Writing about Iraq and Torture...

I’ve been trying to avoid posting any thoughts about the ongoing fiasco in Iraq – you know, the one in which the death count is thus far up to almost 3,000 Americans and 600,000+ Iraqi civilians and fighters (aside: the latter number was just released as part of a new study by public health researchers from Johns Hopkins and an Iraqi Medical School in Baghdad. As pointed out by the Village Voice, "That's more than twice the 290,000 humans that Saddam Hussain is said to have killed during his 25-year reign." Ugh.) – It can be hard to write about the war in a calm, rational, articulate manner without getting riled up. The war can be criticized from so many angles that it's difficult to sit down and focus on a single, blogworthy aspect of the war without veering off into tangential asides like the one above, and without becoming frustrated at one's own ineptitude at using the English language to write about such a delicate and complex topic.

Moreover, when people write about a particular injustice that has been committed during the war, they risk the probability that a majority of their readers will forget about it the very next day. A single, unnecessary massacre of civilians gets chalked up to the 'horrors of war', or just gets thrown into a file cabinet in people's brains entitled "war sucks." As a whole, that file cabinet is not forgotten, but the individual atrocities lose all significance, save but one or two that become representative of the file cabinet as a whole.

Abu Ghraib seems to be one of the few phrases that has, for many people, become representative of the war as a whole. At least for now, the name Lynndie England persists in our consciousness and is equated with everything that is wrong with the American (preemptive attack? liberation? invasion? occupation?) of Iraq. But how many of us still remember that American civilian contractors played an important role in the abuses of prisoners? How many of us ever read the details well enough to find out that a civil lawsuit is being carried out against CACI and Titan, two government-contracted corporations that are implicated, because of military reports, of horrific acts of torture against which the American government has attempted no criminal action.

Ali Eteraz is therefore correct to name this article about corporate torture, "The Forgotten Conspiracy." Here is how it starts:

In 2003, Haider Muhsin Saleh, was living in Dearborn Michigan. A former opponent of Saddam Hussein, he had once been imprisoned and tortured by Saddam's secret police in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Upon being released he had fled to Sweden and become a Swedish citizen. When the Hussein regime fell, Mr. Saleh heeded the United States' call for expatriates to return to and rebuild Iraq. He did so with his own funds. Upon his arrival in September of 2003 he was detained and sent to the same Abu Ghraib prison where he had been previously tortured by Saddam Hussein. Instead of getting a chance to rebuild his country he became prisoner #151138 and was subjected to "interrogation."

Mr. Saleh's genitals were roped to those of other prisoners; his penis stretched with a rope and beaten with a stick; his own semen poured on his head; his naked body poured cold water upon it in the dead of winter; his naked body shocked with an electric stick; his neck wrapped with a belt which allowed him to be dragged; his head beaten with a pistol and slammed against a wall; his anus probed; his body urinated upon. Yet this "interrogation" was different than the others. It was conducted not by soldiers but average American citizens, serving as contractors with major American corporations, CACI and Titan.

In the author's own personal blog, he interviews the lawyer who is bravely taking up the civil lawsuit against these contractors, at the risk of her being labeled a friend of the 'other-side'. I highly recommend reading the whole interview, but here's how it ends:

...I think that [the] rise in the use of mercenaries and this erosion in the distinction between government and non-government functionaries is a very troubling development.

Right now what they have done is that they have passed a law giving the contractors immunity from Iraqi law. The contractors are not immune from US law. However, if you have the current attorney-general that we have, it is unlikely that you will have the private parties that have engaged in the torture be prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Now I may be wrong on that. I hope I’m wrong on that and I hope that we actually see some prosecutions because criminal prosecutions are what is needed here. We are talking about criminal acts and they should be prosecuted criminally. Since they haven’t been so far, we have our law-suit going in which we allege a civil recourse — where we allege a series of criminal acts and racketeering — and we will certainly do our part to try to bring these culprits to justice. But it would certainly be appropriate for the Department of Justice to take an active role and criminally prosecute these people.

So, there you have it; yet another way in which to criticize the way in which the war is being run (putting it mildly and awkwardly). And, when considered along with my last post, another reason to aspire to be a lawyer fighting for the powerless against the big, bad, wolf-corporations that dump toxic sludge on innocent Africans and urinate on (purportedly) innocent Iraqis. Okay, maybe that's taking it too far and falling into the same us-versus-them mentality that cause such atrocities in the first place. But this is why I try to avoid such issues altogether.

Toxic Sludge and Law

Between the book that I'm currently finishing up (A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr), and this recent article in the New York Times entitled "Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast," I've become excited at the prospect of going to law school in New York, a center of International Human Rights law, and someday being able to fight against the big, bad wolf-corporations that kill children using toxic chemical sludge. Hyperbole? Not Quite:

"A Civil Action" is a true story about a couple of companies in Massachusetts that dumped chemical waste on their property, which contaminated the town water wells and ultimately caused several children to develop Leukemia and die at a young age. The familes affected were represented by a young lawyer who spent all of his firm's money and more on the case, "nearly losing everything--including his sanity" (back cover blurb), but who ultimately had his story chronicled in a book as well as a Hollywood movie, in which his character was played by John Travolta.

The Times article, dated October 2, about a "highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda" deposited in Abidjan, the capital city of the Ivory Coast, is framed as a sort of allegory in which the dark sludge represents all that is wrong with globalization:

It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.

I haven't stepped foot in law school yet, but I'm guessing that this is a dream scenario for professors of International Law looking to teach their students about jurisdiction. Appallingly, the sludge has already been blamed for eight deaths and hundreds of people are still being treated every day for various health problems arising as a result of exposure to the sludge. The Dutch public prosecutor has opened a criminal investigation regarding the dumping, and my guess is that it will be a while before any party is held accountable for this, whether that party is the company that produced the sludge and authorized the dumping, the laboratory whose limited analysis on the sludge incorrectly showed little to no toxicity, or the waste management company in the Ivory Coast that offered to take on the waste disposal project, even though everyone knew they had no capabilities for doing so.

Hopefully, more will be done for the victims of this mess than that other big (perhaps far bigger) disaster in Bhopal, India, 22 years ago, when the families of the thousands who died as a result of Union Carbide's toxic gas leak were given an average award of only $2,200, and the site of the accident continues to be highly contaminated and disease-inducing, with no one taking responsibility for the clean up. The head of PR at Dow Co., which now owns Union Carbide, was quoted as saying "$500 is plenty good for an Indian," referring to the amount that many of those who need lifelong medical care received.

If $500 is plenty good for an Indian, I'm scared of what may be deemed plenty good for an African.