Riverbend on rape in Iraq,,freedom is on the marrch.

wake up America....riverbend has been writing about what we have brought to the people of Iraq for starting into the fifth year. is it ok with you, america, to pay for the war machine to create a living hell in the country of other humans????? humans who want the same things out of life that we do. (you know, clean water, food, shelter, safety, and community) wonder what the people of Iraq would have said if they had been consulted about hosting a war.....something tells me they would have opted for the "over there so we don't have to fight them here" option if they'd had a choice. they didn't have the option of watching the "shock and awe" show on TV if it fit into their schedules.
our government has been taken over by greedy corporatist criminal thugs and bullies(and yes, they should be considered armed and dangerous) and their plans for the masses(that's us) are based on the free trade model....as in no borders for corporats and for the rest of us ..hmmm......freedom is on the march......they are stealing our treasure to use to steal others treasure....
wake up america....freedom is on the march.........
are we gunna let this go on??????

wake up america....
time to pull over, and ask for directions.

Maliki's Reaction...
As expected, Al Maliki
is claiming the rape allegations are all lies. Apparently, his people simply
asked the officers if they raped Sabrine Al Janabi and they said no. I'm so glad
that's been cleared up.

No Iraqi woman under the circumstances- under any circumstances- would
publicly, falsely claim she was raped. There are just too many risks. There is
the risk of being shunned socially. There is the risk of beginning an endless
chain of retaliations and revenge killings between tribes. There is the shame of
coming out publicly and talking about a subject so taboo, she and her husband
are not only risking their reputations by telling this story, they are risking
their lives.
No one would lie about something like this simply to undermine the Baghdad
security operation. That can be done simply by calculating the dozens of dead
this last week. Or by writing about the mass detentions of innocents, or how
people are once again burying their valuables so that Iraqi and American troops
don't steal them.full post

.......... I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of ‘terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you
read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, “13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.” The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained. It’s a chapter right out of the book that documents American occupation in Iraq: the chapter that will tell the story of 14-year-old Abeer who was raped, killed and burned with her little sister and parents.They abducted her from her house in an area in southern Baghdad called Hai Al Amil. No- it wasn’t a gang. It was Iraqi peace keeping or security forces- the ones trained by Americans? You know them. She was brutally gang-raped and is now telling the story. Half her face is covered for security reasons or reasons of privacy. I translated what she said below.......

............I look at this woman and I can’t feel anything but rage. What did we gain? I know that looking at her, foreigners will never be able to relate. They’ll feel pity and maybe some anger, but she’s one of us. She’s not a girl in jeans and a t-shirt so there will only be a vague sort of sympathy. Poor third-world countries- that is what their womenfolk tolerate. Just know that we never had to tolerate this before. There was a time when Iraqis were safe in the streets. That time is long gone. We consoled ourselves after the war with the fact that we at least had a modicum of safety in our homes. Homes are sacred, aren’t they? That is gone too. She’s just one of tens,possibly hundreds, of Iraqi women who are violated in their own homes and in Iraqi prisons. She looks like cousins I have. She looks like friends. She looks like a neighbor I sometimes used to pause to gossip with in the street. Every Iraqi who looks at her will see a cousin, a friend, a sister, a mother, an aunt…

Humanitarian organizations are warning that three Iraqi women are to be executed next month. The women are Wassan Talib, Zainab Fadhil and Liqa Omar Muhammad. They are being accused of 'terrorism', i.e. having ties to the Iraqi resistance. It could mean they are relatives of people suspected of being in the resistance. Or it could mean they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. One of them gave birth in the prison. I wonder what kind of torture they've endured. Let no one say Iraqi women didn't get at least SOME equality under the American occupation- we are now equally as likely to get executed. And yet, as the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and
occupation- are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.
Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and
militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You
lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops.
That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.
full post

and this from Juan Cole.....

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Rape Case Political Football in Iraq Iraq War has Caused Spike in Global terrorism

Iraqi security forces, Shiites, raided a house looking for a possible Sunni Arab insurgent named al-Janabi. They found only his wife at home. They took her into custody (probably as a hostage). They accused her of cooking for insurgents. Then the police gang-raped her. She went on Aljazeera and told her story. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite head of a Shiite government, at first said he would have a commission look into her charges. Then he reversed himself and accused the woman of lying and implying that she was put up to it by the Sunni insurgency. Marc
Santora of the New York Times managed to interview the nurse who treated her, and found that Mrs. al-Janabi's story was corroborated.

full post