Return to Iraq–What Could Go Wrong?

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/13/the-seven-people-who-need-to-stfu-about-iraq-right-now/#.U5tf1StV6rM.twitter

“Hush you guys. The guy who thought Sarah Palin would make a good vice-president is explaining to us what we should do in Iraq.”

And do you remember which genius said this, about how long success in Iraq would take: “It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months“?

Giving me an excuse to post this excerpt, which I love:

But imagine if “Donald Rumsfeld” was a wholly imaginary character and that the events recounted in his memoir were audacious fiction, a wicked satire describing an implausible campaign of deceit that ultimately ensnared even the deceivers themselves, leading to a catastrophically lethal blunder in which trillions were squandered and hundreds of thousands slain. Yet despite that all-too-predictable outcome, this fictional narrator with the oddly Dickensian name is unrepentant, effusively praising himself as a hero and a champion of virtue. If it were fiction — the product of conscious artifice rather than of unconscious artifice – Known and Unknown would be on the syllabus of English literature classes everywhere.

Read more: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/09/nra-what-would-rayford-do-do-the-opposite/#ixzz34ca4cB00

Billions Wasted/Lost in Iraq

In unsurprising news: http://news.yahoo.com/auditors-billions-likely-wasted-iraq-174443860.html

 

“The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known,” the report said.

The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company’s billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.

With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn’t pinpoint the amount wasted, it “could be substantial.”

Also, I highly recommend the book We Meant Well; How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People by Peter Van Buren. It’s entertaining as well as informative. Man can write.

Senseless Killing of Zoo Animal Becomes Broadway Play

Do you remember back in 2003 how an endangered Bengal tiger in the beleaguered Baghdad zoo was shot to death by a scared soldier with an illegal weapon because the hungry tiger was tasting another soldier? Well, they’ve made it into a Broadway play. And Robin Williams stars! As the tiger! I am not joking.

Now that this play exists, it’s difficult to internet research on the original story, even in Arabic. For instance, in the play the tiger’s name is Mamdouh. Can’t find any corroboration of that, though.

It wasn’t impossible, though. Okay what happened was some army reserve officer decided it would be a good idea to treat his soldiers to a cookout, and that a good place to roast a lamb would be in the middle of zoo full of underfed carnivores. More fantastic decision making took place that night, when a reservist decided to stand within reaching distance of a tiger. The story we heard at the time was that the soldiers had been drinking, but apparently they hadn’t drunk a significant amount. So the guy who stood a couple feet from a tiger and turned his back was sober. So anyway, as the 11-year-old tiger was munching this soldier’s arm, his buddy pulled a contraband pistol and shot the tiger dead. The snack soldier lost the use of his arm.

Sounds fishy, right? Most zoos don’t have tiger enclosures within reaching distance of the public. Neither did this one. The soldier was between the inner and outer enclosure, that is to say, in a really, really stupid place to be.

If Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it’s that we can create life and therefore we don’t need to think about wildlife conservation, because if you want more tigers, you can just whip them up in a lab.

So anyway, yeah, someone made a Broadway play out of this story.

The play, which is at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, takes place in Baghdad, shortly after “Shock and Awe.” Director Moises Kaufman says the playwright may have come up with a theatrical equivalent, as he attempts to describe Bengal Tiger: “There is a tiger that talks, there is a ghost of the son of Saddam Hussein, there is the ghost of a young girl, there are two American soldiers, one of whom dies in the middle of the play and becomes a ghost.” He concludes, “It’s part ghost story, part war play, part satire, part theater of the absurd.”

Bummer. While researching this I found out that US soldiers also killed four lions that had escaped from the zoo.

Checking in on the Iraq War, Thanks to Wikileaks

Remember how successful the surge supposedly was? The surge started in early 2007. And the new leak of documents through Wikileaks (NY Times article here) show us this other piece of information, that jibes with what we heard a while back (but also after the fact) that it was ethnic cleansing rather than “the surge” that worked.

But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.

From a 2008 story:

“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.” The night-light signature in four other large Iraqi cities — Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit and Karbala — held steady or increased between the spring of 2006 and the winter of 2007, the UCLA team found. None of these cities were targets of the surge. Baghdad’s decreases were centered in the southwestern Sunni strongholds of East and West Rashid, where the light signature dropped 57 percent and 80 percent, respectively, during the same period.’

Back to today’s NY Times story:

The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.

But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures.

According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter.

