Keys Corner

An Amnesty International report released today claims that thousands of prisoners being detained by the US-led forces in Iraq are being held without their legal rights being respected and in many cases there is evidence of torture being applied. Detainees are being held without charge or trial and methods of torture included “knee-capping” using an electric drill, electric shocks, burning of the face with lighted cigarettes, as well as beatings and forcing prisoners to maintain “stress positions” for long periods of time.

Having originally claimed they would give Iraq the best infrastructure in the region, the Bush government has now turned towards winning the the mid-term elections and has announced that there will be no more funding after July 2007 for rebuilding the mess they have created in Iraq. Currently, oil production is well below the pre-war rate (2 billion barrels / day compared with 2.6 bpd before the invasion) and electricity production is also below pre-war levels. The American investment in Iraq has gone largely unnoticed by the local population, with less than 30% of the population even being aware that the USA is contributing to the the rebuilding of their country, according to the Guardian.

The current Iraqi government, installed as a result of the USA’s goal of introducing democracy into the Middle East, is now committing human rights attrocities as bad as those under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record says Ayad Allawi (the country’s first Prime Minister since Saddam’s downfall) in today’s Observer:

‘People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse,’ Ayad Allawi told The Observer. ‘It is an appropriate comparison. People are remembering the days of Saddam. These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.’...

...In a chilling warning to the West over the danger of leaving behind a disintegrating Iraq, Allawi added: ‘Iraq is the centrepiece of this region. If things go wrong, neither Europe nor the US will be safe.’

How many bullets do you need to kill an insurgent in Iraq or Afghanistan?

The number of bullets that the US army needs is truely mind-boggling. As a result, the US ammunition manufacturers can’t keep up, and the US is having to import ammo from Israel to keep up with demand.

The US Army Chief of Staff, Peter J. Schoomaker, said in an interview yesterday that the US is planning for the possible requirement to keep over 100 000 troops in Iraq for the next four years, the Washington Post reports.

Not surprising – they have completely lost control of the town of Haditha, which is 3 hours drive from Baghdad and the US is obviously miles from the White House’s understanding of introducing self-determination into Iraq. Where they will get the neccessary troops for an extended operation of this size is unclear – the US Army has repeatedly missed its own targets for recruiting and the situation is becoming more difficult after growing criticism about the US being in Iraq at all.

Shoomaker’s remarks won’t sit well with George Bush, who is still pushing everything he’s got for a withdrawal of US troops before the next US elections – even to the extent of removing a US veto today on making Islam a cornerstone of the new Iraqi constitution, which must be passed to the Iraqi parliament for approval by midnight tonight.

There has been a lot of comment on the web about the discovery published by Gianluca Neri, that a PDF file released by the US military as an unclassified report on the death of Nicola Calipari – the Italian secret agent escorting Guiliana Sgrena back to Bagdad airport – in fact contains a lot of classified material (marked up with the security classifation S/NF (Secret/No Foreign), or not releasable to foreign nationals) that the USA certainly did not want released.

The material was blacked out, but could be restored by copying the PDF’s text into an editor – showing that whoever prepared the document didn’t understand how to use the DRM features in Adobe Acrobat.

(The page linked to above is in Italian, but the original unclassified document and the “ripped” PDF on that page are both in the original English)

US journalist Michelle Malkin summarizes the main concerns from the US viewpoint:

• An itemization of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and VBIEDs (Vehicle Born IEDs) deployment techniques which have been most effective,
• An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along “Route Irish”,
• Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved,
• A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out,
• Exact grid locations of various assets.
• Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed
• Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods.
• A statistical analysis of “normal” traffic approaching the checkpoint.
• It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
• It briefly describes U.S. Embassy procedures for transporting VIPs along Route Irish and in general.
• It details movement of U.S. and Italian Embassy personnel.
• It describes possible future procedures and configurations for checkpoints.

In other words it has a lot of information of potential use to an insurgent mission planner and a lot that is nobody’s business.

and provides links to several other commentaries here.

I think I’d better refrain from expressing an opinion about the competence of the US military…

Update (2005-05-03):
The Italian government has published their version of the events, which disagrees strongly with the American version. The Italian report blames the troops’ stress and inexperience for contributing to the incident.

So who’s telling the truth? Based on their past record, I wouldn’t put any money on the US troops. And we won’t start a discussion on whether warning shots were fired and hand signals given by the army:

US Marines (via BBC):

US military officials in Baghdad say they tried to stop the car – making hand signals, flashing lights and firing warning shots – before firing at the vehicle’s engine.

