"Sometimes they pretended to kill me"

[seemslikeadream]

A photo composite of a U.S. soldier walking through the Abu Ghraib prison, and an Al-Jazeera logo.

"Sometimes they pretended to kill me"
An Al-Jazeera cameraman detained and tortured at Abu Ghraib recalls beatings, threats and photos of torture victims used as screen savers on military PCs.

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By Phillip Robertson



May 8, 2004 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Last Saturday, Suhaib Badr al Baz, a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, sat in the lobby of the Swan Lake Hotel and calmly described his experience being tortured by U.S. military personnel. The soft-spoken journalist's account of his 74 days in U.S. custody was deeply disturbing, and his story not only supports what is now coming to light about human rights violations in Abu Ghraib, but also adds interesting new details. Al Baz said that much of his mistreatment took place in a building at the Baghdad airport, a place where he heard the sounds of prisoners screaming for long periods of time. If his account is accurate, it means that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq is not limited to Abu Ghraib prison or a single military unit. It may well be, as military critics argue, more widespread.

Like many other prisoners of Abu Ghraib, al Baz was never charged with a crime and did not have the opportunity to defend himself before any court. As soon as he was arrested, he found himself plunged into a secretive network of American detention facilities with little connection to the outside world, a zone where human and civil rights were completely ignored. As a civilian in occupied Iraq, he should have been protected by the Geneva Conventions, but instead, al Baz became the victim of a war crime perpetrated by U.S. soldiers. Article 147 of the Fourth Geneva Convention defines war crimes as: "Willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment ... Unlawful confinement of a protected person ... willfully depriving protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial."


Al Baz, who is a single man of medium build and a slight belly, hardly presents the image of an insurgent. There is nothing threatening about him. He is not dramatic, choosing instead to make his points in a straightforward way. Al Baz never raised his voice while he was talking, and over the three days of our meetings he did not seem angry about his incarceration. In a country of furious people, al Baz did not make a political speech. We sought him out to tell his story; he did not seek the attention.

Al Baz was not an ordinary Iraqi as far as the soldiers were concerned. He works for Al-Jazeera, the Arab media network with few fans in the administration. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently excoriated Al-Jazeera's coverage of Fallujah, saying, "I can definitively say that what Al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable." These comments reflect the bitter feelings the administration has toward producers of negative news about the occupation. But this bitterness is not confined to words -- the U.S. military hit Al-Jazeera buildings in both Baghdad and Kabul, Afghanistan, strikes that the network believes were intentional, though the military denies it. As Baghdad fell to American forces on April 8 last year, a bomb struck the office of the network and killed Tariq Ayoub, an Al-Jazeera cameraman. Many journalists who have covered the war for the past year believe there is a clear pattern of intimidation toward the network by the coalition. Al Baz himself believes he was singled out because of his employer. "They knew me, they had stopped me before," he said of the soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division, who arrested him.

more
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/05/08/torture/index.html

[Captain_Chaos]

1. This is just sick.

Look at what this false administration has done to the image of the United States.

We need to get them OUT of office as soon as possible.












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And the voices rise from every corner of the North America continent calling for one thing of our government...impeachment.

[Zerex71]

13. I vote for death for every one of them.

Prison isn't good enough for this cabal. Neither is being kicked out of office. Which reminds me...What's to stop them from refusing to leave office? As far as I know, no one can physically force them from power.

[Just Me]

14. I gently urge you to tone it down.

Anything which may be interpreted as a death threat could land in you places you do NOT want to go.

[VolcanoJen]

2. KICK. Excellent, sad, depressing, honest, riveting article. (n/m)

[daleo]

3. At the Baghdad airport, eh?

I wonder how Shrub's day went after the plastic turkey thing on Thanksgiving.

[Mattforclark]

4. Yeah, I guess having people pretend to kill you sometimes, is, you know,

one of those things, that, you know, happens, and is normal, you know?

[Kinkistyle]

8. Its like a fun Frat/Skull and Bones prank.

Sometimes when you get all stressed out, ya just need to blow of some steam you know? I find that pretending to kill people really does the trick.

[AussieInCA]

5. America's Gulag is at least cleaner

what a sad state of affairs...screen savers with trophy shots on them. Yep, this was systemic..tell me how you can work around a workplace and not see that.

[anarchy1999]

6. This is just a must read for everyone.

snip to the end:

As I write, Rumsfeld is before Congress trying to explain how U.S. forces could do such things. Many of the journalists in Baghdad think that this will surely finish him off, that it's only a matter of time. I watched Bush give his apology last night, but it all seems too late. The revelations of torture in Iraq by U.S. soldiers have pushed the country through a bloody and bruised event horizon. There is no apology that can bring us back.

Most important of all, "There is no apology that can bring us back."

