“Dear friends,

A very important study has come out, publishing findings of enriched
Uranium in hair samples taken from families in Fallujah. However, the
authors of this study have had trouble getting the media to report
their findings. Please pass this study on to as many people as you
can.

Thank you,

The Justice For Fallujah Project”

Click Here for entire published article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/world/middleeast/17iraq.html?ref=world

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s interior minister said Tuesday that more than 40 police officers would face charges after an investigation into prison abuse found that inmates had been incarcerated without warrants and others had their rights violated.

The Iraqi government has been confronted with accusations of widespread torture in its prisons.

The interior minister, Jawad al-Bolani, spoke during a tour of one of the most notorious prisons in eastern Baghdad, where dozens of prisoners were packed into small cells with clothes hung on the wall to dry and pillows on the floor.

Politicians loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr — many of whose supporters were detained last year as part of a crackdown against militia fighters — kept up their pressure on the government over prison conditions.

A Sadrist lawmaker, Ali al-Miyali, told reporters on Tuesday that torture had been used to extract confessions in a prison in the southern city of Diwaniya and in other prisons.

He also contended that inmates had been detained on false accusations from politically motivated informers and that some families had been forced to bribe police officers for the release of their relatives or even for visitation rights.

“We demand that the government punish those officers and eliminate them from the security services,” Mr. Miyali said.

More than 300 detainees from Mr. Sadr’s movement began a hunger strike over the weekend at the Rusafa prison in eastern Baghdad, hoping to draw attention to their situation, according to family members and aides to Mr. Sadr.

A Sunni member of Parliament, Hairth al-Obaidi, who was an outspoken advocate of prisoners’ rights, was assassinated last week after delivering a sermon at a Baghdad mosque in which he discussed prisoner abuse.  

Iraq’s New Death Squad

The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090622/bauer/print

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The effective head of the American ISOF project is General Trombitas of the Iraq National Counter-Terror Transition Team. A towering man with a gray mustache and a wrinkled brow, Trombitas spent nearly seven of his over thirty years in the military training special forces in Colombia, El Salvador and other countries. On February 23 he gave me a tour of Area IV, a joint American-Iraqi base near the Baghdad International Airport, where US Special Forces train the ISOF. As we walk away from the helicopter, he cracks a boyish smile. Though he’s worked with special forces all over the world, he tells me the men we are about to meet are “the best.”

Trombitas says he is “very proud of what was done in El Salvador” but avoids the fact that special forces trained there by the United States in the early 1980s were responsible for the formation of death squads that killed more than 50,000 civilians thought to be sympathetic with leftist guerrillas. Guatemala was a similar case. Some Guatemalan special forces that had been trained in anti-terrorism tactics by the United States during the mid-1960s subsequently became death squads that took part in the killing of around 140,000 people. In the early 1990s, US Special Forces trained and worked closely with an elite Colombian police unit strongly suspected of carrying out some of the murders attributed to Los Pepes, a death squad that became the backbone of the country’s current paramilitary organization. (Trombitas served in El Salvador from 1989-90 and in Colombia from 2003-2005, after these incidents took place.)

“The standards get looser when the Americans aren’t with [the local special forces], and they can eventually become death squads, which I believe actually happened in Colombia,” says Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down and Killing Pablo, a book about the hunt for Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar by CIA and US Special Forces. The tactics taught in each country are the same, Bowden says. “They teach the same kind of skills. They use the same equipment.”

Trombitas told the official blog of the Defense Department that the training missions used in Latin America are “extremely transferable” to Iraq. Salvadoran Special Forces even helped train the ISOF, he tells me. “It’s a world of coalitions,” he says. “The longer we work together, the more alike we are. When we share our values and our experiences with other armies, we make them the same.”

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Photos show rape and sex abuse in Iraq jails: report

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE54R05220090528?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

LONDON (Reuters) – Photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. President Barack Obama does not want released include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper reported on Thursday.

The images are among photographs included in a 2004 report into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison conducted by U.S. Major General Antonio Taguba.

Taguba included allegations of rape and sexual abuse in his report, and on Wednesday he confirmed to the Daily Telegraph that images supporting those allegations were also in the file.

“These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency,” Taguba, who retired in January 2007, was quoted as saying in the paper.

He said he supported Obama’s decision not to release them, even though Obama had previously pledged to disclose all images relating to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

“I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one,” Taguba said. “The sequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan.

“The mere depiction of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.”

The newspaper said at least one picture showed an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Others are said to depict sexual assaults with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

The photographs relate to 400 alleged cases of abuse carried out at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons between 2001 and 2005.