One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.

Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The sad thing is how the Iraq war has fallen out of the news in the United States.

Wikileaks Video: US Pilots Shoot Reuters Photographers

Wikileaks has a video obtained from the cockpit of a helicopter whose crew shot and killed two Reuters employees and injured some children and others in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007. It’s also on YouTube. Wikileaks also has a site devoted to this video, Collateral Murder.

I was fixin’ to post it here but because the video contains graphic and horrible footage, YouTube requires me to prove my age by signing in, and I don’t want to. Anyhow, click a link if you haven’t seen the footage yet.

Personally, I only watched the beginning. Just reading comments on the video on Balloon Juice was plenty to dissuade me from watching the whole thing.

That 30:1 Kill Ratio Might Have Something to do With It

Stephen M. Walt wrote a great column over at Foreign Policy in response to Tom “Friedman Unit” Friedman’s scrawlings about why Muslim extremists want to kill Americans. This was about two months ago, but somehow I forgot to blog about it earlier.

Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday’s New York Times, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America’s supposedly negative role in the region. If Muslims weren’t so irrational, he thinks, they would recognize that “U.S. foreign policy has been largely dedicated to rescuing Muslims or trying to help free them from tyranny.” He concedes that we made a few mistakes here and there (such as at Abu Ghraib), but the real problem is all those anti-American fairy tales that Muslims tell each other to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions.

I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”

To repeat: I have deliberately selected “low-end” estimates for Muslim fatalities, so these figures present the “best case” for the United States. Even so, the United States has killed nearly 30 Muslims for every American lost. The real ratio is probably much higher, and a reasonable upper bound for Muslim fatalities (based mostly on higher estimates of “excess deaths” in Iraq due to the sanctions regime and the post-2003 occupation) is well over one million, equivalent to over 100 Muslim fatalities for every American lost.

It is also striking to observe that virtually all of the Muslim deaths were the direct or indirect consequence of official U.S. government policy. By contrast, most of the Americans killed by Muslims were the victims of non-state terrorist groups such as al Qaeda or the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans should also bear in mind that the figures reported above omit the Arabs and Muslims killed by Israel in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. Given our generous and unconditional support for Israel’s policy towards the Arab world in general and the Palestinians in particular, Muslims rightly hold us partly responsible for those victims too.

Contrary to what Friedman thinks, our real problem isn’t a fictitious Muslim “narrative” about America’s role in the region; it is mostly the actual things we have been doing in recent years.

————-
This unrelated article at Dawn News says Predator drones in Pakistan have killed 700 civilians and 5 al-Qaeda or Taliban leades.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities.

The success percentage for the drone hits during 2009 was hardly 11 per cent. On average, 58 civilians were killed in these attacks every month, 12 persons every week and almost two people every day. Most of the attacks were carried out on the basis of human intelligence, reportedly provided by the Pakistani and Afghan tribesmen, who are spying for the US-led allied forces in Afghanistan.

“…But You Throw One Shoe…”

Muntazar al-Zaydi is the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at president Bush, yelling the immortal words, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,” and, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.”

Immediately after his release in September he left the country for medical treatment, then got some love in Switzerland before returning to Iraq.

Now he has established a foundation . Maybe some day he’ll be remembered for something other than the shoe-throwing incident.

The MAZ Foundation being secular and independent of all political and religious institutions intends to bring financial, medical and logistical aid to the victims of the breaches to Human Rights in Iraq. It is also the ambition of the foundation to play a role in the prevention of the violating of Human Rights by giving media coverage to individual and collective tragedies and to making international opinion aware of the suffering of the Iraqi people. The MAZ Foundation also intends to finance all national and international legal actions leading to the acknowledgement of guilt and responsibility for the physical, material and moral prejudice suffered by the civilian population.

Here’s the contact page if you should wish to donate.

And here the immortal words in Arabic, in case you have a use for them:

هذه قبلة الوداع من الشعب العراقي أيها الكلب

and

وهذه من الأرامل والأيتام والأشخاص الذين قتلتهم

Iraq is Such a Disappointment to Us

Not to spend too much time on this NYTimes article about how the Iraqis are letting us down by being too dead, disabled, or abroad to run the cool factories and hospitals we built for them just ’cause we’re nice like that. Most of the people who read this blog probably already read that article and commented on it on a bigger blog. So here are just a few choice bits:

BAGHDAD — In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

The projects run the gamut — from a cutting-edge, $270 million water treatment plant in Nasiriya that works at a fraction of its intended capacity because it is too sophisticated for Iraqi workers to operate, to a farmers’ market that farmers cannot decide how to share, to a large American hospital closed immediately after it was handed over to Iraq because the government was unable to supply it with equipment, a medical staff or electricity.

