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Welcome to Talk Nation Radio, a half hour discussion on politics, human rights, and the environment. I’m Dori Smith. Our subject today is Iraq, and a talk given at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain. Students there are studying how to make peace and as part of their education they have joined state peace groups in organizing a week of forums on Iraq. On October 24th they were joined by Journalist Dahr Jamail and we will be listening to a tape of Jamail’s talk.

Dahr Jamail is an American who decided to go to Iraq as an un-embedded reporter because he was concerned about the lack of adequate press coverage about the war. He began reporting for independent media outlets and as his skills and knowledge of Iraq grew he began to report regularly, becoming Iraq correspondent for the Pacifica radio show Flashpoints and contributing regularly to Free Speech Radio News. Unlike many journalists in Iraq, Dahr Jamail ventured out into the country to talk with the Iraqi people, even heading to Fallujah during a very dangerous time there when the US was attacking. He is now recognized as a reliable source to the global media (See: Inter-Press News Service, the Nation Magazine, Asia Times, the Guardian, BBC, and more.)

Dahr Jamail has joinedDemocracy Now’s Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales to talk about politics and the war in Iraq ultimately describing testimony he was invited to give at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Italy and Turkey.

Jamail’s talk this time is somewhat graphic; however, it provides important information about what has gone on in U.S. run prisons in Iraq. Torture which human rights organizations all over the world are trying to stop. Dahr Jamail:

Dahr Jamail: (October 24, 2005) Thanks everyone for coming on this day where the government has actually just announced the 2000th U.S. soldier to have been killed, even though that day is not actually today. There has been at least nine names awaiting confirmation of dead soldiers long before today, but today is the day they chose to announce it. So rather grim day but very important for you and everyone else to keep paying attention to what is happening in Iraq because another grim thing that’s happened actually is this constitution was officially recognized as having passed and already Sunni groups are announcing they are going to be boycotting the upcoming election on December 15th. So things are certainly only going to continue to degrade.

But what I want to talk to you about tonight is some things that I presented at the World Tribunal on Iraq in Turkey this past summer. So I want to give a presentation and talk to you about torture and things like the U.S. Military impeding medical care inside of Iraq, and then give you an update on what is happening on the ground there and what life looks like there today. Then I have a short film to show you and talk to you a bit about the most recent siege of Fallujah.

In May of 2004 I was interviewing a man who had just been released from Abu Ghraib prison. Like so many I interviewed from various U.S. Military detention facilities around Iraq he had been tortured horrifically. He still managed to maintain his sense of humor. He began to laugh when telling me how U.S. soldiers made him beat other prisoners. He laughed because he told me that he had been beaten himself prior to this and it was he could do but to lift his arm and let it drop on other men in order to beat them.

Later in the same interview when telling of another story he laughed again and said, “The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house.” But this testimony is not about the indomitable spirit of the Iraqi people. –About the dignity and strength of Iraqis we need no testimony.

This testimony is about ongoing violations of international law being committed by the occupiers of Iraq on a daily basis in regards to rampant torture, the neglect and impeding of the health care sector and the ongoing failure to allow Iraqis to reconstruct their own infrastructure.

To discuss torture there are so many stories that I could use here, but I’ll use two examples which are indicative of scores of others that I documented while inside Iraq.

Ali Abbas lives in the Al-Amiriyah district of Baghdad. So many of his neighbors were detained that friends urged him to go to the nearby U.S. base to try to get answers as to why so many innocent people were being detained. He went three times. On the fourth time he was detained himself despite not being charged with any crime. This was on September 13th 2003. Within two days he was transferred from the military base to Abu Ghraib where he was held for over three months.

“The minute I got there the suffering began,” said Abbas about his interrogator. “I asked him for water and he said after the investigation I would get some. He accused me of so many things and asked me so many questions. Among them he said that I hated Christians.”

He was forced to strip naked shortly after arriving and remained that way for most of his stay in the prison. “They made us lay on top of each other as if it were sex and beat us with a broom, he said.”

In addition to being beaten on their genitals, detainees were also denied water and food for extended periods of time, and then were forced to watch as their food was thrown in the trash. Treatment included holding a loaded gun to his head to make him not cry out in pain as his hand ties were tightened.

