Iraqi Solidarity News (Al-Thawra)

Hussein Al-alak: A Festival to Remember





Campaigners kicked off a film festival on Tuesday, with a series of films that will charter the Palestinian experiences, at the month long event that will ultimately conclude in December.

The Palestinian Film Festival, which is being organised by the Manchester Metropolitan University, is promising to highlight the plight of the Palestinian people, by showing a series of Middle Eastern films, which will cover the recent attacks on the Gaza Strip, the occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem, along with films, that will also illustrate the ongoing struggle against the separation wall.

According to the Festival organisers, open discussions will follow each screening, with the festival promising to be a lively event, that will be thought provoking and insightful to the viewers. Campaigners in the city of Manchester are welcoming the film festival as being a positive step in demonstrating the issues which are affecting the Palestinian people and are hoping that the use of film will reinforce the need for building solidarity.

The film festival has been organised as a response to the recent week long boycott of Israeli products across the United Kingdom, where members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign staged a variety of protests and direct actions against British companies, who are openly trading with the state of Israel and whose products are believed to have been purchased from the illegal settlements.

It has also been arranged to coincide with a visit by a delegation of Palestinian firemen, who are on a national tour of the United Kingdom, on invitation from the British Fire Brigades Union and were received in the city of Manchester on Monday, with a private reception that was held in their honour by the Lord Mayor.

Over the next few weeks, the Palestinian Film Festival will be showing a wide range of hard hitting productions, including the award winning Occupation 101, which is a comprehensive overview of Israel’s military occupation and the remarkable Arna’s Children, which documents the lives of children growing up in a West Bank refugee camp. Other films include the powerful Bil’in Habibti and the Golden Globe Winner Paradise Now.

The Palestinian Film Festival will be held on the following Tuesday nights, 24th/11/2009, 1/8/15th December 2009, with each showing kicking off at 6 pm. The films will be shown in Lecture Room 7 at the Geoffrey Manton building on Oxford Road, which is in the Manchester City Centre and is facing the Manchester Aquatic Centre.

Hussein Al-alak,
The Iraq Solidarity Campaign
http://www.iraqsolidaritycampaign.blogspot.com

Please also see:

Palestine Solidarity Campaign
http://www.palestinecampaign.org/index2b.asp

Occupation 101
http://www.occupation101.com/about.html

Arna’s Children
http://www.jerusalemites.org/book&film/film26.htm

Bil'in Habibti - Bil'in My Love (teaser)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WynTOY04Ac8

Paradise Now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyz15qG22Ec

Officer threatened to blow prisoners head off
Johnny McDevitt




A "trigger-happy" former commanding officer of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment pointed his gun at an Iraqi prisoner and threatened to blow the man's face off, an Army abuse inquiry has heard.

Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Mendonca, of 1st Battalion QLR, acted as if he were a member of the SAS and presided over a regimental unit in which there was a culture of abuse, according to Donald Payne, a former corporal giving evidence over the death of an Iraqi hotel receptionist at the hands of British troops in 2003.

Payne, the first member of the Armed Forces to be convicted of a war crime, also told the inquiry into Baha Mousa's death that he witnessed a former QLR Lieutenant, Craig Rodgers, place a jerry can of petrol filled with water in front of an Iraqi boy and pour the liquid over him before lighting a match.

Payne, who was dismissed from the Army and sentenced to one year in a civilian jail after pleading guilty to inhumane treatment in September 2006, said that all members of the unit were involved in abusing civilians under their control.

Payne described Lieutenant Colonel Mendonca as 'gung ho'. He told the inquiry of one occasion where the officer cocked his pistol, held it above a prisoner’s mouth and threatened to "blow his face off".The commanding officer also personally shot out blacked-out car windows after a directive was issued banning them, Payne claimed. The former soldier said in a statement to the inquiry:

"It was my impression that the CO was somewhat trigger-happy."He would pull his pistol out at any opportunity. He would behave as if he were a member of the SAS. Everyone knew and commented about his behaviour."Lieutenant Colonel Mendonca, who was later promoted to colonel, was charged with negligently performing a duty over the prisoner abuse but was cleared at the court martial.

Mr Mousa, 26 died in Basra, southern Iraq, on September 15 2003 while in the custody of the regiment, having suffered 93 separate injuries.Payne said he saw every member of the unit commanded by Lieutenant Rodgers, known by the call sign G10A, "forcefully kick and/or punch" the group of Iraqi detainees that included Mr Mousa.