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said his watchdog agency had “regularly raised concerns about the potential waste of U.S. taxpayer money resulting from reconstruction projects that were poorly planned, badly transferred, or insufficiently sustained by the Iraqi government.”

The blame is shared, officials said. While Iraq has often been guilty of poor management, American authorities have repeatedly failed to ask Iraqis what sort of projects they needed and have not followed up with adequate training.

And whether or not the American-built health centers and power plants are ever used as intended, the American companies that won the lion’s share of rebuilding contracts from the federal government have been paid.

Exactly. They got paid, defense industry folks got rich, that’s what we went into Iraq for. Done and done.

Despite the $53 billion spent by the United States, many Iraqis have criticized the rebuilding effort as wasteful. Ali Ghalib Baban, Iraq’s minister of planning, said it had not had a discernible impact. “Maybe they spent it,” he said, “but Iraq doesn’t feel it.”

Iraqis, for whom bombed-out buildings are an unremarkable part of urban existence, also say they have seen little evidence of rebuilding.

“Where is the reconstruction?” asked Sahar Kadhum, a resident of Kut, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad. “The city is sleeping on hills of garbage.”

Indeed, despite the billions in American funds, more than 40 percent of Iraqis still lack access to clean water, according to the Iraqi government. Ninety percent of Iraq’s 180 hospitals do not have basic medical and surgical supplies, according to the aid organization Oxfam. Iraqis also have disproportionately high rates of infant mortality, cerebral palsy and cancer.

Exacerbating the problem, Iraqi and American officials say, is that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and the like.

Buried on the second page, of course. I’d have put it in one of the first two paragraphs, personally.

Also on the subject of health in Iraq, here’s a Guardian article on a huge rise in birth defects in Fallujah.

Doctors in Iraq’s war-ravaged enclave of Falluja are dealing with up to 15 times as many chronic deformities in infants, compared to a year ago, and a spike in early life cancers that may be linked to toxic materials left over from the fighting.

The extraordinary rise in birth defects has crystallised over recent months as specialists working in Falluja’s over-stretched health system have started compiling detailed clinical records of all babies born.

Neurologists and obstetricians in the city interviewed by the Guardian say the rise in birth defects – which include a baby born with two heads, babies with multiple tumours, and others with nervous system problems – are unprecedented and at present unexplainable.

Other health officials are also starting to focus on possible reasons, chief among them potential chemical or radiation poisonings. Abnormal clusters of infant tumours have also been repeatedly cited in Basra and Najaf – areas that have in the past also been intense battle zones where modern munitions have been heavily used.

Falluja’s frontline doctors are reluctant to draw a direct link with the fighting. They instead cite multiple factors that could be contributors.

“These include air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother,” said Dr Qais. “We simply don’t have the answers yet.”

I am not a doctor and have no medical training, but I don’t believe that the psychological status of the mother can cause birth defects.

Falluja was the scene of the only two setpiece battles that followed the US-led invasion. Twice in 2004, US marines and infantry units were engaged in heavy fighting with Sunni militia groups who had aligned with former Ba’athists and Iraqi army elements.

The first battle was fought to find those responsible for the deaths of four Blackwater private security contractors working for the US. The city was bombarded heavily by American artillery and fighter jets. Controversial weaponry was used, including white phosphorus, which the US government admitted deploying.

“Setpiece battles”?

Despite fully funding the construction of the new hospital, a well-equipped facility that opened in August, Iraq’s health ministry remains largely disfunctional and unable to co-ordinate a response to the city’s pressing needs.

On the bright side (just kidding, really), our system of prisons in Iraq (specifically, sweeping up every able- and semi-able-bodied male between eleven and ninety-nine years old and dumping them in a filthy jail with no recourse to the law) has been judged such a success by military commanders that they intend to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Tehran Times article here. Entire article:

Following with the trend of trying to shoehorn the dubious Iraq War strategy onto Afghanistan, the US Army says that it intends to copy its prison strategy from Iraq in Afghanistan.

Brigadier General Quantock touted the Iraqi prison system as a great success, citing the relatively small percentage of released detainees who were re-captured.

