Monday October 20, 2008, 8:49 am
Los Angeles, Alta California - May 2, 2004 - (ACN) The release, by CBS News, of the photographs showing the heinous sexual abuse and torture of Iraqi POW's at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison has opened a Pandora's box for the Bush regime. Apparently, the suspended US commander of the prison where the worst abuses took place, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, has refused to take the fall by herself and has implicated the CIA, Military Intelligence and private US government contractors in the torturing of POW's and in the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well.

Brigadier General Janis Karpinski said to the Washington Post that Military Intelligence, rather than the Military Police, dictated the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "The prison, and that particular cellblock where the events took place, were under the control of the Military Intelligence command," Brigadier General Karpinski said to the Washington Post Saturday night in a telephone interview from her home in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

Brigadier General Karpinski, who commanded the 800th Military Police Brigade, described a high-pressure Military Intelligence and CIA command that prized successful interrogations. A month before the alleged abuses and rapes occurred, she said, a team of CIA, Military Intelligence officers and private consultants under the employ of the US government came to Abu Ghraib. "Their main and specific mission was to give the interrogators new techniques to get more information from detainees," she said.

Today, new photographs were sent to La Voz de Aztlan from confidential sources depicting the shocking rapes of two Iraqi women by what are purported to be US Military Intelligence personnel and private US mercenaries in military fatigues. It is now known that hundreds of these photographs had been in circulation among the troops in Iraq. The graphic photos were being swapped between the soldiers like baseball cards.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one Mexican-American soldier told La Voz de Aztlan, "Maybe the officers didn't know what was going on, but everybody else did. I have seen literally hundreds of these types of pictures." Many of the pictures was destroyed last September when the luggage of soldiers was searched as they left Iraq, he said

An investigation, led by Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba, identified two military intelligence officers and two civilian contractors for the Army as key figures in the abuse cases at the Abu Ghraib prison. In an internal report on his findings, Major General Taguba said he suspected that the four were "either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and strongly recommended disciplinary action."

The Taguba report states that "military intelligence interrogators and other U.S. Government Agency interrogators actively requested that Military Police guards set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses." The report noted that one civilian interrogator, a contractor from a company called CACI International and attached to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, "clearly knew his instructions" to the Military Police equated to physical and sexual abuse. It is not known whether these instructions included, or led to, the raping of Iraqi women detainees as well.

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Iraqi POW Torture Photographs (Click Here)

A released Iraqi POW has come forward and stated to the internationl media that that he was sodomized at the Abu Ghraib prison while a female US soldier cheered and the entire incident filmed.
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Monday October 20, 2008, 8:55 am
Our Tax dollars at work!

This is an outrage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:02 am
hi thanks uhoud ,even more shame to the usa,cut the?of them the evil bastards.

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:05 am
These assholes -- Bushco, ALL OF THEM -- should be sent to Guantanamo where they can spend the rest of their twisted, sadistic lives.

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:09 am
Thank you AniTa for the link , I publish it because i want to let others see what happend in Iraq and i would like to ask all is that fair??? some friends block me for sending the truth to the world thank you for them

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:21 am
Noted!

It will be a great world when the people at the top are held accountable.

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:22 am
This is DISGUSTING!!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:23 am
It is a known fact that the middle eastern women are among the most beautiful in the world..and the US's depraved killing machines have taken advantage of the situation to do whatever they please...and with the endorsement of the US government.

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:26 am
There are many people who refuse to believe this is true, but these are the same people who support the Bush regime...and of course keep in mind that the news has been distorted during the entire occupation of Iraq. It is hard to believe their 'beloved troops' can commit such heinous atrocities.

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:33 am
AniTa middle east women are among the most beautiful in the world but they are with out luck sufferd too much they dream with peace security they miss happy and life and I am one of them

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:38 am
Sickening and disgusting! Those are NOT human beings, just horrible beasts!!!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:39 am
GARRISON OSWALD
MFP/IPI
10-13-08
Monday

AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN FOR THE PAST SIX YEARS, HAVE ROUTINELY BEEN RAPING AND KILLING MUSLIM WOMEN AND GIRLS, SOME AS YOUNG AS SEVEN YEARS OLD.

THIS WAS REVEALED BY CERTAIN US ARMY PERSONNEL LAST WEEK IN PRIVATE LEAKS TO SOME MEMBERS OF INTERNATIONAL PRESS ORGANIZATIONS.

THESE ATTACKS ARE ONLY ONE OF THE MANY BRUTAL AND SAVAGE TACTICS IN ROUTINE USE BY THE US ARMY TO PSYCHOLOGICALLY DEVASTATE AND RENDER MUSLIM POPULATIONS MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY IMPOTENT, SINCE IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT IN ISLAMI SOCIETIES IN GENERAL AND MUSLIM FAMILIES IN PARTICULAR, THE RAPE OR PHYSICAL MOLESTATION OF A FEMALE IS TAKEN AS THE MOST EXTREME AND ULTIMATE FORM OF VIOLATION.