“My hands were enlarged because there was no blood, because they cuffed them so tight,” he told me. “My head was covered with a sack and they fastened my right hand to a pole with handcuffs. They made me stand on my toes to clip me to it.”

Abbas said soldiers doused him in cold water while holding him under a fan and often times, “they put on a loudspeaker, put the speakers on my ears, and said shut up, fuck fuck fuck.”

In this manner Abbas’s interrogators routinely deprived him of sleep. Abbas said that at one point two men came, one a foreigner and one a translator; “He asked me who I was. I said I am a human being. They told me, we are going to cut your head off and send you to hell. We will take you to Guantanamo.”

A female soldier told him our aim is to put you in hell so you would tell the truth. These are the orders we have from our superiors. To turn your lives into hell. Abbas added, “they shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity, and starved us.”

Another time one of the guards said it was time for, “celebrations”. They made some of the detainees strip naked and threw cold water on them said Abbas, and made them run and smash their faces against the walls while the guard was whistling. A female guard told the male detainees that the penis of the dog was longer than theirs, and for Abbas and several other detainees she made them strip naked, tied their hands tightly behind their backs, threw them on the ground and made them say, “I am a donkey” over and over while they were forced to lick the ground.

He also said, “They cut my hair into strips like an Indian. They cut my moustache. Put a plate in my hand and made me beg from the other prisoners as if I was a beggar.”

He told me, Saddam Hussein use to have people like those who tortured us. Why do they put Saddam in a trial but they do not put the Americans to trial. But unlike Saddam Hussein, the U.S. interrogators also desecrated Islam as part of their humiliation. Abbas was made to fast during the first day of Eid, the breaking of the fast of Ramadan, which is haram (forbidden).

Sometimes at night when he would read his holy Koran he had to hold it in the hallway for light. He told me, “soldiers would walk by and kick the holy Koran and sometimes they would try to piss on it or wipe shit on it.”

Abbas did not feel this was the work of a few individual soldiers. “This was organized. It wasn’t just individuals, and every one of the troops in Abu Ghraib was responsible for it,” he said.

Towards the end of his interview Abbas stated, “America does not have a future in the world. The Statue of Liberty has been smashed by the boots of the American troops. And this is all because of Abu Ghraib. Saddam Hussein was a cruel enemy to us but I hoped that I was killed by him rather than being alive with the Americans. After this journey of torture and suffering what else can I think?”

According to a Human Rights Watch report released on April 27th of this year, “Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg. It’s now clear that abuse of detainees has happened all over from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay to a lot of third country dungeons where the US has sent prisoners, and probably quite a few other places we don’t even know about.

The report adds, “Harsh and coercive interrogation techniques such as subjecting detainees to painful stress positions and extended sleep depravation have been routinely used in detention centers throughout Iraq. The earlier report of Major General Antonio Teguba”>found “numerous instances of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses constituting systematic and illegal abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”

Another Pentagon report documented 44 allegations of such war crimes at Abu Ghraib. An ICRC Report concluded that in Military intelligence sections of Abu Ghraib, “methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by Military Intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information.”

Amnesty International has also released similar findings recently. Other human rights groups report that U.S. Military doctors, nurses and medics have been complicit in torture and other illegal procedures such as those administered to Sadiq Zoman

Fifty-five year old Sadiq Zoman, detained from his home in Kirkuk by a raid by U.S. soldiers that produced no weapons, was taken to a police office in Kirkuk, the Kirkuk Airport detention center, the Takrit Airport detention center and then finally to the U.S. 28th combat support hospital where he was treated by Dr. Michael Hodges, a Lt Colonel. Lt Colonel Hodges medical report listed the primary diagnoses of Zoman’s condition as hypoxic brain injury with persistent vegetative state, myocardial infarction and heat stroke.

After one month in custody Zoman was dropped off in a coma at the general hospital in Takrit by U.S. soldiers. Zoman’s last name was listed as his first name on the report despite the fact that all of Zoman’s identification papers were taken during the raid on his home. Because of this it took his family weeks to locate him in the hospital.

