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Nov 6, 2008

Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women
by US Occupation Forces

[Note: FAKE photos, PROVED fakes, are being used by the govt in an attempt to DIS-CREDIT the REAL photos that have surfaced, and will surface in future.] [The following photograph, horrifying and disgusting as it is, appears to be a FAKE, a mere pretense; as the uniforms on the soldiers are all wrong, etc.] [So, if you are going to be offended, then be offended for the right reasons! At least good taste, rather than someone's Human Rights, are the standards being violated here!] [The gross anti-Semitism of the following paragraph, is something that the govt, and not any other entity, appears to be responsible for, in its propaganda department. It would under ordinary circumstances be a huge turnoff, unsympathetic; and that is in fact its purpose, strategically placed by the photographs. Makes the ordinary person think even more, "There is something fishy about these pics." That is what you are supposed to think: "These pics are FAKE." Which, of course, they are. But, next, you are being sub-consiously MANIPULATED to think, "Well, if these awful rape pictures are fake, showing fake American troops; then, therefore ALL pictures of American troops committing rapes, torture and atrocities, must be fake, too! Wow! Whatta relief! To "know" that American troops never commit no rapes and no atrocities never!!!!! ] [This makes for a real "Mind-fu*k"!] [It is of course entirely possible, that many of the sources picking up on these fake photos, did so not catching on to the fact that as journalists, they were being USED to spread U.S.govt DIS-INFORMATION! The more that happened, the happier the govt psy-ops got!]

(Please Note: Many of the photographs showing the rape of Iraqi women and the sodomization of Iraqi POW's at the Abu Ghraib prison are now at USA pornographic websites pointing to the possibility of collusion between the depraved US soldiers in the pictures and US based Jewish pornographers. Many of these photographs were also freely disseminated to US occupation forces, perhaps to inflame their nefarious desires and to motivate them to strike out against the Iraqi populace in these perverse ways.)

by Ernesto Cienfuegos
La Voz de Aztlan

-----------------
"The suggestion that the photos are real is, of course, ludicrous. While some of the select still shots appear dramatic and disturbing, the videos from which the still shots were taken give ample evidence that all participants were willing and that this was a porn shoot replete with high-school level acting skills and, in one case, a pseudo-disco porn soundtrack.

The only English spoken in the movies is the obligatory, "Oh, yeah." Two of the films feature "soldiers" speaking phrases in French and German. In addition, the uniforms have no insignia, the "soldiers" wear jungle camouflage and face paint, instead of desert camouflage. The helmets are not authentic, nor are the T-shirts or shoes.

One Internet blogger laughingly pointed out that one soldier's weapon was a paintball gun, and another one noted the ever-present "porn blanket" that appeared in every scene. One observer commented that the acrobats from Cirque du Soleil would have difficulty figuring out the moves involved in these multiple-partner performance shots.
The films are set in Budapest, not Iraq.
Some of Marchand's still shots were carried on an American site called "Iraq Babes."

133
Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women
World  (tags: Rape Iraqi Women US troops pictures )

Uhoud
- 17 days ago - aztlan.net
Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women


Whether those photos are real or faked; the RAPES described in WORDS, are REAL.
Whether THOSE photos are real or faked; they are LIKE photographs members of Congress have actually SEEN, that have NOT BEEN RELEASED TO THE PUBLIC, YET. ASK your Members of Congress, about them! {They probably aren't allowed to tell!}

Whether those photograph are real or fake, Members of the American Military, yes, the Former Boy or Girl Next Door, as young and guileless as Lynndie Englund, ARE PARTICIPATING IN RAPES AND TORTURES, ORDERED BY THE HIGHER-UPS; all the way up to the SECRETARY OF DEFENSE.

American soldiers ARE INDEED, RAPING, IMPREGNATING, AND IN SOME CASES MURDERING, their own female fellow-soldiers.
They ARE deliberately torturing and destroying helpless ANIMALS.
You are only getting a TINY TIP OF THE ICEBERG, of what is REALLY going on!

Yes, there ARE Iraqi women, children, and young boys, IN AMERICAN-RUN PRISONS in Iraq. Yes, they ARE being tortured -- often, to "soften up" their menfolk and parents, to force them to "talk".
THIS HAS BEEN DOCUMENTED. RELEASED PRISONERS HAVE TALKED ABOUT IT. There appeared last week, on the TV show FRONTLINE -- INTERVIEWS with former prisoners -- many of whom are EDUCATED and SPEAK PERFECTLY GOOD ENGLISH, and don't need translators! They have HEARD WOMEN SCREAMING thru their cell walls......NOT FAKE! and have NIGHTMARES about it STILL....... wouldn't YOU?