It may come as a considerable surprise that the general considers America’s prison strategy in Iraq such an unabashed success, particularly since it wasn’t that long ago that they were scrambling to reform the disastrous system.

And in fact, the recidivism numbers cited are misleading, as one of the most common complaints was that the U.S. tactic of mass arrests had led many innocent people into the prison system simply for being near a militant attack and eventually released without ever being charged with any crimes.

Moreover, Iraq’s police have long complained that the U.S. detention system, with its brutal reputation, amounts to a series of “terrorist factories” where innocent detainees and petty criminals are radicalized.

Brig. Gen. Quantock dismissed these claims and was quick to lay the blame on Iraq’s legal system. Yet if this is a problem in Iraq and will be doubly so in Afghanistan, one of the most corrupt and lawless nations on the planet.

If you’re a fan of snotty NYTimes articles where we deride the Iraqis as being inferior to us, here’s an article for you.

The same US Army that brought you the men who stare at goats is making fun of Iraqi law enforcement for spending a lot of money on bomb detection equipment the US thinks is worthless.

The small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel, is being used at hundreds of checkpoints in Iraq. But the device works “on the same principle as a Ouija board” — the power of suggestion — said a retired United States Air Force officer, Lt. Col. Hal Bidlack, who described the wand as nothing more than an explosives divining rod.

Still, the Iraqi government has purchased more than 1,500 of the devices, known as the ADE 651, at costs from $16,500 to $60,000 each. Nearly every police checkpoint, and many Iraqi military checkpoints, have one of the devices, which are now normally used in place of physical inspections of vehicles.

The Iraqis, however, believe passionately in them. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs,” said Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives.

Dale Murray, head of the National Explosive Engineering Sciences Security Center at Sandia Labs, which does testing for the Department of Defense, said the center had “tested several devices in this category, and none have ever performed better than random chance.”

Love it! The scorn! “The same principle as the Ouija board.” What does this remind me of? Oh yeah, it reminds me of the US Department of Defense’s reliance on polygraph tests!

The accuracy of polygraphic lie detection is slightly above chance. Nevertheless, State and local police departments and law enforcement agencies across the United States are devoted proponents of this unscientific and specious device.

I don’t want to quote too much of this article here, but please read it if you are interested in how US law enforcement uses voodoo science, our modern version of phrenology.

The APA is a professional organization for polygraph examiners who have complete faith in the accuracy of the test. They have their own trade journal Polygraph in which they report scientifically worthless studies and brandish anecdotes of the wonders of their trade. The majority of these members can pride themselves on completing a 6 week to 6 month post- high school training course in the art of polygraphy. They have no formal training in medicine, psychology, physiology, or behavior; the very disciplines on which the testing is based. The majority of them cater to the legal system wherein their economic livelihood depends.

Since they are primarily paid to identify guilty suspects, motivational factors may play a part in their eagerness to find the guilty suspect. (Kleinmuntz, 1987)

The polygraph examiner likens his “skill” to that of the radiologist reading a chest X-Ray or a cardiologist interpreting an EKG. (Barefoot, 1974) This analogy is not only ridiculous but, in fact, if a medical test had a similar sensitivity and specificity to that of the polygraph examination it would simply not be used in the field of medicine. They will cite the fact that the polygraph has been used in the United States for greater than 70 years as if longevity is directly related to validity. They will state that they have personally administered hundreds or thousands of these tests, and have almost never been wrong, as if total number of tests given constitutes accuracy.

They are so convinced of the accuracy of the polygraph that they regard opponents of polygraphy as communists and do-nothing professors. (Arther, 1986) It doesn’t occur to them that someone with a Ph.D. and years of research experience, in the very subjects they ignorantly dabble in, may know something more than they do.

It is astounding that the criminal justice system has institutionalized and perpetuated a so called “technology” that lacks scientific evidence and is in fact rejected by the scientific community. It is as ludicrous as procuring the so called “love meter” machine from the amusement park which measures galvanic skin response and placing it in the courtroom. But in a backward legal system which has been known to use psychics to help with unsolved murders and has allowed the mentally retarded to serve as jurors, it is not entirely surprising.

You just have to laugh at those unsophisticated rubes in the US Department of Defense paying good money to polygraphers. As antiPolygraph.org says:

The reliability of polygraph testing for employee screening is widely disputed on scientific grounds. But many government security officials nevertheless insist on its value and utility, and the practice persists.

