Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
19, 2003
Crisis-Tourism at
Abu Ghraib Prison
The
New Guard is Saddam's Old
By ROBERT FISK
ABU GHRAIB PRISON.
We could see them beyond the dirt yard, standing
in the heat beside their sand-brown tents, the razor wire wrapped
in sheaths around their compound.
No pictures of the prisoners, we were
told. Do not enter the compound. Do not go inside the wire.
Of the up to 800 Iraqis held in Abu Ghraib
Prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, only a handful are "security
detainees"--the rest are "criminal detainees"--but
until now almost all of them have lived out here in the heat
and dust and muck.
Which is why the Americans were so pleased
to see us at Saddam Hussein's vile old jail yesterday: things
are getting better.
So first, the good news. Brigadier General
Janis Karpinski, commander of the US 800th Military Police Brigade,
has cleaned up the burned and looted cells for hundreds of prisoners.
A new medical section with stocks of
medicines, x-ray machines and even a heart fibrillator has been
installed. There is even a kindly Iraqi doctor called Hussain
Majid who praises the new Iraqi Ministry of Health and the occupation
authorities for sending him--and paying for--"all
the medicines we need".
In the newly painted cells, there are
blankets and toothpaste, toothbrush, soap and shampoo for every
man, neatly placed for them--and for us, I suspect--on top of
their prison blankets.
Crisis-tourism is a pastime in New Iraq
but yesterday's little trip around Abu Ghraib was, well, odd.
Karpinski is obviously a tough lady--she
was an intelligence officer in 7th Special Forces at Fort Bragg
and served as a "targeting officer" in Saudi Arabia
after Saddam invaded Kuwait--but she had a little difficulty
at first in recalling that there was a riot at the jail in May
in which US troops used "lethal force" when protesting
prisoners threw stones and tent-legs at American military policemen.
The troops killed a teenage inmate.
But Karpinski was remarkably frank about
other events, such as the fact that the Americans in Abu Ghraib
are attacked four out of every seven nights with mortars, small
arms and rocket-propelled grenades.
That's 16 times a month. And that's a
lot of attacks.
Then came the head doctor of the prison,
Majid. When I asked him what his job was when Saddam used the
place as a torture and execution centre, he replied that he was,
um, the head doctor of Abu Ghraib Prison.
Indeed, half his staff were running the
medical centre at the jail under the Saddam regime.
"No, I didn't ever attend the executions,"
he said. "I couldn't stand that. I sent my junior doctors
to do the death certificates."
Except at night, of course, when the
security services brought in political prisoners for hanging.
Then Majid would receive an instruction saying "no death
certificates".
The politicals were hanged at night.
During the day, the doctor said, it was the "killers"
who were hanged. Killers? Of course, there was a statutory visit
to Abu Ghraib's old death chamber, the double hanging room in
which thousands of Iraqis were put to death. Karpinski gave the
lever a tug and the great iron trap-doors clanged open, their
echo vibrating through the walls.
Majid said he had never heard them before;
that he was never even a member of the Baath Party.
So let this be written in history: the
chief medical officer at Saddam's nastiest prison--who is now
the chief medical officer at America's cleanest Iraqi prison--was
never a member of the Baath Party and never saw an execution.
Of course, there are things which only
those with a heart of stone cannot be moved by--the last words
written and carved on the walls of the filthy death-row cells,
just a few metres from the gallows.
"Ahmed Qambal, 8/9/2000", "Ahmed
Aziz from Al-Najaf governorate, with Jabah, 2/9/01", "Abbad
Abu Mohamed".
Sometimes they had added verses from
the Koran.
"Death is better than shame. Death
is life for a believer and a high honour."
What courage it must have taken to write
such words, their very last on earth.
But there was something just a little
too neat about all this. Against Saddam's cruelty, any institution
looks squeaky-clean.
Yet there's a lot about Abu Ghraib that
doesn't look as clean as the new kitchens.
There is still no clear judicial process
for the supposed killers, thieves and looters behind the razor
wire. There was no mention--until we brought it up--of the mortar
attack that killed six prisoners in their tents last month.
The Americans sent psychologists to talk
to the inmates afterwards and found that they believed--surprise,
surprise--the Americans were using them as human shields.
And you can just imagine what those same
prisoners feel in their tents on four out of every seven nights
when the mortars explode again around the old jail. Which is
one reason, of course, why Karpinski wants to get her prisoners
into their new cells.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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