Iraq and Terrorism

by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was found guilty by a special tribunal Sunday of crimes against humanity for the torture and execution of more than 100 people from a small town north of Baghdad 24 years ago. He was sentenced to death by hanging.”

I oppose the death penalty. That said, there are cases in which I get more upset than others, and Saddam is somewhere around Jeffrey Dahmer’s level on my personal list of death sentences to protest. Rather than say anything about the trial, I thought I’d take this opportunity to remember some other people who were sentenced to death. [UPDATE: These are not the people he was just convicted of killing. I just thought I would rather think about Saddam Hussein’s victims than think about him. END UPDATE.]

[UPDATE: While I wrote this I was only thinking about Iraq, not about the US. So let me state for the record: I don’t think that the dreadfulness of Saddam in any way implies that the invasion was justified, let alone that it was justified as actually executed. Our invasion has had horrible consequences for a lot of people, American and Iraqi, and will continue to have horrible repercussions for years to come. There were a lot of other things we could have done to help, things that would not have left hundreds of thousands dead and a country torn apart. We could, for starters, have actually done something to protest the Anfal campaign when it happened, or done more in Darfur today. By invading Iraq, we removed Saddam, but we also heaped more misery on the Iraqi people, who have surely suffered enough already. END UPDATE.]

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by hilzoy

I’ve been wondering for a while exactly how many people we have in detention outside the US. Roughly 455 at Guantanamo and 560 at Bagram: that was relatively easy to find out. But how many at all those other facilities whose names I didn’t know? Apparently the AP wondered too, and reports the following (via TPM):

“In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

“It was hard to believe I’d get out,” Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release — without charge — last month. “I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell.”

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were “mistakes,” U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.”

Suppose the actual error rate is 80%: that’s 11,200 people who are now locked up for no reason. An awful lot of lives broken, and an awful lot of people who probably now hate us:

“Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how his guards would wield their absolute authority.

“Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your neighborhood,” he quoted an interrogator as saying, “or I will keep you in prison for another 50 years.”

As with others, Karim’s confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. “I will hate Americans for the rest of my life,” he said.”

And that’s also 14,000 people who are about to be definitively stripped of habeas rights if either the administration bill on military commissions or the Warner/Graham/McCain alternative passes:

“Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons — unknown in number and location — remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn’t cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law’s oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

“If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name,” said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. “You can’t have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there.”

The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the “war on terror” ends — as it determines.

“I don’t think we’ve gotten to the question of how long,” said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy. “When we get up to ‘forever,’ I think it will be tested” in court, he said.”

When we get to ‘forever’, if we ever do, those detainees will have been in prison, uncharged and untried, for a very long time. Those who are innocent will have been needlessly deprived of the ability to live their lives, see their families, and do whatever it is they wanted to do with themselves. We will have broken their lives apart, and even if we manage to undo the damage Bush has done to our legal system and our republic, the damage we have done to them can never be undone.

And the crowning touch to all of this is that it was completely unnecessary. The need to find some way to distinguish genuine enemy combatants from people detained by mistake is not a novel one, nor is this the first time we have ever fought in a war in which it’s hard to tell enemies from noncombatants. In almost every war between the drafting of the Geneva Conventions and George W. Bush’s election, we managed to deal with this problem without just tossing the Conventions aside and detaining huge numbers of people [Please see update below fold.] In Vietnam, for instance, we convened “Article 5 Tribunals” and used them to decide which detainees to keep in custody and which to free. (Basic history and doctrine here. I said that we did this in ‘almost all’ wars before Bush because, as the JAG manual quoted here puts it, “No Article 5 Tribunals were conducted in Grenada or Panama, as all captured enemy personnel were repatriated as soon as possible.”)

But our clever President decided to throw out decades of military doctrine and procedure, declare that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to anyone captured in Afghanistan, and decline to set up tribunals to determine the status of detainees. This is directly related to the fact that we now have 14,000 of them, many of whom are probably innocent. Just one more brilliant move in Bush’s never-ending campaign to alienate the entire Middle East in the name of making us safer.

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by Charles

I’ve written little (if anything) on Haditha since last June (here, and a 9,000+ word whopper here), but there are a few subsequent pieces worth bringing up.  The first is a New York Times article which does its own job of piecing together what took place.  The writers put themselves in the shoes of the investigators, interviewing Marines, their lawyers, Iraqi residents and the investigators themselves.  They did a fair job at reconstructing events, and although it’s premature to come to any conclusions, there is a possibility that U.S. Marines committed crimes.

