April 2003 – Citizen Reporter

The first round of Argentina’s elections took place yesterday. How difficult it must be to vote in an election, when your country has been completely robbed and sold by the very political class that continues to present itself as the saviors of the people. How many more IMF and worldbank loans will the next president take out so that Argentina can get a quick-fix of cash only to be hit with huge debts for the next 100 years. How many more banks will fold and withhold people’s money. How many more privatizations will the next president give the green light to while his people are desparate and hungry.

What a great day in Argentina. Election day. It’s like going to a bad restaurant to choose from the awful menu… the food you will be eating for the next 5 years or so.

Guantanamo Bay… Camp X-Ray… where the US thinks it doesn’t have to care about human rights… among the places it chooses to ignore human rights in. I’ll let South Africa’s Mail and Guardian illustrate:

US detains children at Guantanamo Bay

23 April 2003 13:44

The US military has admitted that children aged 16 years and younger are among the detainees being interrogated at its prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a US military spokesperson, yesterday said all the teenagers being held were “captured as active combatants against US forces”, and described them as “enemy combatants”.

The children, some of whom have been held at Guantanamo for over a year, are imprisoned in separate cells from the adult detainees, Lt Col Johnson said. He would say only that the teenagers are “very few, a very small number” and would not say how old the youngest prisoner is.

The US military confirmed their presence yesterday after Australia’s ABC television reported that children were being held at Guantanamo, the controversial detention centre where prisoners from the war in Afghanistan have been held by the US, in breach of the Geneva conventions, for over a year.

The news sparked outrage from human rights groups already campaigning against the indefinite detention of the roughly 660 males from 42 countries, held on suspicion of having links to al-Qaeda or Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime. They have not been charged or allowed access to lawyers.

“That the US sees nothing wrong with holding children at Guantanamo and interrogating them is a shocking indicator of how cavalier the Bush administration has become about respecting human rights,” said an Amnesty International spokesman, Alistair Hodgett.

Human Rights Watch said the US was exacerbating a contentious situation. “[The detention of youths] reflects our broader concerns that the US never properly determined the legal status of those held in the conflict,” said James Ross, legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York.

Lt Col Johnson said the juveniles were being held because “they have potential to provide important information in the ongoing war on terrorism”.

“Their release is contingent on the determination that they are not a threat to the [US] nation and have no further intelligence value.”

Lt Col Johnson said officials determined that some detainees were younger than 16 during medical and other screenings after their arrival in Cuba. He added that all the prisoners aged under 16 years were brought to Guantanamo after January 1 2002 — suggesting that some were 15 or younger when they were first imprisoned.

In September 2002, Canadian officials reported that a 15-year-old Canadian had been captured on July 27 after being badly wounded in a firefight in eastern Afghanistan. Canada’s prime minister, Jean Chr?tien said he was seeking consular access to the boy.

Last week, Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper reported that the youth, now 16, is being held in Guantanamo and that US officials have refused access to Canadian officials.

The newspaper quoted unidentified sources as saying that the youth allegedly threw a grenade that killed Sergeant 1st Class Christopher James Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Globe and Mail said US officials would want to interrogate the Canadian because his father has been identified as a senior financial leader of al-Qaeda.

Lawyers have blamed the indefinite detentions for increasing depression and suicide attempts at the camp, which received the first detainees in January 2001.

According to the US military, there have been 25 suicide attempts by 17 prisoners at Camp X-Ray, with 15 attempts made this year.

Just this Monday the US military announced that one prisoner, who it said was under supervision in the acute care unit of a new mental health ward, made a repeated suicide attempt. – Guardian Unlimited ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

Largest political contributor among the general contracting corporations…. Bechtel. Giving $277,050 to Democrats and Republicans, its interesting that today this very company was awarded a $680 million contract to rebuild Iraqi water, power and sewage systems. A former secretary of state and defense secretary are employed by Bechtel. How interesting, how lucky, how completely surprising that they should get such a mega-contract.

