The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (5 page)

Maher Arar has completed his Ph.D. in Canada and founded an online news magazine, Prism-Magazine.com. He has been focusing on the case of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was arrested in Afghanistan as a child and has grown to adulthood in the Guantánamo prison. Arar, married with two children, told me, “The struggle for justice and struggle against oppression has become a way of life for me, and I can never go back to just a simple 9-to-5 engineer anymore.”

September 8, 2010

September 11: A Day Without War

The ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States should serve as a moment to reflect on tolerance. It should be a day of peace. Yet the rising anti-Muslim fervor here, together with the continuing U.S. military occupation of Iraq and the escalating war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan), all fuel the belief that the U.S. really is at war with Islam.

September 11, 2001, united the world against terrorism. Everyone, it seemed, was with the United States, standing in solidarity with the victims, with the families who lost loved ones. The day will be remembered for generations to come, for the notorious act of coordinated mass murder. But that was not the first September 11 to be associated with terror:

September 11, 1973, Chile: Democratically elected President Salvadore Allende died in a CIA-backed military coup that ushered in a reign of terror under dictator Augusto Pinochet, in which thousands of Chileans were killed.

September 11, 1977, South Africa: Anti-apartheid leader Stephen Biko was being beaten in a police van. He died the next day.

September 11, 1990, Guatemala: Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack was murdered by the U.S.-backed military.

September 9–13, 1971, New York: The Attica prison uprising occurred, during which New York state troopers killed thirty-nine prisoners and guards and wounded hundreds of others.

September 11, 1988, Haiti: During a mass led by Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the St. Jean Bosco Church in Port-au-Prince, right-wing militiamen attacked, killing at least thirteen worshippers and injuring at least seventy-seven. Aristide would later be twice elected president, only to be ousted in U.S.-supported coups d’etat.

If anything, September 11 is a day to remember the victims of terror, all victims of terror, and to work for peace, like the group September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Formed by those who lost loved ones on 9/11/2001, their mission could serve as a national call to action: “[T]o turn our grief into action for peace. By developing and advocating nonviolent options and actions in the pursuit of justice, we hope to break the cycles of violence engendered by war and terrorism. Acknowledging our common experience with all people affected by violence throughout the world, we work to create a safer and more peaceful world for everyone.”

Our
Democracy Now!
news studio was blocks from the twin towers in New York City. We were broadcasting live as they fell. In the days that followed, thousands of fliers went up everywhere, picturing the missing, with phone numbers of family members to call if you recognized someone. These reminded me of the placards carried by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. Those are the women, wearing white headscarves, who courageously marched, week after week, carrying pictures of their missing children who disappeared during the military dictatorship there.

I am reminded, as well, by the steady stream of pictures of young people in the military killed in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and now, with increasing frequency (although pictured less in the news), who kill themselves after multiple combat deployments.

For each of the U.S. or NATO casualties, there are literally hundreds of victims in Iraq and Afghanistan whose pictures will never be shown, whose names we will never know.

While angry mobs continue attempts to thwart the building of an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan (in a vacant, long-ignored, damaged building more than two blocks away), an evangelical “minister” in Florida is organizing a September 11 “International Burn the Koran Day.” Gen. David Petraeus has stated that the burning, which has sparked protests around the globe, “could endanger troops.” He is right. But so does blowing up innocent civilians and their homes.

As in Vietnam in the 1960s, Afghanistan has a dedicated, indigenous, armed resistance, and a deeply corrupt group in Kabul masquerading as a central government. The war is bleeding over into a neighboring country, Pakistan, just as the Vietnam War spread into Cambodia and Laos.

Right after September 11, 2001, as thousands gathered in parks around New York City, holding impromptu candlelit vigils, a sticker appeared on signs, placards, and benches. It read, “Our grief is not a cry for war.”

This September 11, that message is still—painfully, regrettably—timely.

Let’s make September 11 a day without war.

September 22, 2010

Torture in Iraq Continues, Unabated

Combat operations in Iraq are over, if you believe President Barack Obama’s rhetoric. But torture in Iraq’s prisons, first exposed during the Abu Ghraib scandal, is thriving, increasingly distant from any scrutiny or accountability. After arresting tens of thousands of Iraqis, often without charge, and holding many for years without trial, the United States has handed over control of Iraqi prisons, and 10,000 prisoners, to the Iraqi government. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

After landing in London late Saturday night, we traveled to the small suburb of Kilburn to speak with Rabiha al-Qassab, an Iraqi refugee who was granted political asylum in Britain after her brother was executed by Saddam Hussein. Her husband, sixty-eight-year-old Ramze Shihab Ahmed, was a general in the Iraqi army under Saddam, fought in the Iran–Iraq War, and was part of a failed plot to overthrow the Iraqi dictator. The couple was living peacefully for years in London, until September 2009.

It was then that Ramze Ahmed learned his son, Omar, had been arrested in Mosul, Iraq. Ahmed returned to Iraq to find him and was arrested himself.

For months, Rabiha didn’t know what had become of her husband. Then, on March 28, her cell phone rang. “I don’t know the voice,” she told me.

“I said, ‘Who are you?’ He said he is very sick . . . he said, ‘Me, Ramze, Ramze. Call embassy.’ And they took the mobile, and they stop talking.”

