I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
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- Jeffrey
- Oct 29 2005, 04:43 AM
JBryan - Please articulate the successes that you think we have had in Iraq. What strategic US goals have been achieved? Defeating an irrelavant and demoralized Iraqi Army? Lowering world oil prices? Reducing the number of trained Al Qaida terrorists in the world? Reducing the geopolitical influence of Iran? Knocking over some third world thug is nice and all, but there are many thugs in the world, and this is not by itself a vital US interest.
Everyone knows by now that Bush went in with a "war lite" and no game plan for afterwards, because he was deluded into thinking he would be welcomed there. I did not say the war was immoral, I said Bush was naive and incompetent and has harmed rather than helped US strategic interests around the world. By the way, only about 30% of your fellow citizens think anything different. You can keep retailing stories about how aliens spaceships took the real WMD to Mars, the fact is Bush went in without full examination of the facts and no game plan for what goals he could actually achieve.
He in fact has been welcomed by the vast majority of Iraqis who had been absolutely BRUTALIZED by Saddam. In a country of 25M, virtually every single person has a "story" of family members killed, missing, imprisoned, tortured, raped, disfigured and mutililated. From one web site:
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The regime's human rights record remained extremely poor and it continued to commit numerous, serious human rights abuses. Citizens did not have the right to change the Government. The regime continued to summarily execute alleged political opponents and leaders of the Shi'a religious community. Persons were executed arbitrarily because of their association with an opposition group or as part of a continuing effort to reduce prison populations. Until its fall, the regime continued to be responsible for disappearances and to kill and torture persons suspected of or related to persons suspected of oppositionist politics, economic crimes, military desertion, and a variety of other activities. Mass graves related to five major atrocities were identified by year's end. More remained to be investigated. The number of those buried in the graves already discovered was difficult to estimate, but many observers believed that the total will reach 300,000.
Security forces routinely tortured, beat, raped, and otherwise abused detainees. Prison conditions were extremely poor and frequently life-threatening. The regime at times conducted "prison cleansing" campaigns to kill inmates in order to relieve overcrowding in the prisons. The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged detention, and incommunicado detention, and continued to deny citizens the basic right to due process.
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The regime, in power until the fall of Baghdad on April 9, continued to commit numerous political and other extrajudicial killings, especially by executing perceived or alleged political opponents. The U.N. Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on the situation of Human Rights in Iraq had repeatedly criticized the regime for the "sheer number of executions" taking place in the country, the number of "extra judicial executions on political grounds," and "the absence of a due process of the law." Arbitrary or summary executions were widespread.
The discovery of mass graves, considered to be unmarked sites containing at least six bodies, provided evidence of the vast dimension of the practice. Immediately following the fall of the regime and throughout the remainder of the year, mass graves were reported from sources throughout the country. By the end of the year, 275 mass graves had been reported to the CPA and 55 of these mass graves had been confirmed.
Sites have been discovered in all regions and contained members of every major religious and ethnic group in the country, as well as foreign citizens, including Iranian POWs, Kuwaitis and Saudis. Graves contained forensic evidence of atrocities, including signs of torture, decapitated or mutilated corpses, or evidence that victims had been shot in the head at close range. According to results published by the CPA, most of the graves discovered by year's end corresponded to one of five major atrocities perpetrated by the regime:
In the 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens, the regime rounded up 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe in the North and executed them in deserts at great distances from their homes.
In the 1988 Anfal campaign, as many as 182,000 persons disappeared. Most of the men were separated from their families and were executed in deserts in the west and southwest of the country. The remains of some of their wives and children have also been found in mass graves. Chemical attacks against Kurdish villages from 1986 to 1988, including the Halabja attack, when the Air Force dropped sarin, VX and tabun chemical agents on the civilian population, killing 5,000 people immediately and causing long-term medical problems, related deaths, and birth defects among the children of thousands more.
The 1991 massacre after the Shi'a uprising at the end of the gulf war killed tens of thousands of Shi'a in such regions as Basra and Al-Hillah.
The 1991 massacre of Kurds targeted civilians and soldiers who fought for autonomy in the North after the gulf war.
At or near prisons or military establishments, opponents and critics of the regime from all religious and ethnic groups were also executed and buried in mass graves
These crimes have acquired a measure of notoriety and salience. However, thousands of other citizens, including Marsh Arabs, Shi'a citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, and students involved in uprisings in Najaf in 1999 may also be in as-yet undiscovered mass graves.
There have also been mass extrajudicial executions of prisoners. In a prison cleansing campaign between 1997 and 1999 approximately 2,500 prisoners were executed. In October 2001, 23 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison.
The list of offenses with mandatory death penalties grew substantially in the last years of the regime and included minor offenses such as smuggling cars and spare parts. More significantly, the Special Rapporteur has noted that mere membership in certain political parties was punishable by death, and that fear of death for any act or expression of dissent was pervasive. There were recurrent reports of the use of the death penalty for such offenses as "insulting" the President or the Ba'ath Party. The Special Rapporteur also noted that even the "suggestion that someone was not a supporter of the President carried the prospect of the death penalty." In response to the Special Rapporteur's request for information concerning those executed in 2000 and 2001, the regime responded that the number was 249 -- for the crimes of homicide, drug-related offenses and immoral offenses. The Special Rapporteur commented that compliance with his request was "limited."