I believe that the FAKE SITE, could have been SET UP BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT, on PURPOSE in order to DISCREDIT the REAL STORIES. Together with that fake anti-Semitism. To discredit the site even more. The site, I believe, was SET UP IN THAT WAY, with the FAKE AND INACCURATE COSTUMES; so that, in future, when the REAL pictures were FINALLY shown, people in ADVANCE, would HAVE A REASON FOR DIS-BELIEVING THEM.

The U.S. Government, will do ANYTHING, just ANYTHING, to GET THEMSELVES OFF THE HOOK.
World Opinion, however, KNOWS, that, U.S. Govt-sponsored FAKE PORN SITE or no Fake Porn Site; the U.S. Govt. IS GUILTY AS SIN.
This slimey little trick of theirs, setting up THEIR OWN GOVT INTERNET OBVIOUSLY-FAKED WILLING-TO-BE-DISCOVERED-FAKE PORN SITE, will NOT WORK, NEVER, NEVER, EVER, in the eyes of the ENTIRE WORLD.

I believe that with OBAMA now as President, THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT WILL STOP SPENDING TAXPAYERS' MONEY TO SET UP ITS OWN FAKED RAPE PICTURE SITES TO COVER UP THE REAL PRISON RAPE PICTURES. I believe we are COUNTING on Obama, to SHUT DOWN THE PRISONS WHERE THE RAPES AND HUMILIATIONS OF IRAQIS ARE BEING COMMITTED, ENTIRELY. Unlike Bush did, we DO NOT EXPECT PRESIDENT OBAMA TO TRY TO DENY OR TO "JUSTIFY" THE EXISTENCE OF THESE PRISONS AND THESE ATROCITIES. Only the TRUTH, and not FAKERY and LIES, will set us, and the world, free from this nightmare!!!

=============================

Uhoud, it is NOT YOUR FAULT that you were TAKEN IN by this CLEVERLY-FAKED U.S. GOVERNMENT PORN SITE evilly crafted to DISCREDIT YOUR TRUE STORIES. Just be careful from now on -- and WATCH OUT FOR THAT FAKE ANTI-SEMITISM. You are a BRAVE SOUL; keep on reporting TRUTH, my Sister!!!!!

FURTHERMORE: KNOW, THAT I CANNOT PROVE THIS; THAT THE PICTURES IN QUESTION WERE TAKEN FROM A U.S. GOVERNMENT-MANUFACTURED DELIBERATELY-FAKED PORN SITE. HOWEVER, IT IS CONSISTENT WITH OTHER GOVERNMENT-SPONSORED DIS-INFORMATION ACTIVITIES AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE "BLACK OPS". FOR EXAMPLE, THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS SET UP MORE-THAN-ONE FAKE "9/11 TRUTHER" INTERNET SITE, COMPLETE WITH THE SAME ANTI-SEMITISM AND OBVIOUSLY-PROVING-FAKE PHOTOS. THE PURPOSE CLEARLY BEING, TO MAKE 9/11 TRUTHERS LOOK LIKE GULLIBLE FOOLS! AND SMEAR THEM ALL, AS BEING MOTIVATED BY RABID ANTI-SEMITISM!

I furthermore believe, that the "Angel H." person who posted SO OFTEN and at SUCH LENGTH under that picture thread, whose logo is a "Pirate Skull" {odd for an "Angel"!}; could be someone who has shilled for the govt here on Care2 before, quite a while ago, under other names, but with a JESTER'S SKULL LOGO. I seem to recognize that person's STYLE characteristics!! It is "intellectual sweet reasonableness" and "being 'willing' to look at both sides", etc. Yeah, insisting on giving "Equal Time" to govt LIES! The govt figures that that is how to "disarm" us "Liberals" -- sneak in the NeoCon agenda, but NEVER ADMIT you are going by a NeoCon script!!!!!!!! Also, the "Walkadelic" person on that thread, seems to be a govt shill. They both try to put forward "sweet reasonableness" and "looking at both sides" and "being fair" and "objectivity". Their statements do not hold up under scrutiny. And, they seem AWFULLY EAGER to REFUTE any Peace point-of-view!!!!!! at great, great, length -- as if they had nothing better to do! {They are BEING PAID.}

This trick of the govt's, DID NOT WORK WITH CARE2 MEMBERS, THE WAY THEY WANTED IT TO!!! We didn't CARE if the pictures were fake, or not! WE KNEW FROM OTHER SOURCES, THAT THE STORIES OF RAPES, WERE REAL! We Care2 members ARE NOT SO EASILY FOOLED!!!!!! into thinking "Well, if these pictures are fake, then, of course, ALL stories of 'our wonderful troops' doing bad things, must also be faked!" WE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US KNEW BETTER THAN THAT; AND SAID SO!