THESE US ARMY SOURCES ALSO CONFIRMED, THAT SUCH ACTS HAVE BEEN ORDERED BY THE ABSOLUTE TOP MOST COMMANDERS IN THE US MILITARY, THE ISAF (INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE) AND ALSO NATO TOP BRASS OPERATING IN AFGHANISTAN.

THAT CURRENTLY ACTIVE PERSONNEL IN THE US ARMY THEMSELVES HAVE ADMITTED TO SUCH HEINOUS AND ABOMINABLE CRIMES BY THEIR OWN GIs AND ALSO THE ISAF AND NATO SOLDIERS, WILL ONLY BRING ABOUT MORE AGGRESSIVE AND MORE FREQUENT RETALIATORY ATTACKS BY THE MUJAHIDEEN, THE TALIBAN AND OTHER JIHADI GROUPS AGAINST THE AMERICANS.

THESE ACTS BY THE US MILITARY, ISAF AND NATO HAVE ANOTHER VERY DANGEROUS HIDDEN AGENDA BEHIND THEM-----SUCH BARBARIC ACTS WILL MOST CERTAINLY PRODUCE RETALIATION FROM THE MUJAHIDEEN AND AS A REACTIONARY RESPONSE, THE US MILITARY, ISAF AND NATO FORCES CAN THEN PROLONG AND THUS JUSTIFY AND LEGITIMIZE THEIR OBVIOUSLY BLATANT ILLICIT AND ILLEGITIMATE PRESENCE IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES, OF WHICH PAKISTAN IS NEXT ON THEIR LIST!
http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/mld/pol/877568240.html

Monday October 20, 2008, 9:40 am
It's been going on for six years and still people are NOT aware of it.

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:13 am
SICKENING!!!!!!!!!!! THESE BEASTS NEED TO BE STOPPED!!!!!!!!!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:29 am
noted in outrage.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am beyond words

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:29 am
Disgusting! Thank you for posting this we should never close our eyes when soldiers or helpers do this! How does the US military deal with these rapists? Do they go to prison in the USA? Please keep us updated Uhoud! The world needs the truth!
Make this world a better world! Spread light! And fight the darkness!
Namaste
Hans

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:40 am
The part about Us soldiers colluding with " US based Jewish pornographers" is hardly a helpful statement to put on their website, though.

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:45 am
Of course enyone with half a brain knows what has been and is going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everyone of those soldiers in these conflict zones are somebody's father, son, husband, brother, uncle etc yet when they go to war they would hardly be recognizable to those they left behind. How many family members will confront them when they finally return home with the question: "Did you participate in the atrocities perpetrated against those women, girls, boys, men..." None will ask it because they don't want to know nor do they want to believe that their own flesh and blood could be so evil. "It was the others - not our boy" (am I right here?)

Lets keep religion out of the equation and let us remember the wars in europe and subsequent occupation. Let us remember Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia and the other so-called skirmishes and conflicts involving soldiers - the rapes, murders etc that happened there were no less abomniable than what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. What makes these people turn into sub-human beasts once they don a uniform? There is absolutely no excuse for any of their dispicable actions. When they return home, they will be welcomed by their families with open arms who will be overjoyed to have their soldierboy back safe and sound and all the horror they have inflicted on the helpless and vulnerable will NEVER be spoken off.

Go ahead, crucify me for what I have written - but if you stop and think for a moment, you will know deep in your hearts that I am right.

Monday October 20, 2008, 11:35 am
Absoultly disgusting typical human beings doing what they please

Monday October 20, 2008, 11:46 am
I am thoroughly sickened and outraged by this story and what makes me sadder is that I am not in the least bit surprised. What angers me so much is that we invade their country in the name of human rights and democracy and then our troops perpetrate these acts of violence, completely negating the purpose in them being there.
What kind of message are we sending to these people? Why are we so surprised that insurgents continue to resist invasion? To a proud nation such as Iraq, it is sometimes considered better to die whilst fighting for your honour, no matter how futile, than to be humiliated and exploited in this way.

Monday October 20, 2008, 11:50 am
I am speechless - this goes beyond degrading; my heart goes out to the woman. These so called 'soldiers' are nothing but evil b******s that deserve to have their manhood chopped off and force fed to them....rape is one of the worst crimes (let alone publishing the photos - I feel physically sick) as the victim has to live with the memory of the disgusting abuse. I hope these soldiers (they don't deserve to be called men or even human)are tried and imprisoned. The US military must know who they are - why do we keep hearing of so much abuse of power from the US military? I wonder what brainwashing they receive in training - are their egos that inflated that they think they are above decency? Thank you for alerting us Uhoud - horrific though this is, you are right...the truth must be told. Noted with disgust and sadness.

