"To the hell that is Iraq?" New study on deaths.

[MinM]

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board/v ... hp?t=23535

Inside the Military’s Secret Terror-Tagging Tech

* By David Hambling
* June 3, 2009 |
* 3:50 pm |
* Categories: Spies, Secrecy and Surveillance, Terrorists, Guerillas, Pirates

The story that the CIA uses tiny homing beacons to guide their drone strikes in Pakistan may sound like an urban myth. But this sort of technology does exist, and might well be used for exactly this purpose. It might even have been the “secret weapon” that Bob Woodward said helped the American military pacify Iraq.

The military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars researching, developing, and purchasing a slew of “Tagging tracking and locating” (TTL) gear — gizmos designed to keep covertly tabs from far away. Most of these technologies are highly classified. But there’s enough information in the open literature to get a sense of what the government is pursuing: laser-based reflectors, super-strength RFID tags, and homing beacons so tiny, they can be woven into fabric or into paper.

Some of the gadgets are already commercially available; if you’re carrying around a phone or some other mobile gadget, you can be tracked - either through the GPS chip embedded in the gizmo, or by triangulating the cell signal. Defense contractor EWA Government Systems, Inc. makes a radio frequency-based “Bigfoot Remote Tagging System” that’s the size of a couple of AA batteries. But the government has been working to make these terrorist tracking tags even smaller.

Sandia National Laboratories have carried out development on “Radar Responsive” tags, which are like a long-range version of the ubiquitous stick-on RFID tags used to mark items in shops. The Radar Responsive tag stays asleep until it is woken up by a radar pulse. The tags in Wal-mart have a range of a couple of meters, Sandia’s tags can light up and locate themselves from twelve miles away.

This document from 2004 describes the tags as being credit-card sized and with a “geolocation accuracy” of three feet. The radio waves penetrate buildings. Suggested application include “search and rescue, precision targeting, special operations.” The selection of aircraft used to illustrate the system includes a Predator drone.

The reports from Pakistan suggest that the CIA knew which village to strike, they just needed to locate the exact building (descriptions like “third house on the left” can be dangerously ambiguous, especially when viewing from the air). A Radar Responsive tag would be very handy for guiding a strike from a drone a few miles away.

Nor is this the only technology out there. A 2002 Defense Science Board report on counter-terrorism mentioned, among other things, the possibility of using invisible chemical dye to mark terrorists, so they could be spotted using a suitable viewer.

The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review — the Pentagon’s once-every-four-years grand strategy document — included a section on defeating terrorist networks, which mentioned the importance of tagging and tracking both terrorists and their gear. Two methods suggested are tinier-than-tiny radar tags, and dynamic optical tags. Darpa, the Pentagon’s way-out research arm, spent years developing these “small, environmentally robust, retro reflector-based tags that can be read by both handheld and airborne sensors at significant ranges.” They rely on small silicon reflectors which return a laser signal — as long as that signal can be seen from the air. “Each Dynamic Optical Tag or DOT is an inch across and based on a ‘quantum well modulator,’” the agency explains. “They are read using a laser interrogator, which can be mounted on an aircraft; the laser ‘wakes up’ the tag, which sends a return signal at over 100 kbps. This can be simply the ID of the tag, or it can be data that it has recorded - for example, details of where it has traveled since last interrogated, or recorded video or audio.”

Covert radar tags were descried in a 2004 report by the National materials Advisory Board. Inkode, a company that also provides cheap RFID tags for supermarkets, has developed a means of embedding aluminum fibers in paper and other materials. The fibers are described as 6.5 millimeters long and 1.5 micrometers in diameter.

When illuminated with radar, the backscattered fields interact to create a unique interference pattern that enables one tagged object to be identified and differentiated from other tagged objects,” the company says. “For nonmilitary applications, the reader is less than 1 meter from the tag. For military applications, the reader and tag could theoretically be separated by a kilometer or more.”

The fibers can be embedded in “paper, airline baggage tags, book bindings, clothing and other fabrics, and plastic sheet.” Eight thousand fibres can be embedded in a typical 8½ by 11 inch piece of paper, which could be seen by radar at a similar distance to a meter-square target. So even something as small as a cigarette paper could be detected through walls, uniquely identified and precisely located from a tactically-useful distance in order to direct a missile strike.

This 2007 briefing from U.S. Special Operations Command hints at research into even more exotic ways to keep tabs on a target. Technology goals include spotting a “human thermal fingerprint at long distance,” “augmentation of natural signatures: e.g. ‘perfumes’ and ’stains.’” The presentation also mentions a “bioreactive taggant” that is a “current capability.” Next to the words in a picture of a bruised arm.

We do not know if any or all of these technologies are in actually use. After all, mobile phones are also a good way of locating an individual from long range, and there are numerous other sensors that can be used to direct a strike. But technologically speaking, the miniature homing beacon calling in CIA drone strikes is not just another urban myth.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06 ... ging-tech/

[JackRiddler]

.

BREAKING:

Pentagon releases photos of secret weapons employed to pacify Iraq.









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[JackRiddler]

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Report on this very subject in counterpunch:

http://counterpunch.org/hallinan06022009.html

June 2, 2009
Where Will They Strike Next?
Shadow Wars

By CONN HALLINAN

Sudan: the two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northen desert. Within minutes the column was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.

Syria: four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.

Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between Jan. 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.

In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.

War without declaration

The F-16s were Israeli, their target an alleged shipment of arms headed for the Gaza Strip. The Blackhawk soldiers were likely from Task Force 88, a ultra-secret U.S. Special Forces group. The Pakistanis were victims of a Predator drone directed from an airbase in southern Nevada. Each attack was an act of war and a violation of the United Nations Charter. Each attack drew angry responses from the country whose sovereignty was violated, but since neither the Israelis nor the U.S. admitted carrying them out the diplomatic protests had no place to go.

The “privatization” of war, with its use of armed mercenaries, has come under heavy scrutiny, especially since a 2007 incident in Baghdad in which guards from Blackwater USA (now “Xe”) went on a shooting spree, killing 17 Iraqis and wounding scores of others.

But the “covertization” of war has remained largely in the shadows. The attackers in the Sudan, Syria and Pakistan were not private contractors, but U.S. and Israeli soldiers presumably acting under orders from their respective military command.

In his book “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward disclosed that the U.S. military has developed “secret operational capabilities” to “locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups.”

In a recent interview during a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed a U.S. military “executive assassination ring,” part of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

“It’s a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to Cheney’s office,” he said, bypassing the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

Hersh says “Congress has no oversight” over the program, and that under the Bush Administration, “they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on the list and executing them and leaving.”

According to a 2004 classified document uncovered by the New York Times, the U.S. has the right to attack “terrorists” in some 15 to 20 nations, including Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Iran.

The Israeli military has long used “targeted assassinations” to eliminate Tel Aviv’s enemies. Hizbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh was killed last year by an Israeli car bomb in Damascus, and a number of Hamas leaders have been assassinated in Gaza.

U.S. and NATO “assassination teams” have emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, where, according to the United Nations, they have killed scores of people. Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council charges that secret “international intelligence services” allied with local militias are killing Afghan civilians and then hiding behind an “impenetrable” wall of bureaucracy.

When Alston protested the killing of two brothers in Kandahar, “not only was I unable to get any international military commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were involved,” he told the Financial Times.

Alston says these “shadow” units work out of two U.S. bases in Afghanistan, one in Kandahar and other in Nangarhar.

In Iraq, such special operations forces have carried out a number of killings, including a raid that killed the son and a nephew of the governor of Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. The Special Operations Forces (SOF) stormed the house at 3 AM and shot the governor’s 17-year old son dead in his bed. When a cousin tried to enter the room, he was also gunned down. SOFs recently killed two men during an early morning raid in Kut, a city southeast of Baghdad.

Such “night raids” by SOFs have drawn widespread protests in Afghanistan. According to the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, night raids involve “abusive behavior and violent breaking and entry,” and only serve to turn Afghans against the occupation. Iraqi Prime Minster Nuri Kamal al-Maliki charged that the Mar. 26 Kut raid violated the new security agreement between the U.S. and Iraq.

The Predator strikes have deeply angered most Pakistanis. Owais Ahmed Ghani, governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, calls the drone strikes “counterproductive,” and says they do little more than “attract more jihadis.” While everyone knows Americans direct the drones from bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nevada, the U.S. government does not officially take credit for the attacks.

The U.S. also sent SOFs across the Pakistani border to attack a village on Sept. 3, 2008, killing up to 20 people.

If Congress agrees to Gates’ proposed Defense Department budget, it is likely that attacks by SOF and armed robots will increase. While most the media focused on the parts of the budget that step back from the big ticket weapons systems of the Cold War, the proposal actually resurrects a key Cold War priority of the 1960s.

“The similarities between Gates’ proposals and the strategy adopted by the Kennedy administration are too great to ignore,” notes Nation defense correspondent Michael Klare, including “a shift in focus toward unconventional conflict in the Third World.”

Gate’s budget would increase the number of SOFs by 2,800, build more drones like the Predator and its bigger, more lethal cousin, the Reaper, and enhance the rapid movement of troops and equipment. All of this is part of General David Petraeus’s “counter insurgency” doctrine.

