NEWS: Robert Fisk: American hired arsonists? Americans removing thePR m

NEWS: Robert Fisk: American hired arsonists? Americans removing the PR mask 
of "liberation" to direct occupation, lockdown, curfew, staged arson buses 
moving about, destroying the culture of Iraq for occupation while letting 
Iraqi government escape: are Americans intentionally destroying the 
cultural infrastructure of Iraq?


Fisk levels the accusation that the Americans are responsible for setting 
the fires in Baghdad to intentionally destroy the cultural heritage of 
Iraq, to make way for permanent occupation. I would add that this would be 
a similar policy to the destruction of cultural infrastructure of 
Palistinians by Israel: which has included rolling tanks over banks, 
destroying computers, destroying hospital files, destroying schools, 
destroying educational files and data. . .


And, Fisk is only relaying the questions that many Iraqis are posing about 
these events. . .


quote before full text:
-------------------------

Because there is also something dangerous --- and deeply disturbing --- 
about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the 
great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters 
come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses.

I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire 
and it sped out of town.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge --- an 
explanation that is growing very thin --- and that the fires are started by 
"remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who 
feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe 
Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires.

And neither do I.

The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be 
paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their 
targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires. The 
moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the 
whole project.

So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognized one the other day, a 
middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me 
he pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he 
working for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical 
infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the 
Americans stop this?

As I said, something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is 
going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States 
government. Why, for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 
claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in 
Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it?

The Americans say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. This 
is also untrue. If they don't, what are the hundreds of soldiers deployed 
in the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the 
hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?

---------------------------------
full text:


NEWS: Robert Fisk: Americans removing the PR mask of "liberation" to direct 
occupation, lockdown, curfew, etc.while letting Iraqi government escape

Robert Fisk 6:28pm Thu Apr 17 '03
 article#312977

For the People on the Streets, This is not Liberation but a New Colonial 
Oppression
America's war of 'liberation' may be over. But Iraq's war of liberation 
from the Americans is just about to begin

by Robert Fisk

It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of 
"liberation" has already turned into the army of occupation. The Shias are 
threatening to fight the Americans, to create their own war of "liberation".

At night on every one of the Shia Muslim barricades in Sadr City, there are 
14 men with automatic rifles. Even the US Marines in Baghdad are talking of 
the insults being flung at them. "Go away! Get out of my face!" an American 
soldier screamed at an Iraqi trying to push towards the wire surrounding an 
infantry unit in the capital yesterday. I watched the man's face suffuse 
with rage. "God is Great! God is Great!" the Iraqi retorted.

"Fuck you!"

The Americans have now issued a "Message to the Citizens of Baghdad", a 
document as colonial in spirit as it is insensitive in tone. "Please avoid 
leaving your homes during the night hours after evening prayers and before 
the call to morning prayers," it tells the people of the city. "During this 
time, terrorist forces associated with the former regime of Saddam Hussein, 
as well as various criminal elements, are known to move through the area 
... please do not leave your homes during this time. During all hours, 
please approach Coalition military positions with extreme caution ..."

So now -- with neither electricity nor running water -- the millions of 
Iraqis here are ordered to stay in their homes from dusk to dawn. Lockdown. 
It's a form of imprisonment. In their own country. Written by the command 
of the 1st US Marine Division, it's a curfew in all but name.

"If I was an Iraqi and I read that," an Arab woman shouted at me, "I would 
become a suicide bomber." And all across Baghdad you hear the same thing, 
from Shia Muslim clerics to Sunni businessmen, that the Americans have come 
only for oil, and that soon -- very soon -- a guerrilla resistance must start.

No doubt the Americans will claim that these attacks are "remnants" of 
Saddam's regime or "criminal elements".

But that will not be the case.

Marine officers in Baghdad were holding talks yesterday with a Shia 
militant cleric from Najaf to avert an outbreak of fighting around the holy 
city. I met the prelate before the negotiations began and he told me that 
"history is being repeated". He was talking of the British invasion of Iraq 
in 1917, which ended in disaster for the British.

Everywhere are the signs of collapse. And everywhere the signs that 
America's promises of "freedom" and "democracy" are not to be honored.

Why, Iraqis are asking, did the United States allow the entire Iraqi 
cabinet to escape?