Significantly, the new directive tightens control over DoD agencies’ use of any “credibility assessment” technology other than the polygraph. This seems a likely reaction to the post-9/11 debacle wherein some DoD components began using Computer Voice Stress Analysis (CVSA) to interrogate prisoners. The manufacturer of this quack device, the so-called “National Institute of Truth Verification,” has admitted in court that CVSA “is not capable of lie detection,” and the company was recently the subject of an ABC News exposé. DoD eventually put an end to its use of CVSA. The new directive ensures that henceforward, DoD agencies will use only officially approved pseudoscientific techniques for “credibility assessment” purposes.

For more about what we did (wrong) in Iraq, I recommend: Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. Buy them here.

Good or Bad News About Lawsuit Against Blackwater

Judge Tosses Lawsuits Against Blackwater, Now Xe.

Judge Refuses to Dismiss War Crimes Case Against Blackwater.

They sound like totally different, opposite stories, but they’re about the same decision, passed down Wednesday.

The entire AP article:

WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out a series of lawsuits filed by alleged Iraqi victims of the contractor once known as Blackwater USA, but is allowing the plaintiffs to refile their claims.

In a 56-page ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va., dismissed claims filed by 64 plaintiffs — including the estates of 19 people who died — who says Blackwater employees engaged in indiscriminate killings and beatings. The lawsuits also claim the company, now known as Xe, “fostered a culture of lawlessness” while it held a State Department contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq.

Ellis is allowing most of the plaintiffs to refile, but only if they will be able to prove that employees engaged in intentional killings and beatings. He said a pattern of recklessness or a culture of lawlessness is not enough to sustain an allegation of war crimes under the federal law that governs the issue, the Alien Tort Statute.

Xe’s lawyers had argued that the lawsuits should be dismissed under any circumstances because the allegations involve political questions that cannot be resolved by the judiciary and because private entities cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute. Ellis rejected those arguments.

Both sides said they were pleased with the ruling. Plaintiffs’ lawyer Susan Burke said she will refile. She has said in previous hearings that she will be able to prove that Blackwater’s actions were intentional, not just reckless.

Xe spokeswoman Stacy DeLuke said in a statement that “we are confident that they (plaintiffs) will not be able to meet the high standard specified in Judge Ellis’ opinion.”

The ruling comes as a federal judge in Washington is considering what evidence to allow in a criminal prosecution of five Blackwater security guards accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in September 2007.

From The Nation‘s article:

On Wednesday, a federal judge rejected a series of arguments by lawyers for the mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater seeking to dismiss five high-stakes war crimes cases brought by Iraqi victims against both the company and its owner, Erik Prince. At the same time, Judge T.S. Ellis III sent the Iraqis’ lawyers back to the legal drawing board to amend and refile their cases, saying that the Iraqi plaintiffs need to provide more specific details on the alleged crimes before a final decision can be made on whether or not the lawsuits will proceed.

“We were very pleased with the ruling,” says Susan Burke, the lead attorney for the Iraqis. Burke, who filed the lawsuits in cooperation with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is now preparing to re-file the suits. Blackwater’s spokesperson Stacy DeLuke said, “We are confident that [the plaintiffs] will not be able to meet the high standard specified in Judge Ellis’s opinion.”

Ellis’s ruling was not necessarily a response to faulty pleadings by the Iraqis’ lawyers but rather appears to be the result of a Supreme Court decision that came down after the Blackwater cases were originally filed. In a 5-4 ruling in May 2009 in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the court reversed decades of case law and imposed much more stringent standards for plaintiffs’ documentation of facts before going to trial. According to Ellis’s ruling, which cites Iqbal, the Iraqis must now file complaints that meet these new standards.

Judge Ellis, a Reagan appointee with a mixed record on national security issues, rejected several of the central arguments Blackwater made in its motion to dismiss, namely the company’s contention that it cannot be sued by the Iraqis under US law and that the company should not be subjected to potential punitive damages in the cases. The Iraqi victims brought their suits under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows for litigation in US courts for violations of fundamental human rights committed overseas by individuals or corporations with a US presence. Ellis said that Blackwater’s argument that it cannot be sued under the ATS is “unavailing,” adding that corporations and individuals can both be held responsible for crimes and torts. He said bluntly that “claims alleging direct corporate liability for war crimes” are legitimate under the statute.