The concept is hardly new. The units are different than they were 50 years ago—Navy SEALS and Delta Force have replaced Green Berets—but the philosophy is the same. And while the public face of counter insurgency is winning “hearts and minds” by building schools and digging wells, its core is 3 AM raids and Hellfire missiles.

The “decapitations” of insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is little different—albeit at a lower level—than Operation Phoenix, which killed upwards of 40,000 “insurgent” leaders in South Vietnam during the war in Southeast Asia. The massacre of helpless Vietnamese peasants at My Lai was part of the Phoenix program.

In the past, war was an extension of a nation’s politics, “too important,” as World War I French Premier Georges Clemenceau commented, “to be left to the generals.”

But increasingly, the control of war is slipping away from the civilians in whose name and interests it is supposedly waged. While the “privatization” of war has frustrated the process of congressional oversight, its “covertization” has hidden war behind a wall of silence or denial.

“Congress has been very passive in relation to its own authority with regard to warmaking,” says Princeton international law scholar Richard Falk. “Congress hasn’t been willing to insist that the government adhere to international law and the U.S. Constitution.”

The SFOs may be hidden, but there are eight dead people in Syria, four of them reportedly children. There are at least 39 dead in northern Sudan, and dead men in northern and eastern Iraq, and southern Afghanistan. The number of dead in Pakistan runs into the hundreds.

The new defense budget goes a long ways toward retooling the U.S. military into a quick reaction/intervention force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency and covert war. The question is: where will the shadow warriors strike next?

Conn Hallinan can be reached at: ringoanne@sbcglobal.net

This article was originally published by Foreign Policy in Focus.

[JackRiddler]

McGovern has an interesting summary of what really happened during "the surge" on counterpunch. He takes it up from 2006, the bloodiest year in Iraq, when Bush had to appease objections even in the Republican ranks and appointed the Iraq Study Group. This was populated with Old Bush Mob standbys Robert Gates, James Baker and Lee Hamilton. They issued a report recommending against escalation, which was also the view of Gens. Abizaid (then CENTCOM) and Casey (Iraq commander), as well as Khalilzad (ambassador). McGovern says Rumsfeld finally sided with them in a memo, but this was the day before the 2006 election, which was sort of a referendum on Rumsfeld, so he may have been reaching for ways to keep his portfolio.

Next thing that happens is, the Democrats take the Congress, Bush sacrifices Rumsfeld and starts easing out Abizaid, Casey and Khalilzad, and Gates comes in to the Pentagon. But this fellow who's been playing on the no-escalation team turns around and agrees to implement "the surge," which is announced around the same time the Iraq Study Group paper is published with his name on it. McGovern sees this as a factional capitulation of the Old Bush men, but from here it looks like kabuki. Throw off the hated Rumsfeld, put in the new reasonable front man and, presto, you can have your escalation.

McGovern on the "success" of "the surge":

However, many military analysts believed the “surge” was at best a minor factor in improving Iraq’s security climate.

For his book, The War Within, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward interviewed a number of military officials and concluded:

“In Washington, conventional wisdom translated these events into a simple view: The surge had worked. But the full story was more complicated. At least three other factors were as important as, or even more important than, the surge.”

Woodward reported that the Sunni rejection of al-Qaeda extremists in Anbar province (which preceded the surge) and the surprise decision of radical Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr to order a unilateral cease-fire by his militia were two important factors.

A third factor, which Woodward argued may have been the most significant, was the use of new highly classified U.S. intelligence tactics that allowed for rapid targeting and killing of insurgent leaders. Woodward agreed to withhold details of these secret techniques from his book so as not to undercut their continued success.

But there were previous glimpses of these classified U.S. programs that combined high-tech means of identifying insurgents – such as sophisticated biometrics and night-vision-equipped drones – with old-fashioned brutality on the ground, including on-the-spot executions of suspects. [For instance, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War” and “Iraq’s Laboratory of Repression.”]

Brutal Factors

Other brutal factors further explained the decline in violence:

--Vicious ethnic cleansing had succeeded in separating Sunnis and Shiites to such a degree that there were fewer targets to kill. Several million Iraqis were estimated to be refugees either in neighboring countries or within their own.

--Concrete walls built between Sunni and Shiite areas made “death-squad” raids more difficult but also “cantonized” much of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, making everyday life for Iraqis even more exhausting as they sought food or traveled to work.

--During the “surge,” U.S. forces expanded a policy of rounding up so-called “military age males” and locking up tens of thousands in prison on the flimsiest of suspicions.

--Awesome U.S. firepower, concentrated on Iraqi insurgents and civilian bystanders for more than five years, had slaughtered countless thousands of Iraqis and had intimidated many others to look simply to their own survival.

--With the total Iraqi death toll estimated in the hundreds of thousands and many more Iraqis horribly maimed, the society had been deeply traumatized. As tyrants have learned throughout history, at some point violent repression does work.

But this dark side of the “successful surge” was excluded from the U.S. political debate in 2008, much as the illegality of Bush’s original invasion had been treated as a taboo subject during the early years of the Iraq War.

During last year’s presidential campaign, when Barack Obama tried to make the more sophisticated argument about the “surge,” he was badgered by prominent journalists, such as CBS anchor Katie Couric and ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos.

For instance, on Sept. 7, 2008, Stephanopoulos demanded of Obama: “How do you escape the logic that … John McCain was right about the surge?”

When Obama responded that he couldn’t understand “why people are so focused on what has happened in the last year and a half and not on the previous five,” Stephanopoulos cut him off, saying “Granted, you think you made the right decision about going in, but about the surge?”

Unwilling to pay the price for challenging Washington’s conventional wisdom regarding the “surge,” Obama finally agreed to cede the point and “admit” that the “surge” had “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

An Early Sign

It was an early sign that Obama was not prepared to take on Washington’s media/political elites over a factual issue, even one with important national security implications.

Gates is still the man under Obama. McChrystal - who had the Cheney assassination team under his command - is now putting the pressure on for the Afghan escalation. Petraeus, who ran "the surge," ditto.

[JackRiddler]

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Summary of article quoted below:

The Iraq war logs, the 350,000 documents leaked by Wikileaks last October, document about 66,000 deaths of Iraqis designated as civilians in the course of hostilities. (Never mind how many of the 43,000 combatant deaths recorded in the military logs were of actual combatants). The "Iraq Body Count" (IBC), which compiles published reports only, had documented about 100,000 civilian deaths as of Oct 2010.

A big Columbia University study of the two data sets finds that only 20 percent of the deaths appear to be recorded in both. This suggests that both data sets are minority samples of the total number of deaths inflicted. (I would think we should apply a multiplier of 3 to 6 to either number.)

The article is written by Les Roberts, author of the 2006 Lancet study that estimated 650,000 "excess deaths" as a result of the Iraq war ("excess" compared to a theoretical baseline of how many would have died had the extant conditions of 2003 continued without the US-led invasion).

Is there really a need for some kind of further speech about the vast atrocity perpetrated on the Iraqi people by the US-led invasion, in addition to the prior crimes of the sanctions and the Gulf war of 1991?

"To the hell that is Iraq?" was Saddam Hussein's question from the scaffold.

Prior related threads:

Woodward claims new Manhattan Project won Iraq war (most interesting)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20176&p=213769&hilit=iraq#p213769

Oilmen wanted Iraq invasion in April, 2001
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26263&view=next

Patrick Cockburn summing up Iraq in interview...
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20059&p=211551

Map of War Crimes Future
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=25272&view=previous

If 9/11 was an inside job, why didn't US plant WMDs in Iraq?
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22385&p=241716

Is Cheney's clock ticking? Goes to Iraq to get oil, already. (2008)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16688&p=172974&hilit=iraq#p172974

"Ten Years Ago, People Power Stopped Clinton in Iraq" (2008)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16260&p=167366&hilit=iraq#p167366

The Bomb Iran Faction (2009)
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=23856&start=15

http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/wikileaks-analysis-suggests-hundreds-of-thousands-of-unrecorded-iraqi-deaths/

WikiLeaks analysis suggests hundreds of thousands of unrecorded Iraqi deaths

Posted: March 6, 2011 by crescentandcross in Uncategorized

Les Roberts

March 5, 2011

Imagine that the New York Times revealed that five Senators were known to be taking bribes from a particular corporation. Some days later the Washington Post runs a story saying they had independent sources suggesting that four Senators were taking bribes from that same corporation but goes on to state that this was nothing new as the story was already covered, neglecting to mention that three of the four names were different than those previously reported by the Times. This is hard to imagine because eight named Senators in a scandal is not the same as five named Senators, and because healthy competition between papers would tend to point out the information missed by a rival. Yet, this is, at least numerically, what happened following the October 22nd, 2010 release of the Iraq War Logs by WikiLeaks.

The release which supposedly included over 391,000 classified DoD reports described violent events after 2003 including 109,000 deaths, the majority (66,000) being Iraqi civilians. At the time of the release, the most commonly cited figure for civilian casualties came from Iraqbodycount.org (IBC), a group based in England that compiles press and other descriptions of killings in Iraq. In late October, IBC estimated the civilian war death tally to be about 104,000. Virtually all authorities, including IBC themselves, acknowledge that this count must be incomplete, although the fraction missed is debated. The press coverage of the Iraq War Logs release tended to focus on the crude consistency between the number recorded by WikiLeaks, 66,000 since the start of 2004, and the roughly 104,000 recorded deaths from Iraqbodycount since March of 2003. The Washington Post even ran an editorial entitled, “WikiLeaks’s leaks mostly confirm earlier Iraq reporting” concluding that the Iraq War Log reports revealed nothing new.