Mr Rodgers, who left the Army in 2007, strongly denied allegations of prisoner abuse when he gave evidence to the inquiry last week. He said: "I did not hit, punch, kick or physically assault any of the detainees at any time."Witnesses have told the inquiry that they previously lied to protect Payne by saying the Iraqi prisoner accidentally banged his head during a scuffle.

The inquiry today heard Payne’s version of his "struggle" with Mr Mousa prior to the Iraqi’s death. The former corporal admitted putting his knee in the Mr Mousa’s back in order to restrain him, but denied pounding his head against a wall.

Payne said: "I heard his head, but I don't know whether it was the floor or the wall... I heard it whack."Payne said he beat the prisoners because he wrongly believed that they were linked to the deaths of three soldiers with the Royal Military Police in Iraq in June 2003.

Tortured Iraqis to avenge troops killing
Indian Express




A former corporal in the British Army, who is accused of the brutal beating and torture of Iraqi prisoners, has said that he acted out of revenge over the killing of four UK soldiers.

Donald Payne, 35, told a public inquiry that he tortured Iraqis to avenge the murder of three Royal Military Policemen and the killing of an Army captain who had been blown up while delivering humanitarian aid to southern Iraq.

Payne, who has already been convicted of the inhumane treatment of Iraqis, revealed that he and other soldiers had routinely kicked and punched nine Iraqi detainees captured in September 2003.

One of them, Baha Mousa, died from asphyxiation and 93 separate injuries.

The new allegations raise concerns about the widespread abuse of dozens of Iraqi detainees and come days after the Ministry of Defence said it was investigating 33 other separate cases of torture carried out by British soldiers in Iraq.

Payne also claims an officer, Lt Craig Rodgers, subjected one of the detainees to a mock execution by forcing him to the ground and pouring liquid over him so that he believed he was to be set on fire.

In a separate incident, Payne saw his commanding officer, Lt-Col Jorge Mendonca, interrogate a captured Iraqi by placing a cocked pistol above the man''s mouth before telling him he intended to "blow his face off".

Lawyers representing the family of Baha Mousa called said: "At long last Donald Payne has decided to tell the truth. Nobody faced charges for murder or torture in the hopelessly flawed military prosecution and all those responsible should now be charged with murder."

Army Underreporting Suicides
By Dahr Jamail




According to a soldiers' advocacy group at Fort Hood, the U.S. base where an army psychiatrist has been charged with killing 13 people and wounding 30 in a Nov. 5 rampage, the official suicide figures provided by the Army are "definitely" too low.

Chuck Luther served 12 years in the military and is a veteran of two deployments to Iraq, where he was a reconnaissance scout in the 1st Cavalry Division. The former sergeant was based at Fort Hood, where he lives today.

"I see the ugly," Luther told IPS. "I see soldiers beating their wives and trying to kill themselves all the time, and most folks don't want to look at this, including the military."

Luther, who in 2007 became the founder and director of the Soldier's Advocacy Group of Disposable Warriors, knows about these types of internal problems in the military because he has been through many of them himself.Luther told IPS that he believes the real number of soldiers at Fort Hood committing suicide is being dramatically underreported by the military.

"There are suicides of active-duty troops occurring regularly both on and off base," Luther said. "One of them I knew personally since I served with him in Iraq and he was one of my soldiers, and they still have him listed as under investigation for suicide."

"From what I know right now, there are at least three suicides they are not reporting at all. Most notably, there is a soldier who committed suicide that the Army confirmed through a press conference, and this is not being reported, and I'm working with the Pentagon to try to find out why that is not being reported," he said. "The Army won't even release his name."

Yet Luther believes the situation is even worse.

"I definitely believe there are more than these. If this is what they've hidden from us that we know of, we can rest assured there are many, many more than this. We filed a FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to get information from them [Army], but they bog you down in red tape," he said.

Due to the military's continued attempts to mask the true number of suicides in the ranks, along with an ongoing refusal to make the radical policy changes necessary to properly treat soldiers and psychiatric care providers exposed to secondary post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Luther fears the worst for the future.

"There will be more 5 November [referencing the recent Fort Hood tragedy] attacks on fellow soldiers, and they will likely be even more drastic," he said.

