"WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Hundreds of innocent torture victims came forward and filed a complaint late Monday in Washington federal court against CACI, the private military contractor involved in torturing and abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.
The complaint in "Saleh et al. v. CACI et al" alleges that these victims were repeatedly sodomized, threatened with rape and harm to their family members, stripped naked, kept naked in their cells, chained and handcuffed to the bars of their cells, forced to wear women's panties on their heads and bodies, subjected to electric shock, subjected to extreme heat and cold, attacked by unmuzzled dogs, subjected to serious pain inflicted on sensitive body parts, and kicked, beaten and struck.
CACI employees did not play a limited, passive, or secondary role in this torture, according to the complaint. Rather, two CACI interrogators -- Stephen Stefanowicz (known as "Big Steve") and Daniel Johnson (known as "DJ") -- were viewed as among the most aggressive. These two men were responsible for directing former U.S. military personnel Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick, and others to torture and abuse prisoners. Indeed, CACI employees Big Steve and DJ directed such harsh torture that both Graner and Frederick, who were convicted and sentenced, respectively, to 10 and 8 years in prison for abusing prisoners, refused to follow the CACI directives to torture prisoners.
The complaint sets out how Stefanowicz and Johnson and other CACI employees directed soldiers to give prisoners the "special treatment," which was code for making naked prisoners to crawl back and forth over rough concrete until they were bloodied and unable to move. The complaint also alleges CACI, working with others, wrongfully killed Ibrahiem Neisef Jassem, Hussain Ali Abid Salin, and Ahmed Satar Khamass.
Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights:
"These private military contractors cannot act with impunity outside the reach of the law -- CACI must be held accountable for its participation in the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and other facilities."
Susan L. Burke of Burke O'Neil LLC:
"CACI employees conspired with Graner, Frederick and others who have already been convicted and sentenced. Yet CACI employees have evaded accountability, and CACI itself made millions of dollars from the United States. Is this conduct our taxpayer dollars should be paying for?"
Shereef Akeel of Akeel & Valentine, PLC:
"The men and women we represent have been seeking justice for the nightmares they lived at the hands of their torturers. This civil action will bring much needed accountability to the rogue defense contractor willing to torture and abuse innocent persons."
The victims in the case are represented by Susan L. Burke, William T. O'Neil, Elizabeth M. Burke, and Katherine R. Hawkins of Burke O'Neil LLC, of Philadelphia; Michael Ratner and Katherine Gallagher of the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Shereef Hadi Akeel, of Akeel & Valentine, PLC, of Birmingham, Michigan. This is the same legal team that recently sued Blackwater for killing civilians in Nisoor Square in Baghdad this September.
The case is "Saleh et al. v. CACI et al," in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Case No. 05-cv-1165 JR).
Media Contacts: Erin Powers, Powers MediaWorks LLC, for Burke O'Neil LLC and Akeel & Valentine, PLC, (281) 703-6000 or (281) 362-1411; Jen Nessel, the Center for Constitutional Rights, (212) 614-6449; and David Lerner, Riptide Communications, for the Center for Constitutional Rights, (212) 260-5000.
www.uruknet.info?p=39343
Link: sev.prnewswire.com/legal/20071218/LATU08318122007-1.html"
Iraq to slash food rations
"Up to eight million Iraqis still require immediate emergency aid, with nearly half this number living in "absolute poverty" according to Oxfam [GALLO/GETTY]
Iraq plans to cut food rations and subsidies by almost 50 per cent as part of its overall 2008 budget because of insufficient funds and spiralling inflation.
The move the will further undermine the deteriorating rationing system, with critics warning of social unrest if measures are not taken to address rising poverty and unemployment.
Mohammed Hanoun, the Iraqi trade minister's chief of staff, told Al Jazeera that a request for $7.2 billion to cover 10 basic items currently rationed and subsidised by the government was rejected.
"In 2007, we asked for $3.2 billion for rationing basic foodstuffs. But since the prices of imported food stuff doubled in the past year, we requested $7.2 billion for this year. That request was denied."
The trade ministry is now set to slash the list of subsidised items by half to five basic food items, "namely, flour, sugar, rice, oil, and infant milk," Hanoun said.
Gulf War rationing
The ration system dates back to the 1991 Gulf War, when the UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Iraq after its August 2, 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
 |
| Almost 10 million Iraqis rely on the rationing system [EPA] |
The ration cards also helped track population displacement due to the invasion as people are forced to re-register for new cards when they move.
Though the ration system continued even after the fall of the Saddam Hussein government in 2003, there have been calls to eliminate or limit its scope.
Iraqi officials have resisted scrapping the programme altogether for fear of a public backlash. Instead, they have opted for a gradual decrease in subsidised food items.
