03/19/13 – Dahr Jamail – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is Dar Jamal, investigative journalist and author.
Particularly beyond the green zone, dispatches from an unembedded journalist in occupied Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Dar.
How are you doing?
I'm good, thanks.
Always good to be with you.
Great.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And now we tried to talk a week before last, and you were in Baghdad.
And unfortunately, the phone system there still isn't very good.
And we could barely hear you, and the phone ended up cutting out.
And so I thought, you know, we can change it up a little bit.
But I mostly wanted to reprise that interview and just let you talk for about half an hour about what you've seen.
You know, who's who these days.
The violence, of course, there's more than 50 killed and bombings today in Iraq, as I'm sure you're aware, on the 10th anniversary.
And just tell us where you've been and what you've seen, what's important.
I read one piece you did, where you're just interviewing the little old lady refugees, the internally displaced, and the hell that they're still going through at this time.
And I just, you know, you pick what you think is most important to tell the people, Dar, and go right ahead, please.
You bet, Scott.
You know, this trip, I went in to do investigations on five stories.
I've published three so far.
And I'll just touch on each of those, starting with, briefly, the one you mentioned about the ongoing crisis of refugees in Iraq.
We don't hear about it so much anymore.
I mean, of course, you and I, I think, talked a lot in the past about, back during the 2006-2007 bloodletting, there were upwards of 100,000 Iraqis fleeing the country on any given month.
And we heard about these massive numbers of 2.2 million internally displaced persons at that time, and 2 million who had fled the country altogether.
Well, we still have hundreds of thousands who've fled the country altogether.
And internally, even according to the Iraqi government, we still have 1.1 million internally displaced persons.
And a lot of these people who have been displaced since the original war started in 2003, on through people who are still displaced from the two massive sieges against Fallujah in 2004.
And people are scattered across the country.
And it's a horrible situation.
And they're not getting any assistance from the government.
And I'm going to move on now to the next main story that I covered, titled Iraq War's Legacy of Cancer.
We've had so many types of munitions the U.S. military has used in Fallujah, as well as across Iraq during the invasion and occupation.
Mainly, you know what I'm going to talk about, which is depleted uranium munitions.
Pentagon admits using several hundred tons.
We're not sure what the exact numbers, but what we are sure of is that there's been a massive escalation in cancer rates for Iraq as a whole, excluding Kurdistan, but also with particular focus in Fallujah, which I'll come to in a moment.
Even official Iraqi government statistics show that prior to the first Gulf War in 1991, cancer rate in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people.
By 1995, five years after the first Gulf War, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000.
So it had gone from 40 out of 100,000 to 800 out of 100,000.
And then by 2005, in the wake of the 2003 invasion, that number had doubled to 1,600 out of 1,000 people.
And the current trends show a continuing increase in the rate.
So rather staggeringly dramatic, increasing rates of cancer across the country.
And then that said, what's additionally shocking that I learned this trip is that talking to different doctors, both in Fallujah, as well as Baghdad, and Dr. Denon Voss were reporting the same thing, is that the official cancer statistics by the government are hard to come by, because only 50% of the healthcare available in Iraq is public, and the other 50% is private.
And so we're basically only getting statistics from 50% of people seeking healthcare.
So both of them saying, obviously, do the math, you could theoretically double those cancer rates, which is rather shocking indeed.
And then moving on to Fallujah, where I think one of the most, to give perspective on the massive increase in cancer, and how it's really making itself evident in Fallujah, is the cases of congenital malformations of newborns.
And we're seeing that rate really is off the charts.
And I think this is the statistic that I can quote that really puts it into perspective.
As I interviewed a doctor there named Dr. Samira Alani, and she is the only doctor in the entire city who is registering cases, and not getting, of course, any help from Baghdad.
And she went to try to get help on what she's seeing, were really, really horrible situations of newborns, really nightmarish photos.
I mean, I posted a couple of them with my article online.
And there's many, many more than that, that literally are two graphics to post for the news agency that I work for.
But what she's seeing, these horrible malformations, literally babies, Cyclops babies with one eye, babies being born with two heads, babies being born with half their internal organs outside of their bodies.
I mean, really, really nightmarish type of stuff.
And when she spoke with doctors she met with in Japan, and she went to the sites of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and she spoke with them of the rate, what types of rates of congenital malformations did they see in those areas in the wake of the U.S. nuclear bombings of those areas in World War II.
