Damage Done

The American Civil Liberties Union is quite right to cry foul at President Obama’s refusal to release more than 2,000 photos documenting detainee mistreatment at U.S. military prison facilities in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.

True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.

What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.

For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.

In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.

The Military’s Dangers Within

Life on base at U.S. military instillations around the world has gotten a lot more violent in recent years than many realize. Yesterday’s Camp Liberty shootings in Baghdad seem to fit into a pattern of troubling trends.

What Was al-Sadr Doing in Turkey?

Who knows.

Iraq’s Mass Graves: A Warning Sign

The story I repeatedly heard about mass graves when I first started coming to Iraq in 2006 was as follows. At the edge of Sadr City there was a dumpsite. In that dumpsite lived a local drunk. And gunmen from the Mahdi Army would bring him bodies of the Sunnis they had killed for burial, plying him with booze to do the ugly work of putting them in the ground. The rumored gravesite even had a nickname, Happiness Hotel. The drunk, I took it, was supposed to be the innkeeper.

I never had the nerve to properly investigate the rumor. Doing so would have likely put me and my Iraqi colleagues at risk of death threats or worse from Shi’ite militiamen. But the story always disturbed me, because it struck me as plausible.

The newest U.N. human rights report on Iraq points to six recently uncovered mass graves, including one containing 17 bodies at the edge of Sadr City. More mass graves are sure to be uncovered in Iraq in the months and years to come. Whether Happiness Hotel is ever found remains to be seen. But every corpse unearthed in or near Shi’ite militia havens raises the question of culpability in mass murder by the Iraqi government, which abetted the Mahdi Army during the height of the sectarian violence. That same government is still in power now, as U.S. forces prepare to hand over control of the streets across the country to Iraqi security forces whose future human rights practices remain an open question.

Is Baghdad Safer Than New Orleans?

Statistically, yes. According to murder rates, Baghdad is also now safer than Caracas, Venezuela, and Cape Town, South Africa. But that’s little comfort to residents of the city, where bombs have killed scores in recent days.

Will the Mahdi Army Rise Again?

The latest spasm of violence in Baghdad has raised fears among many in Iraq that the Shi’ite Mahdi Army may abandon its standing unilateral cease-fire and return to the business of sectarian revenge killings. Not likely, at least no yet.

Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, has given no indication that he plans a bloody show of strength in the streets with gunmen. I suspect Sadr, like many in Iraq, will be waiting quietly to see how the next few months unfold before making any major moves. Sending Mahdi Army fighters into the streets of Iraq now would bring them face to face with American forces and create a crisis for which U.S. troops may linger beyond the June deadline to be out of Iraq’s urban areas. Above all Sadr wants to see U.S. troops leave, so he is unlikely to pick a fight now. If Sadr is indeed interested in reasserting his militia, he will do so after U.S. forces move to the sidelines of whatever fighting persists in Iraq as U.S. troops move to go.

Death by Numbers in Iraq

There was some discussion last week on TIME's Swampland blog about Iraqi civilian casualties related to my recent article on the subject. The question many blog commentators were wondering was one of the most enduring of the Iraq war: How many have died? To start, there is no fully reliable count. Estimates have ranged from more than half a million on the high end to less than 100,000 as a low.

The high estimate comes from a widely disputed study published in the Lancet in October of 2006 that put the number of civilian casualties from 2003 to the summer of 2006 at 654,965. The findings flowed from a statistical survey and appeared as sectarian violence in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, meaning thousands of other deaths were yet to be tallied. The low estimate, between 91,466 and 99,861, comes from Iraq Body Count and is considered a credible minimum.

The Associated Press ran a story today citing unreleased Iraqi government figures saying at least 87,215 people have been killed since 2005. The Associated Press, which tracks casualty figures with its own reporters and researchers, estimates that more than 110,000 Iraqi civilians have died since 2003, including those counted in the Iraqi government tally.

I think that number sounds low based on my experience looking into civilian casualty figures in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. For Iraq, the best civilian causality estimate I have seen comes from a study published in January of 2008 by the New England Journal of Medicine. That study, another statistical survey, estimated 151,000 deaths in Iraq in the period from March 2003 through June 2006, roughly the first three years of the war. I think you could safely double that figure to come up with a reasonable estimate covering the deaths from 2006 until now, since the New England Journal of Medicine survey did not cover the most violent years of the conflict here.

That means probably more than 300,000 Iraqi civilians have died through the course of the war so far. Meanwhile, at least another 148 Iraqis perished in the last 48 hours in a spate of fresh bombings.

However you look at the numbers, the figures are staggering, especially when considered as a portion of the Iraqi population, which is around 30 million. Take for example the number of just the missing in Iraq. Iraqi officials have told me that unpublished statistics of theirs show that at least 140,000 Iraqis have gone missing since 2003, with 82,000 documented cases in Baghdad alone. The real figure is likely much higher. Many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, have been fearful of dealing with the predominately Shi'ite police because of their suspected ties to militia death squads blamed for much of the kidnapping and murder. So, undoubtedly many disappearances have gone unreported. But even the known disappearances add up to a sizable segment of the Iraqi population. In proportional terms, the mass disappearances in Iraq since 2003 would be roughly equal to seeing more than 800 people vanish daily from America's sixth largest city, Philadelphia, until it stood empty.