Abud Falah al-Sudani, Iraq's trade minister, warned that even a limited move to scrap the system would significantly increase the hardship for the majority of Iraqis who still depend heavily on the Saddam Hussein-era programme.
"Absolute poverty"
The impending move will affect the nearly 10 million who depend on the already fragile rationing system.
| Food rationing in Iraq |
| The rationing system was implemented by the Saddam Hussein government in 1991 in response to the UN economic sanctions on Iraq. |
He told Al Jazeera that his family depended heavily on the food ration system after he lost his job one year ago.
"Reducing the number of subsidised items will turn my sons into malnourished children and put us into a level of poverty much worse than we have seen," he said.
Ibraheem Abdullah, a professor and social affairs analyst at Baghdad University, said the government has inadequately measured the alarming rise in poverty since the March 2003 US-led invasion.
"Urgent measures should be taken to prevent the possible chaos that will lead to worsening conditions in the lives of millions of Iraqis when the food ration is reduced," he said.
"The government should give priority to this issue. Where do they expect unemployed families to find the means to purchase food now?"
Dependency
Apart from the cut in subsidies, Baghdad also wants to reduce by June the number of people dependent on the rationing system by five million.
Yet, up to eight million Iraqis still require immediate emergency aid, with nearly half this number living in "absolute poverty", according to the latest report by Oxfam and a coalition of Iraqi groups, including the NGO Coordination Committee of Iraq.
Najet Muhammad, 27, a mother of two and a Baghdad resident, said baby milk was unavailable for three months because the distribution system had fallen into the hands of rival militias.
She said her already impoverished family was forced to divert money meant for house rent to buy milk at market prices.
"If they reduce the quantity of the ration we will be displaced as the money to pay bills will have to be used for food," Najet said.
"If we are considered a poor family today, tomorrow, we will be considered absolutely desperate."
www.uruknet.info?p=39332Link: english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F80EB18B-84C5-4939-9250-004F6697D8F2.htm"
All Iraqi Groups Blame US Invasion For Discord, St...
"All Iraqi groups blame U.S. for discord
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.
That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.
Conducting the focus groups, in 19 separate sessions organized by outside contractors in five cities, is among the ways in which Multi-National Force-Iraq assesses conditions in the country beyond counting insurgent attacks, casualties and weapons caches. The command, led by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, devotes more time and resources than any other government or independent entity to measuring various matters, including electricity, satisfaction with trash collection and what Iraqis think it will take for them to get along.
The results are analyzed and presented to Petraeus as part of the daily Battle Update Assessment or BUA (pronounced boo-ah). Some of the news has been unarguably good, including the sharply reduced number of roadside bombings and attacks on civilians. But bad news is often presented with a bright side, such as the focus-group results and a November poll, which found that 25 percent of Baghdad residents were satisfied with their local government and that 15 percent said they had enough fuel for heating and cooking.
The good news? Those numbers were higher than the figures of the previous month (18 percent and 9 percent, respectively).
And Iraqi complaints about matters other than security are seen as progress. Early this year, Maj. Fred Garcia, an MNF-I analyst, said that "a very large percentage of people would answer questions about security by saying 'I don't know.' Now, we get more griping because people feel freer."
Iraqi political reconciliation, quality-of-life issues and the economy are largely the responsibility of the State Department. But the military, to the occasional consternation of U.S. diplomats who feel vastly outnumbered, has its own "mirror agencies" in many areas. Officers in charge of civil-military operations, said senior Petraeus adviser Army Col. William E. Rapp, "can tell you how many markets are open in Baghdad, how many shops, how many banks are open. . . . We have a lot more people" on the ground.
On Iraqi politics, "we have four to six slides almost every morning on 'Where does the Iraqi government stand on de-Baathification legislation?' All these things are embassy things," Rapp said. But Petraeus is interested in "his 'feel' for a situation, and he gets that from a bunch of different data points," he added.
Polling in Iraq remains difficult
Even though members of the military "understand the limitations" of polling data, Rapp said, "subjective measures" are an important part of the mix. In July, the military signed a contract with Gallup for four public opinion polls a month in Iraq: three nationwide and one in Baghdad. Lincoln Group, which has conducted surveys for the military since shortly after the invasion, received a year-long contract in January to conduct focus groups.
Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military's focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.
Matthew Warshaw, a senior research manager at D3, said that despite security improvements, polling in Iraq remains difficult. "While violence has gone down, one of the ways it has been achieved is by effectively separating people. That means mobility is limited, with roadblocks by the U.S. and Iraqi military or local militias," Warshaw said in an interview.
Most of the recent survey results he has seen about political reconciliation, Warshaw said, are "more about [Iraqis] reconciling with the United States within their own particular territory, like in Anbar. . . . But it doesn't say anything about how Sunni groups feel about Shiite groups in Baghdad."
