Iraq's Brutal War on Gays: Another "Extraordinary Achievement" of American Militarism, by Chris Floyd, 20 August 2009

As'ad AbuKhalil points us to this press release from Human Rights Watch, detailing an ongoing campaign of torture and murder against Iraqi homosexuals (and "suspected" homosexuals and men considered not "manly" enough). The killings are being carried out by the sectarian extremists unleashed by the American invasion – including agents of the American-installed government. As HRW reports:

Iraqi militias are carrying out a spreading campaign of torture and murder against men suspected of homosexual conduct, or of not being "manly" enough, and Iraq authorities have done nothing to stop the killing...

The 67-page report, "‘They Want Us Exterminated': Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq," documents a wide-reaching campaign of extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, and torture of gay men that began in early 2009. The killings began in the vast Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia, and spread to many cities across Iraq. Mahdi Army spokesmen have promoted fears about the "third sex" and the "feminization" of Iraq men, and suggested that militia action was the remedy. Some people told Human Rights Watch that Iraqi security forces have colluded and joined in the killing....

The killers invade homes and pick people up in the street, witnesses and survivors said, interrogating them before murdering them to extract names of other potential victims. They practice grotesque tortures, including gluing men's anuses shut as punishment. Human Rights Watch spoke to doctors who said that hospitals and morgues have received dozens of mutilated bodies, living and dead.

"Murder and torture are no way to enforce morality," said Rasha Moumneh, Middle East and North Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. "These killings point to the continuing and lethal failure of Iraq's post-occupation authorities to establish the rule of law and protect their citizens."


HRW also points out that the killings and torture violate even the most fundamentalist understanding of Sharia law, which the perpetrators are claiming to enforce.

In his brief post on the report, AbuKhalil goes on to make this pertinent observation:

Good for Human Rights Watch for issuing this report. I just hope that they notice that the American invasion of Iraq has killed Iraqi gays, lesbians, heterosexuals, and asexuals alike.


Yes, when you destroy a society by aggressive war, when you kill more than one million innocent people (out of a total population of 25 million: a kill rate of one out of every 25 Iraqis), when you dispossess four million innocent people, when you join with your local puppets in a savage war of ethnic cleansing, when through invasion and prior years of near-genocidal sanctions you eviscerate one of the most secular states in the Middle East, when you empower violent religious extremists to further your own agenda of domination, this is what you get: the eruption of the human mind's most savage instincts and blind fears, set loose in a maelstrom of degradation.

And still, the urbane, educated, civilized, "progressive" president can stand before the world and declare that America's military rapine of Iraq is "an extraordinary achievement." And so it is. And so was the Holocaust, the Inquisition, the Trail of Tears, the liquidation of the "kulaks" and many other epiphanies of human civilization. But to be extraordinarily evil is not usually considered something to brag about. That Obama can do so without batting an eye is a telling indication of moral degradation of our own society.

Impunity for CIA Torturers : The Debate Intensifies

http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article1211







Translated mardi 12 mai 2009, par Claire Scammell






Obama, who had assured agents that they would not be brought to trial despite disclosures of their use of torture, has been forced to concede the possibility of an inquiry.

By opening the door to a possible inquiry into those responsible for the use of torture, Barack Obama has reopened the debate - after having maintained that there would not be any legal action against CIA agents, who were acting in “good faith”.

Obama had received, at the time, an enthusiastic welcome in Langley, home of the CIA headquarters. It was under pressure from those who had contributed so much to his election that the president had to find a way to respond to the split in opinion over the impunity granted to political sponsors of torturers.

The results of polls have been contradictory ; early last week 70% of citizens polled, shocked by the confidential documents made public by the president, were in favour of immediate legal action against the intolerable acts. Yesterday, a new poll by the Washington Post and ABC News showed a split in opinion over the use of torture on terrorists but also approval from more than 70% for the policies delivered by Obama in his first one hundred days in office.

On the other hand, the wind has turned for those who, in a way never seen before, rallied opinion in favour of a young black candidate ; today, nobody is talking about the colour of his skin. Nineteen humanitarian associations (backed by the multimillionaire George Soros), the internet site Move On (five million subscribers), which played a decisive role in the democratic candidate’s battle for presidency, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU 500,000 members) are proposing a petition calling for the immediate trial of those responsible for the use of torture.

The ACLU has, moreover, announced that it has won the right to publish several dozen photos, taken inside CIA prisons, which prove the systematic use of torture inside the walls of the Abu Ghraib prison. The photos will be published on May the 28th but the press are already evoking the damning content.

It has been heard, from a Senate committee inquiry, that the CIA torturers had started their training immediately after the attacks of 11th September 2001; before the texts which legalised illegality were written. It was also a question of creating, through the use of torture, links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein in order to find another justification for a war started by the biggest lie of the century, that of the existence of weapons of mass destruction.

Author of legal texts, the judge Jay Bybee, who today sits on the Federal Court of Appeal, is the subject of a call for impeachment lodged at the Senate by the Wisconsin senator Russ Feingold. The debate has been drawn out across the two chambers where the majority of Republicans, including John McCain, oppose putting the Bush team under the spotlight. The former vice president, Dick Cheney, who is being questioned, appeared on television to defend the methods “which allowed the CIA to defend the security of the United States”. This is an issue that the CIA, having become more cautious, has indicated it could not assess.

One of the members of the presidential team, the Admiral Dennis Blair, head of national intelligence, has taken a stand against the proceedings, whereas in January, he stated before the Senate that he condemned torture and that it did not yield reliable intelligence.

The White House itself is split. Hoping to conjure up a storm which would risk putting the spotlight on the defence secretary Robert Gates, who held the same post in the Bush administration, Barack Obama has chosen to off-load the responsibility onto the Attorney General, Eric Holder – an advocate for abandoning all investigation – who will have to judge if there is need to open an inquiry, and onto Congress, where a bipartite truth-commission could decide whether there is need to open proceedings which couldn’t fail to put the spotlight on George Bush. This is just the beginning.

On Bush-Cheney War Crimes, and what the world wants from the Obama Administration by Andrew Taylor

The use of Torture by the USA is nothing new, not some departure in theory or practice. During the US backing of the death-squads and regular military of the armed forces of El Salvador "American Advisors" trained El Salvador military torturers in all sorts of techniques. We noticed around 1979 that after the US sessions had taken place the decapitation of peasant activists, FMLN supporters etc began. The USA military trains Latin American Client states in torture at their School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Sometimes even members of the US Centre-Left seem to talk as if Obama's mere "attitude of openess" will magically dissipate the darkness of US imperialism. It will not.

While the USA has 800 military Bases circling the world, while it leads nuclear-tipped NATO, and while it is hand-in-glove with its 50 year old policy of anti-Palestinian, pro-Israeli repression, the US state remains on the objective level an enemy of Humanity.

If the US has renounced its imperial status and wants to return as a republic among other countries in the family of nations, it must show its change of ideology by charging Bush and Cheney, Rice and the White House Lawyers with Crimes against Human Rights and Crimes of War. This "Change" would actually signal to the world that you have not only "repented" but intend to "do justice" in reparation to the devastated the Iraqi nation and others. Anything less will be rightly seen as more American government spin.