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The U.S. military will close Abu Ghraib prison, probably within three months, and transfer some 4,500 prisoners to other jails in Iraq, a military spokesman said on Thursday.I guess this means my blog post from February 21 worked.
American commanders in Iraq are expressing grave concerns that the overcrowded Abu Ghraib prison has become a breeding ground for extremist leaders and a school for terrorist foot soldiers.Another unnamed officer called Abu Ghraib "Jihad University" (not to be confused with the "Open University of Jihad").
..."Abu Ghraib is a graduate-level training ground for the insurgency," said an American commander in Iraq.
Attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a suit with German federal prosecutors last November charging that U.S. officials, including Rumsfeld, are responsible for acts of torture against detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. That is the prison where U.S. soldiers were photographed abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi detainees...The cases are obviously different, but the underlying legal argument is similar to the one used to go after former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in Spanish courts in the late 1990s.
The lawsuit against Rumsfeld was filed in Germany because its laws allow for the prosecution of war crimes and human rights violations across national boundaries.
"Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, the case could not be filed there."Meaning: an ICC case could not be filed in Germany. However, this is a simplification that obscures more than it explains.
US Ambassador Cunningham stated that, "In the absence of a new [Security Council exemption] resolution, the United States will need to take into account the risk of ICC review when determining contributions to UN authorized or established operations. We will also continue to negotiate bilateral agreements consistent with Article 98 of the Rome Statue to further protect U.S. persons from the exercise of jurisdiction by the ICC." Shortly after announcing its decision, the US pulled out peacekeepers from several UN missions, including 2 from Kosovo and 7 from Ethiopia-Eritrea.So, we may one day have some neo-convicts after all.
Hundreds of Iraqi prisoners were being released from the infamous Abu Ghraib jail, some accusing their US captors of maltreatment, as an abuse scandal continues to dog coalition forces.Wow, nearly 500 Iraqi prisoners released all at once.
Some 13 buses filled with Iraqis left the gates of the notorious prison Friday, where thousands of political prisoners were executed under president Saddam Hussein, as part of a scheduled release of 472 prisoners.
"You know, they're not there for traffic violations," he said. "If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners -- they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."I guess he was wrong -- or none of these nearly 500 prisoners were in cell block 1A or 1B.
They saw Iraqi women forced to bare their breasts, forced homosexual sex, sex between U.S. troops, hooded Iraqi prisoners forced to masturbate in front of their captors, another forced to sodomize himself.In all, there were about 1000 new photos and around 300 showed abuse or sexual activity. In the words of Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN), the photos were "worse and more graphic" than those seen to-date.
They also reported viewing pictures of dead bodies, badly wounded soldiers and untrained soldiers stitching up injured detainees. A couple of Congress members were struck by pictures they said showed a detainee forced to smash his head against a wall at Abu Ghraib until his skull appeared to split.
"Ordinary Turks were appalled at the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners and later by the murder of the American businessman," said Omer Madra, founder of Open Radio, an Istanbul station. "But they are not surprised. The Turkish population is aware of a certain double standard . . . that while the U.S. preaches democracy and human rights, it does not always practice them."Having one's foreign policy perceived as complete hypocrisy is never good -- especially if the current main justification for war is democratic transformation of the Middle East.
Portuguese Prime Minister José Durão Barroso, whose country's contribution to the occupation consists of 128 police officers, said: "You cannot, in the name of the struggle against terrorism and for the sake of freedom, contravene the very values and principles on which that struggle is based."Not good. As Bush officials might say, they could be losing their will.
The brutality has "confirmed everyone's worst fears, and confirmed feelings, in France and Germany especially, that they were right to stay out of this mess," said William Drozdiak, director of the German Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels, Belgium. "More and more Europeans are openly expressing their fear of getting too involved with the U.S.... ," he said. "They are questioning whether a security relationship with the U.S. is becoming a negative instead of a positive."The implications for policy are obvious. And bad. Potentially, very bad.
Imagine that, in the next few months, Iran continues to defy UN inspectors and to build nuclear weapons, something that virtually all of the partners in the Atlantic alliance say it would be essential to stop, and, in response, the Bush administration proposes leading a military action aimed at seizing the Iranian nuclear installations.Not that the Doctrine had much life anyway.