Warshaw added: "In Iraq, I just don't hear statements that come from any of the Sunni, Shiite or Kurdish groups that say 'We recognize that we need to share power with the others, that we can't truly dominate.' "
'Shared beliefs'
According to a summary report of the focus-group findings obtained by The Washington Post, Iraqis have a number of "shared beliefs" about the current situation that cut across sectarian lines. Participants, in separate groups of men and women, were interviewed in Ramadi, Najaf, Irbil, Abu Ghraib and in Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad. The report does not mention how the participants were selected.
Dated December 2007, the report notes that "the Iraqi government has still made no significant progress toward its fundamental goal of national reconciliation." Asked to describe "the current situation in Iraq to a foreign visitor," some groups focused on positive aspects of the recent security improvements. But "most would describe the negative elements of life in Iraq beginning with the 'U.S. occupation' in March 2003," the report says.
Some participants also blamed Iranian meddling for Iraq's problems. While the United States was said to want to control Iraq's oil, Iran was seen as seeking to extend its political and religious agendas.
Few mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems, which the report described as an important finding implying that "the current strife in Iraq seems to have totally eclipsed any agonies or grievances many Iraqis would have incurred from the past regime, which lasted for nearly four decades -- as opposed to the current conflict, which has lasted for five years."
Overall, the report said that "these findings may be expected to conclude that national reconciliation is neither anticipated nor possible. In reality, this survey provides very strong evidence that the opposite is true." A sense of "optimistic possibility permeated all focus groups . . . and far more commonalities than differences are found among these seemingly diverse groups of Iraqis."
New American roadmap to overthrow Maliki’s governm...
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Dec 24th 2007
The report of the Jordanian newspaper “Alarab Alyawm” today confirms what I said yesterday, sources told the newspaper that the US started a new “Roadmap” to overthrow Maliki’s government in an acceptable manner.
The plan being prepared for two months by Condoleezza Rice, which will starts effectively under the slogan (national reconciliation) in the coming Cairo conference and sponsored three Arab countries, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, with the participation of Baath party and AMSI.
The most prominent features of the project, which is backed by the United Nations, Britain, France, Japan and number of European countries, preparation of a new political map in Iraq to be implemented in the first half of next year, and begin the formation of a new government in February, after the removal of Maliki’s government.
The newspaper added
This issue was in the discussion between the American Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and President Jalal Talabani, during his visit to Mosul and Baghdad last week, and updated by Secretary Rice in her recent visit to Kirkuk and Baghdad with Jalal Talabani and his two deputies Tariq Hashimi and Adil Abdamahdi.
The United States wants its future relation with Iraq to be accepted and guaranteed by a national government of all Iraqis, Washington looks forward for a relationship that equals its relationship with other Arab countries and the Gulf states with treaties and cooperation in the political, military, economic.
Nuri al-Maliki’s government is in political crisis, isolated and failed in achieving security, economy and providing services, the current government can not give the relationship treaty a l full llegitimate cover, as long many political sectors opposes the treaty and considers it a form of occupation.
The United States wants its future relation with Iraq to be accepted and guaranteed by a national government of all Iraqis, Washington looks forward for a relationship that equals its relationship with other Arab countries and the Gulf states with treaties and cooperation in the political, military, economic.
Nuri al-Maliki’s government is in political crisis, isolated and failed in achieving security, economy and providing services, the current government can not give the relationship treaty a l full legitimate cover, as long many political sectors opposes the treaty and considers it a form of occupation.
State Department politicians, particularly Ambassador David Satterfield (Condoleezza Rice adviser on Iraq), insist on the importance of the active participation of the Baath Party at the conference and playing a role in the future political process, as well as reconciliation with the Association of Muslim Scholars.
The source said that the American administration will be happy if Maliki’s government and some of the parties refuse to participate in Cairo conference, because they are convinced that al-Maliki and his allies do not want national reconciliation."
New Reports Undercut Claims that Surge Is Working
"New reporting from Baghdad and Washington has called into question the frequently asserted claim that the military surge in Iraq is working.
In particular, journalists are beginning to point out that despite security gains inside the Iraqi capital, there are concrete signs that the "fragile" peace cited by Gen. David Petraeus over the weekend will not hold once the Pentagon begins reducing troops numbers to pre-surge levels.
Last week, McClatchy Newspapers published the findings of the Pentagon's most recent quarterly progress report from Iraq. Underscoring the lack of progress in bringing political stability or national reconciliation to Iraq, Reporter Nancy Youssef wrote:
Despite significant security gains in much of Iraq, nothing has changed within Iraq's political leadership to guarantee sustainable peace, a Pentagon report released Tuesday found.The congressionally mandated quarterly report suggests that the drop in violence won't hold unless Iraq's central government passes key legislation, improves the way it manages its security forces and finds a way to reconcile the country's competing sects. It said none of those steps has been taken.
Although security gains, local accommodation and progress against the flow of foreign fighters and lethal aid into Iraq have had a substantial effect, more needs to be done to foster national, 'top-down' reconciliation to sustain the gains," the report said.
The Pentagon report is the latest assessment circulating in Washington as officials ponder whether the strategy of increasing U.S. troop strength this year by 30,000 can be called a victory or whether the drop in violence is a lull that will break once the United States returns to last year's troop levels.
Youssef's reporting also cited concerns about the preparedness of Iraqi security forces to take over from American servicemen. She wrote:
The report also said that despite four years of intense U.S. effort, the Iraqi security forces remain unprepared to operate independently. It said that the ministries of interior and defense are plagued by "deficiencies in logistics, combat support functions and . . . by shortages of officers at all operational and tactical levels."The report also raises questions about the future of so-called concerned local citizens organizations, which U.S. military leaders have credited with helping to quiet many of Iraq's contentious areas. The U.S. pays the organizations' estimated 70,000 members to patrol Iraq's streets, giving them jobs and, U.S. officials believe, less incentive to join the insurgency.
The report said the groups were "crucial to the counterinsurgency effort." But it also warned that they could evolve into a militia that's opposed to Iraq's central government, a fear shared by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki. The vast majority of the concerned local citizens are Sunni Muslims. The government is dominated by Shiites.
Over the weekend, an article by Damian Cave and Alissa Rubin in the New York Times reiterated the concerns surrounding the Sunni patrol groups, part of the so-called "Awakening" movement.
Rubin and Cave wrote:
It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war -- in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.And further down in their article, Rubin and Cave reported:
[I]t remains unclear what the Awakening will become and whether the tribes will stick together or segregate. Nor is it clear whether Iraq's government will ever meet the tribes' demands, which range from the simple (more electricity, water and jobs) to the extreme (a wildly disproportionate share of the seats in the Parliament).In interviews with more than a dozen sheiks in the province, along with police officers, local leaders and imams, not one expressed any trust in the government of Prime Minister Maliki. "They are working only for the Shiites," said Mahmoud Abed Shabeeb, who acknowledged that 130 members of his tribe were policemen, paid by the Shiite-led Interior Ministry in Baghdad. "Everyone knows that."
The New York Times and McClatchy have not been the only news organizations to question the use of the Awakening groups. On his influential Iraq blog, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole pointed out that in some areas, members of the Awakening groups have gotten into fire fights with local security officials. Cole wrote:
The problems with the dual authority being established in Sunni Arab areas-- with tribal Awakening Councils appointing themselves as, often, vigilantes-- became apparent on Monday when a firefight broke out in Bayji between Awakening members and local official police. There really need to be new provincial elections in Iraq so that if any Awakening members are actually popular, they can gain legitimacy at the polls.
Cole also highlighted one of the other consequences of the surge: the massive displacement of Iraqi civilians. On December 19, Cole wrote:
The US troop escalation that began last February seems to be implicated in the displacement of nearly one million Iraqis to Syria between January and October of this year, adding to the nearly 450,000 that fled there in 2006. This is according to projections from a United Nations weighted survey of nearly 800 refugees. Some 78% of those interviewed in Syria said that they came from Baghdad....
How the US 'surge' drove almost one million Iraqis to Syria last spring and summer is a great mystery, and casts severe doubt on its political success. A significant proportion of these one million Surge Victims appear to have been Baghdad Sunnis, since from January of 2007 through July 2007 the US military admits that Baghdad went from being 65% Shiite to being 75% Shiite. Since another 500,000 left between July and October, depending on what proportion of those were Sunnis, Baghdad could now be even more than 3/4s Shiite. The Sunnis are not going to take this lying down, and the 'surge' seems to me to have set the stage for 1) a violent return of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs to their usurped homes in Baghdad and 2) therefore a second Battle for Baghdad as soon as the US forces in Iraq are too weak to prevent it.
On Sunday, Barack Obama told CBS' Bob Scheiffer that the surge has simply brought Iraq back to the starting gate:
[W]e have essentially gone full circle. We had intolerable levels of violence and a dysfunctional government back in 2006. We saw a huge spike in violence to horrific levels. The surge comes in, and now we're back to where we were in 2006 with intolerable levels of violence and a dysfunctional Iraqi government.
And John Edwards gave NBC's Matt Lauer a similar take on the surge:
I think that there has been some decrease in the violence; there's no question about that. But the fundamental question that's been there all along -- and it was there at the beginning of the surge, according to President Bush -- is whether there's been some political progress, Matt.I mean, have the Sunnis and Shi'a actually made some progress toward a political compromise or political reconciliation? And if that hasn't happened -- and it clearly has not -- then there's been no serious progress. That was the entire purpose of the surge."
What a shocker. MSM lied about the surge.
