Information Operations (II)

By Greyhawk

CNN Today:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Construction workers laying a water pipeline in the Iraqi city of Karbala Monday found a mass grave containing the remains of up to 20 people, police in the southern city of Hilla told CNN.

The gruesome find was about 800 meters (half a mile) from the holy shrine of Imam Hussein.

The grave is believed to contain the bodies of people killed by Saddam Hussein's security forces during the uprising of 1991.

This sort of story may become common as Iraq rebuilds. But shortly after the fall of Baghdad CNN's own Eason Jordan explained why many such stories were only rumors in the years prior.

Over the last dozen years I made 13 trips to Baghdad to lobby the government to keep CNN's Baghdad bureau open and to arrange interviews with Iraqi leaders. Each time I visited, I became more distressed by what I saw and heard — awful things that could not be reported because doing so would have jeopardized the lives of Iraqis, particularly those on our Baghdad staff.

Thus began Jordan's confession, his cleansing of the soul at the dawn of a new day. His piece was a litany of terror inflicted by Saddam, and it remains a difficult read even today. Some of his descriptions were "generic":

The secret police terrorized Iraqis working for international press services who were courageous enough to try to provide accurate reporting. Some vanished, never to be heard from again. Others disappeared and then surfaced later with whispered tales of being hauled off and tortured in unimaginable ways. Obviously, other news organizations were in the same bind we were when it came to reporting on their own workers.

Others were horrifyingly specific:

For example, in the mid-1990's one of our Iraqi cameramen was abducted. For weeks he was beaten and subjected to electroshock torture in the basement of a secret police headquarters because he refused to confirm the government's ludicrous suspicion that I was the Central Intelligence Agency's Iraq station chief.
<...>
I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us.
<...>
A 31-year-old Kuwaiti woman, Asrar Qabandi, was captured by Iraqi secret police occupying her country in 1990 for "crimes," one of which included speaking with CNN on the phone. They beat her daily for two months, forcing her father to watch. In January 1991, on the eve of the American-led offensive, they smashed her skull and tore her body apart limb by limb. A plastic bag containing her body parts was left on the doorstep of her family's home.

I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me.

Jordan concluded his brief examination of previously untold truths with an expectation of more to follow:

Now that Saddam Hussein's regime is gone, I suspect we will hear many, many more gut-wrenching tales from Iraqis about the decades of torment. At last, these stories can be told freely.

But the irony is that they aren't - and we can only speculate why. Perhaps doing so might give readers and viewers the non-progressive thought that putting panties on someone's head isn't really torture; that there are worse things than being wrapped in an Israeli flag or smeared with "fake menstrual blood"; that perhaps loud Eminem tracks aren't really a fate worse than some deaths after all. But whatever the reason, there's apparently little space in today's media for those stories that at last could indeed be told freely - there were in fact more stories of Saddam's atrocities before the 2003 invasion than since.

Not for lack of active effort on the part of some to suppress those pre-war tales. Here's Scott Ritter in 2002, explaining why he refused to reveal what he knew about Saddam's now-forgotten children's prisons:

"The prison in question is at the General Security Services headquarters, which was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children--toddlers up to pre-adolescents--whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."

*****

We'll pause briefly now to cleanse our own souls, with these words from John Stuart Mill:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature, and has no chance of being free unless made or kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

*****

To their credit, CNN does report the periodic discovery of mass graves in Iraq.

Forensic experts are investigating a mass grave thought to contain the remains of as many as 1,500 Kurds killed in the 1980s.

The grave, with 18 trenches, is in Samawa, 230 miles (370 kilometers) southeast of Baghdad, along the Euphrates River. Most of Iraq's Kurds live in the north of the country.

"We know they're Kurdish victims because of the clothing and artifacts that were found with the bodies," said Gregg Nivala, an attorney with the Department of Justice's Regime Crimes Liaison Office.

Nivala said more than 300 mass graves have been found in Iraq, but investigators have only been able to get to two. It is not clear how many bodies are in any of the other graves.

Given the numbers, many probably assume that the master of information operations - he who cowed the world's media for years - would be on trial for the total of his crimes against humanity.

