Free Iraq

Ostracized by all

Christian Science Monitor, April 17, 2006
By Charles Levinson

“The US has isolated its Iraqi interpreters, worried they could be working with insurgents.”

MOSUL, IRAQ – “He's known at the US military base here as Roger, from the radio lingo used in old American war movies that he watched to learn English. Like the other Iraqi interpreters working with the Americans, he is certain that if his identity were revealed he would be killed.

To protect his family he visits them only once a year, even though they live just minutes away, and his friends think he works for a cable TV company overseas. Roger's concern for his and his family's well-being is not overblown. Interpreters here - known by US troops as "terps" - estimate that in Mosul alone 50 to 60 of their colleagues have been murdered by insurgents.

But on both sides of this conflict they are regarded with suspicion. They are considered traitors by their fellow countrymen and potential enemy spies by their US employers.

"If you look at our situation it's really risky and kind of horrible," says Roger. "Outside the wire everybody looks at us like we are back-stabbers, like we betrayed our country and our religion, and then inside the wire they look at us like we might be terrorists."

New restrictions on interpreters

...They live the life of a garrisoned soldier, but they are forbidden many of the luxuries that make life on a US military base tolerable. Cellular phones, e-mail, satellite TV, computers, video game consoles, CD players, cameras, the weight room, and even the swimming pool are all off limits.

Entering the mess hall, interpreters alone are singled out and searched at every meal. They are not allowed to take food to-go for fear they might be feeding an insurgent who is on the base illegally. Some commanders take their interpreters' national ID cards so they can't leave the base without permission.

"It gives you the feeling that you are not really trusted," says an interpreter known simply as Vivian, a 20-something Kurdish woman whose good looks invariably turns soldiers' heads.

It is, of course, a valid concern in a struggle against a faceless insurgency in which every Iraqi is a potential enemy.

An interpreter for the previous brigade stationed here was caught spying for insurgents, and in Baghdad there have been cases of interpreters calling in grid coordinates to insurgent mortar teams....

...While bans on cellphones are easy to defend, other rules seem hard to justify to many.

"It doesn't make any sense at all," says Sgt. Matthew Chipman, from Beardstown, Ill., who is in charge of the interpreters for the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team's 2-1 Battalion, stationed in Mosul. "What are they going to do, send information through the weights or through the swimming pool?"

Second-class citizens

Such rules demonstrate why the US effort here leaves a bitter taste in the mouths of so many Iraqis who find themselves treated as second-class citizens in their own country.

And it's not just interpreters who suffer the indignity of US suspicions.

At an air base in Mosul, civilian contractors, soldiers, and Western journalists are given beds and allowed to walk around freely while they wait for flights. Meanwhile, a squad of Iraqi police traveling on a US military flight sleeps on rocks in a fenced-in pen, guarded by US soldiers.

"The terps and all the local nationals are always going to be treated [poorly] except for by the people that they immediately work for," says Sergeant Chipman.

The new, more stringent rules, which interpreters say are having a demoralizing effect, come as the US is having an increasingly difficult time recruiting adequate numbers of English-speaking Iraqis willing to work with American forces.

Chipman says his battalion is desperate for interpreters. Other interpreters bemoan the poor quality of those now being hired.

"In the beginning it was so difficult to get a job as a terp," says one interpreter called "Bob," a musician from the Kurdish city of Dahook.

"Now, many terps don't know English and they get a job," he says. "Someone will tell them 'There's an IED over there' and they'll go to a US soldier and go 'Boom boom' and point. It's miserable. If you can say 'What's up? How you doing?' in English, you're going to get a job."...

...On a recent patrol here in Mosul, a mother and daughter cowered in fear at the sight of US troops in their front yard. It seemed like it might become one more battle for Iraqi hearts and minds that would be lost.

But Roger stepped in quickly to allay their worries. He gives a moving defense of the US occupation. "Why are you afraid?" the Sunni Arab, a native of this northern Iraqi city, asks as tears well up in the teenage daughter's frightened eyes.

"It's not the Americans who are going to hurt you. They're here to help you. It's the terrorists you should fear," he says.

$1,050 monthly salary

Those interpreters who are sticking it out say they do it for the money - the $1,050 monthly salary for combat interpreters is a decent salary in Iraq today, though it's nearly a third less than many Western media outlets pay their interpreters.

