Whether to justify, distract, or terrorize…when in doubt, pull them out of the hat. O and by the way, where did Berg’s U.S.-issue orange jumpsuit come from?

CIA Says Al-Zarqawi Beheaded Berg in Iraq
AP

WASHINGTON – Terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the masked man who beheaded an American civilian in Iraq (news – web sites), U.S. intelligence officials concluded Thursday, as other questions lingered about Nicholas Berg’s final days and his contacts with U.S. and Iraqi author

An American diplomatic official in Iraq had told Berg’s family in early April that he was being detained by the U.S. military, according to e-mails provided by the family.

U.S. officials have said Berg, who was found dead last weekend in Baghdad, was detained by Iraqi police March 24 and was never in the custody of American forces.

Meanwhile, through a technical analysis, intelligence officials were able to determine “with high probability” that the speaker on a video showing Berg’s beheading was al-Zarqawi, a CIA (news – web sites) official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The same person is shown decapitating Berg, the official said.

U.S. authorities consider al-Zarqawi an ally of Osama bin Laden (news – web sites) and say he is running his own terrorist operation.
full article