And when she compared her statistics, and these are only with cases that she personally is registering in the entire city, needless to say, she's missing a lot of them.
And she also said, we're probably missing half of them, that her incidence of congenital malformations in Fallujah is 14 times the rate that were registered in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
So that gives you an idea of how bad the cancer is there, how much of a disaster it is.
And then moving on, and I'll just give another overview, Scott, and then take a breath here.
But the other story I did is about the methods of torture, detention, and executions being carried out by the Maliki government.
Just an overall nutshell of this situation.
Maliki is being referred to as the Shia Saddam.
You hear this across Baghdad.
You hear this across places like Fallujah, where I went this trip.
People in Fallujah are saying it's so bad there that, because of the Maliki forces have the town essentially surrounded with checkpoints.
Just going out to Fallujah, the back way from Baghdad, we're talking about a distance of maybe 60 miles.
But taking the back way, I went through about two dozen checkpoints just to get into the city.
And Fallujans are saying, look, these are manned by basically predominantly Shia militiamen in Maliki's military.
They're being used to come into the city, do home raids, detain people.
And they're saying that the tactics used by the Maliki regime are actually worse than what the Americans carried out there.
Because they said, look, when people were detained from their houses by the Americans, we knew that the odds were pretty good that they would eventually be released.
OK, we knew they would be tortured.
We knew that they would be mistreated.
But we knew that at least eventually they would probably be released.
With Maliki's regime, we know that when people are detained, that they're basically, we're not probably going to see them again.
And what's happening now, Scott, is that it's so bad with the Maliki government.
They're using this thing called Article 4 in their law, which basically is a page taken from the Bush playbook, which gives them carte blanche to go pick up anyone under the guise of a suspected terrorist, meaning they don't have to tell anyone that they have them.
They can hold them indefinitely and do what they want.
So people are being detained from all over Sunni areas of Baghdad, from mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, and from places like Falluja, which are predominantly Sunni by far, all under the guise of Article 4.
They're being tortured horrifically.
A lot of the same stuff that they were taught by Lieutenant Colonel James Steele.
I'm sure you and I have talked about this in the past.
And once again, we see it reported more recently by the joint BBC, Arabic and Guardian investigation.
But Lieutenant Colonel James Steele, retired, who did all the responsible for all the dirty wars, the training that went on there in Central America under Reagan.
Of course, he was brought into Iraq.
Rumsfeld referred to him, I believe it was in 06 or 07, as we're going to start using the Salvador option in Iraq, where he was, of course, referring directly to our beloved friend, war criminal, retired Lieutenant Colonel James Steele, who brought in basically methods of turning the sects against each other and generating infighting, setting up the secret prisons, and teaching them all these wonderful torture techniques that are being used in Iraq today, using lots of electricity on fingers, toes, genitals, tongues, bagging people's heads, hanging them from their ankles, hanging them from their arms for days at a time, raping the men with brew handles, bottles, repeatedly raping the women, threatening the men that they're going to bring in their mothers and their wives and their daughters and rape them in front of them if they don't talk.
All this stuff, the exact tactics used by Lieutenant Colonel James, retired Lieutenant Colonel James Steele, that kind of thing is rampant across Iraq today.
And then the thing that I'll close with is that the amount of executions, Iraq is now executing so many people that it is one of, as far as countries who execute human beings, they are now up near the very top.
They are executing just about more people than any other country on Earth.
They're up right at the top of the scale.
All the human rights groups, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and others are up in arms over it.
Of course, the Maliki regime shows no sign of abating in any of these things that I talked about.
All right.
Well, let's start toward the end there.
You're telling me about, you're talking about the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police, the Dawa Party controlled Iraqi government's agents in Fallujah, raises the question, what of the sons of Iraq, the concerned local citizens and those Sunni militias that Petraeus had made the truce with?
The way it was back when Bush agreed that we had to go ahead and go at the end of 2011, back in 2008, was that the civil war was more or less over.
The ceasefire had been basically, well, Baghdad had been won by the Shiites and the ceasefire more or less taken hold.
But then again, the Shiite government didn't really control the Anbar province.
They really did have quite a bit of autonomy, it seemed like, from the central government, even though they completely lost Baghdad.
Maybe that's not right about what the situation was then.