Monday October 20, 2008, 12:21 pm
Marena...Excellent well thought out comment. Yes,.. unfortunately you are right.

Monday October 20, 2008, 12:30 pm
This is sickening. The same thing happens in Darfur. Raping women and girls does not depend on the beauty of the victim -being beauty criteria subjective but highly dependant on culture- as AniTa states: raping women and girls has always been another "tactic" to destroy the enemy, and is extended throughout the world. STOP THE WAR! STOP VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN NOW!

Monday October 20, 2008, 12:41 pm
Of course this goes on.
It happened in every war in history, why should this one be any different.

Monday October 20, 2008, 12:48 pm
The part on the website about US soldiers colluding with " US based Jewish pornographers" is hardly a helpful statement to put on their website, though.

It lends a bit of dis-credit to the information, dontchathink?

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:05 pm
How could they?

When will the commander in chief do something about these boys out of control?
Oh,I forget,he approves.

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:14 pm
careful... that photo was already exposed as a fake several years ago...

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:18 pm
Monday October 20, 2008, 9:25 am
There are many people who refuse to believe this is true, but these are the same people who support the Bush regime...and of course keep in mind that the news has been distorted during the entire occupation of Iraq. It is hard to believe their 'beloved troops' can commit such heinous atrocities

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:27 pm
Unf*****gbelievable! Though not surprising, I am totally outraged!

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:29 pm
Fake or not-this is still going on everywhere.

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:33 pm
I am not at all familiar with the site this comes from, so I really don't know wether this is fact or propaganda coming from the site, or scare tactics, that does happen in times of war.

And no Uhoud, I am not insulting anyone here. If these photo's are factual, these crimes MUST be addressed. This kind of behavior is deplorable. Rape though is not a crime out of attraction, it is a crime of power and control. It doesn't take good looks to get raped or matter what kind of clothing one wears.

I am not blind to the fact that things like this happen, they happen every day in every neighborhood. I trust you Uhoud, I have seen other stories you have posted, but I do not know this site. I am searching to see if any acredited sources are reporting this news.

I too saw this photo several years ago, or at least one that was strangely similar in nature.

But if it's true, I agree with Francesca that they should have their manhood chopped off and be in prison a long long long time. IF it's true, it is another case in point that those in war need constant mental examination and evaluation. War only destroys, wether it be a country, a building or a human mind.

Human rights must be upheld
People must be held accountable for their actions
And the innocent who are smack dab in the middle of any war caught in all the crossfire need to be heard, need to be recognized and understood!

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:36 pm
I wish these photo not true and fack but if they are fack what about these photo in that link? http://www.aztlan.net/torture_iraqi_pows.htm

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:43 pm
AniTa H said : "There are many people who refuse to believe this is true, but these are the same people who support the Bush regime"

That is a very short-sighted statement, considering the people questioning authenticity. To demand that news sources be reliable is a good idea. While this issue is most likely VERY real, the photos have appeared before and been proven fake.

In addition, the website (if you actually visit it) makes claims again "Jewish US Pornographers" which makes it seem a bit racist in nature.

Bashing someone for saying so by claiming they are blind "Bush supporters" is the truly ignorant statement.

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:47 pm
They don't have the CBS link to the photo's themselves, they only say they are from CBS. I will search CBS to see if I can find anything, along with a few other sources. Like I said, I'm not saying they are lying, I just can't be certain because I have never been at this site before to even know what or where thet get the stories from.

Whatever and whoever did the acts in this story wether a factual happening or a fabrication needs their actions investigated and dealt with accordingly. Even in animal rights advocacy I have seen misleading info given out to support someone's view or get a reaction. I am just very careful about sources when it comes to actually believing it.

I mean, I could ask my husband to dress up in military gear while we stage a rape scene and find some site who would publish it somewhere, so we all must be cautious with sources and facts.

Monday October 20, 2008, 1:48 pm
By the way, I hate Bush, just for the record :.)

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:03 pm
if these photos are real im disgusted of these animals .they should be in front of a fireing range,if these photos arent real the people who took these pictures should be put there in place of them.ill pray for this country iraq god loves all.

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:05 pm
I don't find it hard to believe there are individuals that perptrate these kinds of acts, but I also don't find it hard to believe there are those who falsify things to get the reactions they want. There is a difference between blind faith and careful examination of anything. Wether it be global warming, animal abuse, miltary actions, terrorist actions.

There's been a message being sent around on Care2 for several years now about a missing girl, and she isn't missing at all. Anyone can fabricate things and make them seem real and we would be foolish to believe every last single thing we hear, without proper documentation, proper investigation, etc...