Many of them do it because they believe in what the US is trying to accomplish in Iraq. In fact, they seem among the most fervent supporters of the US effort here. But most of all, they say, they hope their loyal service will earn them American citizenship...

..."I have a dream that one day the army will recognize their good terps and let us go to America," says Roger, who cheered US Humvees when the US first rolled into Mosul in 2003.

Sacrifice of the job

In 28 months of combat patrols with the US Army, Roger has weathered car bombs, rocket propelled grenades, scores of firefights, and more IEDs (improvised explosive devices) than he can count.

"I can't even rewind my brain to think about this," he says. "Now I just laugh at IEDs when they go off. But I no longer have good hearing in my right ear."

The interpreter named Vivian has been working for the US Army for three years now and lives in a two-person barrack surrounded by US soldiers, a somewhat nontraditional living arrangement for a young Iraqi girl from rural Kurdistan.

"My parents no longer consider me a daughter," she says, sitting cross-legged on a flowery pink bedspread, brushing freshly shampooed hair. "They think of me as a soldier now. I spend my days in uniform doing exactly the same things the soldiers do, so I guess I pretty much am a soldier."”
 

xymphora, Wurmser knew: Robert Dreyfuss writes about the power of the Office of the Vice President, and in particular here on David Wurmser, the Likudnik neocon who has largely gotten a free pass in discussions of who to blame for Iraq ...:

" ... Even among ardent supporters of Israel, Wurmser - and his wife, Meyrav, who runs the Hudson Institute’s Middle East program - is considered an extremist. ... Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway: ... ‘A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, ... I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel’s interest than our own.’”

We’re supposed to believe that what has happened to Iraq is a complete surprise to the Bush Administration. Yet Wurmser, Cheney’s chief advisor on the Middle East, knew about the all the problems, described them in detail, and said they didn’t matter as getting rid of Saddam was so important for Israel.
 

xymphora, Demographics and democracy: Ilan Pappe on the Israeli ‘democracy’:

“On 31 July 2003, the Knesset passed a law prohibiting Palestinians from obtaining citizenship, permanent residency or even temporary residency when they marry Israeli citizens. The initiator of the legislation was a liberal Zionist, Avraham Poraz of the centrist party Shinui. ... Poraz declared that those already married and with families ‘will have to go to the West Bank’, regardless of how long they had been living in Israel.

In the dead of night on 24 January this year, an elite unit of the border police seized the Israeli Palestinian village of Jaljulya. The troops burst into houses, dragging out 36 women and eventually deporting eight of them. The women were ordered to go to their old homes in the West Bank. Some had been married for years to Palestinians in Jaljulya, some were pregnant, many had children, but the soldiers were demonstrating to the Israeli public that when a demographic problem becomes a danger, the state will act swiftly and without hesitation. One Palestinian member of the Knesset protested, but the action was backed by the government, the courts and the media."

The Zionist attack on the Israel Lobby thesis started with some quibbles about the Mearsheimer & Walt views of Israeli ‘democracy’, quibbling which has stopped presumably as the Zionists don’t want anybody to enter into a detailed consideration of what Israel actually looks like.
 

Israel uber alles?
 

Rumsfeld: No U.S.-style democracy in Iraq
 

U.S. sees spike in Iraq deaths
 

Pessimism reigns in Iraq as politicians stall again; Latest failure to name prime minister leaves nation paralyzed
 

Pentagon declines comment on report of Iran strike plans
 

ANATOL LIEVEN, Depose and Conquer: "Overthrow" [by Stephen Kinzer] is the history of forcible regime changes by the United States and its local allies over the past 110 years, starting with the undermining of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, passing through Cuba (1898), the Philippines (1898), Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and elsewhere, and ending with present-day Iraq.

What's most depressing about Kinzer's book, however, is not the drastic clash it describes between professed American morality and actual American behavior. For, after all, the historical record of other democratic imperial powers, like Britain and France, has been even worse than that of the United States. Operating in the real world as a great power is not a business for the overly fastidious.

But if you are going to use the argument that making a successful geopolitical omelet requires breaking eggs, you'd better have something edible to show for all the shattered shells lying around. As Kinzer makes clear, the problem is that all too many of the interventions he recounts were not just utterly ruthless; they were utterly unnecessary.