Who’s Shelling the Green Zone?

On Saturday night, two huge explosions rocked central Baghdad. A pair of mortars or rockets, not clear which, fell in the Green Zone area in quick succession. They were the loudest and closest blasts I had heard in months. Iraqi police said the bombs sailed in from eastern Baghdad, essentially putting blame on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army. But there is reason to doubt that. The Mahdi Army has been effectively dormant since last year, when Moqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire that is still in effect as far as his followers are concerned. Many Iraqis who heard the attack instead took the explosions to be a “Back in Business” sign by Sunni militants recently released from the huge American military prison outside Basra, Camp Bucca. For months the U.S. military has been steadily releasing hundreds of detainees in line with a U.S.-Iraqi agreement that calls for the prison to be shuttered as soon as July. U.S. officials have always acknowledged that some of the detainees held at Bucca and other smaller U.S. prison facilities in Iraq are innocent. But questions remain about many. And those questions are unlikely to be answered by the Iraqi Judicial system, which has barely functioning courts and overflowing jails.

Sharing the Blame for Torture in Iraq

This week the New England Journal of Medicine released a new report analyzing the causes of death of civilian casualties in Iraq during the first five years of the war. The findings were surprising. Executions, not headline-grabbing bombs, have killed the most. Researchers say 33 percent of the victims examined in the study died by execution after abduction or capture. And 29 percent of those victims had signs of torture on their bodies such as bruises, drill holes or burns.

Many of the incidents of torture undoubtedly were the work of Shi’ite militias, chiefly the Mahdi Army, which launched a year-long sectarian revenge quest beginning in 2006 against Sunnis. But the government of Iraq has been involved in torture too, and almost certainly still is. As I noted in a dispatch for TIME, the most recent U.N. human rights report on Iraq cites "continuing reports of the widespread and routine torture or ill-treatment of detainees, particularly those being held in pre-trial detention facilities, including police stations." How much the Iraqi government is torturing in its jails and elsewhere is not clear. Neither the United Nations nor any human rights group has published any verifiable statistics on the trend, and the Iraqi government isn’t saying. Almost no one doubts that it’s happening, however.

It’s tempting to chalk up this sad fact as just one more ugly thing from a very troubled country, especially considering the legacy of torture left by Saddam Hussein. But ongoing torture in Iraq poses a moral dilemma for any leaders in Washington willing to consider it: The U.S. government supports the government of Iraq, which has established a pattern of torturing prisoners. Therefore the United States is at present a party to torture.

Of course there is no shortage of countries with shady human rights records who’ve enjoyed U.S. support, past and present. Egypt and Israel come to mind. But Iraq is a special case for two reasons. One, the U.S. military gives direct support to Iraqi security forces, working closely with the very institutions accused of so many crimes. And two, U.S. efforts to remake Iraq represent the most ambitious mission America has undertaken on the world stage since the fall of the Berlin wall. The new Iraq is American-made, a 51st state in many regards as some have noted.

There is no seeable way at this point in the history of the war in Iraq to offer any meaningful accountability for human rights abuses that have occurred since 2003. The full extent of the abuses is unknown, and the notion of U.S. culpability by supporting the Iraqi government goes largely unconsidered by officials in Washington and Baghdad. Moreover, the war is not over. The government of Iraq is still battling an insurgency in Mosul and Diyala province while fighting to preserve the relative calm in Baghdad, all with help from the U.S. military.

The Iraqi government will be fighting insurgents and militias for the foreseeable future. The U.S. military role in that will lessen obviously as U.S. troops begin to withdrawal over the next year or so. But some military assistance is certain to continue, and the current administration should be more, much more, demanding on human rights toward the Iraqi government if indeed President Obama is serious about shunning torture.

Failure to do so will leave the United States playing much the same role in Iraq as it did Guatemala, where Washington offered military assistance to a series of governments that grew utterly brutal through decades of internal conflict in that country. More than 200,000 people died in violence that stretched from 1960 to 1996 in Guatemala. In its landmark 1999 report, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification documented 42,275 victims. Of those, 23,671 were arbitrarily executed, while another 6,159 were “disappeared.” The Guatemalan government was responsible for most of the violence. But the commission’s conclusions said U.S. military assistance played a major role in “reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.”

Keeping U.S. Troops in Mosul

The first concrete signs that the U.S. forces may be staying in Iraqi cities past a June 30 deadline to withdrawal came this week. The U.S. commander in Mosul says American troops will remain in the volatile northern city if asked by the Iraqi government. Many Iraqis I talk to seem to think that U.S. troops will be slow to leave Mosul and other cities in any case despite the standing U.S.-Iraqi withdrawal agreement. Indeed it’s hard to imagine a life in Baghdad at this point without the presence of the U.S. military, which still clogs the street with armored vehicles and shakes the sky with helicopters, every day.

I tend to think the Iraqi government will not be asking U.S. troops to stay in Mosul or anywhere else, however. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki never wanted surge troops in the first place. Even when violence was at its worst, al-Maliki would have rather been left alone to handle things with his army and police, whose counter-insurgency methods have at times involved human rights abuses and cooperating with militias. Given the choice again, I suspect he’ll go the same way.