"Everybody has to outdo someone, so the next are likely to be worse. Violence breeds violence. I was trained to be very violent in combat as a scout...we killed or detained Iraqis before anyone else got there. Two months ago I warned the Army's Chain of Command that before we had an attack by a soldier on other troops when they come home, we needed to make some dramatic changes."

At the time of the interview, one week after army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan's shooting rampage left 13 dead and over 30 wounded at Fort Hood, Luther informed IPS that in the previous three days at Fort Hood, "I've heard commanders tell soldiers requesting psychological help that they are full of crap and don't have PTSD...so if we can't implement these needed changes quickly and rapidly we are going to have more loss of life on U.S. soil by soldiers killing other soldiers."

While not on the scale of the recent shooting incident, several other killings by soldiers have been reported at Fort Hood over the last two years.

According to official military statistics, Fort Hood already suffers the highest number of suicides among Army installations since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. While Luther believes the number is far higher, Army officials at Fort Hood admit to at least 10 suicides on the base from January to July of this year, and at least 75 "confirmed" suicides since 2003.

Several years of repeated war-zone deployments are taking their toll, as Army personnel are experiencing record rates of PTSD, depression, other mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicides.

According to the Army Suicide Event Report, a total of 99 soldiers killed themselves in 2006, the highest rate of military suicides in the 26 years the military has been keeping statistics on suicides. More than a quarter of them were by troops in combat postings in Iraq and Afghanistan. The figure does not include post-discharge suicides by military personnel.

In 2007, at least 115 suicides were reported by the Army, another record. Last year set another record, with at least 133 reported suicides, in addition to there being a record number of suicides in the Marine Corps that year.

The suicide rate for the Army for 2008 was calculated roughly at 20.2 per 100,000 soldiers, which for the first time since the Vietnam War is higher than the adjusted civilian rate.Thus far, 2009 is on pace to set another record for the number of suicides in the Army.Private Michael Kern, an active-duty Iraq war veteran who is based at Fort Hood, served in Iraq from March 2007 to March 2008.

On Nov. 9, four days after the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Kern told IPS, "The 20th Engineering Battalion was hit hard in this rampage. They are scheduled to deploy in January to Afghanistan, and lost a lot of good folks on Thursday [Nov. 5]. I personally know a soldier in that Battalion who attempted suicide last night."

Mental health problems and suicide appear to now be systemic in the military.

By October 2007, data within the Army's fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicated that approximately 12 percent of combat troops in Iraq and 17 percent of those in Afghanistan were coping by taking prescription antidepressants and/or sleeping pills to cope.

In 2008, the Daily Telegraph of London reported that two out of five suicide victims among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have been found to be on antidepressants.In April 2008, the RAND Corporation released a stunning report revealing, "Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan - 300,000 in all - report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, yet only slightly more than half have sought treatment."

A 2008 court case in California revealed a Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) email that revealed 1,000 veterans who are receiving care from the VA are attempting suicide every single month, and 18 veterans kill themselves daily.

The worlds most corrupt countries
By Bill Van Auken, WSWS




US-occupied Afghanistan is the world’s second most corrupt country—after Somalia, where no government has functioned for two decades—while Iraq is the fourth worst, according to a report released by an international watchdog group.

The annual report conducted by the Berlin-based organization Transparency International ranks countries according a Corruption Perceptions Index, which is based on a survey of business and government experts. A score of 10 represents minimum public sector corruption, and zero the maximum. New Zealand, ranked the least corrupt country, scoring 9.4, while Somalia ranked the worst, scoring 1.1.

"Fragile, unstable states that are scarred by war and ongoing conflict linger at the bottom of the index," the organization stated in its report. "These are: Somalia, with a score of 1.1, Afghanistan at 1.3, Myanmar at 1.4 and Sudan tied with Iraq at 1.5. These results demonstrate that countries which are perceived as the most corrupt are also those plagued by long-standing conflicts, which have torn apart their governance infrastructure."

Afghanistan received a worse rating this year than last, falling from 176th place to 179th. The report stated in relation to Afghanistan that "Examples of corruption range from public posts for sale and justice for a price to daily bribing for basic services." It continued, "This, along with the exploding opium trade—which is also linked to corruption—contributes to the downward trend in the country’s CPI score."

