[Mb-civic] Naomi Klein: Crime and Evidence

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

You asked for my evidence, Mr Ambassador. Here it is 

In Iraq, the US does eliminate those who dare to count the 
dead 

Naomi Klein 

The Guardian : Saturday December 4, 2004
David T Johnson, 
Acting ambassador, 
US Embassy, London 


Dear Mr Johnson, On November 26, your press counsellor sent a 
letter to the Guardian taking strong exception to a sentence in my 
column of the same day. The sentence read: "In Iraq, US forces and 
their Iraqi surrogates are no longer bothering to conceal attacks on 
civilian targets and are openly eliminating anyone - doctors, clerics, 
journalists - who dares to count the bodies." Of particular concern 
was the word "eliminating". 

The letter suggested that my charge was "baseless" and asked the 
Guardian either to withdraw it, or provide "evidence of this extremely 
grave accusation". It is quite rare for US embassy officials to openly 
involve themselves in the free press of a foreign country, so I took 
the letter extremely seriously. But while I agree that the accusation 
is grave, I have no intention of withdrawing it. Here, instead, is the 
evidence you requested. 

In April, US forces laid siege to Falluja in retaliation for the 
gruesome killings of four Blackwater employees. The operation was 
a failure, with US troops eventually handing the city back to 
resistance forces. The reason for the withdrawal was that the siege 
had sparked uprisings across the country, triggered by reports that 
hundreds of civilians had been killed. This information came from 
three main sources: 1) Doctors. USA Today reported on April 11 
that "Statistics and names of the dead were gathered from four 
main clinics around the city and from Falluja general hospital". 2) 
Arab TV journalists. While doctors reported the numbers of dead, it 
was al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya that put a human face on those 
statistics. With unembedded camera crews in Falluja, both networks 
beamed footage of mutilated women and children throughout Iraq 
and the Arab-speaking world. 3) Clerics. The reports of high civilian 
casualties coming from journalists and doctors were seized upon by 
prominent clerics in Iraq. Many delivered fiery sermons condemning 
the attack, turning their congregants against US forces and igniting 
the uprising that forced US troops to withdraw. 

US authorities have denied that hundreds of civilians were killed 
during last April's siege, and have lashed out at the sources of these 
reports. For instance, an unnamed "senior American officer", 
speaking to the New York Times last month, labelled Falluja general 
hospital "a centre of propaganda". But the strongest words were 
reserved for Arab TV networks. When asked about al-Jazeera and 
al-Arabiya's reports that hundreds of civilians had been killed in 
Falluja, Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defence, replied that 
"what al-Jazeera is doing is vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable ... " 
Last month, US troops once again laid siege to Falluja - but this 
time the attack included a new tactic: eliminating the doctors, 
journalists and clerics who focused public attention on civilian 
casualties last time around. 

Eliminating doctors
The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to 
storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the 
facility under military control. The New York Times reported that "the 
hospital was selected as an early target because the American 
military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy 
casual ties", noting that "this time around, the American military 
intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching 
what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons". The 
Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers 
"stole the mobile phones" at the hospital - preventing doctors from 
communicating with the outside world. 

But this was not the worst of the attacks on health workers. Two 
days earlier, a crucial emergency health clinic was bombed to 
rubble, as well as a medical supplies dispensary next door. Dr Sami 
al-Jumaili, who was working in the clinic, says the bombs took the 
lives of 15 medics, four nurses and 35 patients. The Los Angeles 
Times reported that the manager of Falluja general hospital "had 
told a US general the location of the downtown makeshift medical 
centre" before it was hit. 

Whether the clinic was targeted or destroyed accidentally, the effect 
was the same: to eliminate many of Falluja's doctors from the war 
zone. As Dr Jumaili told the Independent on November 14: "There is 
not a single surgeon in Falluja." When fighting moved to Mosul, a 
similar tactic was used: on entering the city, US and Iraqi forces 
immediately seized control of the al-Zaharawi hospital. 

Eliminating journalists
The images from last month's siege on Falluja came almost 
exclusively from reporters embedded with US troops. This is 
because Arab journalists who had covered April's siege from the 
civilian perspective had effectively been eliminated. Al-Jazeera had 
no cameras on the ground because it has been banned from 
reporting in Iraq indefinitely. Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded 
reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US 
forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-
Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without 
Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot 
ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do 
his job," the IFJ stated. 

It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of 
intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US 
Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the 
city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. 
On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, 
killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation 
proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces. 

On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José 
Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of 
Reuters. Three US soldiers are facing a criminal lawsuit from 
Couso's family, which alleges that US forces were well aware that 
journalists were in the Palestine hotel and that they committed a war 
crime. 

Eliminating clerics
Just as doctors and journalists have been targeted, so too have 
many of the clerics who have spoken out forcefully against the 
killings in Falluja. On November 11, Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaidaei, the 
head of the Supreme Association for Guidance and Daawa, was 
arrested. According to Associated Press, "Al-Sumaidaei has called 
on the country's Sunni minority to launch a civil disobedience 
campaign if the Iraqi government does not halt the attack on 
Falluja". On November 19, AP reported that US and Iraqi forces 
stormed a prominent Sunni mosque, the Abu Hanifa, in Aadhamiya, 
killing three people and arresting 40, including the chief cleric - 
another opponent of the Falluja siege. On the same day, Fox News 
reported that "US troops also raided a Sunni mosque in Qaim, near 
the Syrian border". The report described the arrests as "retaliation 
for opposing the Falluja offensive". Two Shia clerics associated with 
Moqtada al-Sadr have also been arrested in recent weeks; 
according to AP, "both had spoken out against the Falluja attack". 

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US 
Central Command. The question is: what happens to the people 
who insist on counting the bodies - the doctors who must pronounce 
their patients dead, the journalists who document these losses, the 
clerics who denounce them? In Iraq, evidence is mounting that 
these voices are being systematically silenced through a variety of 
means, from mass arrests, to raids on hospitals, media bans, and 
overt and unexplained physical attacks. 

Mr Ambassador, I believe that your government and its Iraqi 
surrogates are waging two wars in Iraq. One war is against the Iraqi 
people, and it has claimed an estimated 100,000 lives. The other is 
a war on witnesses. 

· Additional research by Aaron Maté



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