That's what I thought the situation was then.
But it sounds to me like you're saying that the Maliki government certainly does have a government monopoly of force in the Sunni triangle, more or less, now, to this day.
No?
Well, no, I think what you said is largely accurate.
But it's, you know, as you know, as well as anyone, it's, of course, a bit more complicated than just that.
And the Maliki government, they have the brunt of the power in that he controls the military and most of the police.
The SAWA forces that you mentioned, they're largely seen as collaborators, as they were.
And they've basically been continuing to be picked off, as anywar.com does such a fine job of reporting regularly on the daily violence in Iraq.
You know, on any given day, any other day, you're going to read what you guys are publishing there and see a SAWA member in Taji was taken out of the checkpoint.
SAWA member was killed in his home along with his family.
And you see that kind of thing regularly.
And in fact, I have an experience.
I think I've talked to you.
Back in 2009, when I was in Iraq, I went into Fallujah and stayed with the SAWA leader.
Sheikh Afan was his name.
He was the SAWA commander of all of Fallujah.
Well, two months ago, he was blown up, blown to bits, killed by a suicide bomber.
So this type of retaliation against the SAWA guys continues.
They're seen as collaborators.
And the people in Iraq are treating them accordingly.
But that said, there still is a very, very huge amount of armed resistance in Iraq, as we can see by these bombings happening today.
But also, there's not the organization that we saw during the U.S. occupation.
But clearly, there are Sunni militias that are heavily, heavily armed with all kinds of weaponry.
And that battle is continuing.
So we're seeing daily roadside bombs, daily attacks against Iraqi police and Iraqi army.
But Patrick Coburn, in one of his recent articles, really said it well.
And this is exactly what I saw in Iraq.
And that's that the Maliki government, while they do have all the power, being the military and the brunt of the police force, that doesn't mean that they're in control.
They're regularly being attacked.
And these guys are basically in reactive mode.
I mean, driving around Baghdad, you can feel that any given time, any of these people could be attacked.
And then they're just going to have to react.
So the element of surprise, the element of launching massive coordinated attacks virtually anywhere in the country is still a very, very real threat for both resistance fighters and al-Qaeda, who are very active within the country, as well.
And we are seeing, you know, another interesting bit that I heard was that there's a lot of the former Iraqi resistance fighters that are now joining in with the increasingly radical liberalized Free Syrian Army, the FSA.
And one of the reasons that the Maliki regime is so nervous about this and is against what's happening up there, the forces that are working to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad, because the word on the street is that the Maliki regime has been afraid that that army would turn around from Damascus and head south to Baghdad.
Yeah, that was something that we talked about a week before last was Patrick Coburn's theory that I think you agreed with, that the entire war going on in Syria is really revitalizing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq.
And of course, maybe this is a pipe dream, at least at this point, but at least a few different times, Dar, there have been quotes of the al-Nusra Front rebels in Syria, who the administration calls al-Qaeda in Iraq.
For that matter, I think they happen to be right about that one, even though it's something that they're saying, it seems like it's actually true.
But some of them have said, yeah, you know, I guess they still want Damascus, but if we can't take the whole country, at least maybe we can just create a new Sunni caliphate between here and the Sunni provinces of Iraq, because who cares about these old borders anyway?
So here, in a way, at least there's the rising specter of the bogus caliphate that never existed, that Bush was waging this war in defiance of actually coming into existence.
And maybe what we've known as Syrian Iraq in the past is really in jeopardy, even in the short term.
Well, that's very much what we're seeing.
I mean, it was really interesting.
I was in Fallujah two Fridays ago to witness the demonstrations during the Friday prayers up there, where they shut down the highway every Friday.
And what's interesting is looking out, and my Fallujah fixer was warning.
He said, look, we have to be really careful.
We were up on the stage with the imams who were talking and leading the demonstrations and then leading the prayers.
And my fixer was saying, look, we need to be really careful, because there are most of this demonstration is peaceful.
And these imams are trying to keep it apolitical.
And they're trying to keep it simply human rights-based.
These are our human rights demands.
We want to stop the detentions.
We want to do away with Article 4.
We want to stop with the assassinations and the death squads and all this stuff.
Obviously, completely legitimate demands.
And they were going to great lengths, really bending over backwards to say, look, this is not political.