Iraq says US raid violated pact

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8019778.stm

A US raid in the south of Iraq, in which two people died, was a crime and those responsible should be tried, says Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki.

He said the raid in the town of Kut was a breach of the security pact governing US military actions in the country.

The US has said the raid was carried out in full agreement with the Iraqis.

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad says it is the most serious dispute between the US and Iraq since the agreement came into force at the start of the year.

One senior local official said the actions had rendered the pact “meaningless”.

US forces stormed buildings in Wasit province early on Sunday morning.

A policeman and a woman were shot dead and six people detained.

The US military said the raid, against a weapons smuggler and “network financier”, had been “fully coordinated and approved by the Iraqi government”.

They said soldiers had shot and killed “an individual with a weapon” outside the house and that the woman who died had “moved into the line of fire”.

Two senior Iraqi army officers were arrested for permitting an American operation to go ahead without the knowledge of the Iraqi authorities.

Pact ‘meaningless’

In a statement read on state TV, Mr Maliki said he condemned the killings as a “breach of the security pact”.

He called on the US to “release the detainees and hand over those responsible for this crime to the courts”.

The incident caused uproar in Wasit, where provincial governor Latif Hamad al-Turfah echoed Mr Maliki’s condemnation.

He said local government and officials had been “surprised that these forces carried out the raid in breach of the agreement signed between the Iraqi and US governments”.

The chairman of the provincial council, Mahmud Abd al-Rida, said the raid had embodied the “meaning of the occupation”.

“Their claim of friendship and early withdrawal from our dear land, according to the security agreement signed by the two Iraqi and US parties, is meaningless,” he said.

The complicated Status of Forces Agreement was signed in November last year and came into force in early 2009.

It requires all military operations in Iraq to have the government’s approval and allows for US soldiers to face trial if they commit crimes off base.

The US currently has more than 140,000 troops in Iraq, and combat troops are due to pull out of Iraq’s cities by the end of June.

Book tells of female U.S. soldiers raped by comrades

her biggest enemy might be one of her fellow soldiers

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090416/us_nm/us_usa_military_rape

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Female U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have more to fear than roadside bombs or enemy ambushes. They also are at risk of being raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers.

“The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq,” a book based on 40 in-depth interviews, recounts the stories of female veterans who served in combat zones and tells of rape, sexual assault and harassment by male counterparts.

Some were warned by officers not to go to the latrine by themselves. One began carrying a knife in case she was attacked by comrades. Others said they felt discouraged to report assaults.

“The horror of it is that it is their own side that is doing this to them,” said the book’s author, Helen Benedict, a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York. The book was released in the United States on Wednesday.

One in 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are female, and more women have fought and died in the Iraq war than any since World War Two, according to U.S. Department of Defense statistics cited in the book.

Benedict said the book’s title comes from the isolation female U.S. soldiers experience when combining the trauma of their combat duties with sexual harassment by fellow soldiers.

“Because women are under so much more danger now and actually in the battle, it’s a particularly tragic situation because all soldiers are supposed to be able to rely on one another to watch their backs,” Benedict said.

“And how can you feel that way if your fellow soldiers are harassing you all day or trying to rape you or actually even raping you?”

One such soldier, Marti Ribeiro, was a third-generation Air Force sergeant who served in Afghanistan in 2006 as a combat correspondent with the Army’s all-male 10th Mountain Division. Her story includes an account of being attacked and raped by a U.S. soldier in uniform while guarding a post.

After completing the shift and not showering to substantiate the attack, she reported it to authorities, only to be told if she filed a claim she would be charged with dereliction of duty for leaving her weapon unattended. She left the military.

“I had dreams of becoming an officer one day, like my father and grandfather,” she says in the book. “Unfortunately, because I’m female, those dreams will not come true.”

SURVEYS UNDERSCORE PROBLEM

The number of reports of sexual assault in the U.S. military rose by 8 percent in fiscal 2008 from the previous year and by 25 percent in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report released by the Pentagon in March.

There were 2,908 reports overall of sexual assault by members of the military. Such assaults include rape, indecent assault and attempted rape, the report said.

Of the 40 women Benedict interviewed who served between 2003 and 2006, 10 said they had been raped, five said they were sexually assaulted including attempted rape, and 13 reported sexual harassment.

A new play based on Benedict’s work was performed in New York and may tour the United States. After a recent performance, real soldiers hugged the actors who portrayed them. Some wiped away tears.

U.S. officials said the increase in assaults was due to efforts to make it easier to report them.

