After the U.S.’s illegal war on Iraq, “reconstruction” became one of Washington’s several clichés to justify the ongoing occupation and the continued crimes against the Iraqis. But in reality, the “reconstruction” of Iraq is the continuation of the destruction of the war-torn country.
According to an article on the Journal Online, occupation forces turned Iraq into a cluster of prisons and detention centers. The $20 billion originally allocated by the Bush Administration to “reconstruct” Iraq was a valuable gift to U.S. corporations. The only visible development in Iraq today is the construction of prisons. Several prisons have been built across the country, where human rights violations are committed on daily basis by occupation forces, although an occupying power is obliged -- under the Geneva Conventions -- to protect the civilian population and provide them with security.
“The U.S. State Department is winding down its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request is for prisons. State Department Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey told reporters he was asking Congress for $100 million for prisons but no other big building projects were in the pipeline,” a Reuters commentary states.
The most infamous prisons in Iraq are the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad and the British-run Camp Bucca. But many other prisons have been established by occupation forces at army bases, airports and public buildings across Iraq, such as the U.S. Military compound at Al-Dhiloeia, north of Baghdad, Camp Cropper Centre at Baghdad International Airport, and the Hilla military compound, a joint U.S.-Polish base. Several Iraqi schools and colleges have also been turned into detention centers.
In August 2004, a legal team from Focus on American & Arab Interests & Relations (FAAIR), U.S. non-profit, non-governmental organization, found that Iraqi prisoners were mistreated, abused, tortured and raped on daily basis at some 38 U.S. military-run detention centers in Iraq. “The list includes everything from resort islands to aircraft hangars to college student housing facilities converted to U.S. military bases with military detention centers. Most of the airports have detention centers, including Baghdad International Airport, Mosul Airport, Baquba Airport, etc,” according to Mohammad Alomari, FAAIR Media Director.
Moreover, different “death squads” - formed, trained and armed by the U.S.-led occupation forces - have their own torture chambers in prisons hidden inside bunkers in the Interior and Defense ministries, police stations and clandestine locations across Iraq. This allows the United States and the United Kingdom to lay the blame of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees on the security forces of the Shia-dominated Interior and Defense Ministries, as if they were independent ministries in a sovereign, not occupied, country. Many Iraqis are also detained in secret facilities or “black sites” as part of a large covert prison system set up by the CIA in 2001 in violation of international laws. The Bush Administration, under intense international pressure, now wants to justify its violation of the Geneva Conventions to validate the use of torture on Iraqi prisoners and other foreign nationals held in U.S.-run prisons in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and other “black sites” around the world.
Innocent
The official number of Iraqi men, women and children in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq is said to be around 16,000, the ABC News reported in June 2005. This figure has rocketed and Iraqi officials now put the number as high as “hundreds of thousands” prisoners. FAAIR estimated the number of Iraqis who have been detained by U.S. and British forces (from March 2003 to October 2004) to be over 156,000. The majority of those detainees are innocent civilians arbitrarily arrested during random raids by U.S. forces. There is no law to certify or register prisoners. Families and relatives have no idea where are their loved ones. Hundreds of Iraqis have simply disappeared after they were taken prisoners.
John Pace of the UN Human Rights in Iraq, recently said that between “80 percent to 90 percent were innocent people” caught “quite blindly" and taken to prisons. They are often tortured, sexually abused and, in many cases, murdered in gross violations of the Geneva Conventions and international law. Furthermore, in an interview with the New York Times, Anthony Lagouranis, a former U.S. army interrogator who served in various places in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib), admitted that he “used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story)." He added, “Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted."
Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general who supervised detention operations at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq, blamed the practices of abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners on top Pentagon officials and the U.S. Administration. “The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized [it] without the approval of the Vice President," she said. “I will continue to ask how they can continue to blame seven rogue soldiers on the night shift, when there is the preponderance of hard information from a variety of sources [that] says otherwise,” she added.
Karpinski also pointed the finger at the role of the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, in the abuses, torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners. In fact, some of those U.S. soldiers involved in the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib have attended training courses in Israel. “In January and February of 2003, Israeli and American troops trained together in southern Israel's Negev desert. Israel has also hosted senior law enforcement officials from the United States for a seminar on counter-terrorism," reported the Associated Press.
As the Iraqis continue to suffer from the brutality of the occupation, the United Nations, the Red Cross as well as other western NGOs and human rights groups do nothing to stop these human rights violations. Moreover, these organizations protest the torture and abuse mainly out of concern for the safety of American and British soldiers. Their concerns have nothing to do with human rights of Iraqis and other foreign citizens detained in U.S.-run prisons around the world.
Those who committed these heinous crimes against the Iraqi people, including the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, mostly women and children, remain at large. Instead, their crimes are blamed on a “few bad apples” in the military, as if those "rogue" soldiers didn't follow the policies laid by the top echelon of the Pentagon and the Bush administration. This deliberate and uncontrolled daily bloodshed and terror generate chaos and strip the Iraqis of their right to live peacefully, creating a situation opposite to the U.S.'s claims of bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people and making it responsible for the same crimes that Saddam Hussein is being tried for.
Almost all Iraqis reject the presence of foreign forces. How could the Americans continue to support an illegal war against defenseless people? An immediate and full withdrawal of occupation forces from Iraq could restore peace to the once nited nation.