I must confess that I put down this fine book with a feeling of deep disheartenment. For what, after all, is the point of such meticulously reported studies if the American public is repeatedly going to wipe such episodes from its collective consciousness, and the American establishment is going to make similar mistakes over and over again, first in the cold war and now in the "war on terror" — each time covering its actions with the same rhetoric of spreading "freedom" and combating "evil"?

As Kinzer writes of the Iranian hostage crisis, "because most Americans did not know what the United States had done to Iran in 1953, few had any idea why Iranians were so angry at the country they called 'the great Satan.' " They still don't.
 

UK Envoy's Iraq Rocket Ordeal
 

Gallup: 57 percent of Americans say U.S. won't win in Iraq (And 'winning' would have meant . . . ?)
 

Juan Cole, Tuesday, April 18th: American sources say that in the northern Baghdad district of Adhamiyah, a neighborhood militia fought a 9-hour-long pitched battle with Iraqi troops and police, with the Americans coming in to settle it.

But Arabic sources such as Al-Zaman , al-Hayat and Aljazeera reported in such a way as to make it look like the brave stand of local (Sunni Arab) men against the predations of (Shiite) death squads masquerading as police. The latter were accused of coming into Adhamiyah in order to kidnap, kill and pillage. The special police commandos of the minstry of the interior are widely believed to comprise Shiite militiamen.

Guerrillas in Ramadi launched a coordinated attack on the Marines, fighting a pitched battle. The US forces damaged a mosque in the course of the fighting.
 

Iraq, US troops under fire as rebels exploit power vacuum
 

April 18, 2006: Commemorate Qana and Demand Israeli Accountability: Israel has consistently committed gross human rights violations in the Arab world in the name of self-defense in the “war on terror.” In doing so, it has been able to act with impunity in the region in part due to the active support or passive acquiescence of the US Government, and partly because it is the strongest military power in the Middle East.i On April 18th, demand Israeli accountability to human rights and international law,by commemorating the 10th year since the Qana Massacre.

On the 10th Anniversary of the shelling of the U.N. compound in Qana, commemorate the lives of those who survived as well as those who died in the massacre and demand that Israel be held accountable for the devastation it wrought. [ . . . ]
 

(Extract)
Where Date Palms Grow, Who Did It?: A viewer was wondering who Assassinated the Two young men? in my previous Blog, and if somebody is investigating into it?

Let me clarify…

NOBODY IN THIS GOVERNMENT CARES!!

The human life in Iraq is cheap in their eyes, all they care about is power and money.

The Militia’s these are mainly bums or BADR corps, they get some small payments whenever they are sent like today in Al Azamiyah District at 3:30 A.M., the people in the neighborhood fought them till they killed most of them, until the ING’s and the U.S. Army came in nine hours latter and took the bodies away “the G.I’s were busy shooting at parked cars and house gates”.
The schools there are all closed down and the ING say that they are not responsible if a child going to school these couple of days gets shoot.

Dear Sir,
Baghdad is in chaos, its been four months since the elections, we still do not have a real government, and every Iraqi believes that we only have God who cares about us anymore, nobody loves Iraq anymore.
I Was seven years old when the first war with Iran began, I am 34 years old, I have lived 27 years of different wars, sanctions, and currently semi civil war.
I have been lucky not to get killed three times 1982, 2003, 2006.
I hope that my luck will not fail me under the law of probability and statistic.
But let us always remember…

Any Iraqi killed today by the Terrorists, the US Army, the Militia, the Iraq Army..etc.

Is just another unpublished statistic…

By the way PSD’s, ever wondered how close you have to be to read your Gunners Sign? Duh?

Gidiup!
 

Douglas Westerman, THE REAL WMD'S IN IRAQ - OURS: Weapons of mass destruction are all over Iraq. Iraqi children are playing among them every day. According to Iraqi doctors, many are developing cancer as a result. The WMD in question is depleted uranium (DU). Left over after natural uranium has been processed, DU is 1.7 times denser than lead - effective in penetrating armored vehicles such as tanks. After a DU shell strikes, it penetrates before exploding into a burning vapor that turns to dust.