Perhaps some would agree, but it seems virtually axiomatic that in the wake of the Iraqi fiasco it would be vastly more difficult to persuade most of them, as they were persuaded in the Gulf in 1991, Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001.
"Even countries that supported the U.S. without a UN resolution in Iraq would find it difficult to do so again without a UN mandate," said Jiri Pehe, a Czech political commentator and the director of New York University in Prague. "If a new war should take place it would be subjected to much closer scrutiny."
To be sure, the prisoner scandal has produced no public gloating, not even in countries like Germany that opposed the Iraq war vociferously from the beginning. Still, the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has, literally, turned itself into the poster boy of opposition to the Iraq war, using the phrase "Power for Peace" as its campaign slogan for the elections for the European Parliament next month. The slogan expresses what the rising crescendo of bad news from Iraq has led the Germans to believe, namely that all of the German government's warnings about the war have proved true: that it was unnecessary in the first place, that it would be difficult to win the peace, and - most relevant to the Abu Ghraib matter - that it would cause Arab public opinion to be inflamed against the West. The conservative opposition parties in Germany, many of whose leaders supported the war and criticized Schröder for not supporting it, are on the defensive.I guess we already knew that.
"It will be much more difficult for any party in Germany to go on a course of clear-cut support for any American position in the future," said Berthold Kohler, a commentator for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "Any American policy that would ask for the support of Europe in another crisis would have to be very good, very strong and based on provable arguments."
"The fully sovereign government which emerges from the 2005 elections should be able to decide what becomes of this force, and if need be, its departure," he [Barnier] said.So the French are still with the Germans.
French officials see the chaos in Iraq strengthening their hand in the Security Council negotiations over the future of Iraq and as a justification of their stance against the war, which they said flouted international law.
Barnier said the difficulties of the U.S.-led coalition only demonstrated the importance of adhering to international law, respecting human rights and seeing armed force as a last resort.
"This is all the more reason to reaffirm (those principles) as guides in these moments of trouble and doubt," he said.
One year later, despite many challenges, life for the Iraqi people is a world away from the cruelty and corruption of Saddam's regime. At the most basic level of justice, people are no longer disappearing into political prisons, torture chambers, and mass graves...However, based on photographs released just this week, the Arab world is getting a different message -- and American citizens should be disgusted.
"According to the U.S. Army, one Iraqi prisoner was told to stand on a box with his head covered, wires attached to his hands. He was told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.The SF Chronicle has a story in today's paper with many more details, including the involvement of US Army intelligence personnel and British soldiers:
...images of American soldiers smiling, laughing and signaling "thumbs-up" as Iraqi detainees were forced into sexually humiliating positions...The war for "hearts and minds" is over and the US and its coalition partners have lost.
Iraqi detainees allegedly were beaten and sexually abused, officials announced Saturday.
Also Saturday, the New Yorker magazine said it had obtained a U.S. Army report that Iraqi detainees were subjected to "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses" at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
The abuses included threats of rape and the pouring of cold water and liquid from chemical lights on detainees, said the internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. According to the report, detainees were beaten with a broom handle, and one was sodomized with "a chemical light and perhaps a broomstick," the New Yorker reports in its May 10 issue.
The scandal broadened Saturday after Britain's Daily Mirror published new photographs of a hooded Iraqi prisoner who reportedly was beaten by British troops. The newspaper's front-page picture showed a soldier apparently urinating on the prisoner, who was sitting on the floor.
The newspaper quoted unidentified soldiers as saying the unarmed captive had been threatened with execution during eight hours of abuse and was left bleeding and vomiting. They said the captive was driven away and dumped from the back of a moving vehicle, and it was not known whether he survived.
The photos appeared in newspapers across the Middle East, angering Arabs who accused the United States of caring only about the rights of Americans.This doesn't quite match the President's words, do they?
Egypt's Akhbar el-Yom newspaper splashed photographs of U.S. soldiers posing by naked, hooded inmates on Saturday's front page, with the banner headline "The Scandal." Al-Wafd, an opposition paper, displayed similar photos beneath the headline, "The Shame!"
Although the pictures have not been published widely by Iraqi newspapers, many Iraqis have seen them on Arabic-language satellite television stations, such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya.