We don't want to make it a she-assuming thing, because it's not.
We just simply want justice.
And we want reparations made in our city, et cetera, et cetera.
But what was in the crowd is you could see there were these groups of al-Qaeda is in the crowd.
And they have their black flags.
And they are calling for marching upon Baghdad straight away.
Let's bring on the suicide bombings.
And let's just have all-out war.
And they're there.
And they're there within the group.
And they are definitely a minority.
But they're very much there.
And it's the same thing that we saw during the height of the organized Iraqi resistance back in 05, 06, 07, and 08, when these people came in and basically started working their way into the Iraqi resistance and radicalizing it.
And being the only employer in town with money, they were bringing in younger folks and recruiting them heavily.
And we're starting to see now, several years after that, the fruits of those labors are that they are there.
And they have grown.
And they have become more organized.
And they have basically worked their way into the fabric of the various towns.
And in that exact way, the Bush policy and the Bush strategies and tactics used there, one, we can point to very obviously the tactics employed by retired Lieutenant Colonel James Steele that, of course, radicalized the population, especially the younger population.
We're seeing the fruits of those policies right now on the streets.
And it's created exactly what they claimed they were going after in the first place in Iraq, which didn't exist.
But now their tactics have created the exact same thing that they said they were going to eradicate.
Yeah.
You know, it's funny, too, because Zarqawi didn't even call himself leader of the local al-Qaeda franchise until the very end of December 2004.
Almost two full years into the war, whereas before he had told bin Laden, go to hell, man, I want to go fight the king of Jordan.
You fight the Americans.
I don't care about that.
You know, he wasn't even an al-Qaeda guy until later.
He called himself that.
But now here's the thing.
I'm sorry.
There's so many different follow ups and directions we can go with all this.
But we're so short on time.
And a subject that's gotten very short shrift and in the Gareth Porter interview just now and in your interview week before last, both and all these is the situation in Kurdistan, the history of the ethnic and sectarian cleansing this whole time, especially, you know, since 2003, maybe since 91, especially since 2003.
And the situation now, which is still incredibly volatile.
I mean, I hate to predict disaster.
I don't want to.
But people always say it's not a matter of if it's just when.
I think so.
That is that I'm really glad you brought that up.
That's an ongoing crisis.
I mean, just look at what's been happening in Kirkuk in the last few weeks, just with the horrendous bombings there.
I mean, just nightmarish bombings that are happening there.
And I really can't see that going away.
And, you know, the great irony is the Kurds have this dream of having their own state and saying things like, look, you know, the Israelis even managed to pull off, you know, creating their own state in the heart of the Arab world.
And here we are.
We're already Muslim and we can't even have our own state.
Why not?
But the reality is the closer that they might come to really becoming an independent state in Iraq, for example, then that the higher the odds become of being crushed by Iran or Syria or Turkey or Iraq.
I mean, they're truly in a no-win situation.
And so, you know, obviously, the Maliki regime has its hands full with just trying to maintain control of Baghdad and the other parts of Iraq that it does have some semblance of control over.
But, you know, it was within the last couple of years that they felt threatened enough and angry by the Kurds in their moves to keep more of the oil resources for themselves and not pay the dividends to Baghdad, yet still wanting economic assistance from Baghdad and bickering in the budget for that.
The Maliki regime decided, well, we're going to roll a bunch of military up there with the borders and threaten an invasion of Kurdistan.
So, again, we're seeing history sort of repeat itself.
And so that is another ongoing problem.
You know, we still see sometimes Turkish airstrikes in the Kurdish areas whenever the rebels start launching some successful attacks on the Turkish military.
And so, yeah, very, very much unresolved.
And it's just, you know, another set of problems for a specific part of Iraq that are very, very unique, but just really just goes to show that even Kurdistan, supposedly the most stable part, definitely the most stable part of the country overall, is wracked with its own set of problems.
All right.
With that, we have to leave it there.
Thanks so much for your time.
It's great to talk to you again, Dar.
Always a pleasure talking with you, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
All right, everybody.
That is Dar Jamal.
He covered the worst years of the Iraq War.
Read his book, Beyond the Green Zone, and find him these days at aljazeera.net.
He's, as he said, he's got three so far, two more coming about the ongoing conflict in Iraq and the state of things 10 years after the American War.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
See you tomorrow.
Hey, y'all.
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