The Skeptic الشكاك

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.
More…

804 ‘Killing Is a Career’

The BBC’s Hugh Sykes talks to leaders of Iraq’s “Awakening movement” who warn that if their men aren’t incorporated into the Iraqi Army and police forces, they may switch sides.

An Ameriya engineer who did not want to give his name is also uneasy. He says the continuing security of the neighbourhood relies on all the Awakening men, not just a few of them.

He fears many will be bored, will lose their status, and may be tempted back to al-Qaeda.

“Killing is a career,” he said.

And al-Qaeda are busy threatening members of the Awakening movement. While I was sitting with him, Abu Ibrahim al Azawi got a mobile phone text message from an al-Qaeda member.

“We will put you in the sewer,” it read, “like all unbelievers who sell their souls for dollars.”

The message continued: “You are the shoes of the worshippers of the cross.” Showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult. [Full story]

(Had to include that last sentence for Angry Arab, who gets a kick out of foreign journalists explaining that “showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult.”)

Along the same lines, see Robert Dreyfuss’ phone interview with another Awakening commander:

The commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement in Baghdad says that attacks by the Iraqi government and government-allied militiamen against Awakening leaders and rank-and-file members are likely to spark a new Sunni resistance movement. That resistance force will conduct attacks against American troops and Iraqi army and police forces, he says. “Look around,” he says. “It has already come back. It is getting stronger. Look at what is happening in Baghdad.” [Full story]

780 Contractor Wants Immunity in Abu Ghraib Suits

Yeah, I’ll bet they do…

HAGERSTOWN, Maryland (AP) — Defense contractor CACI claims it should be immune from lawsuits alleging torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, saying it was doing the U.S. government’s work as a supplier of interrogators.

The Maryland-based company and its sister, CACI Premier Technology, say in court documents that they’ll ask for the charges to be dismissed next week.

Eleven U.S. soldiers were convicted of breaking military laws in the Abu Ghraib scandal but no contractors have faced charges.

CACI and another contractor, L-3 Communications, are accused in separate lawsuits of a conspiracy to torture detainees in 2003 and 2004.

Plaintiffs attorneys said the company’s claim of immunity has no merit.

While we’re on the subject of the United States abroad, see this response to the U.S. presidential debate from Pakistani dentist and blogger Awab Alvi.

760 Detainee Abuse in Iraq

U.S. Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogation expert, tells the Senate Armed Services Committee what he saw in Iraq:

Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him, and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. They could intervene only if he passed out, Kleinman said his two colleagues told the guards.

Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said. […]

Kleinman also detailed sitting in on another interrogation. An Iraqi prisoner was on his knees in a room painted all black with a light shining in his face. Behind him stood an American guard slapping an iron bar against his palm. After every question the Iraqi answered, his military interrogators slapped him across the face. That had been going on for 30 minutes.

In related news, a federal appeals court has upheld a 2006 ruling that the U.S. Department of Defense must release photographs showing the abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. See the ACLU’s press release.

602 Sadrist Penguins

Pure, pure genius:

Via the father of the movements.

601 Gunshots, Bread, Identity

I’ll write more later. I’m still busy with work after a weekend out of town (this is why I work through most weekends), but I wanted to flag a few quick items in the meantime:

