corrente

We've become so used to the outrages of this administration that it's more difficult than it ought to be to grasp just how insane was the decision for an American occupation force to use the infamous Abu Ghraib prison for any purpose whatsoever. The prison should have been secured, its inmates screened to separate the political prisoners from the criminal ones, and the latter should have been transferred to some other facility, even if a makeshift one. Once emptied, the prison should have been turned over to some international human rights group to work hand and hand with Iraqis, like those who immediately started the organization, Occupationi Watch, to begin the work of forensic investigation, which means experts examining records and the space itself, to piece together the history of what had happened there during previous decades.

Instead, in the chaos of those first weeks of our occupation pretending not to be an occupation, all prisoners simply left, and the prison and its records were looted, and/or handed over to Mr. Chalabi.

So who is it, among Iraqis, who have ended up there? Young men? Rabble rousers? Jihadists? Not bloody likely.

Of course I don't know, for sure, and neither do you. Which is an outrage in and of itself. But from this story Riverbend told us back in March, we can get a disturbing clue as to how the Bush administration's impossibly contradictory twin goals of making Iraq a stable democracy and the front line of the war on terror were bound to lead to detention of far too many ordinary Iraqis who loathed Saddam and were glad to be rid of him. It was called "Tales From Abu Ghraib," and I referenced in a previous post. It has newly tragic relevance today.

On a visit with her mother to the home of a friend recovering from an operation, Riverbend meets "M"a young, frail woman of nineteen, who is embarrassed to explain that she has postponned her studies because she was recently detained by the Americans.

On a cold night in November, M., her mother, and four brothers had been sleeping when their door suddenly came crashing down during the early hours of the morning. The scene that followed was one of chaos and confusion… screaming, shouting, cursing, pushing and pulling followed. The family were all gathered into the living room and the four sons- one of them only 15- were dragged away with bags over their heads. The mother and daughter were questioned- who was the man in the picture hanging on the wall? He was M.'s father who had died 6 years ago of a stroke. You're lying, they were told- wasn't he a part of some secret underground resistance cell? M.'s mother was hysterical by then- he was her dead husband and why were they taking away her sons? What had they done? They were supporting the resistance, came the answer through the interpreter.

How were they supporting the resistance, their mother wanted to know? "You are contributing large sums of money to terrorists." The interpreter explained. The troops had received an anonymous tip that M.'s family were giving funds to support attacks on the troops.

It was useless trying to explain that the family didn't have any 'funds'- ever since two of her sons lost their jobs at a factory that had closed down after the war, the family had been living off of the little money they got from a 'kushuk' or little shop that sold cigarettes, biscuits and candy to people in the neighborhood. They barely made enough to cover the cost of food! Nothing mattered. The mother and daughter were also taken away, with bags over their heads.

Umm Hassen had been telling the story up until that moment, M. was only nodding her head in agreement and listening raptly, like it was someone else's story. She continued it from there… M. and her mother were taken to the airport for interrogation. M. remembers being in a room, with a bag over her head and bright lights above. She claimed she could see the shapes of figures through the little holes in the bag. She was made to sit on her knees, in the interrogation room while her mother was kicked and beaten to the ground.

M.'s hands trembled as she held the cup of tea Umm Hassen had given her. Her face was very pale as she said, "I heard my mother begging them to please let me go and not hurt me… she told them she'd do anything- say anything- if they just let me go." After a couple hours of general abuse, the mother and daughter were divided, each one thrown into a seperate room for questioning. M. was questioned about everything concerning their family life- who came to visit them, who they were related to and when and under what circumstances her father had died. Hours later, the mother and daughter were taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib prison- home to thousands of criminals and innocents alike.

In Abu Ghraib, they were seperated and M. suspected that her mother was taken to another prison outside of Baghdad. A couple of terrible months later- after witnessing several beatings and the rape of a male prisoner by one of the jailors- in mid-January, M. was suddenly set free and taken to her uncle's home where she found her youngest brother waiting for her. Her uncle, through some lawyers and contacts, had managed to extract M. and her 15-year-old brother from two different prisons. M. also learned that her mother was still in Abu Ghraib but they weren't sure about her three brothers.

M. and her uncle later learned that a certain neighbor had made the false accusation against her family. The neighbor's 20-year-old son was still bitter over a fight he had several years ago with one of M.'s brothers. All he had to do was contact a certain translator who worked for the troops and give M.'s address. It was that easy.