And they're right. Not just the Beast of Baghdad and his two sons, Qusay 
and Uday, but the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Deputy Prime 
Minister, Tariq Aziz, Saddam's personal adviser, Dr A K Hashimi, the 
ministers of defense, health, the economy, trade, even Mohammed Saeed 
al-Sahaf, the Minister of Information who, long ago, in the days before 
journalists cozied up to him, was the official who read out the list of 
executed "brothers" in the purge that followed Saddam's revolution --- 
relatives of prisoners would dose themselves on valium before each Sahaf 
appearance.

Here's what Baghdadis are noticing --- and what Iraqis are noticing in all 
the main cities of the country. Take the vast security apparatus with which 
Saddam surrounded himself, the torture chambers and the huge bureaucracy 
that was its foundation. President Bush promised that America was 
campaigning for human rights in Iraq, that the guilty, the war criminals, 
would be brought to trial.

The 60 secret police headquarters in Baghdad are empty, even the 
three-square-mile compound headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

I have been to many of them. But there is no evidence even that a single 
British or US forensic officer has visited the sites to sift the wealth of 
documents lying there or talk to the ex-prisoners returning to their former 
places of torment.

Is this idleness. Or is this wilful?

Take the Qasimiyeh security station beside the river Tigris. It's a 
pleasant villa --- once owned by an Iranian-born Iraqi who was deported to 
Iran in the 1980s. There's a little lawn and a shrubbery and at first you 
don't notice the three big hooks in the ceiling of each room or the fact 
that big sheets of red paper, decorated with footballers, have been pasted 
over the windows to conceal the rooms from outsiders. But across the 
floors, in the garden, on the roof, are the files of this place of 
suffering. They show, for example, that the head of the torture center was 
Hashem al-Tikrit, that his deputy was called Rashid al-Nababy.

Mohammed Aish Jassem, an ex-prisoner, showed me how he was suspended from 
the ceiling by Captain Amar al-Isawi, who believed Jassem was a member of 
the religious Dawa party. "They put my hands behind my back like this and 
tied them and then pulled me into the air by my tied wrists," he told me. 
"They used a little generator to lift me up, right up to the ceiling, then 
they'd release the rope in the hope of breaking my shoulder when I fell."

The hooks in the ceiling are just in front of Captain Isawi's desk. I 
understood what this meant.

There wasn't a separate torture chamber and office for documentation. The 
torture chamber was the office. While the man or woman shrieked in agony 
above him, Captain Isawi would sign papers, take telephone calls and --- 
given the contents of his bin --- smoke many cigarettes while he waited for 
the information he sought from his prisoners.

Were they monsters, these men? Yes. Are they sought by the Americans? No. 
Are they now working for the Americans? Yes, quite possibly --- indeed some 
of them may well be in the long line of ex-security thugs who queue every 
morning outside the Palestine Hotel in the hope of being re-hired by the US 
Marines' Civil Affairs Unit.

The names of the guards at the Qasimiyeh torture center in Baghdad are in 
papers lying on the floor.

They were Ahmed Hassan Alawi, Akil Shaheed, Noaman Abbas and Moham-med Fayad.

But the Americans haven't bothered to find this out. So Messrs Alawi, 
Shaheed, Abbas and Fayad are welcome to apply to work for them.

There are prisoner identification papers on the desks and in the cupboards. 
What happened to Wahid Mohamed, Majid Taha, Saddam Ali or Lazim Hmoud? A 
lady in a black chador approached the old torture center. Four of her 
brothers had been taken there and, later, when she went to ask what 
happened, she was told all four had been executed. She was ordered to 
leave. She never saw or buried their bodies. Ex-prisoners told me that 
there is a mass grave in the Khedeer desert, but no one --- least of all 
Baghdad's new occupiers --- are interested in finding it.

And the men who suffered under Saddam? What did they have to say? "We 
committed no sin," one of them said to me, a 40-year-old whose prison 
duties had included the cleaning of the hangman's trap of blood and feces 
after each execution. "We are not guilty of anything. Why did they do this 
to us?"

"America, yes, it got rid of Saddam. But Iraq belongs to us. Our oil 
belongs to us. We will keep our nationality. It will stay Iraq. The 
Americans must go."