A research team from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health released a report this week analyzing the amount of overlap between the 66,000 WikiLeaks reports and the previously known listing of IBC. The team developed a system for grading the likelihood that the WikiLeaks War Log record matched an entry in IBC, scoring the match between 0 (not a match) to 3 (very likely a match). The matching records were graded by at least two reviewers and then a third reviewer arbitrated any discrepancies. The conclusion? Only 19% of the WikiLeaks reports of civilian deaths had been previously recorded by IBC. With so little overlap between the two lists, it is almost certain that both tallies combined are missing the majority of civilian deaths, suggesting many hundreds of thousands have died.

On some level, not noticing that the WikiLeaks list of 66,000 deaths were different events than those previously recorded by IBC is somewhat understandable. Reporters have precious few hours to read, assess, reach out to experts, and then produce copy on the topic of the day. It takes several minutes to review a particular War Log and then go to the public database on Iraqbodycount.org and see if on that specific day there was an event that seems to match the War Log description. In fact, many papers ran an AP wire article on the WikiLeaks release so it is likely very few reporters actually looked at the Iraq War Logs.

On the other hand, WikiLeaks gave these records in advance to five papers including the New York Times and it took the Columbia University team just minutes to realize that for most events reported outside of Baghdad (where matching takes more work) there were no reported killings in a particular city or province on that day within IBC’s database.

This is not the first time this topic has been inadequately covered by the US press. A study I coauthored in The Lancet in estimating 100,000 excess deaths by September of 2004 (an estimate confirmed three times since then) received extraordinary press coverage almost everywhere in the world, but almost none within the US. Project Censored cited the topic of Iraqi civilian deaths as the second most under-reported topic of 2004. A survey by researchers from Johns Hopkins University suggested there had been 600,000 deaths due to the invasion by mid-2006. A poll by the Opinion Research Business in late 2007 put the tally over 1 million. Both estimates were viciously attacked by critics, largely supported by experts in their respective disciplines, but consistently labeled as “controversial” by the press.

The implications of the WikiLeaks Iraq War Logs for the US standing in the Middle-East are profound. The only public estimate of the Iraqi death toll ever provided by the US was President Bush’s response at a public forum in December of 2005 in which he said, “I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis,” with the Whitehouse spokesmen later attributing this estimate to media accounts. This number matched the IBC estimate at that time. WikiLeaks’ War Logs suggest the US had information to know that this estimate was only a small fraction of the reality.

Les Roberts is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University.

Saddam Hussein's Last Words
http://metaexistence.org/lastwords.htm

Transcript: Our translation from the Arabic original

Background voices, which are very hard to hear, are having a conversation in the background and someone calls someone else in the execution chamber by "Ali" or is looking for "Ali."

Saddam Hussein: "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God."

Saddam Hussein: "Oh God." [saying this in preparation, as is Middle Eastern custom, as the noose is put around his neck]

One voice leads customary Muslim prayer (called a salvat): "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."

All Voices, including Saddam Hussein, repeat the customary prayer: "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."

A group of voices: "Moqtada...Moqtada ...Moqtada." [Meaning the young Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr]

Saddam with amusement: "Moqtada...Moqtada! Do you consider this bravery?" [This can also be translated as meaning "Is this your manhood?"]

Several individuals say several times: "To Hell [hell-fire]!" [This can be translated as "Go to Hell!"]

Saddam Hussein mockingly replies/asks: "To the hell that is Iraq!?"

Others voices: "Long live Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr."

Single Voice: "Please do not [stop]. The man is being executed. Please no, please stop."

Saddam Hussein starts recitation of final Muslim prayers: "I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God. I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed..." [Saddam Hussein is suddenly interrupted without finishing his prayer with the opening of the trap door.]

Several Voices: "The tyrant [dictator] has collapsed!"

Other voices: May God’s blessings be upon Mohammed and his household (family).

Single Voice: "Let him hang for eight minutes."

Many conversations continue in the background about Saddam Hussein.

[The Consul]

We don't do body counts; that is, bodies that aren't US. We don't do body counts; especially if they are children. We say this is war; that is what war is, support our troops and honor our heroes. It is as if these wars have already been put in the past tense and public interest has been completely consumed by other issues, none of which can in a rational mind can be seen as more important.

Having just read Siegfried by Robert Mulisch I can't help but feel the sinking pit of my stomach sink even lower. We are directly or indirectly responsible for the untimely demise of more than a million people and we, as a people, if we acknowledge it at all, do so only with rabid denial. With King's hearings it is obvious that there is a further attempt to dehumanize not just Iraqis but all Islamic peoples. It is less subtle than Hitler's hatred for the jews, but it is every bit as foul in it's moral integrity. This is a kinder gentler fascism. But make no mistake, the cost of this neverending war time economy is the dismemberment of infants, the decapitation of old ladies praying on their knees, the massacre of whole families by soldiers who have lost their minds and strategic scores punched on buttons in Colorado.
Saddam Hussein authored many books, at least many that bore his name. These are believed to be his last written words:

The enemies forced strangers into our sea
And he who serves them will be made to weep.
Here we unveil our chests to the wolves
And will not tremble before the beast.

We forget the last twenty years of our involvment with him and Iraq at great peril. Are we a nation of sheep...or of swine?

[nathan28]

The Iraq death count was a bone of contention here, too.

A big Columbia University study of the two data sets finds that only 20 percent of the deaths appear to be recorded in both. This suggests that both data sets are minority samples of the total number of deaths inflicted. (I would think we should apply a multiplier of 3 to 6 to either number.)

The article is written by Les Roberts, author of the 2006 Lancet study that estimated 650,000 "excess deaths" as a result of the Iraq war ("excess" compared to a theoretical baseline of how many would have died had the extant conditions of 2003 continued without the US-led invasion).

IIRC Roberts' initial study of 650,000 was critiqued severely as being methodologically flawed, practically by an order of magnitude. The biggest *academic* criticism IIRC was that Roberts didn't have an effective way to screen out multiple reports of the same death, and those authors suggested that it was closer to 65,000 dead. I can't find the original study evaluating the 2006 one. To be completely honest much of the downward revisions by academics now seem very politically motivated, rather than concerned with method, to me.

One or two readers may recall Tim Lambert, the error-prone Sydney academic who became romantically attached to Lancet‘s absurd claim that some 655,000 Iraqis were killed during allied liberation of their country. According to shocking WikiLeaks data, however, the death count in Iraq over six years was closer to 100,000:
The Iraq documents gave “not just the aggregate, not just that, you know, ‘in Fallujah a lot of people died,’ but rather the deaths of each person, with precise geographic coordinates and the operation under which they died”, [WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange] said.

“That is the big outcome for us, is that these people whose deaths were previously anonymous, they are no longer anonymous.

“We can see where they died and under what circumstances.”
Further from Slate‘s Fred Kaplan:
The WikiLeaks documents add further doubts to a controversial report in a 2006 issue of the medical journal the Lancet, claiming that, even that early in the war, 655,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, most of them by U.S. air and artillery strikes.
Previous thoughts from Francis Sedgemore. And further still.

UPDATE. “I’m not sure it’s what WikiLeaks intended,” writes Andrew Bolt, “but its latest leaks reveal that the infamous Lancet paper which claimed the US-led liberation of Iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis in fact exaggerated the death toll by at least 600 per cent.”

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/count_down/

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30362&p=369712#p369712

So DoD reports are 109,000, >60% non-combatant (questionable how you define that in an insurgency)
One civilian watchdog says 104,000
State Dep't says 66,000 deaths since 2004, which may refer to the DoD civilian count?
Earlier "independent" reporting by the Guardian suggested that 100,000 was a more "accurate" figure than the Lancet
Spoiler:Some posters suggested that theWikileaks war logs Spoiler:were a psyop to make the war less "serious" but the war logs release led to 15,000 being added to the DoD count if my reading comprehension is any good


BUT even if Roberts's count of 650,000 was based on "romantic[]" and "absurd" data-gathering--and let's not euphemize here, by "data gathering" I mean "asking people how many people they knew had been killed by violence or died from the effects of war"--the civilian watchdog group and the DoD ***ONLY OVERLAP ON ONE IN FIVE OF THOSE DEATHS***.

Now, I don't do quantitative work and never took statistics, so I'm about to get this wrong but between two studies, both of which counted a minority sample of the population, of the DoD's 65,000, ~40,000 are "unique" and of the IBC 104,000 thousand, ~80,000 are unique between the two. That means that 40,000 + 80,000 + 20,000 = 140,000, and those are civilian deaths and more or less confirmed. Add in the ~40,000 and you have 180,000 dead in Iraq. This could very well still be a minority count.

And let's not forget the two million or so who died during the Clinton sanctions era.

[JackRiddler]

nathan,

Roberts wrote the quoted blog entry, not the study. That was done at Columbia Millman School of Public Health and is available here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/50105556/Do-W ... ian-Deaths.