I am so heartsick over all of this. We knew people were being abused, is this "Shock and Awe", all over again? I think it is. Incoming, there will be another "terrorist attack". "They" hate us, don't you know, especially now. This is game over.

[Wind Dancer]

7. This is horrific

and only gets worse. The president needs to be impeached!

[AliceWonderland]

9. Men shouting "Good Bush, bad Saddam!"

Al Baz says that he was taken from the base in Samarra to the airport in Baghdad, where his treatment took a sharp turn for the worse. "In there I heard some horrible noises, many people screaming. They told me to sit on the floor and I went numb from the cold. If I moved my head even a little bit, a soldier would grab my hood and slam my head into the wall. Sometimes they pretended to kill me by pulling the trigger of their rifles. I found out later that they were punishing other people there." Al Baz says that he heard screams, men shouting "Good Bush, bad Saddam!" and crying out to God for help. "But it didn't do anything to decrease the punishment they were going through."

[saigon68]

10. Typical Nazi abuse by the military

Its more tha 1 or 2 CHIMP

[seemslikeadream]

11. Torture, the CIA and the Press

Just to remind everyone, Vice-President Dick Cheney defended CIA Director George Tenet after Hersh broke the Abu Ghoryab scandal, and said that Tenet had Bush's "full confidence." This is important to note, for it establishes the chain of command, which leads from Bush, through Cheney, through Tenet, to the CIA people who did hire Messrs. Stephanowicz and Israel; and even more to the point, it illustrates how policies made by Bush and company flow through the corporate media to the public, and become directly responsible for the kidnapping, illegal detention, torture, rape and murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraqi.


Again, Hersh is careful in what he doesn't say. For example, former CIA Director (and unofficial "black propaganda" minister) R. James Woolsey was, in 1985, one of seven directors of the Titan Corporation. In 2002, Titan employed Adel Nakhla, who was assigned by Titan as a civilian translator to the 205th MI Brigade. Notably, Nakhla is named as a "suspect" in the Taguba Report, which Seymour Hersh analyzed and then presented to the public in an article for The New Yorker, even before the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff had, by his own account, had a chance to read it.1

more
http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine05082004.html

[seemslikeadream]

12. Torture as Normalcy As American as Apple Pie

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Torture's back in the news, courtesy of those lurid pictures of exultant Americans laughing as they torture their Iraqi captives in Abu Ghraib prison run by the US military outside Baghdad. Apparently it takes electrodes and naked bodies piled in a simulated orgy to tickle America's moral nerve ends. Kids maimed by cluster bombs just don't do it any more. But torture's nothing new. One of the darkest threads in postwar US imperial history has been the CIA's involvement with torture, as instructor, practitioner or contractor. Since its inception the CIA has taken a keen interest in torture, avidly studying Nazi techniques and protecting their exponents such as Klaus Barbie. The CIA's official line is that torture is wrong and is ineffective. It is indeed wrong. On countless occasions it has been appallingly effective.

Remember Dan Mitrione, kidnapped and killed by Uruguay's Tupamaros and portrayed by Yves Montand in Costa-Gavras's film State of Siege? In the late 1960s Mitrione worked for the US Office of Public Safety, part of the Agency for International Development. In Brazil, so A.J. Langguth (a former New York Times bureau chief in Saigon) related in his book Hidden Terrors, Mitrione was among the US advisers teaching Brazilian police how much electric shock to apply to prisoners without killing them. In Uruguay, according to the former chief of police intelligence, Mitrione helped "professionalize" torture as a routine measure and advised on psychological techniques such as playing tapes of women and children screaming that the prisoner's family was being tortured.

In the months after the 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, "truth drugs" were hailed by some columnists such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter for use in the war against Al Qaeda. This was an enthusiasm shared by the US Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into "truth serums" at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline and then observed their behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their guards and made confessional statements about their own psychological makeup.

As part of its larger MK-ULTRA project the CIA gave money to Dr. Ewen Cameron, at McGill University. Cameron was a pioneer in the sensory-deprivation techniques. Cameron once locked up a woman in a small white box for thirty-five days, deprived of light, smell and sound. The CIA doctors were amazed at this dose, knowing that their own experiments with a sensory-deprivation tank in 1955 had induced severe psychological reactions in less than forty hours. Start torturing, and it's easy to get carried away.

Torture destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. Just like the FBI after 9/11/01 the CIA in 1968 got frustrated by its inability to break suspected leaders of Vietnam's National Liberation Front by its usual methods of interrogation and torture. So the agency began more advanced experiments, in one of which it anesthetized three prisoners, opened their skulls and planted electrodes in their brains. They were revived, put in a room and given knives. The CIA psychologists then activated the electrodes, hoping the prisoners would attack one another. They didn't. The electrodes were removed, the prisoners shot and their bodies burned. You can read about it in our book, Whiteout.

more
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn05082004.html