Apart from the mass graves, the regime practiced a policy of selective elimination of prominent Shi'a clerics and their followers suspected of disloyalty to the Government. Regime agents publicly targeted family members of defectors and dissidents for torture and killing (see Section 1.f.). Regime security forces killed numerous political prisoners, minority group members, criminal suspects, and others during attempted apprehension or while in custody.
Land mines continued to kill civilians. Approximately 7 million landmines left over from the Iran/Iraq war remained in place in the North. PUK representatives reported that the population living in the region under its control suffered approximately 250 casualties per month from exploded mines. Many of these victims died. In February 2002, the Minister of Justice specifically informed the Special Rapporteur that prostitution was not punishable by death under the law and claimed that no one had been sentenced to death for prostitution in the country in many years. However, in the past, security forces used allegations of prostitution to intimidate opponents of the regime. Security forces allegedly beheaded at least 130 women between June 2000 and April 2001, and an additional number of men suspected of facilitating such activities in October 2000. Security agents reportedly decapitated numerous women and men in front of their family members. According to Amnesty International (AI), the victim's heads were displayed in front of their homes for several days (see Section 5).
b. Disappearance
There is a substantial overlap between the victims of arbitrary and unlawful killings reported in the previous Section and the "disappeared" in this Section. Those who disappeared frequently belonged to groups whose corpses were unearthed in mass graves.
Until the regime's fall, there continued to be widespread reports of disappearances. The regime did nothing to address accusations of previously reported disappearances. A large number of citizens remain unaccounted for.
Local human rights associations, international human rights, representatives of the CPA, U.N. officials, the U.N. Special Rapporteur, representatives of the Governing Council, the Interim Authority's Human Rights Ministry, and the regional human rights ministries in Irbil and Suliemaniyah have all provided estimates on the number of missing persons in the country. By the end of the year, it was widely believed among all of these organizations that the regime had executed as many as 300,000 civilians, and probably more. Several of these organizations held the view that as many as 1.3 million persons were missing as a result of wars, executions, and defection.
The majority of the disappearance cases known to the Special Rapporteur were persons of Kurdish origin who disappeared during the 1988 Anfal Campaign. The Special Rapporteur estimated that the total number of Kurds who disappeared during that period could reach several tens of thousands. Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimated the total at between 70,000 and 150,000, and AI at more than 100,000. During the year, the two regional Human Rights Ministers claimed that 182,000 Kurds were executed during the Anfal Campaign. The second largest group of disappearance cases known to the Special Rapporteur consisted of Shi'a who were reported to have disappeared in the late 1970's and early 1980's as their families were expelled to Iran due to their alleged Persian ancestry. Subsequently, there were large-scale killings of Shi'a in the South at the end of the gulf war.
Hundreds were still missing in the aftermath of the brief Iraqi military occupation of Erbil in 1996. Many of these persons may have been killed surreptitiously late in 1997 and throughout 1998, in the prison-cleansing campaign (see Section 1.a.). The missing were primarily from the Kurd minority but included members of the Assyrian, Turkmen, and Yazidi communities.
Despite several well-publicized exchanges with Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, the regime ignored requests from those governments to account for those who had disappeared during Iraq's 1990-91 occupation of Kuwait, and regarding prisoners of war captured in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. The regime failed to return, and did little to account for, a large number of Kuwaiti citizens and citizens of other countries who were detained during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Of 609 cases of missing Kuwaiti citizens under review by the Tripartite Commission on Gulf War Missing, only 3 were resolved. In the past, the regime denied having any knowledge of the others and claimed that any relevant records were lost in the aftermath of the gulf war although it subsequently claimed to have provided such records to Kuwait in October 2002.
After the fall of the former regime, officials from the CPA, working with Iraqis, the Human Rights Ministry, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) through the Tripartite Commission process, have closed 45 cases of Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian missing persons whose corpses were found in mass graves and confirmed through DNA testing.
Numerous credible reports have alleged the existence of special prison wards that hold individuals whose whereabouts, status, and fate were not disclosed (see Section 1.c.).
Few victims became targets of the regime because of any crime they had committed; rather, they were arrested and held as hostages in order to force a relative, who may have escaped abroad, to surrender. Others were arrested because of their family's link to a political opponent or because of their ethnic origin (see Sections 1.d. and 1.f.).
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
The 1968 Constitution expressly prohibited torture; however, the security services routinely and systematically tortured detainees. According to former prisoners, torture techniques included branding, electric shock administered to the genitals and other areas, beating, removal of fingernails, amputation without anesthesia, burning with hot irons and blowtorches, suspension from rotating ceiling fans, dripping of acid on the skin, rape, breaking of limbs, denial of food and water, extended solitary confinement in dark and extremely small compartments, and threats to rape or otherwise harm family members and relatives. Evidence of such torture was often apparent when security forces returned the mutilated bodies of torture victims to their families. There were persistent reports that families were made to pay for the cost of executions of loved ones. Refugees often reported to host governments in a variety of countries instances of torture, and displayed scars and mutilations to substantiate their claims. Since the fall of the former regime, Iraqis have repeatedly and consistently reported to the CPA, human rights organizations, and the international media that they suffered from these types of torture.