The findings corroborated those issued by numerous other groups. Integrity Watch Afghanistan, for example, estimated that the average Afghan household is compelled to pay $100 in bribes to police and officials every year—an immense burden in a country where 70 percent of the population lives on $1 a day or less. The group estimated that as much as $250 million is paid in bribes each year, a sum equal to the country’s entire 2006 national development budget.

In relation to Iraq, the report found rampant corruption as well, with corrupt government officials operating with impunity. It cited a recent study by the Bertelsmann Foundation stating that in Iraq "non-security institutions remain weak and debilitated. The Iraqi leadership faces many structural constraints on governance, such as a massive brain drain, a high level of political division, and extreme poverty."

The release of the report will provide further grist for the mill in Washington’s public pressure campaign on Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai—who is to be inaugurated this Thursday for a second term based on an openly rigged election.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Sunday demanded that Karzai crack down on a culture of "impunity for those who are corrupt," and threatened to cut off non-military aid if he does not. She proposed that the Afghan regime form an anti-corruption task force to do the job.Just a day later, the regime’s interior minister announced the creation of just such a task force at a press conference where he appeared together with the US and British ambassadors.

There is a strong element of farce in such gestures. This is the third such task force that the Karzai government has created over the past five years. The first one had to be disbanded after it was learned that its chief had been convicted on drug charges and imprisoned in the US. A second such commission was created last year, to little or no effect.

The report’s assessment of corruption in Afghanistan and Iraq is no doubt accurate. It ignores, however, the essential fact that both countries have been subjected to protracted US military occupation—Afghanistan for eight years and Iraq for six and a half.

With Washington exercising immense power in both countries, it seems logical that it would join them at the bottom of the list. Transparency International, however, ranked the US at 19, roughly equivalent with the ranking given to Japan. The organization seems also to have turned a blind eye to the intimate complicity of the US government in the massive and catastrophic fraud carried out on Wall Street.

There is an undeniable connection between the blatant corruption of the Afghan and Iraqi officials and the corrupt character of the entire US project in both Afghanistan and Iraq from the outset.

In both cases, wars were launched based upon lies—the claims that the mission in Afghanistan was to hunt down Osama bin Laden, and in Iraq to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. The real motive behind the invasion of both countries was the pursuit of the geo-strategic interests of US imperialism in the world’s two greatest energy producing regions.

Alongside this essential goal, US corporations pursued their own interests through war profiteering.

Among the most well known examples is KBR, the subsidiary of Halliburton, the corporation formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. KBR has reaped more than $31 billion for contracting services in building and maintaining bases for the US military occupation in Iraq. Even after Pentagon probes have uncovered massive overcharges, waste and negligence, the company saw its multi-billion-dollar contract renewed in 2008.

On Monday, the company that serves as the main food supplier for the US troops in Iraq, Public Warehousing Company, was indicted for carrying out tens of millions of dollars in overcharges and other fraud in the multi-billion-dollar contracts that it signed with the Pentagon.In Afghanistan, the US has appropriated more than $39 billion in non-military aid since 2001, even as conditions of life for the country’s impoverished people have further deteriorated.

According to a recent study made at the request of the Afghan regime’s ministry of finance on the impact of international aid, three quarters of all US non-military aid is funneled through international contactors. The study found that while aid provided directly to the Afghan government saw approximately 85 percent of the money used directly in local projects, with funds channeled through international contractors and NGOs, the rate was just 20 percent.

Such figures have convinced the Afghan population that the US government is every bit as corrupt as its puppet regime in Kabul and is complicit in the graft of Karzai’s ministers and local officials.

It is estimated that as much of 54 percent of the $39 billion in aid money for Afghanistan has gone to international security contractors and to pay for other means of protecting US assets and personnel. Private security contractors outnumber US troops today in Afghanistan.The amount of money being siphoned off by US corporations and contractors makes the graft that has enriched Afghan officials pale by comparison.

Washington’s demand that Karzai crack down on corruption is as hypocritical as it is futile. Those most implicated in corruption—including Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, a leading official in Kandahar province, who has been described by US officials as a heroin trafficker—are among the closest collaborators of the US occupation and the CIA.

Washington’s demand for a crackdown on Afghan corruption is aimed, on the one hand, at placating American public opinion, which is heavily opposed to the Obama administration’s deployment of more troops in Afghanistan. On the other, it may yet serve as the pretext for putting an end to Karzai’s presidency and the shapi ng of a regime even more tightly under the control of the US embassy and the American military.