He is not. Hussein now stands trial for one of his "lesser" crimes - events that followed his visit to the Shi'ite town of Dujayl:

Archival footage from the day, recently discovered and broadcast by Britain's Channel 4, shows crowds running after Hussein's convoy, cheering and throwing sweets as the president enters town. Wearing army fatigues and a black beret, Hussein stood atop a building and thanked the wildly enthusiastic residents for their war efforts.

As the motorcade took its leave, passing thickets of palms, gunfire erupted, many witnesses have recounted. Assassins had been waiting. Hussein's security forces fired back.

"It was a real firefight," said Mowaffak Rubaie, Iraq's national security advisor and a well-known former Shiite activist who was imprisoned and tortured by the regime. Several members of the entourage were killed, but the president escaped, as did most, if not all, of the attackers.

The archival footage shows Hussein addressing the crowds again after the assassination attempt. "These few shots won't frighten the people of Iraq and they won't frighten Saddam Hussein. We will find and question [the suspects]. They will turn out to be three, four or five people. But the 39,000 people of Dujayl are with the revolution. We distinguish between the people of Dujayl and a small number of traitors in Dujayl."

The next day, Baath Party and security officials started arresting anyone with a question mark next to his name, anyone linked to the Shiite shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, anyone with connections to Dawa, local people say.

"They grabbed people on the street and took them away," Massoud said. "They were forcing them to confess against others. If they couldn't find someone, they would take his wife and children until he showed up."

Iman-Sen Araji's husband, Abbas, then a teacher of Islamic law, was among those arrested. "They didn't knock," the mother of five said. "They pushed through the door and surprised us. They didn't say why he was taken. I didn't dare ask."

Within days, a command center had been set up, according to witnesses, at Baath Party headquarters. Helicopters flew over the orchards and fired rockets at the trees.

Jaffar Ali Mussawi, the farmer's youngest son, was checking on the family's orchards when the 16-year-old was stopped by police. "Someone said, 'Hey, his brother was arrested,' so they arrested him too," the elder Mussawi said.

Several days later, security officers came for Mussawi's third and last son, Hassan Ali, then 22. Mussawi never saw his three sons again.

In all, 1,500 people were rounded up, the mayor said.

Within days of the attack on the president, Araji and her five children were loaded onto a truck and taken to a prison in Baghdad, Araji said. They and nearly 60 other families from Dujayl were placed in a big room.

"They tortured us and beat us with sticks," she said. "They said, 'Confess! Give us information!' "

After 25 days, the residents were told they were going home.

They were packed up and put in vehicles. But instead of home, their destination was the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. There, they said, they were subjected to more beatings and humiliation. Guards paraded husbands before their wives and children as they were being tortured, Araji recalled.

Abbas Araji's sister and mother were the last to see him alive sometime in late 1983 or early 1984, his wife said. He looked emaciated and near death. His execution order was discovered after the regime's fall.

His family's torment continued. Iman-Sen said she and her children were sent along with other families to Nograt Salman, a remote desert outpost of mud huts near the Saudi border.

Hania Mufti, an official with Human Rights Watch, said such forced relocations to camps were common in Iraq throughout the 1980s. Often there were no guards because there was no way to escape. "They were surrounded by nothing but quicksand and scorpions," Mufti said.

"There were a lot of kids at these places. A lot of people died, and they would just throw the bodies out and the wild dogs would eat them."

You could be forgiven for not knowing that - the focus of the media's trial coverage has been on the accused, the presence (or lack) of his chief apologist, and questions regarding the legality of the court.

His guilt, of course, is a foregone conclusion. Thus we don't really need to rehash his crimes, do we? Because, "of course, we all agree he was a bad guy".

Normally another word follows that statement, rendering it the equivalent of "I felt awful having these stories bottled up inside me" and "Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace". That extra word dismisses the unspeakable crimes and explains why, when "at last, these stories can be told freely" they are instead told rarely.

That word is "but".

"Of course, we all agree he was a bad guy, BUT..."

Information operations isn't just about the stories you tell; much is revealed by the stories you don't.

Or those some might prefer to keep buried in the sands of Babylon.

Posted by Greyhawk / December 28, 2005 7:12 PM | Permalink