Hodges medical report did not mention the fact that the back of Zoman’s head was bashed in. Nor that he had electrical burn marks on the bottoms of his feet and genitals. Or why he had lash marks across his back and his chest.

Today he lies in bed still in a coma and there has been no compensation provided to his now impoverished family to what was done to Sadiq Zoman.

Another aspect I shall discuss is the catastrophic situation of the health care system in Iraq. I released a report on the condition of Iraq’s hospitals under the U.S. led occupation. Although the Iraq Ministry of Health has supposedly gained its sovereignty and has received promises of over 1 billion dollars in U.S. funding, hospitals in Iraq continue to face ongoing medicine, equipment, and staffing shortages under the U.S.-led occupation.

During the 1990s, medical supplies and equipment were constantly in short supply because of the sanctions against Iraq. While the war and occupation brought promises of relief from the effects of the sanctions, hospitals have had little chance to recover and re-supply. Instead the occupation has closely resembled a low grade war since its inception.

In addition, allocation of resources by occupation authorities has been dismal. Thus throughout Baghdad there are ongoing shortages of functional equipment and medicines of even the most basic items such as analgesics, antibiotics, anesthetics, and insulin. Surgical items and even basic supplies like rubber gloves, gauze, and medical tape, are running out.

In April of 2004 an International Committee of the Red Cross stated that hospitals in Iraq are overwhelmed with new patients, short of medicine and supplies, and lack of adequate electricity and water with ongoing bloodshed stretching the hospitals already meager resources to the limit.

Ample testimony from medical practitioners in Iraq confirms this crisis. The general practitioner at the prosthetics workshop at Al-Kena Hospital in Baghdad, Dr. Dr. Thamiz Aziz Abul Rahman who said, “Eleven months ago we submitted an emergency order for prosthetic materials to the Ministry of Health, and still we have nothing.” After a pause he added, “This is worse than even during the sanctions.”

Dr. Qasim al-Nuwesri, the chief manager at Chuwader General Hospital, one of the two hospitals in the sprawling slum area of Sadr City, Baghdad and home to 3 million people, added that they, too, faced a shortage of most supplies and also of ambulances. But for his hospital, the lack of potable water was the major problem. “Of course we have typhoid, cholera, kidney stones…but we now even have the very rare Hepatitis Type-E…and it has become common in our area,” said al-Nuwesri, adding that they never faced these problems prior to the invasion of 2003.”

Chuwader Hospital needs at least Chuwader hospital needs at least 2000 liters of water per day to function with basic sterilization practices. According to Dr. al-Nuwesri, they received 15% of this amount. “The rest of the water is contaminated and causing problems, as are the electricity cuts,” he added, “Without electricity our instruments in the operating room cannot work and we have no pumps to bring us water.”

At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Ahmed, who asked that only his first name be used because he feared US military reprisals said of the April 2004 siege that “the Americans shot out the lights in the front of our hospital. They prevented doctors from reaching the emergency unit at the hospital, and we quickly began to run out of supplies and much needed medications.” He also said that several times Marines kept the physicians in the residence building, intentionally prohibiting them from entering the hospital in order to treat patients.

In November, shortly after raising Nazzal Emergency Hospital, US forces entered Fallujah General Hospital, the city’s only healthcare facility for trauma victims, detaining employees and patients alike. According to medics on the scene, water and electricity were “cut off,” ambulances targeted or confiscated by the US military, and surgeons, without exception, were kept out of the besieged city.

Hospital raids by the US military and US-backed Iraqi forces now appear to be standard operating procedure. On the 18th of June of this year, doctors at the main hospital in Baquba went on strike, saying they are fed up with constant abuse at the hands of aggressive Iraqi police and soldiers.

Dr. Mohammed Hazim in Baquba, pleaded for his governor to protect he and his colleagues from “organized terrorism of the police and army.”

When wounded Iraqi security forces showed up demanding treatment, a Dr. Hussein told one of them he would require an x-ray. The doctor was told to go to hell by the policeman he was treating and was then beaten. The same policeman then ordered another police officer to put a bag over the doctor’s head and take him away.