"Depleted uranium has a half life of 4.7 billion years - that means thousands upon thousands of Iraqi children will suffer for tens of thousands of years to come. This is what I call terrorism," says Dr Ahmad Hardan. [ . . . ]
 

David Livingstone, Globalists Created Wahhabi Terrorism To Destroy Islam: The 'House' of Saud" - No More Islamic Than Billy Graham
 

Charley Reese, Israel - The Dead Roach In America's Salad: The Israeli lobby and the neoconservatives are beating the drums for war with Iran. I hope the president is not that dangerously stupid. The betting on whether he is that stupid is about even.
 

Sam Bahour, Conditions on the Ground Have Never Been So Tense - Is Hamas Being Forced to Collapse?: Only last week came a U.S. Department of Treasury decree making it illegal for Americans to do business with the Palestinian government. We wait to see tomorrow’s nooses.

All of this as Palestinians watch in dismay, trying to maintain a dignified life under an humiliating military occupation. The international community demanded Palestinians hold free and fair elections at all levels of government, so the Palestinians did just that, and superbly given their reality. But after voting a reflection of their bitter reality of being caged in open air prisons in their own homeland, the U.S. is now punishing them for not voting as the U.S. wanted.
 

If Americans Knew; What every American needs to know about Israel/Palestine: Nine little-known statistics -

1. 124 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians and 720 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis since September 29, 2000.
2. 1,084 Israelis and 3,863 Palestinians have been killed since September 29, 2000
3. 7,633 Israelis and 29,731 Palestinians have been injured since September 29, 2000.
4. The U.S. gives $15,139,178 per day to the Israeli government and military and $232,290 per day to Palestinian NGO’s.
5. Israel has been targeted by at least 65 UN resolutions and the Palestinians have been targeted by none.
6. No Israelis are being held prisoner by Palestinians, while 9,184 Palestinians are currently imprisoned by Israel.
7. 0 Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians and 4,170 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israel since September 29, 2000.
8. The Israeli unemployment rate is 8.9%, while the Palestinian unemployment is estimated at 25-31%.
9. 60+ new Jewish-only settlements have been built on confiscated Palestinian land between March 2001 and July 11, 2003. There have been 0 cases of Palestinians confiscating Israeli land and building settlements.
 

Nurit Peled-Elhanan, The Suffering Palestinian Women Undergo Every Day: [The following is the speech Nurit Peled-Elhanan delivered at the European Parliament, Strasbourg, on March 8 on the occasion of International Women's Day.]

... I would like to dedicate my speech to Miriam R'aban and her husband Kamal, from Bet Lahiya in the Gaza Strip, whose five small children were killed by Israeli soldiers while picking strawberries at the family's strawberry field. No one will ever stand trial for this murder.

It is true unfortunately, that the local violence inflicted on Palestinian women by the government of Israel and the Israeli Army, has expanded around the globe. In fact state violence and army violence, individual and collective violence are the lot of Muslim women today, not only in Palestine but wherever the enlightened Western world is setting its big imperialistic foot. It is violence which is hardly ever addressed and which is halfheartedly condoned by most people in Europe and in the USA.

... [T]he people who are destroying the world today are not Muslim. One of them is a devout Christian, one is Anglican and one is a non-devout Jew.

I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour. I don't know the kind of violence that turns a woman's life into constant hell. This daily physical and mental torture of women who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs of privacy and dignity, women whose homes are broken in at any moment of day and night, who are ordered at a gun-point to strip naked in front of strangers and their own children, whose houses are demolished, who are deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life.

I cannot completely understand Palestinian women or their suffering. I don't know how I would have survived such humiliation, such disrespect from the whole world. All I know is that the voice of mothers has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet. Mothers' cry is not heard because mothers are not invited to international forums such as this one. This I know and it is very little. But it is enough for me to remember these women are my sisters, and that they deserve that I should cry for them, and fight for them. And when they lose their children in strawberry fields or in on filthy roads by the checkpoints, when their children are shot on their way to school by Israeli children who were educated to believe that love and compassion are race- and religion-dependent, the only thing I can do is stand by them and their betrayed babies, and ask what Anna Akhmatova, another mother who lived in a regime of violence against women and children, had asked:

Why does that streak o blood, rip the petal of you cheek?
 

ANIMATION (Union of Concerned Scientists): The Nuclear Bunker Buster
 

Truth About Iraqis, Iraq: Is a new attack on Aadhamiya imminent?: How many more innocent women and children need die before the conscience of the world awakens?