Watch out for that "Pirate Skull" "Angel", and "Walkadelic", on other threads. That "Skull" person, whatever his real name is, and he has gone by Randy and David and other names, seems to associate that "Death's Head" with a kind of a MOCKING SUPERIORITY, as if he is "taking us all in"............

BMutiny T     Barbara

Oct 2, 2006
The "horror of the shrieking boys" gets a rubber stamp from the boot-licking U.S. Congress & Senate as America officially becomes a dictatorship

http://tinyurl.com/mb2xc

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | September 29 2006
http://prisonplanet.com/

BUSH GIVEN AUTHORITY TO SEXUALLY TORTURE AMERICAN CHILDREN

Slamming the final nail in the coffin of everything America used to stand for, the boot-licking U.S. Senate last night gave President Bush the legal authority to abduct and sexually mutilate American citizens and American children in the name of the war on terror.

There is nothing in the "detainee" legislation that protects American citizens from being kidnapped by their own government and tortured.

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman states in the L.A. Times, "The compromise legislation....authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."
http://tinyurl.com/pspdk

Similarly, law Professor Marty Lederman explains: "this [subsection (ii) of the definition of 'unlawful enemy combatant'] means that if the Pentagon says you're an unlawful enemy combatant -- using whatever criteria they wish -- then as far as Congress, and U.S. law, is concerned, you are one, whether or not you have had any connection to 'hostilities' at all."
http://tinyurl.com/omb3j

We have established that the bill allows the President to define American citizens as enemy combatants. Now let's take it one step further.

Before this article is dismissed as another extremist hyperbolic rant, please take a few minutes out of your day to check for yourself the claim that Bush now has not only the legal authority but the active blessings of his own advisors to torture American children.

The backdrop of the Bush administration's push to obliterate the Geneva Conventions was encapsulated b y John “torture” Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, co-author of the PATRIOT Act, author of torture memos and White House advisor.

During a December 1st debate in Chicago with Notre Dame professor and international human rights scholar Doug Cassel, John Yoo gave the green light for the scope of torture to legally include sexual torture of infants.

Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?

Yoo: No treaty.

Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…

Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Click here for the audio.
http://tinyurl.com/dyz2y

So if the President thinks he needs to order children's penises to be put in vices, there is no law that can stop him and after last night's vote, the Senate and Congress, exemplified by sicko 16-year-old boy groomer Mark Foley (R-FL) , has graciously provided Bush its full support for kids around the world to be molested in the name of stopping terror.
http://tinyurl.com/hu4tv

Yoo's comments were made before the passage of the torture legislation last night. Up until that point Bush had merely cited his role as dictator-in-chief as carte-blanche excuse for ordering torture - now his regime have the audacity to openly put it in writing - going one step further than even the Nazis did.

Again, for those who are still deluded into thinking the extent of the "pressure" is loud music and cold water being thrown over Johnny Jihad in Ragheadistan, consider for a moment the fact that your own Congress and President who, according to the Constitution, are mandated to serve you, have just legalized abducting your kids from your home and electric shocking their genitals.

Now that the criminals have declared themselves outside of the law does that mean we'll see Bush barbecuing babies on the White House lawn? Of course not, but the policy of torturing children in front of their parents has already been signed off on by the Pentagon and enacted under the Copper Green program and it happened at Abu Ghraib .
http://tinyurl.com/nobyk
http://tinyurl.com/4hfuu

Women who were arrested with their children were forced to watch their boys being sodomized with chemical glow sticks as the cameras rolled. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says that the U.S. government is still withholding the tapes because of the horror of the "soundtrack of the shrieking boys" and their mothers begging to be killed in favor of seeing their children raped and tortured.
http://tinyurl.com/4jgm3

Your government has just lobbied for and Congress has passed legislation to discard the Geneva Conventions and mandate all this.

