Be sure to check out our collection of useful links to blogs and websites from around the globe, ranging from US foreign policy, national security and politics to law, development, econo- and enviro-bloggers, and tech and media.
Most of the Iraq chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World will be nothing new to regular readers of his blog. The first part surveys different views of the war in the United States and the Arab world. In the U.S., the war is sold through “Islam Anxiety,” which Cole uses throughout his [...]
The document reads, like so much else from the Cheney years, like a document from a South American dictatorship in the 1970s or 1980s. If someone had told me a few years ago that it had popped up in the Soviet archives, I would have believed him. Read the whole thing if you can. It is a distressing document. Here’s what the “CIA pros” did to prisoners (the non-CIA pros improvised the president’s directive to torture and abuse prisoners in very similar ways): stress positions, nudity, hooding, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, long time standing, beatings, hypothermia, and walling. They key thing, according to the CIA, is to enhance “the potential dread a high-value detainee might have of US custody”. Notice the shift from the standards of the past. In the past, the US was known for being a country whose soldiers would never mistreat prisoners; now, the US wants the world to know that US custody is something to be dreaded. That’s what Cheney did to America. He’s proud of it. If you are ever captured by a US soldier, and suspected of terrorism, you know that torture will be coming soon. The values of Washington and Eisenhower and Reagan are inverted. The reputation of the US as a defender of human rights is reversed. The point is that America must be feared for its willingness to abandon all human rights.
This is what the neocon right believe in, even as they prattle on about extending human rights as an American value. They say they believe in democracy. What they also believe in is what we saw done to innocent human beings at Abu Ghraib:
Nudity. The HVD’s clothes are taken from him and he remains nude until the interrogators provide clothes to him.
Sleep deprivation. The HVD is placed in the vertical shackling position to begin sleep deprivation. Other shackling procedures may be used during interrogations. The detainee is diapered for sanitary purposes, although the diaper is not used at all times.
The diapers are necessary because when you shackle someone in the same position for hours and hours on end and feed him Ensure, he will shit himself. All torturing regimes deal with shitting torture victims. The US followed other regimes in both diapering prisoners or, better still, forcing them to lie in their own excrement, as was discovered by horrified FBI agents at Gitmo. Other torture regimes capture piss and shit in bowls beneath the torture victims. Various forms of nude shackling, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation (all barred under Geneva and the UN Convention) are then supplemented by constant bombardment with light, loud noise, water-dousing and walling. These techniques can be used in combination. [emphasis added]
Don’t it make you proud? Don’t you wonder why the Obama administration would want to politicize criminal conduct by actually investigating torture and holding those that tortured accountable under the law?
Just as the death of Edward Kennedy marks the passing of one of the most prominent politicians in the American political firmament, today the Iraqi political scene lost one of its key figures as well. Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of one of Iraq’s main Shiite political parties, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), succumbed to a long bout with cancer. al-Hakim, who was once feted by President Bush at the White House, passed away in a hospital in Tehran - a location of some significance given that it was his one time home during his years spent in exile from Saddam’s Iraq.
Reidar Visser, as usual, provides a detailed backstory:
More than anything, through his political career, Hakim became a symbol of the chaos, the contradictions and the opportunism that have characterised Iraq in the post-2003 period. Having abandoned religious studies at an early level, Hakim made a professional career in the 1980s as a political-military operator in what was then called the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a Khomeinist outfit created by Iran in 1982 in order to maximise its control of the Iraqi opposition during the Iran–Iraq War. He returned to Iraq from Iran after the start of the Iraq War in 2003, and in August that year, after the death of his brother Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim in a terrorist attack in Najaf, was propelled to the top leadership position in SCIRI.
