Like A Tree Which Has Been Uprooted"

[mom cat]

Like A Tree Which Has Been Uprooted"
One Iraqi Woman’s Story, by Nagem Salam

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Five Minutes

“I’m afraid to give my real name,” she said to begin the interview. After being detained in her hometown of Ba’qubah on September 14th, 2003 and held in three detention facilities for four months, she preferred to be called Umm Taha. “The American’s picked me up for nothing, so what’s stopping them from doing it again?”

A highly educated woman with four children, she had worked for the Iraqi government as a legal investigator. While sitting in her home on September 14th of last year, she received a phone call from an interpreter for the coalition forces who asked her to meet some USA soldiers at the governorate building.


“He told me they just needed to verify something and that it would only take five minutes,” she said with disbelief, “but when I arrived there the Americans tied my hands and held guns to my head.”

Like most Iraqis who have been detained by the USA-led coalition forces, Umm Taha was not charged with any crime, nor given a reason for her capture. When she asked why she was being detained, a soldier told her, “We’re taking you to Ibel Fanas Airport and we’ll tell you there.” She was then roughly loaded into a military vehicle and driven to the holding facility. Once there, she was frisked by a female soldier in front of several men, which is grossly disrespectful of her culture and Islamic religious beliefs. “After this, they yelled at me, pushed me around, put me in an old bathroom, threw me a blanket and closed the door.”

The bathroom had four clogged toilets and it was infested with insects, and extremely hot and dirty. “They kept me in there for twenty-two days and the only time I was allowed outside was to use the toilet since none of them in my cell worked.” When she was taken out to relieve herself, she was forced to do so in front of male detainees. “It was a disgrace,” she said while looking at the ground. Aside from humiliating “bathroom” breaks, and getting fluid infusions in the clinic, and being forced to clean the mainstream detainee toilets in front of the men, she spent the whole twenty in solitary confinement in a small room with four grungy, clogged toilets.

http://www.world-crisis.com/index/P497/

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. One question:

How would Americans feel if they were treated this way? I think we liberals know. When I ask freepers, they say these folks are Muslims and because of that, they 'deserve' it.

[mom cat]

3. I guess I shouldn't be surprised when racism trumps knowledge

with some folks, but it is sad, :cry:

[stellanoir]

2. our deplorable treatment of other human beings

will haunt us for generations to come. But * says, "who cares? we'll all be dead." This "America is safer" meme is such subterfuge. He's pissed off 20 generations of the progeny of well over a billion people. Yeah, I feel really safe.

[mom cat]

4. and "those people" have long long memories.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

5. And let's not forget the law of the universe-

what goes around comes around. Some call it karma. I tremble for my country, because I figure that many Americans like us, who have fought the idiocy and racism of this administration, will be the ones to get hurt.