Abu Hassen was contacted by M. and her uncle because he was an old family friend and was willing to do the work free of charge. They have been trying to get her brothers and mother out ever since. I was enraged- why don't they contact the press? Why don't they contact the Red Cross?! What were they waiting for?! She shook her head sadly and said that they *had* contacted the Red Cross but they were just one case in thousands upon thousands- it would take forever to get to them. As for the press- was I crazy? How could she contact the press and risk the wrath of the American authorities while her mother and brothers were still imprisoned?! There were prisoners who had already gotten up to 15 years of prison for 'acting against the coallition'... she couldn't risk that. They would just have to be patient and do a lot of praying.

By the end of her tale, M. was crying silently and my mother and Umm Hassen were hastily wiping away tears. All I could do was repeat, "I'm so sorry... I'm really sorry..." and a lot of other useless words. She shook her head and waved away my words of sympathy, "It's ok- really- I'm one of the lucky ones... all they did was beat me."

You can find what Riverbend has to say about "those pictures" of what some of "us" we doing at AbuGhraib here.

There is so much rage and frustration. I know the dozens of emails I’m going to get claiming that this is an ‘isolated incident’ and that they are ‘ashamed of the people who did this’ but does it matter? What about those people in Abu Ghraib? What about their families and the lives that have been forever damaged by the experience in Abu Ghraib? I know the messages that I’m going to get- the ones that say, “But this happened under Saddam...” Like somehow, that makes what happens now OK... like whatever was suffered in the past should make any mass graves, detentions and torture only minor inconveniences now. I keep thinking of M. and how she was 'lucky' indeed. And you know what? You won't hear half of the atrocities and stories because Iraqis are proud, indignant people and sexual abuse is not a subject anyone is willing to come forward with. The atrocities in Abu Ghraib and other places will be hidden away and buried under all the other dirt the occupation brought with it...

Well, there goes one heart and mind.

It is so typical of this administration and its ideological supporters that winning hearts and minds in Iraq is conceived of as somehow separate from everything else we are doing in Iraq. As Patrick Cockburn notes here, Saddam should not have been a tough act to follow; against all odds, this Bush has managed to bungle what should have been the easiest part of the mission, earning a minimal amount of respect from ordinary Iraqis. Nor is it only "those photographs" that can be blamed. Their disclosure crystallized what Iraqi's have known for some time, and have been trying to tell us, by recounting to reporters incidents like this:

Watching the dancing, jeering crowd in Waziriya was Nada Abdullah Aboud, a middle-aged woman, dressed in black. She had a reason for hating Americans, though she claimed she did not do so. "I do feel sorry for the young soldiers, though they killed my son," she said quietly. "They came such a long distance to die here." It turned out that her son, Saad Mohammed, had been the translator for a senior Italian diplomat working for the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority. She said: "My son was driving with the Italian ambassador last September near Tikrit when an American soldier fired at the car and shot him through the heart."

Saad Mohammed was one of a large but unknown number of Iraqis shot down by US troops over the past year. There seems to have been no rational reason why he had been killed. But the high toll of Iraqi civilians shot down after ambushes or at checkpoints has given Iraqis the sense that, at bottom, American soldiers regard them as an inferior people whose lives are not worth very much.

Iraqis have large extended families. Every incident like this one reverberates within the family, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and even city to city.

Just take a look at this summary of previous stories about how ordinary Iraqis were experiencing our occupation that Occupation Watch has helpfully pulled together from its own files for us. It should have been impossible not to know why Iraqis saw us as conquerors.

One of the first of such reports was dated July, 2003, within only several months of the President's visual proclamation that our "Mission" had been "Accomplished. You can read it here.

To be fair, many similar incidents are described in numerous stories published in the mainstream press; my impression is that reporters on the ground in Iraq have done a fair to good job of keeping track of how America's mission in Iraq has been at war with itself; for me, the casual use of a word like "pacification" said it all. The mistakes of that first month of our occupation, allowing wide-spread looting across the country, allowing the structure of civil society to be dismantled, because according to the logic of the Bush administration's post-invasion policy it would be superimposing on the chaos a top-down imperial occupation a la MacArthur in post-war Japan, so why not allow it have proved to be not rectifiable

Since the President's landing on the top deck of that aircraft carrier, every succeeding day has produced yet more evidence of the folly of that policy, and not merely the the falsity of the message "mission accomplished" itself, but also the falsity of the mission itself, so why oh why have the pundit portion of the SCLM fallen down so miserably on the job, when all they would have had to do to understand any of this is to have read the actual reporting of their own colleagues.