Ellis also rejected Blackwater’s argument that “conduct constitutes a war crime only if it is perpetrated in furtherance of a ‘military objective’ rather than for economic or ideological reasons.” Ellis said that under Blackwater’s logic “it is arguable that nobody who receives a paycheck would ever be liable for war crimes. Moreover, so narrow is the scope of [Blackwater’s] standard that it would exclude murders of civilians committed by soldiers where there was no legitimate ‘military objective’ for committing the murders.”

“What is important here is that the judge is saying that violations of war crimes can be committed by private people or corporations,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He said Ellis’s ruling is “an affirmation of the precedent set by CCR thirty years ago” when it brought the first successful Alien Tort suit in 200 years “that those who engage in violations of fundamental human rights abroad can be held liable in the US.” Ellis’s ruling, he says, “is sympathetic to the idea that the Blackwater case is an appropriate use of the law.”

Ellis rejected Burke’s allegation that Blackwater engaged in summary executions, saying that under the law such classification of killings “require[s] state action, and none is alleged here.” Blackwater also made an argument that the cases should have been tried in Iraq–or that the Iraqis’ lawyers should have exhausted that possibility before filing their cases in US courts.

I’m going to guess that they would have liked this tried in Iraq for one or both of two reasons: 1) Iraqi courts might have ruled they owed a few thousand dollars per dead Iraqi, and/or 2) Iraqi courts might have ruled that Blackwater wasn’t responsible for the actions of its employees. The latter reason is why Blackwater/Xe is arguing that another lawsuit against them, brought by the widows of three American servicemen’s widows, should be held in Afghanistan.

Ellis shot down that argument and pointed out that Blackwater’s own lawyers admitted that under the Paul Bremer-era Order 17 in Iraq, Blackwater would have immunity for its crimes under Iraqi law. Ellis also rejected Blackwater’s claim that punitive damages are not allowed in these types of cases. As Ellis wrote, Blackwater’s lawyers “offer no support” for this argument “in the case law or from recognized international treatises.”

One of the central thrusts of the Iraqis’ suits against Blackwater is that Erik Prince is the head of an organized crime syndicate as defined by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Sweet.

Burke and CCR decided to sue Prince and his companies directly rather than his individual employees because they say Prince “wholly owns and controls this enterprise.” They allege that Prince directed murders of Iraqi civilians from Blackwater’s headquarters in Virginia and North Carolina. Ellis dismissed the claims that the Iraqis have standing under the RICO Act, but ruled that they can file an amended complaint that “Prince ordered or directed the killings allegedly committed in Iraq from within the United States, and that such conduct proximately caused the damage allegedly suffered by the RICO plaintiffs.” In one of the cases, Ellis ruled that the four-year statute of limitations had expired for a RICO claim.

On August 3, lawyers for the Iraqis submitted two sworn declarations from former Blackwater employees alleging that Prince may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. One former employee alleged that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.” What role, if any, these allegations will play in the amended complaints is unclear, but Burke insists she has evidence to back up all of her allegations.

Burke’s case is also bolstered by the evidence the US government will present in its criminal case against Blackwater forces. On September 7, federal prosecutors in Washington, DC, submitted papers in the criminal case against five Blackwater operatives for their alleged role in the 2007 Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad that killed seventeen Iraqi civilians and wounded more than twenty others. Burke is representing many of these families in her civil case. Blackwater forces “fired at innocent Iraqis not because they actually believed that they were in imminent danger of serious bodily injury and actually believed that they had no alternative to the use of deadly force, but rather that they fired at innocent Iraqi civilians because of their hostility toward Iraqis and their grave indifference to the harm that their actions would cause,” the acting US Attorney in DC, Channing Phillips, alleges in court papers submitted by Kenneth C. Kohl, the lead prosecutor on this case. “[T]he defendants specifically intended to kill or seriously injure the Iraqi civilians that they fired upon at [Nisour] Square.” The government also alleges that one Blackwater operative “wanted to kill as many Iraqis as he could as ‘payback for 9/11,’ and he repeatedly boasted about the number of Iraqis he had shot,” while “several of the defendants had harbored a deep hostility toward Iraqi civilians which they demonstrated in words and deeds.”

Muntazar al-Zaidi in Switzerland

AP News has a news article about my favorite show thrower that reads like a blog post. The author/reporter couldn’t resist injecting his own point of view into his article, and for some reason the editor let it run.