• The Good: Kifaya leader George Ishaq and at least nine journalists detained for trying to cover the situation in Mahalla (see last post) have been released. Good. Reuters photographer Nasser Nouri was among them. His photos were among the best from last weekend’s unrest, and he got them at the price of a rubber bullet to the leg and a weekend in jail. The man deserves a nice, fat, all-expenses paid holiday to a seaside resort of his choosing (are you listening, Mr. Wright?).
• The Bad: Yesterday a court in Cairo rejected an appeal to free Isra’a Abd al-Fattah, who spread word of the April 6 strike via Facebook, and six others. They are in custody pending investigation. Isra’a told Al-Masry al-Youm: “I am not a hero or a leader. I am just an Egyptian girl who loves her country and who received a message saying: ‘Stay Home,’ which I forwarded to my friends only.”
• The Ugly: The fate of hundreds of other detainees taken from around the country last week is still unknown. Al-Masry al-Youm has an eloquent photo showing one of them, a wounded demonstrator chained to his hospital bed, on the front page today. Family members are still in the dark, and it’s not clear a) who’s in custody, b) what, if anything, they’re charged with, and c) whether they have any sort of legal representation. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued condemnations and calls for an investigation into the use of excessive force by police. I can’t find the Amnesty statement online, so I’m posting both after the break.
• The Ugly: Police have arrested a man in al-Sharqiyyah governorate for firing gunshots in a bread line when bakers refused to give him more government-subsidized bread than his daily family ration allowed. The price of bread has increased by 50 percent over the past year.
• The Good: Two fantastic posts on religion and identity in Egypt. “To veil or not to veil: that is the goddamn question” Egyptian journalist, blogger, and muhaggibah Pakinam Amer asks. Read it alongside Forsoothsayer‘s excellent post on being an Egyptian, an Arab, and a Copt. “I am an Arab,” she declares, no matter what the diaspora Copts say.
• The Good: ‘Al-Qaeda’s Arithmetic of Response,’ a solid guest post from a mutual friend of Abu Muqawama‘s and mine. In the hands of a lesser researcher, each paragraph of this would have been a stand-alone article. Londostani, who actually knows what he’s talking about, needs to write a book, if only as an antidote to all the self-aggrandizing opportunists making a buck off 9/11 via Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.
• The Good: McClatchy correspondent Hannah Allam’s excellent account of her recent trip into Sadr City.

AI and HRW statements below the break…

More…

568 In your nerves and in your bed…

…coming down around your head.

The evergreens:

• There’s a tense political stalemate in Lebanon.
  • The Arabs are divided.
• Israeli military strikes are killing Palestinians in Gaza.
  • Al-Jazeera is all dead babies and grieving grandmothers.

What’s really new:

• The Israeli strikes are killing more Palestinians than usual: 112 since Thursday, Al-Jazeera reports (incidentally, the Wall Street Journal agrees). An Israeli official threatened Gazans with a “holocaust.”
  • This time the strikes hit the offices of (Hamas) Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. (Fatah) President Mahmoud Abbas at last felt compelled to leave the peace talks. People the world over were surprised to hear the peace talks were still in progress in the first place.
• A small Turkish force raided PKK positions in northern Iraq.
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become the first Iranian president to visit Iraq.
• The United States announced it has warships off the coast of Lebanon. (Can someone please explain to me why? What possible good can come of this? An unnamed U.S. official told news agencies the USS Cole is there as “a show of support for regional stability,” but I’m still baffled. What stability? Or rather, how will the warships establish regional stability?)

519 Britney Spears to Convert to Islam, Ensh’Allah

Hannah Allam gives “the story behind the story” of Bush’s visit to the UAE. Bush arrived in Saudi today, close on Sarko’s heels. The French president offered the Saudis nuclear aid.

More importantly, a British tabloid reports that Britney Spears may convert to Islam to marry the “pap rat” who “lured” her with “Brummie dirty talk.”

Egyptian squash players are the talk of the town in New York.

Egyptian authorities discovered another tunnel and more explosives near the Gaza border.

The stock market continues to climb, surpassing the 11,000 mark by the CASE index for the first time yesterday.

A steel “monopoly” in Egypt… but would competition lower prices?

Fred “The Saboteur” Abrahams writes on Libya:

At the end of the day, one fact is clear: Gaddafi is interested first and foremost in protecting and promoting his own power, and perhaps in eventually ensuring a transfer of power to one of his sons. His decision to engage with the west was driven by this calculated goal, fearing he was next after the US invasion of Iraq, and his future decisions will follow that logical course.

He will never undertake radical reform, such as allowing independent media or opposition groups. But acting in concert, the west can condition its relations on small but significant steps, such as abolishing the death penalty, improving the penal code, and strengthening the judicial system, all of which Gaddafi himself has placed on the agenda. [Full story]

Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court yesterday maintained that article 33 bis of the Agrarian Reform Act is unconstitutional.

