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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Crime & Police : Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq : Regime |
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Hadji Girl: Racism is just another poison we're spreading in Iraq |
Current rating: 0 |
by Robert C. Koehler
(No verified email address) |
07 Jul 2006
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Atrocity damage control requires isolating such events, not just vertically (keep the blame as far down the chain of command as possible), but horizontally, so that journalists and the public at large don’t start thinking they see a pattern of barbarism in our mission to liberate Iraq. A perfunctory investigation followed by widely publicized punishment needs to end each matter as it comes up. |
For some reason, the grunt’s love song made the brass cringe:
“I grabbed her little sister and put her in front of me . . . as the bullets began to fly, the blood sprayed from between her eyes, and then I laughed maniacally.”
Cpl. Joshua Belile had a recording contract and everything, but, uh-uh. No singing Marine’s gonna be regaling America with the sadistic pleasures to be had in occupied Iraq, no sir, not with all the atrocity investigations going on these days, and the dirty truth of our Middle East adventure oozing into the coverage of even the most administration-sympathetic media outlets.
Last week I wrote a column about horror on the macro level in Iraq: the likely serious health consequences resulting from widespread use of depleted uranium munitions (http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0629-32.htm), constituting a crime against not just the Iraqis but the whole world, because of airborne radiation poisoning. This week, horror on the micro level is once again making the news, with the arrest of Steven Green, a recently discharged GI, in connection with the rape and murder of a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, along with the murder of her parents and 7-year-old sister, four months ago in Mahmoudiya.
Atrocity damage control requires isolating such events, not just vertically (keep the blame as far down the chain of command as possible), but horizontally, so that journalists and the public at large don’t start thinking they see a pattern of barbarism in our mission to liberate Iraq. A perfunctory investigation followed by widely publicized punishment needs to end each matter as it comes up.
But suddenly the embedded media aren’t so compliant. As we read about the brutal, premeditated murders in Mahmoudiya on March 12, we’re likely to get a recap of other criminal investigations under way or recently concluded: the Haditha massacre, a shooting in Fallujah (eight servicemen charged with murder), another shooting in Ramadi, the deaths of detainees here and there. Indeed, we might even get a civilian body count thrown in. The acknowledged Iraqi dead are apparently up to 50,000 in the mainstream media (even though the British medical journal Lancet published a study putting the likely total at twice that — a year and a half ago).
All of which brings me back to Cpl. Belile’s derailed recording career. The song he’d posted on the Internet and hoped to make a splash with — “Hadji Girl” — tells the story of a GI who falls for a local girl at an Iraqi Burger King. He accompanies her home but, oops, it’s a trap. The dad and brother, shouting “jihad,” brandish their AK-47s, so he pulls the sister in front of him as a shield and (ha ha) she’s the one who gets shot. Then he returns fire with his M-16 and blows the rest of the family “to eternity.”
Adding to the tenderness of this song, which, according to Marine Times, the high command has apparently forbidden Belile to record, is the fact that “hadji” is a racist term, the new slur for Arabs and Muslims, Iraq war vet Aiden Delgado explained on blackcommentator.com. “It is used extensively in the military,” he said, “. . . with the same kind of connotation as ‘gook,’ ‘Charlie’ or the n-word. Official Army documents now use it in reference to Iraqis or Arabs. It’s real common.” He also said of his Army training: “We sang in cadences. And the chants had anti-Arab themes. Like burning turbans, killing ragheads.”
I humbly submit there’s no such thing as a benign occupation — that you cannot subjugate a people without also dehumanizing them. This is called racism. It’s the ever-present undercurrent of our mission in Iraq and it’s as insidious and life-threatening to Iraqis as DU poisoning, as the story of a real-life “Hadji Girl” in Mahmoudiya makes clear.
According to the Washington Post and other accounts, the young girl, Abeer Qasim Hamza, had the extraordinary misfortune of attracting, with her good looks, the interest of some of the GIs who manned the checkpoint she was required to pass through several times a day. They made advances at her. She was afraid, she told her mother. Her unspeakable tragedy illustrates a basic fact of occupation: Iraqi civilians are at the mercy of immature young Americans with guns. They have no rights.
A witness “found Abeer sprawled dead in a corner, her hair and a pillow next to her consumed by fire, and her dress pushed up to her neck,” the Post said.
Unlike the Marine in the song, the boys from the 502nd Infantry Regiment weren’t lured into temptation by a femme fatale. They were on the prowl for spoils. Pvt. Green and his buddies, accounts tell us, allegedly planned the operation in advance: rape the girl, kill her, set her on fire, kill the witnesses, blame it on the insurgents. It almost worked.
Only after an act of grotesque counter-barbarism — the torture and beheading of two American soldiers from the very same unit — did a guilt-ridden fellow soldier spill the beans about the Mahmoudiya atrocity, during a post-beheading session with a stress counselor.
John Pike, director of the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, suggests that what we’re witnessing is not necessarily a spike in GI murders of Iraqi civilians all of a sudden but, rather, a no-longer-avoidable pressure to investigate them. “It may be,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, “that this has been going on all along and it was just not being reported.”
I’d say these murders are an absolutely predictable form of the “collateral damage” of occupation. Its architects are the ones who belong on trial, for the rape of a nation.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer.
© 2006 Robert C. Koehler
http://www.commonwonders.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts |
by John Kifner
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
07 Jul 2006
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A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.
The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance policy and strictly enforce it.
The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
The defense secretary at the time, William Perry, said the rules were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.
"They're communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military," he said. "Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
The report cited accounts by neo-Nazis of their infiltration of the military, including a discussion on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront. "There are others among you in the forces," one participant wrote. "You are never alone."
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator."
"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
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Investigation by Southern Poverty Law Center Uncovers Swelling Numbers of Racist Extremists in U.S. Military |
by Southern Poverty Law Center
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
07 Jul 2006
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MONTGOMERY, Alabama - July 7 - Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, U.S. military officials have relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists, with the result that large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces, according to an investigative report released today by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The report –- available at http://www.splcenter.org -– comes a decade after the Oklahoma City bombing and the racially motivated murder of a black couple by neo-Nazis in the 82nd Airborne Division prompted hearings by the House Armed Services Committee and a crackdown on racist extremism by the Department of Defense.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) President Richard Cohen, in a letter delivered today, urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward racist extremism among members of the military.
"Because hate group membership and extremist activity are antithetical to the values and mission of our armed forces, we urge you to adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to white supremacy in the military and to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policy is rigorously enforced," Cohen said.
A military investigator is quoted in the report as saying, "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a problem." In addition:
-- A Department of Defense gang specialist estimates that thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity.
-- Hundreds of neo-Nazis identify themselves online as active duty soldiers. These include an airman based at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia who is pictured holding assault rifles in front of a swastika and Iron Eagle neo-Nazi banner. A military investigator there said that although he was aware of the airman's neo-Nazi identity, he interpreted ambiguous military regulations to mean that the airman "has to actually organize or recruit or commit a crime" before action can be taken against him.
-- One investigator identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists based at Fort Lewis in Washington, but only two were discharged. Investigators also uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis in the Army and Marines who were spread out across five military installations in five states.
-- The SPLC informed military investigators about an active duty Navy SEAL who was heavily involved in neo-Nazi activities, but he was allowed to complete his tour of duty in Iraq and receive an honorable discharge.
"Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics, and explosives," said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project. "We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution. Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh."
The report, available today on the SPLC website, will appear in next month's issue of Intelligence Report, the quarterly magazine of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, which has been tracking hate groups since 1981.
http://www.splcenter.org/ |
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