If the Americans and the British want to understand the nature of the 
religious opposition here, they have only to consult the files of Saddam's 
secret service archives. I found one, Report No 7481, dated 24 February 
this year on the conflict between Sheikh Mohammed al-Yacoubi and Mukhtada 
Sadr, the 22-year-old grandson of Mohammed Sadr, who was executed on 
Saddam's orders more than two decades ago.

The dispute showed the passion and the determination with which the Shia 
religious leaders fight even each other. But of course, no one has bothered 
to read this material or even look for it.

At the end of the Second World War, German-speaking British and US 
intelligence officers hoovered up every document in the thousands of 
Gestapo and Abwehr bureaux across western Germany. The Russians did the 
same in their zone. In Iraq, however, the British and Americans have simply 
ignored the evidence.

There's an even more terrible place for the Americans to visit in Baghdad 
--- the headquarters of the whole intelligence apparatus, a massive 
grey-painted block that was bombed by the US and a series of villas and 
office buildings that are stashed with files, papers and card indexes. It 
was here that Saddam's special political prisoners were brought for vicious 
interrogation --- electricity being an essential part of this --- and it 
was here that Farzad Bazoft, the Observer correspondent, was brought for 
questioning before his dispatch to the hangman.

It's also graced with delicately shaded laneways, a creche --- for the 
families of the torturers --- and a school in which one pupil had written 
an essay in English on (suitably perhaps) Beckett's Waiting for Godot. 
There's also a miniature hospital and a road named "Freedom Street" and 
flowerbeds and bougainvillea. It's the creepiest place in all of Iraq.

I met --- extraordinarily --- an Iraqi nuclear scientist walking around the 
compound, a colleague of the former head of Iraqi nuclear physics, Dr 
Sharistani. "This is the last place I ever wanted to see and I will never 
return to it," he said to me. "This was the place of greatest evil in all 
the world."

The top security men in Saddam's regime were busy in the last hours, 
shredding millions of documents. I found a great pile of black plastic 
rubbish bags at the back of one villa, each stuffed with the shreds of 
thousands of papers. Shouldn't they be taken to Washington or London and 
reconstituted to learn their secrets?

Even the unshredded files contain a wealth of information. But again, the 
Americans have not bothered --- or do not want --- to search through these 
papers. If they did, they would find the names of dozens of senior 
intelligence men, many of them identified in congratulatory letters they 
insisted on sending each other every time they were promoted. Where now, 
for example, is Colonel Abdulaziz Saadi, Captain Abdulsalam Salawi, Captain 
Saad Ahmed al-Ayash, Colonel Saad Mohammed, Captain Majid Ahmed and scores 
of others?

We may never know. Or perhaps we are not supposed to know.

Iraqis are right to ask why the Americans don't search for this 
information, just as they are right to demand to know why the entire Saddam 
cabinet --- every man jack of them --- got away. The capture by the 
Americans of Saddam's half-brother and the ageing Palestinian gunman Abu 
Abbas, whose last violent act was 18 years ago, is pathetic compensation 
for this.

Now here's another question the Iraqis are asking --- and to which I cannot 
provide an answer. On 8 April, three weeks into the invasion, the Americans 
dropped four 2,000 lb bombs on the Baghdad residential area of Mansur. They 
claimed they thought Saddam was hiding there. They knew they would kill 
civilians because it was not, as one Centcom mandarin said, a "risk free 
venture" (sic). So they dropped their bombs and killed 14 civilians in 
Mansur, most of them members of a Christian family.

The Americans said they couldn't be sure they had killed Saddam until they 
could carry out forensic tests at the site. But this turns out to have been 
a lie.

I went there two days ago. Not a single US or British official had bothered 
to visit the bomb craters.

Indeed, when I arrived, there was a putrefying smell and families pulled 
the remains of a baby from the rubble.

No American officers have apologized for this appalling killing.

And I can promise them that the baby I saw being placed under a sheet of 
black plastic was very definitely not Saddam Hussein. Had they bothered to 
look at this place --- as they claimed they would --- they would at least 
have found the baby. Now the craters are a place of pilgrimage for the 
people of Baghdad.

Then there's the fires that have consumed every one of the city's 
ministries --- save, of course, for the Ministry of Interior and the 
Ministry of Oil --- as well as UN offices, embassies and shopping malls.