Very sorry, I should have linked that, in keeping with my own rule of always going to the original available source (at least online). I see that the study did not compare all war logs (Wikileaks) entries to all IBC entries. Rather, four researchers exhaustively went through a random sampling of 2,500 war logs entries and were able to match these to IBC data in only 20 percent of cases. The rest is extrapolation from the sample.

The write-up describes the methodology and results as follows:

Methods

a) Iraq War Logs were downloaded
from the website of the UK newspaper, The Guardian, whichhad provided the data from the Iraq War Logs in excel format. Those files are available athttp://www.guardian.co.uk/news/databl ... journalism.

b) On October 25, 2010, the Iraq Body Count data file of incidents was downloaded
to preserve afile uninfluenced by the WikiLeaks data.

c) The WikiLeaks data file was filtered to only contain civilian deaths. These 33,809 entries contained reports of 65,679 civilian deaths. These deaths were recorded as ‘killing events.’ A killing event could include one or several deaths. Bombings, for example, generally included at least several deaths, while shooting events frequently entailed 1 death.

d) Initially, each of 23 students in a graduate class on epidemiological methods for documenting human rights abuses was systematically (based on the date field) assigned 100 killing event data entries to review
and determine if the killings described in those reports were included inIraq Body Count’s dataset, not included, or might be included.

e) After the initial evaluation of 2,300 data files, the participants developed a set of decision rules to standardize the matching process. Participants were asked to code each WikiLeaks killing event record as: 0=no match, 1=unlikely match, 2=likely a match, 3= high probability it is a match.

These included that to be coded above 0, two events must:

-- Not have contradictory locations or be contradictory types of event (in broad terms,shootings, torture, airstrikes, or explosive devices were different types of events).

-- IBC killing event reports could not be later than 2 days after the WikiLeaks event time. Moreover, IBC reports could not be any days before the WikiLeaks event time. (This is because the press reporting process might have delayed the arrival of reports in IBC.However, since IBC data are based on press reports, it would be impossible for them to have dates prior to those recorded in the WikiLeaks data). If there were multiple events in WikiLeaks that corresponded to multiple events in IBC, then participants were to match only the number that appeared in IBC. In other words, if, for example, there were 4 different shooting killing events in one neighborhood in Baghdad recorded in WikiLeaks and only 3 potential matches in IBC, then only 3 killing event matches could be recorded. If there was a disparate number of deaths in a killing event that otherwise appeared to be a likely match, then the WikiLeaks deaths could be considered matched or likely matched based on the reviewer’s judgment.

f) To aid with the matching process, the software Google Earth was utilized and a Google Earth template was developed to identify specific neighborhoods in Baghdad.

In the subsequent steps, the full matching process is repeated by a second individual who is not aware of the rating already given or the identity of the earlier rater. If the two ratings conflict, it goes to a third and possibly fourth rater to resolve the conflict, but with limits on how much a rating can be changed.

Sorry you must follow the scribd link to get a display of the graphics!

Results
In total, 2409 files were examined by the three or four reviewer process. An additional 88 reports(3.5%) were unmatchable because they lacked information such as the date or because they were deemed to have been an accident and not conflict related. By any measure of match (scores=1, 2 or 3), the majority of events described in the WikiLeaks War Logs were not included in the Iraq Body Count database. The figure below shows the fraction of 2409 War Log records that were matched to records in IBC. It is likely that 19.3% of records matched. 8.7% of records have a small chance of being listed in IBC. These were primarily single killings in Baghdad. Threefourths of records (72.0%) were judged as very likely not being in IBC.


Figure 2 shows the fraction of events that match as a function of the number of civilians reportedly killed. Events that killed many people were far more likely to be reported in both datasets than were killing events that involved few people. The majority of War Logs reports (73.6%) were single killing events and only 15.6% of these were judged to be in IBC.


Because the larger events were most likely to be matched to IBC, we assessed the fraction of total deaths (not reports of killing events) reported in WikiLeaks that were also in IBC. Figure 3 shows these results. Roughly two-thirds of deaths, probably 68%, were not included in IBC in spite of the fact that the larger killing events were likely to be recorded by both listings. This is because the vast majority of reports involved only one or two death.

SNIP

Then they have a variety of caveats about possible problems with false positives and negatives. See the original.

By these findings I think Roberts and the Johns Hopkins report (650,000 deaths) are largely vindicated, at least in comparison to the claims of just 100,000 deaths, or Bush's pure-evil and surely drunken claim of a "mere" 30,000. (Even that is ten times 9/11 in a nation with one-tenth the US population, or one hundred Nine-Elevens. By the Cheneyan rules of engagement they should get to wage unlimited war against largely arbitrary targets for the next 5,000 years.)

By a conservative assessment, and even saying there's a 25 or 30 percent overlap, and even accepting the War Logs' claims about what constitutes a "civilian" as opposed to a "combatant" (by definition dubious -- armies always prefer to count dead bodies as combatants), you're still looking at more than a quarter million dead civilians.

The claims of how many "killed" by the sanctions from 1991-2003 are more dubious. As I remember, the claim that sanctions had killed a half-million children at the time of Albright's 1998 statement -- that "we think the price is worth it" -- was not actually an estimate of those directly killed, i.e. starved or caused to die by sanctions. It was a demographic extrapolation of excess deaths plus lowered infant survival rates (difference in death rate compared to prior period plus difference in infant mortality).

This is not to minimize or excuse. The sanctions caused intolerable mass suffering and resulted in many deaths of the most innocent and vulnerable populations than would have otherwise been the case. They prevented and slowed down the clean-up and repair of the water system and other essential infrastructure that had been attacked and badly contaminated during the 1991 war. People were poisoned by the water supply and died for a lack of medicines, and children were the most vulnerable. There was a huge post war rise in the number of birth defects and stillbirths attributable to environmental poisoning.

It's just that the 500,000 number did not represent direct killing in the sense that shooting or bombing or burning or torturing someone to death is, and the claims you hear of sanctions killing one million are extrapolations from the half-million figure until 1998 over another five years until 2003. I don't know where you got two million from sanctions.

Again, none of this is to downplay the criminal morality of the sanctions regime, the enormous lie on which it was based (Iraqi WMD were essentially eliminated by 1993!), the cost in suffering to a whole nation. It certainly does not reduce the monstrousness of Albright's statement. At some point we have to say the case for willful mass murder meriting trials for the perpetrators and reparations for survivors has been made regardless of the legitimate debate over how to classify the different kinds of human costs. It's not like the perpetrators had noble motives, or didn't know what they were doing. "We think the price is worth it."

Note that the rate of additional deaths due to environmental poisoning and infrastructural problems like blackouts must have risen even higher after March 2003, and at least until recently.

.

[JackRiddler]

bump

[Alfred Joe's Boy]

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee." -- John Donne
http://www.online-literature.com/donne/409/

[JackRiddler]

Another thread of interest on Iraq and the lies that engineered the "sectarian conflict," this one on Zarqawi (starting with a limited hangout from Nick Davies, same guy who later did the Guardian hit on Assange).

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/ ... hp?t=16137

[JackRiddler]

.

I'm surprised everyone here isn't aware of the American role in the looting of the Iraqi National Museum, which I believe was in the vein of shock and awe, an intentional move to break the spirit of the Iraqi people and make them acquiesce to whatever order the occupiers would provide.

At the very least the American invaders showed they were aware that their arrival in Baghdad would unleash potential for chaos and looting, by either the government or by mobs, by preparing to occupy, secure and protect the locations of certain important treasures.

These were the Oil Ministry and the Interior Ministry. I presume I don't need to explain why?

That the national museum and library were not on this list, although known as the location of priceless treasures, is at the very least an act of gross negligence.

However, there was the following report in the Swedish press:

http://globalresearch.ca/articles/ROT304A.html

What the most incisive war correspondents and critics of the mainstream media fail to mention
US Forces deliberately encouraged the Looting

by Ole Rothenborg

Article in Swedish published in Dagens Nyheter, 11 April 2003.
Translation http://www.globalresearch.ca 15 April 2003

Khaled Bayomi looks a bit surprised when he looks at the American officer on TV regret that they don't have any resources to stop the looting in Baghdad.

- "I happened to be there", he said, just as the US forces told people to commence looting.

Khaled Bayomi departed from Malmoe, Sweden to Baghdad, as a human shield, and arrived on the same day the fighting began. About this he can tell us plenty and for a long time, but the most interesting part of his story is his witness-account about the great surge of looting now taking place.

- I had visited a few friends that live in a worn-down area just beyond the Haifa Avenue, on the west bank of the Tigris River. It was April 8 and the fighting was so heavy I couldn't make it over to the other side of the river. On the afternoon it became perfectly quite, and four American tanks pulled up in position on the outskirts of the slum area. From these tanks we heard anxious calls in Arabic, which told the population to come closer.

- During the morning everybody that tried to cross the streets had been fired upon. But during this strange silence people eventually became curious. After three-quarters of an hour the first Baghdad citizens dared to come forward. At that moment the US solders shot two Sudanese guards, who were posted in front of a local administrative building, on the other side of the Haifa Avenue.

- I was just 300 meters away when the guards where murdered. Then they shot the building entrance to pieces, and their Arabic translators in the tanks told people to run for grabs inside the building. Rumours spread rapidly and the house was cleaned out. Moments later tanks broke down the doors to the Justice Department, residing in the neighbouring building, and looting was carried on to there.