“Our security guards tried to stop them, telling them I was a doctor, but they didn’t listen and beat the security guards too,” he said, “Then one of them put a gun to my head and threatened me.”

Similar behavior has been reported during the recent US-Iraqi military operations in Haditha and Al-Qa’im. Doctors also recently went on strike at the large Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad in a very similar incident.

Many doctors in Iraq believe that the lack of assistance, if not outright hostility, by the US military, coupled with the lack of rebuilding and reconstruction by foreign contractors has compounded the problems they are facing.

The former ambassador of Iraq Paul Bremer admitted that US led coalition spending on the Iraqi Health system was inadequate when he said, “It’s not nearly enough to cover the needs in the healthcare field.”

When asked if his hospital had received assistance from the US military or reconstruction contractors, Dr. Sarmad Raheem, the administrator of chief doctors at Al-Kerkh Hospital in Baghdad said, “Never ever. Some soldiers came here five months ago and asked what we needed. We told them and they never brought us one single needle…We heard that some people from the CPA came here, but they never did anything for us.”

At Fallujah General Hospital, Dr. Mohammed said there has been virtually no assistance from foreign contractors, and of the US military he commented, “They send only bombs, not medicine.”

International aid has been stymied by the horrendous security situation in Iraq. After the UN headquarters was bombed in Baghdad in August 2003, killing 22 people, aid agencies and NGOs either reduced their staffing or pulled out entirely.

With senior Iraqi doctors fleeing Iraq en masse for fear of being kidnapped, interns and younger doctors are left to deal with the catastrophic situation. The World Health Organization last year warned of a health emergency in Baghdad, as well as throughout Iraq if current conditions persist. But despite claims from the Ministry of Health of more drugs, better equipment, and generalized improvement, doctors on the ground still see “no such improvement.”

To conclude, a summary of the overall situation on the ground in Iraq is in order. Over two and a half years into the illegal occupation, while Iraq sits upon a sea of oil, ongoing gasoline shortages plague Iraqis who sometimes wait two days to fill their cars. In a country where a long gas line once meant a one-car wait, Iraqis who are lucky enough to afford it now purchase black market petrol and hope that it is not watered down.

Electricity remains in short supply. Most of Iraq, including the northern region, receives on average 3 hours of electricity per day amidst the nearly non-existent reconstruction efforts. Even the better areas of Baghdad receive only 6-8 hours per day, forcing those who can afford them to use small generators to run fans and refrigerators in their homes. Of course, this is only for those who’ve been able to obtain the now rarefied gasoline.

The security situation is, needless to say, horrendous. With over 100,000 Iraqis killed thus far and the number of US soldiers now over 2,000, the violence only continues to escalate.

Since the new Iraqi so-called government was sworn this past April, well over 3,700 Iraqis and over 540 US soldiers have died in the violence. These numbers will only continue to escalate as the occupation grinds on. As the heavy handed tactics of the US military persist, the Iraqi resistance continues to grow in both its number and lethality.

As I mentioned before, potable water remains in short supply. Cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases are rampant even in parts of the capital city as lack of reconstruction continues to plague Iraq’s infrastructure. Raw sewage is common not just Baghdad, but in other cities throughout Iraq.

With over 70% unemployment, a growing resistance and an infrastructure in shambles, the future for Iraq remains bleak as long as the failed occupation grinds on. While the Bush Administration continues to disregard calls for a timetable of withdrawal, Iraqis continue to suffer and die with little hope for their future. With each passing day, the catastrophe in Iraq resembles the US debacle in Vietnam more and more.

Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhmi, a senior political scientist at Baghdad University told me last winter during an interview, “It will take Iraqis something like a quarter of a century to rebuild their country, to heal their wounds, to reform their society, to bring about some sort of national reconciliation, democracy and tolerance for each other. But that process will not begin until the US occupation of Iraq ends.”

Yesterday the results of a poll which was commissioned by the British Military were released and the poll found that 82% of Iraqis strongly oppose the continuing presence of foreign troops. Less than 1% of the population feels that foreign troops have helped improve security. And 45% of Iraqis feel that attacks against U.S. troops are justified.

