by Kathy Kelly
May 12, 2004

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
-Arundhati Roy
Porto Alegre, Brazil, World Social Forum, January 27, 2003

“Kathleen Kelly, report to Admin.” I was routinely cleaning toilets in my dorm at Pekin Federal Prison Camp when the loudspeaker summoned me to the Administration Building. “You’re going next door,” said the guard on duty. “Someone wants to talk with you.” During a five minute ride to the adjacent medium-security men’s prison, I quickly organized some thoughts about civil disobedience and prison terms, expecting to meet a journalist. Instead, two well-dressed men stood to greet me and then flashed their FBI badges. They had driven to Pekin, IL from Chicago, where they work for the FBI’s National Security Service.

Both men were congenial. They assured me that their visit had nothing to do with Voices in the Wilderness violations of federal law in numerous trips to Iraq, where we regularly delivered medicines and medical relief supplies. Nor had they come to talk about why I’m currently imprisoned for protesting the US Army’s military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. What they proposed was “a conversation,” since they had information which they felt would help me and Voices teams in Iraq, both now and in the future. Likewise, I could help them, and perhaps improve national security, by answering some of their questions.

I said I’d prefer not to talk with them without a lawyer present. The more talkative agent quickly nodded and suggested a follow-up visit with a lawyer. He spoke further about his favorable impressions of Voices in the Wilderness and how useful it would be for our travelers to better understand some of the people whom the Iraqi government, under Saddam Hussein, had assigned to work with us as “minders” during our past trips. He said he had information about “bad things” they had done or had planned to do. Having this conversation would benefit Voices in its travel to other countries as well. (Voices has focused solely on Iraq, although some of us have visited other countries with other groups).

At that point, I decided not to talk with them at all. “I don’t want to accuse either of you of any wrongdoing,” I said, wanting to be polite, “but your organization has used methods that I don’t support, and sometimes your job requires you to lie.”

Like people around the world, Voices in the Wilderness is outraged by the systematic torture and humiliation - indeed the murder — of Iraqi detainees. This is true not only at Abu Ghraib, the Baghdad prison infamous under Saddam Hussein for the cruel treatment and execution of political prisoners, but elsewhere among US-run prisons in Iraq.

Our outrage is multiplied by the knowledge that this is not, as George Bush portrays it, the work of six or seven delinquent soldiers. This depiction is the strategy of an administration on the run, both from the political fallout of this scandal, and from the intractable resistance in Iraq to the American occupation. Torture becomes necessary where invaders encounter broad resistance and seem totally ignorant about the structure of that resistance and the nature of the local civil society.

George Bush would have us believe that the vileness at Abu Ghraib is an isolated instance of treachery, a regrettable aberration in an otherwise humane system. No; the abuse of Iraqi detainees, directed by US military intelligence and unopposed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is part of US strategy in Iraq. It is consistent with the US military’s disregard for the Geneva Conventions in Iraq and with the Bush administration’s disregard for international law. Worse, it is characteristic of an historic pattern of abuse practiced by the US military as an instrument of foreign policy.

By Jo Wilding
May 9th

“The US fought the people of Falluja because it said they were Saddamis. Now they are letting the real Saddamis have their old jobs back. For a year we have been told there are no jobs, but suddenly there are 6000 jobs for Baathis.” Saleh was one of a few thousand men at a demonstration that went from Kahromana Square to Firdos Square against the re-employment of all but the highest-ranking former Baathists.

“The Governing Council decided this without consulting the people. Now the Baathis will be representing us. They started killing people before. They never did good things before. It is impossible. There are not enough jobs. They have to give the chance to new people.” Taalib was a politician in the Daawa Party, forced out by the Baathists.

Mehdi was employed by the Ministry of Information, fired along with 50 other workers because he did not join the Baath Party. “Now they are bringing the Baathis back we will face the same problem.” The same is true for teachers. Hassan graduated in 1991 and applied for a job as a teacher but was refused because he was not a Baath Party member.

“The employees who humiliated us are now Ministry of Education employees. After the war they said all the politicians and teachers and others would get our old jobs back but none of us did,” Hassan said.

The decision is only a public announcement and a larger scale advancement of a policy which has gone on since the US took over in Iraq. Adil went to apply for a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when it reopened after the war and found the same Baathi still there on reception, refusing to let him in, telling him no, there were no jobs there for him.

Neo-Baathism, the process of slipping the old party back into power, was predictable. When the US and UK talked about De-Baathification they hinted at a massive operation but appeared to plan for much less. The regime figureheads were to be changed, its loyalties, but not its power base. The people were expecting more, especially the ones who lost people to the Baathists.

by Mike Ferner

George “that’s not the way Americans do things” Bush is outraged.

General “those troops let us down” Kimmit is outraged.

Senators and Congressmen are outraged.

Everyone is shocked, simply shocked to hear that abuse is going on at Abu Ghraib prison!

Of course it’s an outrage that American soldiers and mercenaries are torturing Iraqi prisoners. But ask anyone who has gone through military basic training and they might well respond: “What did you THINK was going on in Iraq?”

What could be more naked abuse than cluster-bombing children and terrorizing whole cities? What could be more obscene than sending armless and legless GIs home by the planeload? Our leaders are outraged at what is happening inside Abu Ghraib? When they know full well that next door in Fallujah our troops were killing so many people-including women and children-that the soccer stadium was turned into a cemetery? There have been pictures of all this, too. Not on 19th Century Fox, or other corporate news outlets, but there were pictures aplenty.

Another Open Letter to the Troops in Iraq
from Stan Goff

In 1994, I was running an A-Detachment in 3rd Special Forces, ODA-354 to be precise, a team that specialized in free-fall parachute infiltration and special (strategic) reconnaissance. 3rd Special Forces Group’s area of operation encompassed sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, and our team was specifically designated for the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So we had two language requirements on the team, Spanish and French (even though most Haitians actually speak Haitian Kreyol).

I had a communications sergeant on my team named Ali Tehrani. His father was an expatriate Iranian who’d married a German, and Ali had been raised in extremely comfortable circumstances in Europe, where his father and the society around him pushed him to fluency in English, German, Spanish, and French. Ali also spoke decent Italian. He was the most fluent French-speaker on the battalion, and a year before we were sent to Haiti with the 1994 invasion, Ali had been sent to the camps constructed by the United States military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the purpose of detaining tens of thousands of Haitians who were trying to escape the brutal repression and grinding poverty of Haiti in ramshackle boats. Ali was needed there because of his language fluency.

Ali was typical of many of the “non-white” members of Special Forces in two respects. He was demonstrably patriotic - compelled, it seemed, to prove his devotion to the American security state - and he adopted the prevailing attitude within much of Special Operations of Negrophobia - a kind of institutional disdain for Black troops that served to bloc other “non-whites” with whites in SF. It’s a peculiar mechanism of white supremacy where there is not a master-race mentality so much as a deficient-race ideology from which all others could self-exclude. This - along with an anabolic version of masculinity - served as one form of social glue in SF culture, though there were a few exceptions.