U.S. threatens to halt services to Iraq without troop accord - International Social/Political

U.S. threatens to halt services to Iraq without troop accord
by Roy Gutman and Leila Fadel via reed - McClatchy Newspapers Monday, Oct 27 2008, 11:19pm
international / social/political / other press

But blackmail tends to backfire!

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military has warned Iraq that it will shut down military operations and other vital services throughout the country on Jan. 1 if the Iraqi government doesn't agree to a new agreement on the status of U.S. forces or a renewed United Nations mandate for the American mission in Iraq.

Many Iraqi politicians view the move as akin to political blackmail, a top Iraqi official told McClatchy Sunday.

In addition to halting all military actions, U.S. forces would cease activities that support Iraq’s economy, educational sector and other areas -- "everything" -- said Tariq al Hashimi, the country’s Sunni Muslim vice president. "I didn’t know the Americans are rendering such wide-scale services."

Hashimi said that Army Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, listed “tens” of areas of potential cutoffs in a three-page letter, and he said the implied threat caught Iraqi leaders by surprise.

"It was really shocking for us," he said. "Many people are looking to this attitude as a matter of blackmailing."

Odierno had no comment Sunday, but U.S. Embassy officials told McClatchy that a lengthy list of the sort Hashimi described has been passed to the Iraqi government. Among the services the U.S. provides are protection of Iraq’s principal borders, of its oil exports and other shipping through the Shatt al Arab into the Persian Gulf and all air traffic control over Iraq.

The status of forces agreement, which calls for a final withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, was supposed to resolve a number of contentious issues between the two countries, but its completion 10 days ago has instead provoked a political crisis within Iraq's Shiite-dominated government and between Iraq and the United States.

Fearing a major battle in the Iraqi parliament, Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki solicited proposed amendments from his cabinet and called a meeting to review them Sunday afternoon.

However, the two main Shiite parties, Maliki's Dawa party and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, were unable to produce their full lists of demands, and he postponed the meeting until Tuesday, other cabinet members said.

Hashimi said that Iran, a longtime backer of both parties, is pressuring Iraq's leaders not to accept the agreement.

The dispute "is real and factual. The government is not manipulating this dispute," Hashimi said. He said he hadn't yet seen the objections to the accord, even those from his own Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party.

Political party heads, including Hashimi, say that Maliki is responsible for the agreement, but Maliki has been unwilling to back the accord unless his Shiite coalition and other party members join him to take the political heat.

An additional complication is the decision of Hashimi’s Iraqi Islamic party to suspend all "official communication" with U.S. military and civilian officials until it receives an explanation and an apology following a joint U.S.-Iraqi military raid against party backers in Anbar province in which one man was killed.

It's unclear what will happen when the Iraqi cabinet offers a list of proposed changes and Maliki winnows them down to proposed amendments.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, "I don’t think you slam the door shut" on amendments, but Hashimi said the U.S. is "adamant in saying, 'We close the door, we are not accepting any sort of amendment.' "

He said that if the United States met Iraq halfway and accepted amendments to the controversial articles of the accord, it would make it "rather easy" to submit the agreement to the parliament.

The alternative to a new agreement governing U.S. forces, an Iraqi request to the U.N. Security Council to extend the U.N. mandate, which now expires on Dec. 31, is also highly contentious.

One of the biggest concessions Iraq won from Washington in the negotiations over the forces accord was a stipulation that private contractors such as Blackwater that have been accused of killing Iraqi civilians would become subject to Iraqi law.

Immunity from prosecution for private contractors and for all official U.S. entities under Iraqi law was promulgated by the U.S. occupation government in June 2004, and ending that order is the subject of another confrontation between Iraq and the United States, Hashimi said. He said the United States insists that it would reject any Iraqi request to change the mandate.

Ironically, Iraqi politicians of practically every stripe agree that the proposed agreement would be a major advance toward restoring Iraq's full sovereignty and a vast improvement over the initial U.S. proposal made last spring.