Pedophiles nationwide should rejoice - they can comfortably take a stroll down to the local swimming pool, grab whoever they like, drag them home, rape and torture them, and then in their defense cite the U.S. government as an example of how one should conduct themselves.

The bill also retroactively gives Bush, the Neo-Cons or any of their henchmen immunity from war crimes charges dating back to September 11 . Ask yourself why they would be so careful to protect themselves from accusations of war crimes.
http://tinyurl.com/lnxx3

Could that possibly be because they are knowingly committing war crimes?

The legislating of torture itself should be a criminal act. All laws that contradict the U.S. Constitution are null and void. It was once a law that black people were slaves.

Only by engaging in civil disobedience and refusing to tolerate or acknowledge the laws of a criminal regime that has greased the skids for sexually torturing kids can we ever have a hope of returning America to its past glory.

*fair use* 
Visibility: Everyone
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Posted: Oct 2, 2006 9:08am
Jul 30, 2006
The Hidden War Against Iraqi Women
Abu Ghraib. Haditha. Guantanamo. These are words that shame our country. Now, add to them Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a young Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up their crimes, her father, mother, and sister murdered. The rape of this one girl, if proven true, is probably not simply an isolated incident. But how would we know? In Iraq, rape is a taboo subject. Shamed by the rape, relatives of this girl wouldn't even hold a public funeral and were reluctant to reveal where she is buried.

Like women everywhere, Iraqi women have always been vulnerable to rape. But since the American invasion of their country, the reported incidence of sexual terrorism has accelerated markedly. -- and this despite the fact that few Iraqi women are willing to report rapes either to Iraqi officials or to occupation forces, fearing to bring dishonor upon their families. In rural areas, female rape victims may also be vulnerable to "honor killings" in which male relatives murder them in order to restore the family's honor. "For women in Iraq," Amnesty International concluded in a 2005 report, "the stigma frequently attached to the victims instead of the perpetrators of sexual crimes makes reporting such abuses especially daunting."

This specific rape of one Iraqi girl, however, is now becoming symbolic of the way the Bush administration has violated Iraq's honor; Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has already launched an inquest into the crime. In an administration that normally doesn't know the meaning of an apology, the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., both publicly apologized. In a fierce condemnation, the Muslim Scholars Association in Iraq denounced the crime: "This act, committed by the occupying soldiers, from raping the girl to mutilating her body and killing her family, should make all humanity feel ashamed."

Shame, yes, but that is hardly sufficient. After all, rape is now considered a war crime by the International Criminal Court.

It wasn't always that way. Soldiers have long viewed women as the spoils of war, even when civilian or military leaders condemned such behavior, but in the early 1990s, a new international consensus began to emerge on the act of rape. Prodded by an energized global women's movement, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in 1993. Subsequent statutes in the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for
Rwanda, as well as the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court in July 2002, all defined rape as a crime against humanity or a war crime.

No one accuses American soldiers of running through the streets of Iraq, raping women as an instrument of war against the insurgents (though such acts are what caused three Bosnian soldiers, for the first time in history, to be indicted in 2001 for the war crime of rape).
Still, the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.

Rape and sexual humiliation in prisons 

The scandal of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib focused on the torture, sexual abuse, and humiliation of Iraqi men. A variety of sources suggest that female prisoners suffered similar treatment, including rape.

Few Americans probably realize that the American-run prison at Abu Ghraib also held female detainees. Some of them were arrested by Americans for political reasons -- because they were relatives of Baathist leaders or because the occupying forces thought they could use them as bargaining chips to force male relatives to inform on insurgents or give themselves up.

According to a Human Rights Watch report, the secrecy surrounding female detentions "resulted from a collusion of the families and the occupying forces." Families feared social stigma; the occupying forces feared condemnation by human rights groups and anger from Iraqis who saw such treatment of women by foreigners as a special act of violation.

On the condition of anonymity and in great fear, some female detainees nevertheless did speak with human rights workers after being released from detention. They have described beatings, torture, and isolation. Like their male counterparts, they reserve their greatest bitterness for sexual humiliations suffered in American custody. Nearly all female detainees reported being threatened with rape. Some women were interrogated naked and subjected to derision and humiliating remarks by soldiers.