Cynthia Smith, a Department of Defense spokeswoman, said the department was committed to eliminating sexual assault from the military through prevention and response policies and eliminating barriers to reporting assaults.

“The Department of Defense’s goal is to establish a climate of confidence that encourages victims to report sexual assault and get the care they need,” she said in an e-mail.

Benedict and some researchers say U.S. government figures are much lower than their findings because the government only counts those brave enough to report the assaults.

The problem is not new to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A 2003 survey of more than 550 female veterans who served in wars from Vietnam to the first Gulf war found that 30 percent said they suffered from rape or attempted rape and 79 percent reported being sexually harassed, according to the American Journal of Industrial Medicine.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2009/04/15/GI-guilty-in-detainees-deaths-in-Iraq/UPI-77621239771080/

VILSECK, Germany, April 15 (UPI) — A U.S. Army sergeant was found guilty in Germany Wednesday of having killed four prisoners while on duty in Iraq.

A military jury deliberated nearly 4 hours before convicting Master Sgt. John Hatley of premeditated murder and conspiracy in the 2007 slayings of the four bound and blindfolded detainees, whose identities were never determined and whose bodies haven’t been found since they allegedly were dumped in a canal near Baghdad, Stars and Stripes reported.

The military panel acquitted Hatley on an unrelated count that he murdered or wounded another detainee on a Baghdad street earlier in 2007, the newspaper said. He also was acquitted of trying to cover up the canal killings.

Hatley faces either life with the chance for parole or life without when the jury considers sentencing Thursday.

Hatley, 40, is the third soldier from the 172nd Infantry Brigade to be convicted in the detainees’ deaths. The other two, Sgt. 1st Class Joseph P. Mayo, 27, and Sgt. Michael Leahy, 28, were convicted earlier and sentenced to prison.

Iraq’s Shiites call for end of US occupation

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jCmSv-PbnXxzS4811dy_O-Yr37cQ

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Thousands of followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called for an end to US occupation of Iraq on Friday, but the government ignored the sixth anniversary of the invasion.

Death tolls have tumbled since Iraq’s deadliest days in late 2007, and in just three months time American forces are to withdraw from major cities and towns in a prelude to a total pullout in 2011.

Neither the Iraqi authorities nor the US military marked the March 20, 2003 invasion that toppled president Saddam Hussein and his totalitarian Baath party from power.

But Sadr’s devotees used Friday prayers to call for an end to the American presence.

“We reject occupation… occupiers out,” the faithful chanted, fists raised, in Sadr City, an impoverished district of northeast Baghdad, as a US flag was set ablaze.

Sheikh Haidar al-Jaberi, a member of Sadr’s politburo, called for a major demonstration on April 9, anniversary of the fall of Saddam’s Sunni regime.

“March 20 should be a festival, but after what the Americans have done, it’s a sad day,” Jaberi said, referring to the start of spring.

“They never kept their promises,” added Qassem Zamel, who came to pray.

“The Americans came to liberate us from a dictator but they have destroyed the country,” said Zamel, who is in his 60s.

He said his three sons were arrested in March 2003 and were still in jail, although he did not know why.

Shiites — the majority in Iraq — suffered repeated purges under Saddam’s brutal 35-year reign and had at first welcomed the “Iraqi Freedom” invasion.

The campaign that ousted Saddam was supposed to bring democracy and a better life, but most Iraqis were caught in the maelstrom of violence that swept the country. Sunni insurgents and Al-Qaeda fought US troops and unleashed sectarian warfare with Shiite militia such as Sadr’s Mahdi army.

Meanwhile in Tokyo, about 500 Japanese demonstrated to call for an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, as well as from Afghanistan.

They carried banners that read: “Weapons can’t solve the Iraqi and Afghan wars.”

“If we remain silent, I don’t think the troops will withdraw” from Iraq and Afghanistan, said organiser Ken Takada.

A report released on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the invasion underscored the plight of Iraqis.

“Millions of civilians are still facing hardship every day,” said International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Jakob Kellenberger.

“Indiscriminate attacks continue to leave dozens of people killed or injured on a daily basis despite improvements in the security situation in many parts of Iraq.”

In 2007, 17,430 Iraqis died in violence, but in a sign of progress this fell to 6,772 in 2008. The first two months of 2009 saw 449 die, the lowest official toll since the invasion.

“The humanitarian situation in many areas of the country remains serious despite the Iraqi authorities’ considerable efforts to provide basic services such as water and health care,” Kellenberger said.

Two major bomb blasts this month killed more than 60 people and maimed scores more, serving as grim reminders of the risks.