Just one of my comrads, out of many, who was murdered this week:

Silenced in the name of freedom

By Paul Belden

AMMAN – Some reporters can pull off the fashion trick of wearing a military helmet without looking ridiculous, but not Tariq Ayyoub. He had a round open face that just wasn’t suited for it. And none of those strap-on steel hardhats ever seemed to stay upright on his head. They always went slipping down one side of his face or the other during stand-ups, making him appear like a rained-on goof.

That was too bad, because the man was a fighter. None of his friends or family members can even remember the number of times he was arrested for practicing journalism as an al-Jazeera producer in a region still struggling with the concept of openness and a free press. “Oh, many many times,” said Khalid, his brother. “I can’t count them.”

The most recent time was just a couple weeks ago when Tariq reported on rumors of American military movements near the al-Ruwasheid border area in Jordan and got brought in for questioning, again. Nothing stuck, however, and within the week he had that helmet back on his head and was reporting live from Baghdad. Being Jordanian, the bastard didn’t need a visa, unlike journalists from many other countries.

I call him that, with affection, for Tariq was my friend. Of course, he had no business being my friend – I only arrived in town in mid-February, an annoying new-guy reporter looking for contacts – and an American, by no means anybody’s favorite flavor of the moment. But Tariq had graciously taken the time to show me some ropes, give me some phone numbers, pass me some tips, always in his distinctive clipped Queen’s-English accent that held within it a hint of India.

I’d like to say that it was my irresistible charm at work, but no such thing – Tariq did what he did for me for everybody. He took a look at you, and then he made you a friend. It was just the way he was.

Which was probably why Tariq had so many friends. People repaid him in kind. He earned the sort of loyalty and respect that doesn’t come through by being a braggart or a bully-boy, so common in journalism. He won hearts and minds by setting an example of bravery and honesty and kindness that others couldn’t help but seek to emulate.

“If you write one thing about him,” said Sawsan abu-Hamdeh, al-Jazeera’s Amman correspondent, “say this: Tariq was an honest man. He was incorruptible.”

As the world now knows, Tariq Ayyoub was killed on Tuesday morning when two or more American missiles hit the al-Jazeera office on the west bank of the Tigris river in Baghdad. Tariq was standing on the rooftop at the time, reporting on a battle that was shaping up several hundred meters to the south. The Palestine Hotel, haunt of journalists, was also hit that morning, killing two journalists, as well as the office of Abu Dhabi TV, located about 300 meters upriver from where Tariq was killed.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that it would never intentionally target independent journalists in general, or al-Jazeera in particular. Pentagon spokesman Bryan G Whitman went so far as to tell the Washington Post newspaper on Wednesday, “Not only are we not trying to silence their [al-Jazeera’s] journalists, we’re one of the few countries that has not expelled their journalists.” It seemed a weird thing to say of somebody with Tariq’s record of journalistic bravery, but never mind. Maybe they saw that helmet and thought he was going to jump down from that rooftop and charge a tank.

But it doesn’t matter. Every street vendor and taxi driver in Amman knows the circumstances of Tariq’s death, and to say that anybody here is buying any part of that crap for a heartbeat would be to commit a severe overstatement of fact. “Of course they meant to kill him – for Christ’s sake, he was standing on the roof! Two bombs came in and blew it apart,” said Serene Halasa, a former al-Jazeera correspondent whose first job in journalism was working under Tariq. “The lies they tell – they’re insulting. Without honor.”

Halasa was one of a crowd of Tariq’s friends and colleagues who had crowded at the al-Jazeera offices in Amman on Tuesday to stand in front of a ceiling-high bank of television screens and watch a re-run of the last report Tariq had filed from Baghdad. It was a piece about how ordinary Iraqis were trying to maintain a scrap of normality in their lives while street battles raged a few kilometers away. He showed people shopping, cooking, doing normal things.