Open questions abound.  There are inconsistencies in the stories about the Iraqi men killed in or near a taxi (and conflicting accounts about other events that day).  There are questions about the Marines using the same tactics in Haditha (where civilians were intermingled with paramilitants) as were used in Fallujah (where civilians were warned to leave and most did).  There are questions about the Marines not changing tactics after clearing the first house.

Last month, an article by the New York Times reported allegations of malfeasance higher up the chain of command:

The investigation found that an official company logbook of the unit involved had been tampered with and that an incriminating video taken by an aerial drone the day of the killings was not given to investigators until Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, intervened, the officials said.

Those findings, contained in a long report that was completed last month but not made public, go beyond what has been previously reported about the case. It has been known that marines who carried out the killings made misleading statements to investigators and that senior officers were criticized for not being more aggressive in investigating the case, in which most or all of the Iraqis who were killed were civilians. But this is the first time details about possible concealment or destruction of evidence have been disclosed.

But the October 2006 Atlantic Monthly takes a different look at Haditha, with the author seeing it not from the perspective of an investigator, but an infantryman.  The initial conclusion is apt…

How did the heroes of Fallujah come to kill civilians in Haditha? A Vietnam veteran who witnessed the battle of Fallujah says it’s too soon to judge the marines—but not the high command.

…but requires much more explanation than the simple paragraph would indicate.  It is too soon to judge the Marines, but in terms of "high command", Bing West wasn’t talking about the alleged cover-up by superior officers.  Rather, he is addressing the entire strategy employed by the coalition after major combat operations were completed.  I’ve been meaning to re-subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly, and the Road to Haditha is as good a reason as any for a re-up.  Below the fold are some excerpts worth mentioning.

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by Charles

For me, oftentimes the daily newsfeed of Islamist violence has a desensitizing effect, so much so that I lose perspective on the magnitude of all of these evil acts put together, all across the globe.  There is one common denominator to all of this:  There are Islamist individuals and groups who are willing to murder civilians in order to advance their religio-political objectives, all for the glory of Allah and His Prophet.  For the heck of it, and to get a slightly broader view, I thought I’d try an experiment and summarize Islamist events over a week’s time, from one Friday to the next.  A one-week snapshot of terrorism and militant Islamism if you will.  So here we go, around the world in eight days.

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by Charles

Since the peace agreement last May, the ongoing genocide in Darfur has not abated.  The Washington Post:

These new forces [a rebel faction and the Sudanese military], armed with expanded weapons stocks and backed by government planes making bombing runs, are augmenting the Janjaweed militias that already were raping, looting and killing their way through Darfur, a vast, arid region the size of Texas. Since the fighting began in 2003, war and disease have killed as many as 450,000 people in Darfur and driven more than 2 million from their homes.

Just so you know before continuing, the rest is more of the same old right wing cause du jour, and not well researched either.

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by Charles

As noted in my previous post, I’ve been critical of Donald Rumsfeld’s performance as Defense Secretary. But my opposition does not extend to cheap shots. An example is the hatchet job by Robert Burns of Associated Press, making stuff up about Rumsfeld’s Tuesday speech at the American Legion National Convention. Thankfully, McQ at QandO exposes the rank bias that Burns is guilty of, comparing Burns’ interpretation of Rumsfeld’s speech with Rumsfeld’s actual words.  [Update:  In typical fashion, AP changed its content without announcing any changes.  See the QandO update.]

The worst part of Burns’ misleading reportage was that it was unquestioningly spread to other news sources such as CNN, ABC, Fox and who knows how many other outlets. Mainstream media was already burned with fauxtography in the Israel-Hezbollah War, yet here we are again, witnessing a mainstream media reporter peddling faux news. Predictably, the Democratic Party took the Burns’ hit piece and ran with it, never mind the actual text of the speech. [Update: Allahpundit has found more interpretation problems concerning Rumsfeld’s speech.]

It’s hard enough fighting an information war against al Qaeda and its sympathizers. The challenge is all the greater when a sometimes hostile media twists and distorts the words of the very people who are directly engaged in fighting this War Against Militant Islamism.  Concerning the Information War, Rumsfeld is dead right:

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