Despite such precariousness, US and Iraqi officials offer repeated assurances of a smooth transition as American troops pull out and fledgling Iraqi forces take control.

Fears of a return to high levels of sectarian strife or even all-out civil war are played down by both sides, with the authorities working towards a semblance of something like normal life amid the ruins and countless concrete blast walls that litter Baghdad.

The tourism ministry announced on Thursday that the first official Western tour group to enter Iraq since the invasion was visiting historic and religious sites.

“This visit is a positive sign for the return of touristic activity to Iraq,” ministry spokesman Abdul Zahra al-Telagani said of the five Britons, two Americans and a Canadian on an organised two-week trip.

“It reflects the improvement in the security situation.”

Iraq, under UN sanctions for much of the 1990s, has been off limits to all but the most adventurous of Western tourists for many years.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_11867484?source=most_viewed

FLORISSANT, Mo. — Inside the tidy suburban home of John and Linda Johnson, no photos of their eldest daughter grace the walls. Army Pfc. LaVena Johnson was just 19 when she died in Iraq in 2005; to this day her parents cannot bear to display reminders of her life.

John Johnson does possess other photos of his daughter — explicit color shots of her autopsy and death scene. He shows them to a visitor. They are horrifying: LaVena Johnson in a pool of blood. LaVena Johnson’s corpse on a coroner’s table.

John Johnson does not let his wife, Linda, or four children see these images, but he studies the photos for hours at a time, trying to determine how his daughter died.

Army investigators ruled that LaVena Johnson committed suicide by firing her M-16 automatic rifle into her mouth. Her body was found beside the rifle inside a contractor’s storage tent on a U.S. military base in Balad, Iraq, on July 19, 2005.

There was no suicide note, no recovered bullet and no significant gunshot residue on her hands. But the Army cited fellow soldiers’ reports that she was depressed and had spoken of killing herself.

John Johnson says his daughter was raped and murdered, with her death scene staged to make it appear that she shot herself. He accuses the Army of covering up for a killer or killers to conceal a soldier-on-soldier murder, explaining that military personnel would have had unrestricted access to the area where his daughter died and therefore would not have attracted undue attention.

If LaVena Johnson’s death were investigated as a homicide, John Johnson added, it would raise questions about base security and discourage women from enlisting.

In 2005, in response to concerns about sexual assaults against female service members, the Pentagon established the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. Citing a reluctance to report rape for fear of stigma or reprisals, the office does not share information with law enforcement or the military command.

Like the Johnsons, other families have questioned the military’s findings of suicide in the deaths of their daughters in Iraq or Afghanistan. They too accuse the military of jumping to conclusions and ignoring evidence of murder. But these grieving families have discovered that there are no clear answers and few conclusive facts — only murky evidence that can be interpreted more than one way. The result is a climate of mistrust and suspicion that leaves the military on the defensive and the families feeling deceived.

Christoper Grey, a spokesman for the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, called its investigation of the Johnson case “thorough and complete.” He said the command is ready to reopen any investigation in which “new credible information warranting further investigation is brought to our attention.”

Of the 115 female service member deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, 16 have been ruled suicides. Overall, 205 of the 4,868 military deaths in those wars through Jan. 31, were ruled suicides. The 128 reported Army suicides in 2008 was the highest annual level since the Pentagon began tabulating suicides in 1980.

The Johnson case, and several others involving female service members, have been championed by retired Army Col. Ann Wright, a former U.S. diplomat.

Wright accuses the military of withholding evidence pointing to sexual assaults and other attacks on female service members. She contends that the military has been too quick to close some women’s deaths as suicides without first conducting thorough homicide investigations. She accuses the military of stonewalling families who question its findings.

“What the military is doing is egregious,” she said. “In many cases, they have the information the families want but refuse to release it. These families are really fighting upstream.”

For the Johnsons, the circumstance of their daughter’s death has become an obsession. It is a wound that may never heal.

For more than three years, John Johnson has studied every aspect of his daughter’s death. He keeps cross-referenced stacks of investigative reports, crime scene photographs, lab reports and angry letters sent to the Army, the Pentagon and Congress.

The Johnsons, both former Army employees, say they feel betrayed by a military they and their daughter served honorably. In his family room, John Johnson stabbed his finger at an Army autopsy report, his voice rising in indignation.

“I’m not just a grieving father guessing at things,” he said. “I’m going strictly by the facts. I’m going by the Army’s own evidence.”

After John Johnson filed a Freedom of Information Act request and enlisted the aid of his congressman, the Army provided original color autopsy and crime scene photos in June 2007.