The British Guardian reported that one female prisoner managed to smuggle a note out of Abu Ghraib. She claimed that American guards were raping the few female detainees held in the prison and that some of them were now pregnant. In desperation, she urged the Iraqi resistance to bomb the jail in order to spare the women further shame.
Amal Kadham Swadi, one of seven Iraqi female attorneys attempting to represent imprisoned women, told the Guardian that only one woman she met with was willing to speak about rape. "She was crying. She told us she had been raped. Several American soldiers had raped her. She had tried to fight them off, and they had hurt her arm. She showed us the stitches. She told us, 'We have daughters and husbands. For God's sake don't tell anyone about this.'"

Professor Huda Shaker, a political scientist at Baghdad University, also told the Guardian that women in Abu Ghraib have been sexually abused and raped. She identified one woman, in particular, who was raped by an American military policeman, became pregnant, and later disappeared.

Professor Shaker added, "A female colleague of mine was arrested and taken there. When I asked her after she was released what happened at Abu Ghraib, she started crying. Ladies here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects. They say everything is OK. Even in a very advanced society in the west it is very difficult to talk about rape."

Shaker, herself, encountered a milder form of sexual abuse at the hands of one American soldier. At a checkpoint, she said, an American soldier "pointed the laser sight [of his gun] directly in the middle of my chest… Then he pointed to his penis. He told me, 'Come here, bitch, I'm going to %#&!*% you.'"

Writing from Baghdad, Luke Hardin of the Guardian reported that at Abu Ghraib journalists have been forbidden from talking to female detainees, who are cloistered in tiny windowless cells. Senior US military officers who have escorted journalists around Abu Ghraib, however, have admitted that rapes of women took place in the cellblock where 19 "high-value" male detainees were also being held. Asked how such abuse could have happened, Colonel Dave Quantock, now in charge of the prison's detention facilities, responded, "I don't know. It's all about leadership. Apparently it wasn't there."

No one should be surprised that women detainees, like male ones, were subjected to sexual abuse at Abu Ghraib. Think of the photographs we've already seen from that prison. If acts of ritual humiliation could be used to "soften up" men, then the rape of female detainees is hardly unimaginable.

But how can we be sure? In January, 2004, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. military official in Iraq, ordered Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba to investigate persistent allegations of human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib. The Taguba Report confirmed that in at least one instance a U.S. military policeman had raped at least one female prisoner and that guards had videotaped and photographed naked female detainees.
Seymour Hersh also reported in a 2004 issue of the New Yorker magazine that these secret photos and videos, most of which still remain under wraps by the Pentagon, show American soldiers "having sex with a female Iraqi prisoner." Additional photos have made their way to the web sites of Afterdowningstreet.org and Salon.com. In one photograph, a woman is raising her shirt, baring her breast 
presumably as she was ordered to do.

The full range of pictures and videotapes are likely to show a great deal more. Members of Congress who viewed all the pictures and videotapes from Abu Ghraib seemed genuinely shaken and sickened by what they saw. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn called them "appalling"; then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle described them as "horrific." Ever since the scandal broke in April 2004, human rights and civil liberties groups have been engaged in a legal battle with the Department of Defense, demanding that it release the rest of the visual documents. Only when all those documents are available to the general public will we have a clearer -- and undoubtedly more ghastly -- record of the sexual acts forced upon both female and male detainees.

Sexual Terrorism on the Streets

Meanwhile, the chaos of the war has also led to a rash of kidnappings and rapes of women outside of prison walls. After interviewing rape and abduction victims, as well as eyewitnesses, Iraqi police and health professionals, and U.S. military police and civil affairs officers, Human Rights Watch released a report in July, 2003, titled Climate of Fear: Sexual Violence and Abduction of Women and Girls in Baghdad. Only months after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, they had already learned of twenty-five credible allegations of the rape and/or abduction of Iraqi women. Not surprisingly, the report found that "police officers gave low priority to allegations of sexual violence and abduction, that the police were under-resourced, and that victims of sexual violence confronted indifference and sexism from Iraqi law enforcement personnel." Since then, as chaos, violence, and bloodletting have descended on Iraq, matters have only gotten worse.

After the American invasion, local gangs began roaming Baghdad, snatching girls and women from the street. Interviews with human rights investigators have produced some horrifying stories. Typical was nine-year-old "Saba A." who was abducted from the stairs of the building where she lives, taken to an abandoned building nearby, and raped. A family friend who saw Saba A. immediately following the rape told Human Rights Watch:

"She was sitting on the stairs, here, at 4:00 p.m. It seems to me that probably he hit her on the back of the head with a gun and then took her to [a neighboring] building. She came back fifteen minutes later, bleeding [from the vaginal area]. [She was still bleeding two days later, so] we took her to the hospital."