(and via Bloomberg):

The convoy carrying Sgrena and Calipari was approaching the checkpoint at a “high rate of speed’’ about 8:55 p.m. yesterday, said Marine Sergeant Salju Thomas by telephone from Baghdad. “It’s an extremely threatening act,’’ Thomas said. “That’s the exact same thing that car bombers do.’‘

Giuliana Sgrena (via the BBC):

“There was suddenly this shooting, we were hit by a hail of gunfire, and I was speaking with Nicola, who was telling me about what had been happening in Italy in the meantime, when he leaned towards me, probably also to protect me,” Ms Sgrena told Rai radio… ...Asked if the car was going too fast when the US troops opened fire, she said: “We weren’t going particularly fast given that type of situation.”

Update (2005-03-06):
The Observer reports that acording to the Italians, not only was the vehicle travelling slowly due to the road conditions, but that it had already passed several checkpoints on the way to the airport, and that despite the injuries to the occupants, the marines first confiscated their weapons and mobile phones, preventing them from contacting their colleagues in Rome for an hour, before organising medical aid:

...Italian reconstruction of the incident is significantly different. Sgrena told colleagues the vehicle was not travelling fast and had already passed several checkpoints on its way to the airport. The Americans shone a flashlight at the car and then fired between 300 and 400 bullets at if from an armoured vehicle. Rather than calling immediately for assistance for the wounded Italians, the soldiers’ first move was to confiscate their weapons and mobile phones and they were prevented from resuming contact with Rome for more than an hour

Enzo Bianco, the opposition head of the parliamentary committee that oversees Italy’s secret services, described the American account as unbelievable. ‘They talk of a car travelling at high speed, and that is not possible because there was heavy rain in Baghdad and you can’t travel at speed on that road,’ Bianco said. ‘They speak of an order to stop, but we’re not sure that happened.’...

This is really going to improve Italian public opinion about being involved in the Coalition of the Willing:

March 4 (Bloomberg)—Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi demanded the U.S. explain the shooting death of an Italian officer at a U.S.-controlled Baghdad checkpoint who was escorting a journalist freed in Iraq after a month in captivity.

The shooting occurred after a convoy accompanying Giuliana Sgrena to the airport for her return trip to Italy was stopped at the checkpoint and shooting broke out, Berlusconi said at a press conference in Rome. The Italian intelligence officer, Nicola Calipari, saved Sgrena’s life by using his body to shield her from the gunfire. Sgrena was also shot in the incident, Berlusconi said…

And what a horrific experience, having survived her kidnapping, for Giuliana Sgrena.

(Full article on Bloomberg)

Alternet picks through recent reports from various sources to piece together a picture of how Fallujah may be run by the Americans and the local Iraqi government – after they are able to disengage from the ongoing fighting there.

This measure and its underlying purpose:

Fallujans are to wear their universal identity cards in plain sight at all times. The ID cards will, according to Dahr Jamail’s information, be made into badges that contain the individual’s home address. This sort of system has no purpose except to allow for the monitoring of everyone in the city, so that ongoing American patrols can quickly determine if someone is not a registered citizen or is suspiciously far from their home neighborhood.

is not so very different from this one, is it? The one allows identification of the friend at a glance, the other allows the “enemy” to be identified. Welcome to democracy as defined by the neo-conservatives in the American government.

MSN/Slate are running an article on the battle for Fallujah, which is in full swing at the moment. The author of the article, Fred Kaplan, takes a critical position, surmising that Bush will use any half-way convincing “win” to justify pulling the US troops out of Iraq as soon as the Iraqi elections have taken place – assuming the elections are not a complete fiasco.

But what is interesting, is that according to the US National Public Radio, the often cited combined US and Iraq troops which are involved on the current assault are composed of some 10-15 thousand US troops and a mere 170 Iraqi troops. It seems that originally, 500 Iraqi troops should have been deployed alongside the US troops (which is a pretty low number too), but the remaining 330 deserted before the operation started. These were members of the 36th Special Operations battalion – the elite of Iraq’s new security forces. Obviously the Iraqis will not be in a position to take over responsibility for their own security any time soon. It looks pretty clear to me, that the most important role of the Iraqi troops is as an alibi for the USA, so they can imply it is not unilateral US action.

The other interesting point in the article was a link to the New York Times, listing the countries that have now pulled out of the Coalition of the Willing or announced plans to significantly reduce or withdraw their troops completely within the coming months. Quite a long list, leaving the US looking increasingly isolated in Iraq.

At the same time, the Guardian reports that since the Iraqi war started 19 months ago, 57 journalists have been killed in the fighting. This compares with 60 journalists killed in the whole of the Vietnam war (approx 17 years, depending on exactly how you define the period of war).