- I was standing in a big crowd of civilians that saw all this together with me. They did not take any part in the looting, but were to afraid to take any action against it. Many of them had tears of shame in their eyes. The next morning looting spread to the Museum of Modern Art, which lies another 500 meters to the north. There was also two crowds in place, one that was looting and another one that disgracefully saw it happen.

Do you mean to say that it was the US troops that initiated the looting?

- Absolutely. The lack of scenes of joy had the US forces in need of images on Iraqi's who in different ways demonstrated their disgust with Saddam's regime.

But people in Baghdad tore down a big statue of Saddam?

- They did? It was a US tank that did this, close to the hotel where all the journalists live. Until noon on the 9th of April, I didn't see a single torn picture of Saddam anywhere. If people had wanted to turn over statues they could have gone for some of the many smaller ones, without the help of an American tank. Had this been a political uproar then people would have turned over statues first and looted afterwards.

Back home in Sweden Khaled Bayomi is PhD student at the University of Lund, where he since ten years teaches and researches about conflicts in the Middle East. He is very well informed about the conflicts, as well as he is on the propaganda war.

Isn't it good that Saddam is gone?

- He is not gone. He has dissolved his army in tiny, tiny groups. This is why there never was any big battle. Saddam dissolved Iraq as a state already in 1992 and have shad a parallel tribal structure going, which since then has been altogether decisive for the country. When USA begun the war Saddam completely abandoned the state, and now depends on this tribal structure. This is why he left the big cities without any battle.

- Now USA are forced to do everything themselves, because there is no political force from within that would challenge the structure in place. The two challengers who came in from the outside were immediately lynched.

Khaled Bayomi refers to what happened to general Nazar al-Khazraji, who escaped from Denmark, and Shia-muslim leader Abdul Majid al-Khoei, who both where chopped to pieces by a raging crowd in Najaf, because they where perceived to be American marionettes. According to Danish newspaper BT, al-Khazraji was picked up by the CIA in Denmark and then brought to Iraq.

- Now we have an occupying power in place in Iraq, that has not said how long they will stay, not brought forward any time-plan for civilian rule and no date for general elections. Now awaits only a big chaos.

Translated from the Swedish by Kenneth Rasmusson, Copyright Dagens Nyheter 2003. For fair use only/ pour usage équitable seulement .

And in case you think that's just one source reporting, here is an article that provides much more evidence for systematic facilitation of the looting by the invaders in the days after the fall of Baghdad, as well as failure to meet treaty obligations to protect cultural heritage:

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... /smith.htm

ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006)

“Furious Envy”: Baudrillard and the Looting of Baghdad1


Stephen Smith
(Canberra, Australia)



I. Introduction

I kept crying when they burned the National Library. …Wasn’t that my country that they burned?2

There is strong suspicion that the American failure to protect Iraqi heritage sites was more than mere negligence, but a deliberate oversight – perhaps a kind of cultural “shock and awe” – designed to devastate a sense of shared culture among Iraqis, leaving a blank page for the imprint of the US occupying force and the reconstruction to follow. This paper examines what has happened in Iraq since April 2003 drawing on reports from a variety of recent scholarly and journalistic sources. They point to the distinct possibility that we have witnessed a premeditated cultural genocide of the magnitude rarely experienced over the 7000-year time span of the artefacts in question. Further, we are faced with exactly the kind of humiliation likely to bring, according to Baudrillard, terrorist reprisals upon the US and its allies in the West.

Early on, among non-embedded journalists, doubts were raised about the seemingly random nature of the looting. In Baghdad, UK journalist Robert Fisk asked:

But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?3

Jean Baudrillard provides us with a theoretical model with which to begin answering this and related questions. In this article “Our Society’s Judgement and Punishment”4, Baudrillard argues that: “It is the mission of the West to make the world's many cultures interchangeable and subordinate to the global order. A culture bereft of values, taking revenge on the values of other cultures”.5 As Baudrillard understands the very complex dynamics involved:

The rise of the globalizing system has been driven by the furious envy of the indifferent, low-definition mono-culture, confronted by high-definition cultures. Envy is what the disenchanted system which has lost its intensity feels when facing high-intensity cultures. It is the envy of a deconsecrated society that emerges when confronted with sacrificial cultures and structures6.

The importance Baudrillard attaches to the loss of capacity for “giving back” can be equated, in a cultural sense, to unequal exchange. If all cultures are interchangeable and subordinated, there can no longer be cultural exchange and humiliation breeds resentment and potential terrorist reprisal. A capacity for “giving back” across North and South – between the West and the rest of the world – ultimately provides humanity’s sole common ground. This is precisely what is missing under globalisation and war (seemingly inseparable phenomena these days), and the humiliations they bring.

To understand the hatred the rest of the world feels towards the West, Baudrillard calls upon us to reverse commonly held assumptions:

The hatred expressed at the West by non-Westerners is not that of a people from whom everything has been taken. It is the hatred of those who have received everything, but have never been allowed to give anything back. This is not the hatred of the dispossessed or exploited, but that of a humiliation – of those who can give nothing in return. It is this symbolic understanding that explains the attacks of September 11, 2001 – acts of humiliation responding to another humiliation. The worst thing that can happen to global power is not to be attacked or destroyed, but to be humiliated. Global power was humiliated on September 11 because the terrorists inflicted something the system cannot give back. Armed reprisals are merely a means of physical response and cannot respond to the challenge the terrorists symbolically represent. On September 11, global power was symbolically defeated. Armed attacks or war is a response to an aggression, but not to a symbolic challenge. A symbolic challenge is accepted and removed when the other is humiliated in return (and this does not happen when the other is killed by bombs or locked away at Guantanamo Bay).7

Baudrillard’s understanding of humiliation suggests that the US views peoples outside of the West as a kind of “universal” other. In this formula, an Iraqi is interchangeable with someone from al-Qaeda, who can change places with any other Arab, Muslim, Asian etc. Today, this vengeance assumes the proportions of a cultural genocide in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad – a vengeance that can again be interpreted as a further humiliation. As an Iraqi archaeologist told the New York Times:

A country's identity, its value and civilization resides in its history. If a country's civilization is looted, as ours has been here, its history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.8

In Baghdad the loss of treasures was the result of a few fiery days of looting. But to what extent did deliberate oversight by the US, as a possible manifestation of the “furious envy” Baudrillard speaks of, typify the conduct of the war? We now know from the images of Iraqi prisoner abuse at the hands of US troops at Abu Ghraib, that America wantonly perpetrated acts of humiliation. In this case it is now also known that high levels in the chain of command knew of the abuse by the guards.9 It appears that here too we see the presence of that “furious envy” at work as a common element in the occupation plan.


II. Occupation Responsibilities And What Was Actually Lost?

To establish grounds for a strategy of deliberate oversight where cultural artefacts are concerned, we can begin by measuring the US response in Baghdad against three key indicators: 1) In the first days of occupation, what responsibilities were taken up by US forces in the city and what capability to protect Iraqi sites did they exhibit? 2) Given the long and premeditated nature of the invasion of Iraq, did the US, as chief occupying power, owe a duty of care to Iraq’s cultural heritage? And 3) to what extent was action against cultural sites encouraged by the actions (and lack of action) by US forces on the ground?

There was a clear difference in priority given to protection of economic as opposed to cultural sites by US occupying forces in Iraq. The safeguarding of the files and secrets within the Iraqi Oil Ministry reveals the motives and capabilities of the invading forces. The case of Iraqi Oil Ministry shows the impressive abilities of American forces to safeguard an institution they wanted protected. It experienced round the clock surveillance and was guarded by US tanks at every entrance. It was also one of a very few public buildings to remain untouched by looters. Many cultural sites were close to each other in two small precincts. It is now widely understood that the US had enough of its troops in these areas to prevent looting but withheld such orders.10

The US did have a duty to protect Iraq’s heritage by three international treaties which form the basis for protecting cultural heritage in time of war and its aftermath. These are: The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907; the Geneva Convention of 1949 (and its two Protocols); and the Hague Convention of 1954 (and its two Protocols). Together these cover threats to heritage sites. However, during the US-led invasion of Iraq, no plans were in place to counter threats of deliberate attack, incidental damage, pillage, or outright theft.11

The anguish of many was taken up by Robert Fisk in one of his more blunt dispatches.

Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose – and less than three months after US archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the Baghdad Archaeological Museum on a military data-base – did the Americans allow the mobs to destroy the priceless heritage of ancient Mesopotamia? And all this happened while US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was sneering at the press for claiming that anarchy had broken out in Baghdad.12

“Stuff happens”, was Rumsfeld’s reply. “It’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” He then attempted to make light of the situation saying: “Television is merely running the same footage of the same man stealing a vase over and over”. He then added that he didn’t think there were that many vases in Iraq.13 Drawing this image of a stolen vase being replayed repeatedly it is ironic that Rumsfeld unwittingly makes reference to Baudrillard’s conception of the virtualization of the real in the hyperreal.14

The people taking to the streets included a organized element. These were antiquities smugglers and militants who incited further waves of looting by the poorest victims of the regime. In this state of chaos, organised crime had time to plan and execute these heists under a cover of general plundering.