He [Muntazar al-Zaidi] condemned the United States, saying it played a role in 1 million deaths and forcing 5 million people to flee. He made no mention of the violence among Iraqi groups since the 2003 U.S. invasion.

Did the author/reporter, Bradley S. Klapper, used to write speeches for George W. Bush? Because this sounds exactly like something he’d say. As if, when talking about the US invasion of and years-long @#$%ing of Iraq, it’s unfair not to mention that some of the deaths were at the hands of Iraqis fighting each other as a result of the world-class incompetence of the Bush administration. I think this is an outgrowth of the “fair and balanced” trend in journalism today where if you have a scientist on your show explaining global warming, you must give equal time to whacked out minister or small town board of education member countering that God wouldn’t make the earth any warmer than we can handle.

Most of Iraq’s 2 million international refugees live in neighboring Syria and Jordan, while the International Organization for Migration says a similar number of Iraqis are uprooted inside the country’s borders. About 100,000 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths over the last 6 1/2 years, according to The Iraq Body Count, a London-based group whose figures are widely considered a credible minimum.

And here he’s complaining about al-Zaidi’s accuracy. Klapper provides us with an unattributed estimate of 2 million refugees abroad and a vague, also unattributed estimate of “a similar number” inside Iraq to imply that al-Zaidi is making stuff up. He also gives us a lowball estimate of 100,000 deaths and hopes we won’t notice the word “minimum” right next to the word “credible.”

Al-Zeidi’s reception in Switzerland was noteworthy. While his shoe-throwing act of protest in December made him a hero for many in the Muslim world, there was little public outpouring of support for him when he was released last month in Baghdad.

To back up his claim that al-Zaidi got a lukewarm reception in Iraq, Klapper gives us no facts whatsover. We’re supposed to take his word for it because he’s a news-talking guy.

Here’s a YouTube clip from the news at the time of al-Zaidi’s release last month:

It kind of looks like he’s missing a tooth or two. This one shows a little more of the crowds’ sentiments. They look jubilant to me:

I mean, I can understand that Mr. Klapper wants to make the pinko Swiss look un-American, but what’s his angle, trying to make it sound like Iraqis weren’t happy to see al-Zaidi out of jail?

The article started like this:

The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President George W. Bush leaned back in his chair and soaked in the round of applause.

This was not Baghdad or Damascus or Beirut. This was Geneva, where Muntadhar al-Zeidi was given a hero’s welcome Monday far warmer than the subdued reception in his own homeland.

Again with downplaying the way the Iraqi’s received him. That is so bizarre.

By the way, Muntazar al-Zaydi now has 46,248 fans on his Arabic-language Facebook page.

Here’s a Guardian audio article about the celebrations in Baghdad on the occasion of al-Zaydi’s release.

“It’s a mood of high celebration…”

They do report that it was more subdued than they expected. That could be because it was in the middle of Ramadan. Possibly because al-Zaydi wanted some peace and quiet.

From the Telegraph:

Mr Zaidi returned to his home in the Shia suburb of Sadr City, where relatives had gathered with balloons, banners and sheep to slaughter in his honour.

Scores of people, including local politicians and tribal leaders, joined them for the celebration. “They are very happy and they are singing and dancing,” one of his brothers, Maytin, told The Daily Telegraph. “This is our tradition when someone gets released, we play music and dance.”

Another brother, Uday, said the journalist would be sleeping at an “undisclosed location” and would travel to Greece for treatment on Thursday.

“I congratulate the Iraqi people and the Muslim world and all free men across the world on the release of Muntazer,” said Uday Zaidi. “Every time Bush turns a new page in his life he will find Muntazer’s shoes waiting for him.”

And OMG, I went one click too far, and found this execrable post by Bob Barr saying al-Zaydi should quit whining, because if he had thrown his shoes at President Bush while being a swarthy Iraqi in the United States, he would have been treated much worse, probably including waterboarding (which he says he was treated to in Iraqi prison, too). As if everyone didn’t know that already.

Seriously, it’s unbelievable.

I don’t usually link to assholes, but the commenters are pretty funny. Apparently Bob can’t attract his own kind to his blog.

UPDATE: My apologies to Bob Barr. A little bird suggested that my sarcasm meter must have gone out of whack, as Barr’s whole post was a work of sarcasm. I am disappointed in myself, since sarcasm was the only language my family spoke at home.

Also, if parts of this post appear to missing, blame WordPress. I don’t know what’s going on with that.