501 Terrorism, Counterterrorism

Too important not to note:

The blasts in Algeria yesterday, blasts which caught a school bus, killed at least 77 people, and destroyed a UN compound. Adding insult to injury (and death), these murderous dogs sound like parodies of themselves:

In a detailed Internet statement, the group identified two “martyrs” who detonated vehicles loaded with explosives outside the court building and “the headquarters of the international infidels’ den,” a reference to the U.N. offices. [WaPo. Domestic, Algerian coverage here.]

François al-Hajj, the Lebanese Army’s chief of operations, was killed, along with three other people, in a bomb attack outside of Beirut today. He was tipped to have been chief of the armed forces if Gen. Michel Suleiman becomes president.

A triple car bombing in the southern Iraqi city of Amara killed at least 40 people today.

Human Rights Watch yesterday released a damning report casting serious doubt on the 2006 “Victorious Sect” arrests here in Egypt. “Beyond coerced confessions, there appears to be no compelling evidence to support the government’s dramatic claims,” HRW said.

On the eve of peace talks, Israeli tanks attacked Gaza yesterday, killing at least six Palestinians. The Palestinians said the attacks, and new Israeli settlements planned for East Jerusalem, were an attempt to disrupt the peace talks. The Israelis said the attacks were routine, as if that were somehow better.

Lastly, and much less importantly, I must confess I’m still thinking about robots. The product of too much time and too little sleep, no doubt. At the risk of further damaging my credibility, I can’t resist passing along this 75-year-old editorial about an inventor shot by his robot, which appeared on one of my favorite blogs, Paleo-Future, today.

489 The Idiot’s Guide to Governing Unruly Provinces

Noah Shachtman reports:

Psychological operations specialist Sgt. Joe Colabuno spent a year-and-a-half helping convince the Sunni residents of Fallujah to turn against local extremists by appealing to citizens’ sense of civic pride, pumping up their love of the national soccer team, citing the Koran, and provoking jihadists to overreact. Colabuno also appealed to the Sunnis hatred and fear of Shi’ites, and of Shi’ite Iran.

“For 7 or 8 months,” Colabuno tells me, “all we hear about is ‘Iran is doing all [of the attacks], Iran is behind everything.’ There was frustration from them [Fallujah’s locals] because we wouldn’t ‘admit it.’ Like maybe the U.S. was conspiring with Iran.”

“We’d stress in our SITREPS [situation reports] that in order to get these people on our side, we’ve got to play into their fears abut Iran,” he adds.

Then, in January, “the White House suddenly got involved,” talking tough about how Tehran was stoking instability in Iraq. “That overnight changed the attitudes of the people towards us. They took it as almost an apology,” he adds. [Full post]

To which the Weekly Standard replies:

In the words of Billy Joel, ‘we didn’t start the fire.’ “Sectarian hate” predated the American invasion of Iraq, and we’d be foolish not to exploit it, when possible, to further our own ends. This is how empires effectively managed unruly provinces for centuries. Noah’s not all wrong, it’s certainly a dangerous game. But it seems that the strategy, for now, is showing obvious signs of success. Down the road it may cause problems, but back in January, everyone expected down the road to be all out civil war–so this seems like a good problem to have. [Full post]

Now, let’s put aside morality, wisdom, and foresight for a second. My recollection of the history of empires is faded, I’ll confess. But I don’t recall Rome stoking wars between Thracia and Phrygia, or London inciting war between Nova Scotia and New England. There’s a good reason for that: An empire made up of warring provinces is not much of an empire. And the world needs another Iran-Iraq war like it needs another WWI.

But right, no foresight, no morality… So how’s it panning out in the short-term? Rather than asking someone from one of those “unruly provinces” (they’re not to be trusted), let’s talk to an American soldier:

A Sunni insurgent group we’ve been battling for months, responsible for the death of my friend and numerous attacks, agreed to fight Al Qaeda alongside us. Since then, they’ve grown into a much more organized, lethal force. They use this organization to steal cars and intimidate and torture the local population, or anyone they accuse of being linked to Al Qaeda. The Gestapo of the 21st century, sanctioned by the United States Army. [Full post]

Propagandists: Kindly stick to the Iraqi football team. Iraqis know better what they need, but I suspect that most would prefer unity and something to cheer over an outside force fanning their civil war or egging them on to the Iranian front.

I'm Reading: