A Case of Extraordinary Rendition

Canadian citizen Maher Arar was passing through the U.S. on a trip when he was detained by officials and subjected to “extraordinary rendition”. He was accused of having terrorist links and was flown from New York to Syria, where he was tortured. He was eventually freed and returned to Canada. No charges were ever filed against him. He is working with the Center for Constitutional Rights to appeal a case against the U.S. government that was dismissed on national security grounds.

Below is a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. It was delivered by videotape because he is not allowed to enter the U.S.

In his remarks Arar expresses gratitude that some Americans remain opposed to torture. It is a sad statement about America and the fragility of an ideology that made the U.S. a great country. It is important to remember that this could happen to any one of us. We used to criticize communist regimes and dictators (like Hussein) for doing the very thing our government is doing now.

By MAHER ARAR
Watch the video

Hello my name is Maher Arar. Sorry I could not join you for today’s ceremony.

All Center for Constitutional Rights Staff and I are humbled to have been chosen this year’s recipient for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. This award means a tremendous amount to us. It means that there are still Americans out there who value our struggle for justice.

It means that there are Americans out there who are truly concerned about the future of America. We now know that my story is not a unique one. Over the past two years we have heard from many other people who were, who have been kidnapped, unlawfully detained, tortured and eventually released without being charged with any crime in any country.

The Rendition

My nightmare began on September 26, 2002. I was transiting through New York airport, JFK Airport, when they asked me to wait in a waiting area. I found that to be strange. Shortly after, some FBI officials came to see me and they asked me whether, I was willing to be interviewed.

My first immediate reaction was to ask for a lawyer and I was surprised when they told me that I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen.

Then I asked for a phone call, I wanted to call my family to let them know what was going on. And they just ignored my request.

Then they told me, we only have couple of questions for you and we’ll let you go. So I agreed. I had nothing to hide. And the interrogation started. Soon after, you know, they asked me about people I knew. It was deeper, until the interrogation was going deeper and deeper and deeper.

During this time, they played mind games with me. They would sometimes insult me; say to me something like you’re smart. Other times they would accuse me of being dumb.

And, I repeatedly ask for a lawyer, to make a phone call. They always ignored my question.

The interrogation that day lasted about four hours with the FBI officials and another four hours with immigration. At the end of that day, instead of sending me back to Canada, they shackled and chained me and sent me to another, another terminal in the airport where I stayed overnight and in that place, in that room they kept me in, the lights were, were always on. There was no bed in that room and I could not sleep that night.

The next day another set of interrogations started. This time it was about, they asked me about political opinions–I answered openly, I didn’t try to hide my political opinions. The asked me about Iraq. They asked me about Palestine and so many other issues. And they also, if I remember correctly, asked me about my emails and some other questions.

Sent to Syria

And they told me that day we are about to decide about your fate. At the end of that day, surprisingly, one of the immigration officers came and asked me to volunteer to go to Syria. I said to them: why do you want me to go to Syria, I’ve never been there for 17 years. And they say, “You are special interest.” Of course, back then I did not know what this expression meant. But it was clear that the Americans, the officer did not want me to go to Canada.

When he insisted, I said, let me go back to Switzerland. That was my point of departure before I arrived at JFK and he refused. Eventually they took me into the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal prison, where they kept me for about 12 days. During this time I was interviewed for six hours by INS. It was a very exhaustive interview from 9PM to like around 3AM in the morning. When I asked them to, during this interview to go, to allow me to go back to my cell to perform my prayer, they refused, completely refused.

Also during my stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center I could clearly see that I was being treated differently from other prisoners. For example, they didn’t give me toothpaste they would allow me to go for recreation for about a week. They always ignored my demand for making a phone call. Eventually they allowed me to make a phone call. Up until that time, which was a week after I was arrested, no one in my family knew where I was. My wife thought I was disappeared, I was killed. No one knew exactly what happened, until I informed my mother-in-law that I was arrested.

Eventually on October 8th, against my will, they took me out of my cell. They basically read the pieces of document to me saying, that we will be sending you Syria. And when I complained, I said to them, I did explain to you if I’m sent back I will be tortured and they, I remember, the INS person flipped a couple of pages in this document, to the end of this document and read to me a paragraph that I still remember until today, an extremely shocking statement she made to me.

She said something like: The INS is not the body or the agency that signed the Geneva Convention, convention against torture. For me what that really meant is we will send you to torture and we don’t care.

So they put me on a private jet, which I found extremely strange. I was the only passenger on that, on that plane. Its a luxurious plane, with leather seats in it. My only preoccupation during this trip is how I could avoid torture. By then, I realized that they were exactly sending me to Syria for torture. And that became very clear to me. Then the plane flew to Washington from Washington it flew to Maine then to Rome, then from Rome to Jordan.

Shackled and Chained

And I remember on the plane I was most of the time I was shackled and chained except the last two hours when they offered me a shish-kabob dinner. Up until this day I do not, I cannot explain why they did that. If I was a dangerous person like they claimed in the beginning, why they would remove my chains and shackles the last two hours of the trip?

During also the trip, whenever I wanted to use the bathroom, one of the team members would go inside with me. Even though I complained that this was against my religious belief.

The plane landed in Jordan on three in the morning October 8th. And a couple of Jordanians were waiting, men, were waiting for me. They took me, they blindfolded me, they put me in a car and shortly after they started beating me on the back of my head. Whenever I complained about the beating they would actually start beating me more. So I just kept silent.

I stayed in Jordan for about 12 hours in a detention center. I still don’t know what that place is.

I was always blindfolded whenever they took me from one cell to another or when they took me to see the doctor. But I felt something strange in that prison. I felt, what, that I used an elevator, which is quite strange for a Middle Eastern prison.

After 12 hours of detention, unlawful detention in Jordan I was eventually driven to Syria. And I just didn’t want to believe that I was going to Syria. I always was hoping that someone, a miracle would happen–the Canadian government would intervene. A miracle would happen that would take me back to my country Canada.

I arrived in Syria that same day, at the end of the day and I was able to confirm that I was in fact in Syria after my blindfold was removed and I was able to see the pictures of the Syrian President. My feeling then is I just wanted to kill myself because I knew what was coming. I knew that the Americans, the American government send me there to be tortured.

Sometime later the interrogators came in. They started asking questions, routine questions at the beginning, but whenever I hesitated to answer their questions or whenever they thought I was lying one of them would threaten me with a chair, a metallic chair with no seats in it, only the frames. And back then I did not understand or I did not know how they would torture people with it. I later learned that from other prison inmates.

But the message was clear: if you don’t speak quickly enough we will torture you. That day, the interrogation lasted about four hours. There was no physical beating; there was only verbal threats. Around midnight, they took me to the basement. In the basement, the guard opened a door for me, a metallic door. I could not believe my eyes. I looked at him and I said, what is that? He didn’t answer. He just said to me: Enter.

Imprisonment

The cell was about three feet wide, six feet deep and about seven feet high. It was dark. There was no source of light in it. It was filthy. There were only two thin covers on the floor. I was naïve; I thought they would keep me in this place for one, two, maybe three days to put pressure on me. But this same place, the same cell that I later called the grave was my home 10 months and 10 days. The only light that came into the cell was from the ceiling, from the opening in the ceiling. There was a small spotlight and that’s it.

Life in the cell was impossible. At the beginning–even though it was a filthy place, it was like a grave–I preferred to stay in that cell rather than being beaten. Whenever I heard the guards coming to open my door I would just think, you know, this is it for me that would be my last day.

The beating started the following day. Without no warning…(long pause as he fights tears) without no warning the interrogator came in with a cable. He asked me to open my right hand. I did open it. And he hit me strongly on my palm. It was so painful to the point that I forgot every moment I enjoyed in my life.

Torture

This moment is still vivid in my mind because it was the first I was ever beaten in my life. Then he asked me to open my left hand. He hit me again. And that one missed and hit my wrist. The pain from that hit lasted approximately six months. And then he would ask me questions. And I would have to answer very quickly. And then he would repeat the beating this time anywhere on my, on my body. Sometimes he would take me to a room where I could, where I was alone, I could hear other prisoners being tortured, severely tortured. I remember that I used to hear their screams. I just couldn’t believe it, that human beings would do this to other human beings.

And then they would take me back to the interrogation room. Again another set of questions, and the beating starts again and again. On the third day the beating was the worst. They beat me a lot with the cable. And they wanted me to confess that I have been to Afghanistan. This was a big surprise to me because even the Americans who interviewed me, the FBI officials who interviewed me, did not ask me that question. I ended up falsely confessing in order to stop the torture. The torture decreased in intensity.

From that moment on they rarely used the cable. Mostly they slapped me on the face, they kicked me, they humiliated me all the time.

The first 10 days of my stay in Syria was extremely harsh and during that period I found my cell to be a refuge. I didn’t want to see their faces. But later on living in that cell was horrible. And just to give you an idea about how painful it is to stay in that place–I was ready after a couple of months, I was ready to sign any piece of document for me, not to be released, just to go to another place where it is fit for human being.

During this time I wasn’t aware that my wife launched a campaign with other human rights organizations like Amnesty International and others. My wife lobbied the media, she lobbied politicians and eventually I was released. The Syrians released me and they clearly stated through the ambassador in Washington that they did not find any links to terrorism. I was not charged in any country including Canada, United States, Jordan and Syria.

Since my release I have been suffering from anxiety, constant fear, and depression. My life will never be the same again. But I promised myself one thing, that I will continue my quest for justice as long as I have a breath. What keeps me going is my faith, Americans like yourselves and the hope that one day our planet Earth will be free of tyranny, torture and injustice.

________________
Here’s another video about extraordinary rendition.

Imagine, for a moment, how you would feel if nobody listened to you. Your daughter ignores everything you say. She leaves the house late in the evening and returns at sunrise. She drinks, does drugs and has sex with strangers in her bedroom. You plead, cajole, and urge her to change so that she will have a better future. But nothing seems to create a change in behavior. If anything it gets worse and worse. You are at your wits end and feel you have no alternatives but to send her to a rehab center (which you cannot afford) or kick her out of the house.

At work, although you are the manager of six and truly care about your staff, none respect you or follow your instructions. You arrive at 9 only to find the office empty. You hold meetings to emphasize the importance of teamwork. You offer financial incentives to those who work hard. You fire the worst of the bunch.

Yet, day after day, you struggle to get someone to listen and realize the value in what you are doing — to help them to understand that if they would only work with you they would be better off.

Welcome to the maddening and humiliating world of allied troops in Iraq. These troops believed they were sent to spread “freedom and democracy” and to save Iraqis from a brutal dictator. Three years later they find they have captured the dictator but lost the cause. The people they had hoped to save despise them.

In a new GuardianFilm/BBC documentary, an American soldier is discussing this very issue with an Iraqi he is training. The Iraqi says they were better off under the leadership of Saddam Hussein and complains that people can’t afford cooking oil or electricity.

The soldier seems incredulous: “Just for those two things you are willing to give up your freedom of life.”

The sullen response was, “Yes of course I am. These things are the basic essentials of life.”

There are many other basic essentials he is likely thinking about when he makes this statement — security and safety, for example. But the brief conversation illustrates the divide between allied troops and Iraqis.

The movie. Iraq, The Real Story, is worth viewing (it’s only 8 minutes long). It shows just how disturbing life is for US troops in Iraq. Every day they face stinging betrayals, frustration and humiliation. The very people they are training to take over the country are turning their guns on them.

During one shootout an Iraqi commander is heard on a radio telling his men not to fire on the insurgents as American troops mutter to themselves about shooting the commander if he comes within sight. After an incident in which grenades are thrown at US troops from the center of an Iraq/American command centers, everyone in the area is rounded up. An American wielding a gun screams at them asking if they are afraid. All shake their heads no. None are afraid, none acknowledge knowing anything about the insurgents, none are punished. After a few hours they return to the streets.

The soldiers are left standing there, impotent and angry. They command no fear, no respect, nothing but disgust and rage. These soldiers are going to need a lot of support and understanding when they return home. So are their families.

I, like most Americans, believe the only ones winning this war are the executives at companies like Halliburton.

 

Yesterday the State Department’s Alberto Fernandez took back the statements he made on al Jazeera in Arabic on Saturday. On Saturday he told an Arab-speaking audience: “undoubtedly there has been arrogance and stupidity from the United States in Iraq.”

Yesterday Americans learned he didn’t really mean it: “Upon reading the transcript of my appearance on Al-Jazeera, I realized that I seriously misspoke by using the phrase ‘there has been arrogance and stupidity’ by the U.S. in Iraq…This represents neither my views nor those of the State Department. I apologize.”

In light of the developments in Iraq it is difficult to disagree with his original statement. It appears, however, the spinners have decided the American public cannot handle the truth. It appears to be another case of telling the Arab audience what it wants to hear and the American audience another story altogether. Unfortunately for Americans everyone else is getting the truth. 

  

There are two interesting things in this story. The first is State Department spokesman Sean McCormack’s response to Alberto Fernandez’s statement about stupidity in Iraq and the second is about the parades.

Diplomat Cites US ‘Stupidity’ in Iraq 

A senior U.S. diplomat said the United States had shown “arrogance” and “stupidity” in Iraq but was now ready to talk with any group except Al-Qaida in Iraq to facilitate national reconciliation.

In an interview with Al-Jazeera television aired late Saturday, Alberto Fernandez, director of public diplomacy in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department offered an unusually candid assessment of America’s war in Iraq.

“We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq,” he said.

“We are open to dialogue because we all know that, at the end of the day, the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation,” he said, speaking in Arabic from Washington. “The Iraqi government is convinced of this.”

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, in Moscow with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, later said that Fernandez disputes the description of his comments.

“What he says is, that is not an accurate reflection of what he said,” McCormack said. Asked whether the Bush administration believes that history will show a record of arrogance or stupidity in Iraq, McCormack replied “No.” (Editor’s comment: HUH?)

A senior Bush administration official questioned whether the remarks had been translated correctly. “Those comments obviously don’t reflect our position,” said the official, who asked not to be identified because a transcript had not been available for review.

… On Wednesday, and again on Friday, Sunni insurgents believed to belong to al-Qaida in Iraq, staged military-like parades in the heart of five towns in the vast and mainly desert province of Anbar, including the provincial capital Ramadi. Some of these parades, in which hooded gunmen paraded with their weapons, took place within striking distance of U.S. forces stationed in nearby bases.

The parades proved to be a propaganda success, with TV footage of Wednesday’s parade shown in many parts of the world, a likely embarrassment for the U.S. military as well as the embattled Iraqi government.

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A War Vet’s Thoughts

News — Lisa @ 12:08 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

War veteran Kevin Tillman writes about his brother, Pat Tillman, and the war on terrorism.  

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.  It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.  He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.  How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.  How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.  How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out. 
Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is.  Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.  Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Read more here.

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Snipers in Iraq

Iraq, News — Lisa @ 1:35 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

Sometimes I wonder how a country full of so many intelligent, educated, warm, compassionate people can be so indifferent to the suffering caused by its government’s actions. If Americans would try to put themselves in the place of Iraqi civilians, it would be difficult for the president and his staff to so easily and absurdly spin issues and events.

Recent interviews and news reports make this obvious. Yesterday President Bush acknowledged that comparing US military efforts in Vietnam to Iraq might be fair and accurate.

He sees it this way: “They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause the government to withdraw.”

From news reports leaking out of Iraq it seems more likely that the “they” he is referring to is not al Qaeda or insurgents, but the Iraqi population in general. Iraqi civilians seem to “be sick and tired if the Iraqi effort” and want the American government to leave.

How can we tell? In recent months there has been an upsurge in US soldiers dying from gunshot wounds. Normally, after years of war, an increase in gunshot wounds means one of two things: soldiers are killing themselves or each other, or the enemy has successfully managed to train and plant snipers. CNN.com has an interesting video provided by the Islamist Army showing snipers calmly and effectively targeting US troops on the ground. The insurgent group says it wants to reach the American public so it can lobby for the country’s troops to leave.

What is being left unsaid is that in order for snipers to effectively operate in a large city such as Baghdad, they need the support of the community. They need access to rooftops, alleys, backyards and places where people live. They must be able to shoot and disappear quickly without being apprehended or shot themselves.

Americans should ask themselves why. Why would ordinary civilians simply living their lives allow snipers to pick off American soldiers in the streets? We know that prior to the war there were no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and we know that Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11. Why then, are people who lived under a tyrannical dictator so anxious to see Americans die?

Quite simply, after living in a war zone for more than three years and watching family members die, they are tired and they are angry. Think about how Americans felt after 9/11. On that day nearly 3,000 innocent civilians died. Since the US has been in Iraq reports say that between 50,000 and 600,000 have been killed because of the violence, many of them young children. Yesterday, 47 Iraqis were killed and 46 injured.

Additionally, by now we have all seen the horrific images of Abu Ghraib and know about the detainees who can be abused and tortured by members of the military. Today four US soldiers who were accused of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl and killing her five-year-old sister and her parents were indicted on murder charges. There are several other similar cases pending.

President Bush is right when he says that Iraq is the nation’s current Vietnam. He’s right about the reasons, too – just like in Vietnam the people on both sides of the conflict grew sick of the brutality of war and wanted it to stop. And just like Nixon during the Vietnam War, we’ve seen our share of anti-war protestor harassment and arrests. Our civil liberties have been snatched from us, privacy is a thing of the past, torture and abuse are acceptable means of interrogation and the right to habeas corpus – one of the things that made our country great – is gone.

Unfortunately for us all, Bush, the “compassionate conservative” says he is “patient. I’m not patient forever. But I recognize the degree of difficulty of the task, and therefore, say to the American people, we won’t cut and run.” Since former Secretary of State James Baker concluded that “cutting and running” is the only way out of the mess, it seems we may join the Iraqi people in mourning for years to come.

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Cheney: Democracy working in Iraq

Iraq, News — Lisa @ 7:31 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

Vice President Cheney was asked by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh to respond to the growing criticism of the administration’s policies in Iraq. Here’s what he said:

Well, I think there’s some natural level of concern out there because in fact, you know, it wasn’t over instantaneously. It’s been a little over three years now since we went into Iraq, so I don’t think it’s surprising that people are concerned.

On the other hand, this government has only been in office about five months, five or six months now. They’re off to a good start. It is difficult, no question about it, but we’ve now got over 300,000 Iraqis trained and equipped as part of their security forces. They’ve had three national elections with higher turnout than we have here in the United States. If you look at the general overall situation, they’re doing remarkably well.

It’s still very, very difficult, very tough. Nobody should underestimate the extent to which we’re engaged there with this sort of, at present, the “major front” of the war on terror. That’s what Osama bin Laden says, and he’s right.

Joseph Goebbels would be proud. Hitler’s famous propagandist said that “if you tell a big lie and repeat it ofen enough people will eventually come to believe it.” Cheney has mastered the big lie: Everything is just fine in Iraq, despite what you might have heard, the US has trained Iraqis to take control and the country is on the road to democracy.

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Jobless Man Asks Judge to Send Him to Jail

News, General — Lisa @ 10:09 am - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

Nobody could figure out a way to help this aging man survive besides sending him to prison?

Jobless Man Asks Judge to Send Him to JailCOLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A man who couldn’t find steady work came up with a plan to make it through the next few years until he could collect Social Security: He robbed a bank, then handed the money to a guard and waited for police. 

On Wednesday, Timothy J. Bowers told a judge a three-year prison sentence would suit him, and the judge obliged.

“At my age, the jobs available to me are minimum-wage jobs. There is age discrimination out there,” Bowers, who turns 63 in a few weeks, told Judge Angela White.

The judge told him: “It’s unfortunate you feel this is the only way to deal with the situation.”

Bowers said he had been able to find only odd jobs after the drug wholesaler he made deliveries for closed in 2003. He walked to a bank and handed a teller a note demanding cash in an envelope. The teller gave him four $20 bills and pushed a silent alarm.

Bowers handed the money to a security guard standing in the lobby and told him it was his day to be a hero.

He pleaded guilty to robbery, and a court-ordered psychological exam found him competent.

“It’s a pretty sad story when someone feels that’s their only alternative,” said defense attorney Jeremy W. Dodgion, who described Bowers as “a charming old man.”

Prosecutors had considered arguing against putting Bowers in prison at taxpayer expense, but they worried he would do something more reckless to be put behind bars.

“It’s not the financial plan I would choose, but it’s a financial plan,” prosecutor Dan Cable said.

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Failures of the Imagination

News — Lisa @ 4:37 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

I am a little behind in my reading and just got to this story in the Columbia Journalism Review. It describes how Carlotta Gall, a New York Times reporter, had trouble getting stories that detailed abuse by US troops in Afghanistan into the paper.

Gall has done great work covering Afghanistan and is in my opinion one of the best war reporters out there today. I describe her work in No Questions Asked (chapter about the inhumanity of war) and explain just why some burning questions were not answered by the American media. Listen to how she described pursuing the story: She heard a rumor, followed up with phone calls, physically visited an area, returned to the area and got the story. An excellent example of how reporters are supposed to do their jobs.

Anyway, if you haven’t read the story, it describes how editors at the major newspapers had a hard time believing that American soldiers could do anything wrong oversees. Abu Ghraib, the Iraq War and the resulting mess was caused by Failures of Imagination

Carlotta Gall was curious. It was early December 2002, and Gall, the Afghanistan correspondent for The New York Times, had just seen a press release from the U.S. military announcing the death of a prisoner at its Bagram Air Base. Soon thereafter the military issued a second release about another detainee death at Bagram. “The fact that two had died within weeks of each other raised alarm bells,” recalls Gall. “I just wanted to know more. And I came up against a blank wall. The military wouldn’t release their names; they wouldn’t say where they released the bodies.”

Gall started calling the governors of provinces, she says, “asking if a family had received a body back from Bagram in their province.” None had, but Gall did learn that U.S. forces had detained some suspects near the eastern border town of Khost.

She visited Khost and left empty-handed, but a few weeks later, she got another tip and traveled back. The body of one of the detainees had been returned, a young taxi driver known as Dilawar. Gall met with Dilawar’s family, and his brother handed Gall a death certificate, written in English, that the military had issued. “It said, ‘homicide,’ and I remember gasping and saying, ‘Oh, my God, they killed him,’” says Gall. “I hadn’t really been thinking that before.”

The press release announcing Dilawar’s death stated that the taxi driver had died of a heart attack, a conclusion repeated by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, then-Lieutenant General Daniel McNeill, whom Gall later cited as saying that Dilawar had died because his arteries were 85 percent blocked. (“We haven’t found anything that requires us to take extraordinary action,” McNeill declared.) But the death certificate, the authenticity of which the military later confirmed to Gall, stated that Dilawar — who was just twenty-two years old — died as a result of “blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease.”

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.”

Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.)

“Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.”

Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)

Gall, who is British, chalks up the delay to reluctance to “believe bad things of Americans,” and in particular to a kind of post-9/11 sentiment. “There was a sense of patriotism, and you felt it in every question from every editor and copy editor,” she says. “I remember a foreign-desk editor telling me, ‘Remember where we are — we can smell the debris from 9/11.’”

Read more here:

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Study: 655,000 Iraqis die because of war

News — Lisa @ 6:48 pm - Print This Post - EMail This Post- Share this : Digg , Del.icio.us, reddit, Newsvine, Stumble it!

Here’s an AP story on a recent study about Iraqi deaths.  

 Study: 655,000 Iraqis die because of war

A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

The timing of the survey’s release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it “politics.”

In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

“Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003,” Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.

An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings.

“They’re almost certainly way too high,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election.

“This is not analysis, this is politics,” Cordesman said.

What’s missing from this news story is information that Cordesman is a conservative who used to work as John McCain’s naional security assistant and who has held several positions with the department of defense under Republican presidents. Also, several other studies have put the number at at least double the number quoted by Cordesman.

Here’s the Washington Post’s article:

Study Claims Iraq’s Excess Death Toll has reached 655,000 

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Jane Arraf an NBC News reporter in Baghdad made the higher estimate seem feasible.

So does this article stating that more than 2,600 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the month of September. Lest we forget, that is nearly as many innocent civilians who died on 9/11.

It is time to take responsibility for these deaths. Write to your congressman, ask why so many innocent civilians died last month. Ask what our exit strategy is. Ask questions, it is your responsibility as a citizen.

 

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