It was during 2005 in particular that Hakim would make his mark on the post-2003 politics of Iraq, through a series of remarkable policy initiatives. Ever since the first pre-war opposition conferences in 2002, SCIRI had managed to wrestle itself to the unlikely position as the preferred partner of the United States in “dealing with the Shiite community of Iraq” (a strategy that in itself was predicated on a belief in Washington that the complexities of Iraqi politics would be best approached through sectarian lenses), and it consolidated this position between 2003 to 2005 by appealing to sectarian identity as a basis for political power. Then, in August 2005, Hakim dramatically launched a bid to create a federal region that would comprise the nine Shiite-majority governorates south of Baghdad – an overt projection of sectarian identity onto Iraq’s administrative map that had hitherto been the preserve of Israelis, Kuwaitis and pro-Kurdish American senators, and a scenario so radical and divisive that its sheer presence on the political agenda added a major obstacle to Iraq’s process of national reconciliation. [...]
Throughout the post-war period, Hakim masterfully managed to balance US and Iranian pressures and was successful in creating the impression in Washington that SCIRI was on course to liberate itself from Iranian overlordship. This involved theatrics such as a name change in May 2007, where SCIRI became ISCI (without the “revolution”) and where the rumour was circulated (but never officially confirmed) that ISCI would henceforth take its orders from the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf in Iraq, instead of from Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Simultaneously, Hakim, who himself was never an Islamic scholar of repute, managed to create the impression of religious authority among Americans by focusing on his status as the son of a Shiite luminary (the Grand Ayatollah Muhsin al-Hakim) and as a sayyid (descendant of the Prophet), thereby prompting many international journalists to describe him as a “leading cleric” and one of the most “powerful” politicians of Iraq. It was only gradually since 2008 – and more pronouncedly since the local elections in January 2009 – that the idea of ISCI as a loyal ally of Iran returned to US policy-making circles in earnest. [...]
Hakim’s health began to deteriorate several years ago, but he remained a vital policy-maker until his death. Since May 2009, from his convalescent home in Tehran, he presided over a series of meetings with Iraqi politicians that prepared the ground for the revamping of the Shiite political alliance (UIA or the United Iraqi Alliance) that he had been instrumental in crafting back in 2004. Responding to experiences from the local elections, the newly formed Iraqi National Alliance (INA) now accords greater rhetorical emphasis to the idea of Iraqi national unity, but its programme still remains remorseless towards former Baathists (who are to be “cleansed” from the Iraqi state), and ISCI still keeps focusing on an ideology of radical decentralisation which many Iraqis believe contradict the idea of national unity.
Hakim chose to be treated for cancer in Iran and it is remarkable that the United States was unable to correctly interpret his physical movements as the most revealing indicator of his true political loyalties. Since 2003 and until today, Hakim, SCIRI/ISCI and members of the Badr brigades have travelled in and out of Iran without any restriction. It was Iranian territory that was used to orchestrate the new INA. It is inconceivable that the authorities in Tehran would have allowed these processes to go on within their own borders had they not felt that right until his death Hakim was pursuing a policy that was in Iran’s best interests. Instead, however, until recently Washington clung to a rosy scenario in which ISCI was seen as a potential convert to the American cause; ultimately it was the contradictions in this policy that would create the space for Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim’s peculiar political career.
For anyone interested in reading up on the new Iraqi National Alliance political party that, in a bit of cats and dogs sleeping together peculiarity, features the unlikely partnership of ISCI with its longtime rivals, the Sadrists, Visser has more. As does Raed Jarrar.
From Christopher Davidson’s new book Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond:
“Early in (2008) it was revealed by the BBC that several hundred UAE Armed Forces’ troops and armoured cars had been deployed to Afghanistan to maintain supply line security and deliver humanitarian aid. On occasion this contingent has had to fend off Taleban attacks [...]
In reading the third and shortest chapter of Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, “The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha,” I was struck by something that wasn’t there. The point of this chapter is that Wahhabism does not cause terrorism, nor is Saudi Arabia the main exporter of anti-American violence in the region. [...]
While President Bush was still in office and his administration was trying to come to an agreement with the Iraqi government on terms governing the continued troop presence in Iraq (what is referred to as the Status of Forces Agreement, or “SOFA”), Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani made a public statement demanding that any such [...]