I have counted a total of 35 ministries now gutted by fire and the number 
goes on rising.

Yesterday I found myself at the Ministry of Oil, assiduously guarded by US 
troops, some of whom were holding clothes over their mouths because of the 
clouds of smoke swirling down on them from the neighboring Ministry of 
Agricultural Irrigation.

Hard to believe, isn't it, that they were unaware that someone was setting 
fire to the next building?

Then I spotted another fire, three kilometers away. I drove to the scene to 
find flames curling out of all the windows of the Ministry of Higher 
Education's Department of Computer Science.

And right next to it, perched on a wall, was a US Marine, who said he was 
guarding a neighboring hospital and didn't know who had lit the next door 
fire because "you can't look everywhere at once".

Now I'm sure the marine was not being facetious or dishonest --- should the 
Americans not believe this story, he was Corporal Ted Nyholm of the 3rd 
Regiment, 4th Marines and, yes, I called his fiance, Jessica, in the States 
for him to pass on his love --- but something is terribly wrong when US 
soldiers are ordered simply to watch vast ministries being burnt by mobs 
and do nothing about it.

Because there is also something dangerous --- and deeply disturbing --- 
about the crowds setting light to the buildings of Baghdad, including the 
great libraries and state archives. For they are not looters. The looters 
come first. The arsonists turn up later, often in blue-and-white buses.

I followed one after its passengers had set the Ministry of Trade on fire 
and it sped out of town.

The official US line on all this is that the looting is revenge --- an 
explanation that is growing very thin --- and that the fires are started by 
"remnants of Saddam's regime", the same "criminal elements", no doubt, who 
feature in the marines' curfew orders. But people in Baghdad don't believe 
Saddam's former supporters are starting these fires.

And neither do I.

The looters make money from their rampages but the arsonists have to be 
paid. The passengers in those buses are clearly being directed to their 
targets. If Saddam had pre-paid them, they wouldn't start the fires. The 
moment he disappeared, they would have pocketed the money and forgotten the 
whole project.

So who are they, this army of arsonists? I recognized one the other day, a 
middle-aged, unshaven man in a red T-shirt, and the second time he saw me 
he pointed a Kalashnikov at me. What was he frightened of? Who was he 
working for? In whose interest is it to destroy the entire physical 
infrastructure of the state, with its cultural heritage? Why didn't the 
Americans stop this?

As I said, something is going terribly wrong in Baghdad and something is 
going on which demands that serious questions be asked of the United States 
government. Why, for example, did Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, 
claim last week that there was no widespread looting or destruction in 
Baghdad? His statement was a lie. But why did he make it?

The Americans say they don't have enough troops to control the fires. This 
is also untrue. If they don't, what are the hundreds of soldiers deployed 
in the gardens of the old Iran-Iraq war memorial doing all day? Or the 
hundreds camped in the rose gardens of the President Palace?

So the people of Baghdad are asking who is behind the destruction of their 
cultural heritage: the looting of the archaeological treasures from the 
national museum; the burning of the entire Ottoman, Royal and State 
archives; the Koranic library; and the vast infrastructure of the nation we 
claim we are going to create for them.

Why, they ask, do they still have no electricity and no water? In whose 
interest is it for Iraq to be deconstructed, divided, burnt, de-historied, 
destroyed? Why are they issued with orders for a curfew by their so-called 
liberators?

And it's not just the people of Baghdad, but the Shias of the city of Najaf 
and of Nasiriyah â?? where 20,000 protested at America's first attempt to 
put together a puppet government on Wednesday â?? who are asking these 
questions. Now there is looting in Mosul where thousands reportedly set 
fire to the pro-American governor's car after he promised US help in 
restoring electricity.

It's easy for a reporter to predict doom, especially after a brutal war 
that lacked all international legitimacy.

But catastrophe usually waits for optimists in the Middle East, especially 
for false optimists who invade oil-rich nations with ideological excuses 
and high-flown moral claims and accusations, such as weapons of mass 
destruction, which are still unproved.

So I'll make an awful prediction.

That America's war of "liberation" is over. Iraq's war of liberation from 
the Americans is about to begin.

In other words, the real and frightening story starts now.

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