Ramze Ahmed was being held in a secret prison at the old Muthanna Airport in Baghdad. A recent report from Amnesty International, titled “New Order, Same Abuses,” describes Muthanna as “one of the harshest” prisons in Iraq, the scene of extensive torture and under the control of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

As Rabiha showed me family photos, a piece of paper with English and Arabic words slipped out. Rabiha explained that in order to describe in English what happened to her husband, she had to consult a dictionary, since she had never used several of the English words: “Rape.” “Stick.” “Torture.” She wept as she described his account of being sodomized with a stick, suffocated repeatedly with plastic bags placed over his head, and shocked with electricity.

Not surprisingly, as detailed in the Amnesty report, the Iraqi government said that Ramze Shihab Ahmed had confessed to links to al-Qaida in Iraq. In a January 2010 press conference organized by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, videotapes were played showing nine others confessing to crimes, including Ahmed’s son, Omar, who, showing signs of beatings, confessed to “the killing of several Christians in Mosul and the detonation of a bomb in a village near Mosul.”

Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa program, told me in London, “there’s a culture of abuse [in Iraq] that has taken root. It was certainly there during the days of Saddam Hussein, but what we wanted to see from 2003 was a turning of the page, and that hasn’t happened. So we see secret prisons, people being tortured and ill-treated, being forced to make confessions . . . the perpetrators are not being held to account. They’re not being identified.”

After that brief, interrupted phone call that Rabiha received from her husband, she did call the British government, and its embassy in Iraq tracked Ahmed down in al-Rusafa prison in Baghdad. Normally with a cane, they found him in a wheelchair. Rabiha has a photo of him taken by the British representative.

Amnesty reports that there are an estimated 30,000 prisoners in Iraq (200 remaining under U.S. control). The condition and treatment of the Iraqi prisoners is considered by the U.S. to be, Smart says, “an Iraqi issue.” But with the U.S. continuing to pour billions of dollars into its ongoing military presence there, and to fund the Iraqi government, the treatment of prisoners is clearly a U.S. issue as well. Amnesty has launched a grassroots campaign to spur further action to secure Ahmed’s release.

Meanwhile, Rabiha al-Qassab, isolated and alone in north London, spends time feeding the ducks in a local park, which her husband used to do.

She told me: “I talk with the ducks. I say, ‘You remember the man who gave you the food? He is in a prison. Ask God to help him.’”

October 27, 2010

War Should Be an Election Issue

Just days away from crucial midterm elections, WikiLeaks, the whistle-blower website, unveiled the largest classified military leak in history. Almost 400,000 secret Pentagon documents relating to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq were made available online. The documents, in excruciating detail, portray the daily torrent of violence, murder, rape, and torture to which Iraqis have been subjected since George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished.” The WikiLeaks release, dubbed “The Iraq War Logs,” has been topping the headlines in Europe. But in the U.S., it barely warranted a mention on the agenda-setting Sunday talk shows.

First, the documents themselves. I spoke with Julian Assange, the founder and editor in chief of WikiLeaks.org. He explained: “These documents cover the periods of 2004 to the beginning of 2010. It is the most accurate description of a war to have ever been released . . . each casualty, where it happened, when it happened and who was involved, according to internal U.S. military reporting.”

David Leigh, investigations editor at the
Guardian
of London, told me the leak “represents the raw material of history . . . what the unvarnished version does is confirm what many of us feared and what many journalists have attempted to report over the years, that Iraq became a bloodbath, a real bloodbath of unnecessary killings, of civilian slaughter, of torture and of people being beaten to death.”

The reports, in bland bureaucratic language and rife with military jargon, are grisly in detail. Go to the website and search the hundreds of thousands of records. Words like “rape,” “murder,” “execution,” “kidnapping,” and “decapitation” return anywhere from hundreds to thousands of reports, documenting not only the scale and regularity of the violence, but, ultimately, a new total for civilian deaths in Iraq.

The British-based Iraq Body Count, which maintains a carefully researched database on just the documented deaths in Iraq, estimates that the Iraq War Logs document an additional 15,000 heretofore unrecorded civilian deaths, bringing the total, from when the invasion began, to more than 150,000 deaths, 80 percent of which are civilian.

In one case, in February 2007, two Iraqi men were attempting to surrender, under attack by a U.S. helicopter gunship. The logs reveal that the crew members called back to their base and were told, “They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets.” The two were killed. The helicopter unit was the same one that, months later, attacked a group of civilians in Baghdad, killing all of the men, including two Reuters employees, and injuring two children. That case, also documented in the Iraq War Logs, was the subject of another high-profile WikiLeaks release, which it called “Collateral Murder.” The Apache helicopter’s own video of the violent assault, with the accompanying military radio audio, revealed soldiers laughing and cursing as they slaughtered the civilians, and made headlines globally.

Imagine if the military operations were not subject to such secrecy, if the February murder of the two men with their arms raised, trying to surrender, had become public. If there was an investigation, and appropriate punitive action was taken. Perhaps Reuters videographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, twenty-two years old, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, the father of four, would be alive today, along with the civilians they were unlucky enough to be walking with that fateful July day. That’s why transparency matters.

Sunday’s network talk shows barely raised the issue of the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history. When asked, they say the midterm elections are their main focus. Fine, but war is an election issue. It should be raised in every debate, discussed on every talk show.

I see the media as a huge kitchen table, stretching across the globe, that we all sit around, debating and discussing the most important issues of the day: war and peace, life and death. Anything less than that is a disservice to the servicemen and -women of this country. They can’t have these debates on military bases. They rely on us in civilian society to have the discussions that determine whether they live or die, whether they are sent to kill or be killed. Anything less than that is a disservice to a democratic society.