The FBI’s Top Ten Art Crimes list now includes Iraqi looted and stolen artefacts. This list indicates that between 7000 and 10,000 items are still missing. The most valuable pieces are by now either in the hands of, or on their way to, wealthy collectors. These items will be too famous to be put on the black market again. Of the 40 most valuable stolen artefacts from the museum looting, 25 still remain unaccounted for. They include the diorite statue of Entemena; the almost life-size head of the Goddess of Victory and a gold and ivory plaque of a lioness attacking a Nubian.15







As we now know, there was a level of exaggeration in the first reports of the Museum looting. They failed to understand that curators often shifted “missing” items to more secure vaults just prior to the outbreak of war. In a number of surveys since then scholars have been able compile a more accurate “lost and found” ledger.

The American Journal of Archaeology (AJA) is one source that has tried to track the fate of missing relics. It put the initial losses at up to 15,000 items. But 5000 of these pieces, says the AJA, were found in a world wide recovery operation. On his website of record, Francis Deblauwe has compiled data from a range of scholarly sources. His database showed 11,500 items as still missing. He then took into account pieces recovered abroad but not yet returned. With this adjustment, he settles on a figure of 8,500 items actually lost.16 These figures corroborate the numbers on the FBI’s list. The picture is a little brighter then than was originally believed for museums. But success in the recovery of items stands in contrast to events at some institutions where there was a heavy loss of books and manuscripts.

Ideas in books and texts may well be closer to what is the core of culture than corresponding objects and artefacts. In this sense artefacts work partly to substantiate ideas. As a result of the loss of texts, the Iraqi people would be more isolated from the meaning of treasures on display in their museums.

The events at the National Library were catastrophic. For scholars who visited following the looting, the tour, which began at the Museum, showed a long trail of devastation that went from one site to the next. UNESCO’s Mounir Bouchenaki was one of these witnesses. He said he felt a sense of pain while crunching through the 20 to 30 centimetres of ash in the rooms of the burned Library collections.17 Speaking to members of a library world body in August 2005, Rene Teijgeler revealed the extent of damage to Iraqi book collections. Most shocking, he says, is how the National Library lost 25 percent of its books. The National Archives lost 60 percent of its holdings.18 Another scholar, Nabil Al-Tikriti, went to Baghdad in May 2003 to interview staff from libraries and manuscript houses. He learned that at the time of the invasion, the National Library and Archives contained 12 million documents among which was “the largest Arabic newspaper collection in the world”. As a result of the looting it seems the entire periodical collection was lost; the only ray of hope was that staff had time to move some of the papers to a safe place.19

Jeff Spurr, on behalf of the Middle East Librarians Association, also reported on the state of Iraqi libraries. At the National Library, he found that looters destroyed as much as 60 percent of the Ottoman and Royal Hashemite documents. He concurs that about 25 percent of the book holdings were lost.20


III. What Occupation Forces Did (And Didn’t Do)

Another devastating loss took place at the Iraqi Academy of Sciences and this begins the story of what was and was not done to protect Iraqi cultural sites. According to staff members, the pillage began after a US tank crew crashed through the front gate. They rolled over and crushed the Academy’s main sign, removed the Iraqi flag flying at the entrance, and left. With the gate torn open looters swarmed into the facility taking up to half of the Academy’s holdings of 58,000 published works. Based on the extent of empty rooms, these losses may be as high as 80 percent.21

One of the most unsettling stories told is from the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs Central Library (also known as the Awqaf library) – the oldest public manuscript collection in Iraq. Fire totally destroyed the two-story building on April 13-14, 2003. As was the practice at similar places, staff had relocated most of the 7,000 manuscripts as a precaution. Their attempts to move the last quarter of their collection (about 1,740 manuscripts) failed when US troops shot and killed one of the guards and then disarmed the Iraqis protecting the new site. Staff describe how, on the same afternoon that the manuscripts were moved back, a highly organised looting and burning took place. As an eyewitness reported:

Roughly 15 Arab males in civilian clothes drove up to the library in various vehicles, including a white Lada and a white VW Passat with “TV” taped to their windows and bodies. While most of the men proceeded to remove manuscript trunks and burn the library, two men (civilians) remained at the entrance filming the event. Once 22 of the trunks were removed, the men used some sort of yellow substance to burn the entire library in under 15 minutes.22



As is evident from some of these incidents, it was the actions of US troops that sparked or enabled looting at cultural sites. This is also true of what happened at some museums.

On April 11, 2003, Stockholm’s newspaper Dagens Nyheter provided an on the spot report by “human shield” Khaled Bayomi. Bayomi described the role of US soldiers in the looting:


The soldiers shot two Sudanese guards who stood at their posts outside a local administration building. Then they blasted apart the doors to the building and from the tanks came eager calls in Arabic encouraging people to come close to them… Arab interpreters in the tanks told the people to go and take what they wanted in the building. The word spread quickly and the building was ransacked… The next morning the plundering spread to the Modern Museum, which lies a quarter mile farther north.23

Walter Sommerfeld (Professor and Head of Ancient Oriental Studies at the University of Marburg), was in Baghdad in May 2003 (a few weeks of the plundering). His report notes an emerging trend at the time:

The most surprising detail of the descriptions was that American soldiers made the lootings possible by breaking or shooting often well-secured gates open, shouting to by-standers ‘Go in, Ali Baba, it’s yours!’. This stock phrase was repeated over and over again by witnesses; ‘Ali Baba’ seems to be the American catch phrase for looting Iraqis.24



In describing the looting of the National Museum, one of Sommerfeld’s observers adds that US soldiers incited the crowd with the words “this is your treasure, get in!” One of those he spoke with was a guard at a neighbouring mosque. The guard told him:

The Americans came back at 4:30 the next morning, and an officer ordered his troops to advance into the museum. Kuwaitis were there with the American troops. ...They took archaeological artefacts out of the museum and loaded them onto seven trucks of the U.S. military. The whole convoy drove away accompanied by armoured cars.25

The BBC’s Jonathan Duffy provided a similar account of the role of US troops in the looting at Nasiriya’s Technical Institute. The Dean, Dr Khalid Majeed, said the Americans arrived in five vehicles, but refused to ward off looters. Instead the soldiers fired several dozen rounds at the college’s south wall. The crowd, says Dr Majeed, saw this action as the “green light” to looters.26

Robert Fisk suspected that a wave of arson came after the looting and he agrees with Professor Sommerfeld that the burning was a separate event:

The arsonists came afterwards, systematically dousing the looted buildings with gasoline… and lighting them ablaze. The difference in time between the looting and burning of a building was sometimes as much as four days.27

Fisk pointed to other interesting aspects such as the use by the gangs of blue and white buses to move around hitting a chain of institutional targets in the city:

The arsonists were an army. They were calculated and they knew where to go, they had maps, they were told where to go. Who told them where to go? ... This is a very, very important question that still needs to be reconciled and answered.28

How did these gangs act beyond the control of US forces that was strong enough to force the melting away of the well armed Republican Guard?29

Article 9 of the Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict30, sets out the rules that apply to states in control of occupied territories. They must prevent “any illicit export, removal or transfer of ownership of cultural property” (this of course includes looting). Also banned are actions to “destroy cultural, historical or scientific evidence” (which includes arson).31

The US Attorney General and Interpol32 accept that the most valuable items were not taken by casual looters but by criminal groups who knew precisely what they were looking for with a waiting market of private wealthy collectors. Despite such knowledge and admissions, US lawmakers remained slow to protect Iraqi heritage. Bills before the Congress stayed “parked” for months. The Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act was the outcome; it became law on December 3, 2004 (more than a year and a half after the looting). The Act bans the import of relics from Iraq unless certified as “not removed in violation of the laws of Iraq”. US Customs is also empowered by the Act to seize illegal items and to return them to Iraq.33

Even if found pieces are unharmed, thieves remove accession numbers to make illegal sale easier. The theft of museum pieces to become art commodities tears them away from their cultural context. Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post points to the profound and irreparable change this causes: “Once an object has been stolen from a museum, it begins a metamorphosis, losing its scholarly and archaeological context and becoming a mere commodity.34 How well this plundering of Mesopotamia’s treasures fits Baudrillard’s classic analysis of the reparation of Pharaoh Rameses II as: “…an irreparable violence towards all secrets, the violence of a civilisation without secrets”.35 The desire to unmask Egypt’s secrets is a link to the “furious envy” of a global power faced with the symbolic order of Iraqi (and world) heritage that do not easily fit into the New Global Order.