He credited President Bush with changing the U.S. position as a result of twice-weekly conference calls with Maliki.

© 2008 McClatchy Newspapers

The Torturer's Tale
by Jolyon Jenkins via rialator - First Post Monday, Oct 27 2008, 11:33pm

Tony Lagouranis never expected to become a torturer. He didn't even really want to be a soldier. But at 30, he was bored and broke. He had a facility with languages, fancied learning Arabic, and figured the US army would teach him for free and help him clear his student debts. When he started his training, the Twin Towers were still intact and no one expected the US to go to war in Iraq.

Even when Lagouranis chose to specialise as an interrogator, his army instructors implied that the Iraqis he questioned would be friendly and co-operative. "The last experience we had had with interrogation in the military was in the first Gulf war, when most of the prisoners were completely willing. They said: ask them a question and they'll tell you what you wanted to know."

But by the time he arrived in Iraq, the army knew better. Vast numbers of suspects were being rounded up, and they weren't talking. His superiors at the detention facility where he worked in Mosul gave him a list of authorised interrogation tactics - some might say, torture tactics.

‘It said explicitly that the interrogator needed the freedom to be creative... So basically there were no limits.’

"It listed things like the use of dogs, dietary manipulation, using sleep deprivation, stress positions and 'environmental manipulation'," said Lagouranis. "We took that to mean that we could induce hypothermia, we could keep them in a hot shipping container, in the sun, for days at a time, we can use loud music and strobe lights and things like that. And it was also an open-ended document. It said explicitly that the interrogator needed the freedom to be creative. It said these are only suggestions of what you can do. So basically there were no limits."

Lagouranis saw people crippled through prolonged use of the stress positions he forced them to adopt, and driven to the verge of insanity through weeks of sleep deprivation and psychological disorientation. But maybe it was worth it if it produced valuable intelligence in the fight against the insurgency? No, he says. As a method of getting intelligence it was useless. And besides, the aim of interrogations shifted subtly. "A lot of what we ended up doing was trying to gather confessions, not intelligence. I think that the commanders wanted to show that they were doing a good job and were picking up guilty people. But in fact we were just rounding up whoever was on the street. They just wanted us to force people to confess so that they could brief their commanders and say that they had captured all the terrorists."

'It was fine to douse the prisoner with icy water and put him in front of an air-conditioner, so long as the paperwork was in order.'

While training back in the US, Lagouranis had become friends with another linguist, Stephen Lewis. Lewis was sent to a top secret interrogation facility in Baghdad. He too was given a list of acceptable interrogation techniques but with the added refinement of a bureaucratic infrastructure. Before each interrogation he had to sign off a checklist of what he intended to do to the suspect. It was fine to douse the prisoner with icy water and put him in front of an air-conditioner, so long as the paperwork was in order.

After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004 Lewis and fellow interrogators worried that they might become the fall guys if their methods became public knowledge. They raised their concerns with superiors. Within hours, a crack team of army lawyers descended on the base, to give a PowerPoint presentation arguing that everything being done was compatible with international law. And, said the colonel in charge of the base, the interrogators had nothing to fear. "I remember him standing up and saying I give you my word that there is no way that the Red Cross would ever get inside the doors of this unit." How reassured was Lewis by this? "Not reassured at all. Why would he be worried about it? Why not let the Red Cross in?"

There are many academic studies showing that it doesn't take much for an ordinary person to become a torturer. But with Lagouranis and Lewis, something more remarkable happened. Independently, and working in different bases, they decided to stop torturing. Lagouranis, by now suffering from stress, managed to get an honourable discharge on the grounds that he suffered from an "adjustment disorder". Lewis applied to become a conscientious objector, was turned down, and had to serve out his remaining army term.

Today they share a flat together in a run-down district of Chicago. Lagouranis works as a night club bouncer; Lewis as a tennis coach. I think of them as two of the most morally admirable people I've met: proof, indeed, that although anyone can become a torturer, nobody has to.

© 2008 First Post Newsgroup IPR Limited

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