Arrested persons routinely were subjected to mistreatment, including prolonged interrogations accompanied by torture, beatings, and various deprivations. Cruel and unusual punishments prescribed by the law, including amputations and branding. In 2000, the authorities introduced tongue amputation as a punishment for persons who criticized Saddam Hussein or his family. Soldiers had their ears cut off as punishment for desertion. An "X" was branded on their foreheads so that citizens would not think that they were wounded war veterans. In February 2002, the Minister of the Interior admitted the existence of this practice, but claimed "it had now definitively ceased." Since the fall of the regime, Iraqis with amputated hands, tongues, and ears have presented themselves to CPA authorities confirming these reports of torture and seeking assistance.
There were numerous allegations of politically motivated torture and reports of torture against family members, including the children, of suspected critics of the regime. For instance, a health coordinator for the refugee health program in Yemen claimed in January 2002 that an Iraqi child under her care in Yemen bearing the marks of needle scars on its wrists and forearms had been injected with an agent that caused severe mental retardation in retaliation for the father's suspected opposition to the regime.
Beyond the use of torture, the regime systematically employed cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of people for political purposes. Human rights organizations and opposition groups continued to receive reports of women who suffered from severe psychological trauma after being raped while in custody. Security forces also reportedly sexually assaulted and threatened sexual assault against officials, opposition members and their families, in order to blackmail them into compliance (see Section 1.f.). This continued an alleged pattern of the regime's systematic use of rape for political purposes. One former female prisoner reported to the CPA that she suffered repeated rape, including with metal objects, and burning of her breasts while in the custody of the former regime. She showed significant scarring. Former Mukhabarat (Intelligence Service) member Khalid Al-Janabi reported in 2001 that its Technical Operations Directorate used rape and sexual assault in a systematic and institutionalized manner for political purposes. The unit reportedly also videotaped the rape of female relatives of suspected oppositionists and used the videotapes for blackmail purposes and to ensure their future cooperation (see Section 1.f.). The security forces allegedly also raped women who were captured during the Anfal Campaign in the 1980s and during the 1990 occupation of Kuwait. The regime never acknowledged these reports, conducted any investigation, nor took action against those who committed the rapes.
Prison conditions were extremely poor and life-threatening. There reportedly were numerous official, semi-official, and private prisons throughout the country. Overcrowding was a serious problem. In February 2002, the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs admitted to the Special Rapporteur that its prison system was overcrowded. The regime granted a much-publicized amnesty in October 2002 to all prisoners except those accused of spying for the United States or Israel. This public relations event served mainly to corroborate previous reporting of summary executions, disappearances, torture, and inhuman living conditions within the regime's prison system. Many prisoners remained unaccounted for after the amnesty which released many hardened criminals into the population.
Certain prisons were infamous for routine mistreatment of detainees and prisoners. Abu Ghurayb, Baladiat, Makasib, Rashidiya, Radwaniyah, and other prisons reportedly have torture chambers. Hundreds of Fayli (Shi'a) Kurds and other citizens of Iranian origin, who had disappeared in the early 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war, reportedly were being held incommunicado at the Abu Ghurayb prison. There were numerous mentally ill prisoners at Al-Shamma'iya prison in Baghdad, which reportedly was the site of torture and a number of disappearances. The Al-Radwaniyah detention center was a former prisoner of war (POW) facility near Baghdad and reportedly the site of torture as well as mass executions (see Section 1.a.). Since the fall of the former regime, the CPA has received numerous and consistent complaints of torture during interrogations in secret detention centers immediately following arrest and prior to transfer to prisons. Many of these individuals also claimed that they were tortured in the prisons after their transfer. Al-Radwaniyah has been consistently reported as a site of mass executions, and hundreds of Iraqis have reported that they believed there is a mass grave somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the prison.
The regime did not permit international monitoring of prisons; however, in 2002 the Special Rapporteur visited prisons and noted that the Abu Ghurayb prison's conditions "were appalling."
Kurdish regional officials reported in 2000 that prisons in the three northern provinces were open to the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and other international monitors. According to the ICRC, regular and consistent improvement in conditions was observed on their weekly prison visits to declared prisons. However, both the PUK and the KDP reportedly maintained private, undeclared prisons, and both groups reportedly deny access to ICRC officials. There were reports that authorities of both the PUK and KDP tortured detainees and prisoners.
But they key point to why we were in Iraq (rather than say N Korea or Burma where there are also oppressive regimes) is simply that the continual violation of the terms of the 1991 cease fire (including violating the no fly zone, firing upon allied aircraft, continued human rights violations, manufacture of biological and chemical weapons, and engaged in hostile activities such as missile launches against her neighbors) demanded the response. We had legal, ethical, humanitarian and moral grounds to enforce the treaty.
To give one small but significant bit of evidence for the true success of the US led campaign in Iraq, there are now 150 daily newspapers published in Iraq. This is something that I should think we can all take pride in.
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