IV. Further Symbolic Violence and Humiliation in Planning

In “Our Society’s Judgment and Punishment”, Baudrillard notes that war is a mix of a number of events:

As an extension of politics and economics by other means, warfare (including the conflict in Afghanistan) normalizes savagery while beating unorthodox sectors into line. War is also used to reduce zones of resistance and to colonize and subdue any terrain – geographical or mental.36

While the US has failed to protect Iraq’s heritage, it has also been active in the further destruction of places of symbolic importance. In one case, a base has been established for 2,000 troops on the site of the ancient city of Babylon. This action went ahead despite the warnings of archaeologists in the field that it put at risk iconic objects such as the huge basalt Lion of Babylon sculpture. In one spot, souvenir hunters have tried to gouge out the decorated bricks that form the famous dragons of the Ishtar Gate. The British Museum was most scathing in its reaction to the establishment of the camp in this spot: “This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge”.38

According to Baudrillard we might also expect to find the presence of simulation models alongside the conflict in Iraq. We now know that the Pentagon has plans for a dozen or more “enduring bases” in Iraq. This would appear to signal an indefinite occupation of the country. Over the long term these bases are the spearhead of what could ultimately be a massive further penetration of American culture. War preparations in Kuwait included the build up of base camps like mock cities. The same template is being used in Iraq, often superimposed on the site of Saddam’s palaces (“The Green Zone”) or his old bases. One of the few concessions to Iraqi sensitivity has been to rename the signs over the front gate. Thus the former Camp Cooke is now Al Taji Camp; and Camp Victory is Camp Al-Nasr. These bases, complete with PX stores, fast food halls, Internet cafes, and movie theatres, are a model that anticipates the “new” Iraq the US seeks to impose in its own image.39

While the US “builds” one model in Iraq, it destroys a different kind of simulation back on US soil. Furious envy finds a new “target” in the war terrain of the near future – the Third World city. US training now includes a venture into virtual “battle space” of the streets of Third World cities and slums. Here, they construct miniature villages – Arabic in style – for the sole purpose of staging military assaults. Like a phosphorous lit Fallujah, we can see how these tiny Middle Eastern neighbourhoods have no other purpose than the assumption of an attack against them.40

A type of modular architecture is one form of the model and it also exists as software. Here too, it seeks to humiliate the culture it represents. Not only in the lesson of how to attack but also in the desire to unmask all secrets: by surveillance; the planting of listening devices; and tracking of the “enemy”.41 The denizens of these “cities” are all interchangeable by means of computer code. With this method it builds a “furious envy” into the artificial intelligence of a re-playable game world.

Baudrillard, however, also alerts us to the ever present possibility of reversibility. In the case of Abu Ghraib, “those who live by the spectacle will die by the spectacle”.42 Abu Ghraib is as an “atrocity museum” or new model for humiliation but one that provided “an immanent justice of the image” as the photos were taken by the US purveyors of humiliation themselves. According to Baudrillard:

These scenes are the illustration of a power… without aim, without purpose, without a plausible enemy, and in total impunity. … It only manages to humiliate itself, degrade itself and go back on its own word in a sort of unremitting perversity. The ignominy, the vileness is the ultimate symptom of a power that no longer knows what to do with itself.43



Perhaps all of this, all the looting and arson and losses are, in the end, nothing but a story of reversal. Perhaps the price to be paid for an even greater reversal is the loss of the cultural heritage of Baghdad. The world will never again be naïve about the various underlying motives (more than oil certainly) that led the Americans to Iraq – will it?



V. Conclusion

It appears that no sooner has the shadow of Saddam Hussein moved on than the shadow of US-led reconstruction is cast over Iraq and the entire Middle East. If, as Baudrillard says, there is an attempt to make the world’s wealth of cultures interchangeable, this would certainly create an unequal exchange. Despite former glories, the humiliated peoples of nations such as Iraq would have nothing to give back in return, except the symbolic challenge of terrorism. The war in Iraq, like the war on terror, despite all of its uncertainties, seems certain in one respect: it will provide the motivation for further terrorist attacks on the US and its Western allies. We have already seen what this can do in the homelands of fellow members of the Iraq invasion forces: Spain (2004) and the United Kingdom (2005). If Baudrillard’s understanding of humiliation and symbolic exchange has it right, Americans and other allies may well find themselves asking a very serious question in the not too distant future: was the looting of Baghdad and the humiliation of Iraq worth it?




Stephen Smith is a freelance writer living in Canberra, Australia. He has worked in the area of public policy for libraries and is at present working in the area of broadcasting policy. He has written a number of Baudrillard inspired pieces for the website Electronic Iraq: http://electroniciraq.net






Endnotes


1 This is an updated version of an article which first appeared in Electronic Iraq: http://electroniciraq.net/news/1065.shtml (September 4, 2003). Much water has flowed under the bridges of the Tigris since. One response to the looting of Iraq’s cultural treasures in April 2003 has been to foster closer ties between the world’s scholars and their counterparts in Iraq. This in turn has assisted the flow of information about what was lost or recovered. While the main focus of the earlier article was on the National Museum, it is now clear that the more severe level of devastation was suffered by libraries and manuscript collections.



2 From the documentary film About Baghdad. In-Counter Productions (2004): http://www.aboutbaghdad.com/) cited in Jeff Spurr. “Indispensable Yet Vulnerable: The Library in Dangerous Times. A Report on the Status of Iraqi Academic Libraries and a Survey of Efforts to Assist Them, with Historical Introduction”. Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, produced in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/mela/indispensable.html

3 Robert Fisk. “Library Books, Letters, and Priceless Documents are Set Ablaze in Final Chapter of the Sacking of Baghdad”. In The Independent, April 15, 2003. See: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0415-07.htm

4 Jean Baudrillard. “Our Societies Judgment and Punishment”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 3, Number 2, (July 2006): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... jb_soc.htm

The original from which this material is taken is: Jean Baudrillard. "La Violence du Mondial”. In Power Inferno. Paris: Editions Galilée, 2002:63-83. A longer English translation by François Debrix appears in Ctheory.net. See “The Violence of the Global”: http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=385. See also: Jean Baudrillard. “The Despair of Having Everything” Le Monde Diplomatique, November 22, 2002. Translated by Luke Sandford: http://MondeDiplo.com/2002/11/12despair (also posted at http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Arch ... 00067.html).

5 Jean Baudrillard. “Our Society’s Judgement and Punishment”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... jb_soc.htm

6 Ibid., Emphasis mine.

7 Ibid.

8 John F. Burns. “Pillagers Strip Iraqi Museum of its Treasure”. In the New York Times. April 13, 2003: http://truthout.org/docs_03/041403C.shtml

9 See: Seymour M. Hersh. Chain of Command: the road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. New York: Harper Collins, 2004; See also: “Lifting the Hood. The Prisoner of Abu Ghraib”, by reporter Olivia Rousset. Dateline, SBS Television, November 9, 2004, http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/index.p ... 2005-11-09

[SBS is Australia's multicultural and multilingual public broadcaster].



10 Nabil Al-Tikriti. “Iraq Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries Situation Report”. (June 8, 2003). Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, produced in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/docs/nat.html; See also: “Oil Ministry the most secured building”. In The News International, Pakistan (April 17, 2003).



11 James A. R. Nafziger. “Protection of Cultural Heritage in Time of War and its Aftermath”. Art Loss in Iraq. International Foundation for Art Research, http://www.ifar.org/heritage.htm

12 Robert Fisk. “A Civilisation Torn to Pieces”. In The Independent. (April 13, 2003). Also available online at: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle ... temID=3456

13 Lawrence Smallman. “Rumsfeld Cracks Jokes, but Iraqis aren’t Laughing”, Aljazeera.net, April 13, 2003. Also available online at: http://www.asiantribune.com/show_article.php?id=390

14 Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983:146.

15 United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Top Ten Art Crimes – Iraqi Looted and Stolen Artefacts, http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/topten/iraqi.htm; and http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/arttheft/asia ... aqart.htm; Kim Sengupta. “World is the Poorer for Loss of Iraqi Antiquities”. In The Canberra Times. (November 12, 2005: B4). See also: Kim Sengupta. “Pillaging the Gardens of Babylon”. The Independent Online Edition (November 9, 2005): http://news.independent.co.uk/world/mid ... 325740.ece

16 Matthew Bogdanos. “The Casualties of War: The Truth about the Iraq Museum”. In American Journal of Archaeology, Volume 109, Number 3, July 2005, http://www.ajaonline.org/index.php?ptype=content&aid=5; Dr. Francis Deblauwe. “Best guess of the losses at the National Museum”. The Iraq War and Archaeology, a joint project of Archaeos Inc and Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Vienna: http://iwa.univie.ac.at/

17 David Tresilian. “Assault on Heritage”. Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue No. 723, (December 30, 2004 - January 5, 2005): http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/723/sc111.htm

18 Rene Teijgeler. “So Yesterday Was the Burning of Books” – Wartime in Iraq”, Lecture Held at Responsible Stewardship Towards Cultural Heritage Materials, Preconference of the IFLA Rare Book and Manuscript Section, Copenhagen, The Royal Library (August 11, 2005). Published online by: The Iraq War and Archaeology, a joint project of Archaeos Inc and Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Vienna, October 5, 2005, http://iwa.univie.ac.at/teijgeler.html

19 Nabil Al-Tikriti. “Iraq Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries Situation Report”. (June 8, 2003). Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, produced in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/docs/nat.html.



20 Jeff Spurr. “Indispensable Yet Vulnerable: The Library in Dangerous Times. A Report on the Status of Iraqi Academic Libraries and a Survey of Efforts to Assist Them, with Historical Introduction”. Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, produced in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, See: http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/mela/indispensable.html.



21 Nabil Al-Tikriti. “Iraq Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries Situation Report”. (June 8, 2003). Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries, produced in collaboration with The Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, http://oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/docs/nat.html.