The medical report by the U.S. military doctor who treated Saba A. "documented bruising in the vaginal area, a posterior vaginal tear, and a broken hymen."

The U.S. State Department's June 2005 report on the trafficking of women suggested that the extent of the problem in Iraq is "difficult to appropriately gauge" under current chaotic circumstances, but cited an unknown number of Iraqi women and girls being sent to Yemen, Syria, Jordan, and Persian Gulf countries for sexual exploitation.

In May 2006, Brian Bennett wrote in Time Magazine that a visit to "the Khadamiyah Women's Prison in the northern part of Baghdad immediately produces several tales of abduction and abandonment. A stunning 18-year-old nicknamed Amna, her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, says she was taken from an orphanage by an armed gang just after the US invasion and sent to brothels in Samarra, al-Qaim on the border with Syria, and Mosul in the north before she was taken back to Baghdad, drugged with pills, dressed in a suicide belt and sent to bomb a cleric's office in Khadamiyah, where she turned herself in to the police. A judge gave her a seven-year jail sentence ‘for her sake' to protect her from the gang, according to the prison director."

"Families and courts," Bennett reported, "are usually so shamed by the disappearance [and presumed rape] of a daughter that they do not report these kidnappings. And the resulting stigma of compromised chastity is such that even if the girl should resurface, she may never be taken back by her relations."

Disappearing women

To avoid such dangers, countless Iraqi women have become shut-ins in their own homes. Historian Marjorie Lasky has described this situation in "Iraqi Women Under Siege," a 2006 report for Codepink, an anti-war women's organization. Before the war, she points out, many educated Iraqi women participated fully in the work force and in public life. Now, many of them rarely go out. They fear kidnap and rape; they are terrified of getting caught in the cross-fire between Americans and insurgents; they are frightened by sectarian reprisals; and they are scared of Islamic militants who intimidate or beat them if they are not "properly covered."

"In the British-occupied south," Terri Judd reported in the British Independent, "where Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi's Army retains a stranglehold, women insist the situation is at its worst. Here they are forced to live behind closed doors only to emerge, concealed behind scarves, hidden behind husbands and fathers. Even wearing a pair of trousers is considered an act of defiance, punishable by death."

Invisible women -- for some Iraqi fundamentalist Islamic leaders, this is a dream come true. The Ministry of the Interior, for example, recently issued notices warning women not to go out on their own. "This is a Muslim country and any attack on a woman's modesty is also an attack on our religious beliefs," said Salah Ali, a senior ministry official. Religious leaders in both Sunni and Shiite mosques have used their sermons to persuade their largely male congregations to keep working women at home. "These incidents of abuse just prove what we have been saying for so long," said Sheikh Salah Muzidin, an imam at a mosque in Baghdad. "That it is the Islamic duty of women to stay in their homes, looking after their children and husbands rather than searching for work---especially with the current lack of security in the country."

In the early 1970s, American feminists redefined rape and argued that it was an act driven not by sexual lust, but by a desire to exercise power over another person. Rape, they argued, was an act of terrorism that kept all women from claiming their right to public space. That is precisely what has happened to Iraqi women since the American invasion of Iraq. Sexual terrorism coupled with religious zealotry has stolen their right to claim their place in public life.

This, then, is a hidden part of the unnecessary suffering loosed by the reckless invasion of Iraq. Amid the daily explosions and gunfire that make the papers is a wave of sexual terrorism, whose exact dimensions we have no way of knowing, and that no one here notices, unleashed by the Bush administration in the name of exporting "democracy" and fighting "the war on terror."

Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen teaches history and public policy at U.C. Berkeley and is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute. A new edition of her most recent book, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin, 2001), will be published with an updated epilogue in 2007.
 
This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), a blog of the Nation Institute run by Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War
=========================
Please see that this important and verified information gets out to the media, and on the Internet -- it is the most hidden information of the entire illegal Iraq war and Occupation!
B Mutiny T
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Posted: Jul 30, 2006 12:23pm

 

 
 
Content and comments expressed here are the opinions of Care2 users and not necessarily that of Care2.com or its affiliates.

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BMutiny TCorporationsEvil
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TAKE ACTION: Protect Domestic Violence Victims From Further HarmA bill was presented in 2010 to start a program for a GPS tracking device to notify law enforcement officials and the victim whenever a violator enters a restricted area. Since then, this...

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