As he studied the photos, he said, he saw blood inside and outside the contractor’s tent. Other evidence suggested to him that LaVena Johnson was killed elsewhere and her body dumped in the tent: Bootprints in blood and on a bag of cement, the absence of blood and brain spatter on the tent, and the Army’s failure to find the fatal bullet.

A small fire next to the body was evidence, he said, that someone tried to cover up her murder. A caustic substance appears to have been poured on her genitals, he said, to eliminate signs of rape.

The abrasions on LaVena Johnson’s face suggest to John Johnson that she was beaten, and scratches on her arms are likely defensive wounds, he said. And he does not believe his 5-foot-1 daughter’s arms were long enough to pull the trigger of an M-16 cradled between her legs, as described in the Army report.

A gunshot residue test, performed on the woman’s hands to determine whether she had fired a weapon, found “insignificant” residue, the report said.

The report quoted three soldiers as saying LaVena Johnson seemed depressed and spoke of suicide. But two of them also said she told them she was only joking and would never take her own life. “She didn’t want to hurt her family,” one soldier said.

A statement by her company commander, Capt. David Woods, said: “This soldier was clearly happy and seemingly very healthy physically and emotionally.”

One soldier said LaVena Johnson was upset over a breakup with a soldier she had met in the U.S., the report said. She learned 10 days before her death that she had genital warts, according to the report.

Grey, the Army spokesman, said the only blood found outside the tent was on a bench that had been removed after LaVena’s Johnson’s body was discovered. Investigators are not aware of any boot prints in blood or on a cement bag, and found no cuts, bruises or abrasions “that would have led us to believe that they had been created by suspicious means,” Grey said.

Investigators believe the bullet exited through an open tent flap window, Grey said. They concluded that LaVena Johnson had burned pages from her journal before she shot herself, starting a small fire inside the tent.

Grey said investigators demonstrated that it was “easily possible” for a person of LaVena Johnson’s stature to shoot herself through the mouth with her M-16. And because investigators found no evidence of sexual assault, Grey said, there was no reason to collect vaginal or fingernail swabs.

Paul Stone, a spokesman for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, said the damage to LaVena Johnson’s face is consistent with the rapidly expanding gases discharged by an M-16, which he said can break bones and leave bruises and abrasions. The Institute also concluded that LaVena Johnson committed suicide.

After John Johnson met in April with U.S. Rep. Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee reviewed the case. It concluded that further review “would not find anything to change the findings and conclusions” of the Army.

John Johnson called the committee’s conclusions “insulting.”

The Johnsons had their daughter’s body exhumed in 2007 for an autopsy, conducted by Dr. Michael Graham, the St. Louis city medical examiner.

Graham concluded that she died of a gunshot wound fired through her mouth. In an interview, Graham said he could not determine whether the wound was self-inflicted because John Johnson did not provide him with crime scene photos and other material. John Johnson had not yet received the crime scene photos from the Army at the time of the autopsy.

“I saw no evidence that it was not self-inflicted,” Graham said.

John Johnson called Graham’s conclusions “disappointing” and said a lawyer is advising him on what to do next.

Linda Johnson wept as she recounted her final phone conversation with her daughter, two days before she died.

“She was her normal jubilant self,” Linda Johnson said. “She talked about coming home and Christmas plans. She loved Christmas — she told me make sure her father didn’t start decorating till she got home. This was not a girl getting ready to harm herself.”

The family has not celebrated Christmas since LaVena Johnson’s death, she said.

John Johnson was stoic as he thumbed through his daughter’s autopsy photos. With his shaved head and black mustache, he appeared resolute, unbowed.

He spread the photos before him once more, convinced they contain the answers he is seeking. “I’m not giving up,” he said, “until somebody tells me the truth about what happened to my baby girl.”

G.I. CRIP: Could He Serve With Cops?

http://www.wweek.com/wwire/?p=22929

Portland Police Sgt. Pete Simpson brought up an interesting point during an interview with WW for this week’s story about a convicted gangbanger who may be deployed to Iraq.

Simpson points out there are Portland cops who serve in the Oregon National Guard, and it’s the Guard that is seeking to send Levell Peters to Iraq this summer after Peters was convicted of a felony for a gang-related shooting last year.

“He could be serving right next to a police officer who’s on the other side of the law and who’s supposed to trust this guy with his life,” Simpson says.

Police Bureau records indicate there are 18 uniformed officers who are members of the National Guard or reserves, says Detective Mary Wheat, a police spokeswoman.