22 Ibid.

23 Ole Rothenborg. “US Troops Encouraged Ransacking”, in Dagens Nyheter. Translated by Joe Valasek of Truthout.org (May 12, 2003): http://truthout.org/docs_03/041603D.shtml For the original Swedish language version see: Ole Rothenborg. “USA uppmanade till rofferi”, in Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm, (April 11, 2003): http://www.dn.se/DNet/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=1435&a=129852

24 Walter Sommerfeld. “The Systematic Destruction of Iraqi Culture”. Translated by Christian Hess. University of Marburg, Germany. University of Marburg webpage:
http://www.uni-marburg.de/altorientalistik/war.html

25 Ibid.

26 Jonathan Duffy. “US troops ‘Encouraged’ Iraqi Looters”, BBC News Online,
(May 6, 2003): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3003393.stm

27 Walter Sommerfeld. “The Systematic Destruction of Iraqi Culture”. Translated by Christian Hess. University of Marburg, Germany. University of Marburg webpage:
http://www.uni-marburg.de/altorientalistik/war.html

28 Robert Fisk and Amy Goodman. “An Anti-colonial War Against the Americans May Have Already Begun: an Interview with Robert Fisk on Democracy Now”,
Znet Iraq, April 22, 2003, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle ... temID=3503



29 The foregoing points to significant and varied evidence of a planned attack on cultural locations. A full independent investigation is now required to examine US complicity.

30 UNESCO, “Second Protocol to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, The Hague, March 26, 1999, http://www.unesco.org/culture/laws/hagu ... col2.shtml

31 Neither the USA nor the UK has signed this Convention or the Second Protocol.

32 “Prepared Remarks of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft”. INTERPOL Meeting on Cultural Property Looting in Iraq (May 6, 2003), Lyon, France: http://www.interpol.com/Public/ICPO/spe ... 030506.asp

33 United States House of Representatives. (House Resolution 1047): “Emergency Protection for Iraqi Cultural Antiquities Act”. (Passed: December 7, 2004); American Schools of Oriental Research, Information on Iraq: http://www.asor.org/policy2.htm; See also: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h108-1047

34 Philip Kennicott. “The Vanishing Past”. In The Washington Post (April 18, 2003): http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy ... Found=true.



35 Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983:21.

36 Jean Baudrillard. “Our Society’s Judgement and Punishment”. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 3, Number 2 (July 2006): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... jb_soc.htm

37 http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=h ... ry/dennis/ Visual_Arts/101Images/02_1.21-27_Ishtar_Gate_1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.luc.edu/depts /history/dennis/ Visual_Arts/101Images/page_001_ALL1.htm&h=375 &w=445&sz= 48&tbnid=tjFpGWR0e34J:&tbnh=104&tbnw=124&hl=en&start=4&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dishtar%2Bgate%2B%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff

38 Rory McCarthy and Maev Kennedy. “Babylon Wrecked by War”, in The Guardian, January 15, 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0, ... 42,00.html

39 David R. Francis. “US Bases in Iraq: Sticky Politics, Hard Math”. In The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0930/p17s02-cogn.html; “War Preparations Pick Up Pace in Kuwait”. In USA Today. February 9, 2003, http://usatoday.com/news/world/2003-02- ... dup_x.htm; GlobalSecurity.org. Military/Iraq facilities, “Al Taji Camp”: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... l-taji.htm



40 Geoff Manaugh. “A Miniature City Waiting for Attack (Military Urbanism)”. In Nettime (August 27, 2005): http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l@b ... 2951.html;

See also: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2005/08/mi ... ttack.html

41 Ibid.

42 Jean Baudrillard. “War Porn” In International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2004): http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudi ... taylor.htm

43 Ibid.




©International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (2006)

To further understand that this was pattern and not coincidence, recall that soon thereafter the USG was shipping $18 billion dollars in cash from US-based Iraqi accounts to Iraq, where most of the money was disappeared. They dissolved the only functioning institution, the army, and banned all Baath Party members from employment (even though professionals of all kinds had to be in the party to work, and in marked contrast to how de-Nazification was done after World War II). This made an Iraqi-led recovery impossible. The war of aggression on Iraq was an operation to loot and destroy, from the beginning.

.

[JackRiddler]

.

barracuda, would you mind combining this thread with the other one I started at viewtopic.php?f=8&t=20176 and calling it, "To the hell that is Iraq?"

THANKS B!

.

[JackRiddler]

.

Sigh, six years since I wrote the following riff on the original news stories about the C-130s loaded with Iraqi cash.

The key with this money was that it never belonged to anyone but the Iraqis. That made it absolutely plunderable. There was no way it was ever going to survive.

Interesting by the way that Darrell Issa issued his Maoist statement, that Iraq should repay the US for the costs of the war, now that it has been "liberated," last week. (I say Maoist because it's like the Chinese state demanding that the families of executed prisoners pay the costs of the bullet that murdered them.) Hard not to see that as an intentional distraction; easy to imagine Issa's involved in the plunder on some level, likely doing a favor for a friend there.

Another distraction back at the time was the Republicans' fake oil-for-food scandal where they tried to smear the UN, Russia and favored targets like George Galloway for somehow profiting off the program as payoff from Saddam for their opposition to war. (The Galloway part was completely faked, his name was clumsily photoshopped on to a list of contractors.) And at the same time as that nonsense, the actual oil-for-food money had been held in escrow by the Federal Reserve, to be loaded on to planes in the form of cash, to be disappeared altogether.

http://www.911truth.org/article_for_pri ... 5010121987

Wednesday, August 24 2005 - 9/11 Consequences

The Plunder Never Ends

So this is how the US government does business!

Cash from the New York Federal Reserve is loaded on to C-130s and shipped to Bagdad -- to the tune of $12 billion since the start of the US occupation of Iraq in March 2003.

The money originally came from Iraqi oil sales under Saddam and was held in trust under the rules of the UN oil sales program. Now it is handed out to Iraqi and US government contractors in the form of cash. Or "candy," as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) puts it.

In the end, $8.8 billion can no longer be accounted for. And the Pentagon acknowledges Halliburton "requested that information in the audits be withheld" from the Congressional subpoena, "including allegations that the firm had spent too much money in purchasing fuel."

"By law, contractors can request that the government withhold any proprietary information from release."

Interesting law, when corporations can decide information about their public contracts is proprietary.

But anyway, it's all just "pocket change," says an e-mail circulating at the Fed.
(See article: "Worries Raised on Handling of Funds in Iraq," Los Angeles Times, June 22, 2005.)

And who can argue with that?

SNIP - News articles archived...
http://www.911truth.org/article_for_pri ... 5010121987

[Saurian Tail]

No need to worry about all those deaths. It was all worth it. The investment in Iraq is about to pay off ... it was "absolutely, absolutely justified" to quote the US Ambassador. The quote highlighted in red below is perhaps the most direct I have seen.

US envoy says Iraq critical to global energy needs

By Anwar Faruqi | AFP – Sat, Jul 2, 2011

http://news.yahoo.com/us-envoy-says-ira ... 52638.html

The US ambassador in Baghdad said on Saturday that the State Department has asked for a $6.2 billion budget for Iraq in 2012, underscoring that its oil and gas reserves were critical for the world's future energy needs.

"This country is on a glide path to increase its oil exports," James Jeffrey told reporters at the sprawling US embassy in Baghdad, the world's largest.

The embassy plans to double in size next year to 16,000 personnel, when it takes over many military tasks after US troops pull out of Iraq at the end of this year, including military sales and training of Iraqi security forces.

Nearly 50,000 American troops still remain, down from a high of 170,000 after the 2003 US-led invasion.

"Right now they are at about 2.2 million barrels (of oil) per day. They could go as high as four to six million within four or five years," he said, noting that energy-related facilities remained vulnerable to insurgent attacks.

"There's no other source of millions of new barrels in the pipeline anywhere in the world," Jeffrey said. "The implications on the price per barrel are dramatic."

Saudi Arabia, the only producer inside the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries with an extra production capacity of about 1 million barrels per day (bpd), is able to control global prices, Jeffrey noted.

He said that Iraq was also critical to Europe's future gas needs.

"The only source of enough gas for Europe to become somewhat more diversified in energy sources -- or gas sources -- is Iraq," he said. "Azeri gas is not sufficient, Turkmen gas is many years off."

Iraq sits on one of the world's largest oil reserves -- 143 billion barrels by Baghdad's own estimates. It also has the world's 11th largest gas reserves, but decades of sanctions and wars have prevented effective production.

Current gas production -- all of it associated gas from oil wells -- is 42.5 million cubic metres per day, but half is burned off in flares from oil wells, according to Baghdad-based analyst Ruba Husari.

"Given the criticality of Iraq, given the investment we've made in it... the effort that we need to make and the amount of money required to make it is absolutely -- absolutely -- justified," Jeffrey said.

He added that his top concern for Iraq's future stability was insurgent Shiite groups that were beholden to neighbouring Iran.

"Not getting some of these militias under control can undercut rule of law and governance in those areas where they are allowed to roll around free," Jeffrey said.

He said two of the groups, Ketaeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahel al-Haq, "are nothing more than thuggish clones" of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

Last week Major General Jeffrey Buchanan, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told AFP that the two groups, plus the Promised Day Brigade, were responsible for attacks against US forces, which last month suffered their worst casualties in three years with 14 soldiers killed, most in rocket attacks.

Buchanan accused Iran of supplying more lethal weapons to those groups.

Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi dismissed as "ridiculous lies" US claims that Tehran smuggled weapons to Iraq and Afghanistan, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Saturday.