“Probably this is just the calm before the storm,” he said in the wrap-up. There was no blood in the piece – that came later, with the footage of Tariq’s body being carried out to a car in a blood-stained blanket later that day.

After Tariq’s last piece, the bank of screens in the al-Jazeera office cut to live coverage of US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair making important promises to the people of Iraq. It was somewhat unfortunate timing: their eyes red and glistening, people in the room began spitting on the screen. “Liars,” they said. “Killers.” And so on.

Tariq Ayyoub was born in 1968 in Kuwait to a Palestinian family that originally hailed from Nablus. His family moved to Jordan in 1990 as refugees of the first Gulf War. He earned a scholarship to study economics (a bachelor’s degree) and English literature (master’s) at university in Kolkata, India, after which he returned to Jordan to pursue a career in journalism. Before joining al-Jazeera, he worked as a producer for APTN and wrote for the English-language daily The Jordan Times. He is survived by his wife, Dima, and a one-year-old daughter, Fatmeh.

In a covered parking lot across from the Ayyoub family home in Amman on Tuesday, a group of old men sat in rows on small white plastic chairs waiting for Tariq’s father to arrive. He finally did, looking old and gray and tired in his red-and-black kaffiyeh (scarf), a whitened stubble sprinkling his weathered cheeks.

As the men in the room rose one by one to kiss him on both cheeks in the traditional Arab greeting, many whispered in his ear the words shahid, shahid. Meaning, Your son Tariq is a martyr.

One of the men, noticing my obvious outsider status, asked me where I came from: “Ah, the land of the free,” he said. “Tariq was a fighter for freedom, also. Freedom of speech? You know this, I think? Tariq also fought for this.”

Never forget…. Never Forget… The same way so many Iraqi’s cheer and celebrate the US invadors in Baghdad…. that is the same way they cheered and celebrated the national Baath Party in the seventies. The same people who swore allegience to Saddam, will now swear they support the USA.

They’ll keep showing you that image of Saddam statues.. over and over… if they keep showing it to you, you might start to believe in what is happenning. Because we’d like to believe something wonderful is happenning. But sadly, nothing new is happenning. Iraq has returned to colonialism. Perhaps it is better than dictatorship. Perhaps. But never forget the thousands that have died… the millions who are now in desparate situations.. lacking water… lacking food, lacking work, lacking safety. Welcome to freedom Iraq… now start begging.

Within Europe, the EU subsidizes a news channel called: Euronews. Whats characteristic of Euronews is that there are no anchors or little people at desks saying “Good morning, Im____ and here’s whats happenning.” Instead, Euronews features reports from the field and that’s it. Often the footage comes from the public media of that country. One excellent segment is called NO COMMENT, where you watch footage from some current event with no comment, just the original sound.

Well, ever since the begining of the US’s invasion of Iraq, Euronews has offered some really unique and un-sensational coverage, and the NO COMMENT segment is always footage from the streets of Basra or Baghdad, etc. Today’s footage showed the people of Baghdad…. piling sandbags in front of their shops draging supplies into their crumbling homes. Perhaps the most striking thing was the age of these people; standing guard with what seemed to be a broken kalishnakov was an old Iraqi man… probably 70 years old.. he seemed alert and determined but scared. So scared. He probably has grandchildren. Some of them may not have survived.. or may not survive this invasion.. and the old man seems to have accepted the responsibility.. to fight in their honor. He probably can’t move very fast, so he has propped himself up against the sandbags. He’s not defending a regime. He’s not defending any man or devil-incarnate. This man is defending his home, his shop, his street, his children. And while it may not fit the American Government’s line of justification and moralization of what they have done in Iraq, it is the truth for many old men in Baghdad. Liberators? This is not the first foreign army to make that claim, these old men do not forget.

Watching these nervous old men… awaiting certain death… a thought re-occurs… how much can be justified? How many lives are “worth it”. How sure are these leaders that there was no other way? How hard did they try to avoid this?