Some of the top recommendations made by the World Tribunal on Iraq; the Culminating Session which took place in Istambul this past summer:

1. The top recommendation was a full immediate unconditional withdrawal of all occupation forces from Iraq.

2. Full compensation paid to every Iraqi who has suffered the loss of a loved one or been damaged as the result of the invasion or occupation.

3. All reconstruction projects reopened for bidding, giving Iraqi companies top preference.

Now I want to talk about Fallujah before I show a film about that city and I want to do this really to highlight the disparity in the media coverage between what I saw on the ground and what actually happened on the ground compared to how it was maybe reported in the corporate media back home. So try to remember as I go through this talking about Fallujah, maybe bits of news that you picked up along the way from the Yahoo home page as far as headlines in the mainstream media or that kind of thing.

So what I want to do is just contextualize what happened in Fallujah during the invasion leading up to the November siege and then I’ll show the film, because the film will take it from what happened with the November siege on up to today.

To start with most people in Fallujah before the invasion considered themselves victims and opponents of Saddam Hussein. So much so that during the invasion of Iraq itself in the spring of 2003 there was no fighting in Fallujah. But problems began not too long after that when, about three weeks after the fall of Baghdad right at the end of April of 2003 U.S. forces had occupied a secondary school in the middle of Fallujah. So the people had a demonstration the day before classes because they weren’t too keen on having soldiers in the school and plus they wanted the school available for their kids to use the next day.

U.S. forces ordered the demonstrators to disperse and when they didn’t they opened fire and killed 17 of them. Hence the resistance was born in Fallujah. People then started launching attacks on the military, and then of course, the military responded with more patrols and heavier handed tactics and so it went leading up to the events of the situation just before the April siege of the city started which was the U.S. basically couldn’t any longer run patrols in the city without them being attacked every single time.

So they had started using armed contractors, I prefer to call them mercenaries in Iraq, to carry out their dirty work because these people don’t have to operate under the Military rules of engagement and they don’t, and so these guys, there had been reports coming out of Fallujah for months prior to March of 2003 of these guys running around carrying out assassinations and literally raping and pillaging in the city.

When a small two car convoy of these guys was going through the city on March 31st of 2003 they were attacked and horrible things were done to their bodies. They were burned and chopped up and parts of them hung from one of the bridges of the Euphrates right on the outskirts of the city. It was something that was strongly denounced by all of the religious leaders, the mosque speakers, and the Imams in the city staunchly denounced this behavior that happened after these guys were killed. Of course, that wasn’t reported in any of the media back here, but despite that happening the Military commanders in charge of Fallujah, the Marine commander, did not want to invade the city. He felt that it was, well this was obviously a huge setback to their efforts, but they felt it was better to carry on with reconstruction projects and try to win back the trust of the people of Fallujah.

The order to siege the city in April came directly from Mr. Bush himself, despite what Military planners were saying –it probably wasn’t the best idea, very similar to the invasion of Iraq.

So the April siege occurred. There were 734 deaths according to Fallujah General Hospital in the city and they estimated that conservatively 60% of them were civilians.

The siege failed because the Military, it became clear that without totally destroying the city they wouldn’t be able to take it, which was essentially what they tried to do in November. And so from the beginning of May 2004 up until the November siege started the city remained unoccupied. It was the only unoccupied city of Iraq for those months.

You’ve been listening to a talk by journalist Dahr Jamail who spoke at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut, on October 24th. Jamail has written extensively about his trip to Fallujah. He carries with him a video of the devastation of that city that is very disturbing for his audiences to see. His reports on Fallujah are available at Dahr Jamail joined student peace groups and members of the pacifist group AFSC, the American Friends Service Committee, for his lecture on Iraq. For Talk Nation Radio I’m Dori Smith. This program was produced in the studios of WHUS Storrs and you can log on to listen Live every Wed. at 5 PM.
try Talk Nation for transcripts and discussion about the issues in this talk. A wonderful composer named Fritz Heede was kind enough to send us a CD for today’s program. His music can be heard in the background of the film The Oil Factor

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