I believed that girl was missing in that story that still occasionally gets forwarded around. I quickly forwarded it to everyone I knew, the a week later when I found out more info, I promptly said sorry everyone, it's not true. So I have learned to investigate before I believe 100%, or even 10%.

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:07 pm
Gee You guys what is it going to take to open up your eyes?? WHAT?? Do you think the sweet american soldiers didn't rape women over there... just google it on the internet!! There are so many stories that are covered up. What about abu graib? I suppose you think that didn't happen either? What about over 1.2 million people killed in Iraq because of US occupation..I suppose you don';t believe that either!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:09 pm
And.....of course the media and powers that be are going to 'discredit' photos like these.Huh!!! Doesn't look to me like she was posing. I think that is what rape looks like . By the way this happens all the time in Iraq.

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:12 pm
Oh and 'Angel' please don't send me any more 'green stars'

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:17 pm

In Iraq, rape remains a crime largely kept out of the sight of a society that finds it almost too heinous to imagine (which doesn't necessarily make it uncommon). Consider, for instance, the comments of an Iraqi journalist, Raheem Salman, who works for the Los Angeles Times and who interviewed the first relative to enter the house of the 14 year old victim after she had been raped and murdered, and her body partially burned by American soldiers:


"Well, indeed, to tell you frankly that it has a great impact upon the whole society, upon all Iraqis. This is one of the worst crimes, you know, to be committed against a girl in this age. Some people describe this murder and rape as horrible and gruesome and disgusting, indeed. Others describe it even as a brand of shame, even in the American Army's history. Others consider it as example of the atrocity of some of the soldiers. Among the lawmakers here in our parliament, some female lawmakers, you know, protested strongly under the dome of the parliament. They asked the parliament to call the prime minister and the minister of interior. They also asked for a real participation of the Iraqi side in the investigation, and not only the Americans."

Or consider the young Sunni blogger, Riverbend, who writes Baghdad Burning and now seems to live as a semi-shut-in in an Iraqi capital caught in a heightening state of civil war. ("It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence.") In a post in which she discusses the death of a friend -- a twenty-six year-old civil engineer caught in sectarian violence in his neighborhood -- she also turns to the rape case in this fashion:


"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Finally, consider the fine reporter Nir Rosen, who has spent much of the last three years as an independent journalist in Iraq -- and who looks Iraqi enough (his father was Iranian) to have been able to experience both sides of the occupation. He has been embedded with U.S. troops, but also embedded with ordinary Iraqis. ("My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the "gook" of the war in Iraq.") At the Truthdig website, he writes a summary account of the American occupation ("creating enemies instead of eliminating them") as he encountered it that has to be read to be believed. He concludes:


"In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

In a similar way, the now highly publicized rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers focuses attention on one horrifying case of sexual terrorism, but not on the larger issue of what has actually happened to the majority of Iraqi women in the wake of the American invasion and occupation of their country. Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the author of a superb history of the modern women's movement, The World Split Open, explores this distinctly under-reported but crucial topic: What, in fact, has the Bush administration's "liberation" of Iraqi women meant since 2003? Tom


The Hidden War on Women in Iraq
By Ruth Rosen

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 fuck 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 breasts, 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."

In 2005, Amnesty International also interviewed abducted women. The story of "Asma," a young engineer, was representative. She was shopping with her mother, sister, and a male relative when six armed men forced her into a car and drove her to a farmhouse outside the city. They repeatedly raped her. A day later, the men drove her to her neighborhood and pushed her out of the car.

As recently as June 2006, Mayada Zhaair, spokeswoman for the Women's Rights Association, a local NGO, reported, "We've observed an increase in the number of women being sexually abused and raped in the past four months, especially in the capital."

No one knows how many abducted women have never returned. As one Iraqi police inspector testified, "Some gangs specialize in kidnapping girls, they sell them to Gulf countries. This happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get in and out without passports." Others interviewed by Human Rights Watch argued that such trafficking in women had not occurred before the invasion.

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.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101034/ruth_rosen_on_sexual_terrorism_and_iraqi_women

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:21 pm
The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:23 pm
DID YOU READ THAT??
The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"
READ IT AGAIN UNTIL YOU COMPREHEND!!

Monday October 20, 2008, 2:31 pm


July 11, 2006

It promises to be a long summer. We're almost at the mid-way point, but it feels like the days are just crawling by. It's a combination of the heat, the flies, the hours upon hours of no electricity and the corpses which keep appearing everywhere.

The day before yesterday was catastrophic. The day began with news of the killings in Jihad Quarter. According to people who live there, black-clad militiamen drove in mid-morning and opened fire on people in the streets and even in houses. They began pulling people off the street and checking their ID cards to see if they had Sunni names or Shia names and then the Sunnis were driven away and killed. Some were executed right there in the area. The media is playing it down and claiming 37 dead but the people in the area say the number is nearer 60.

The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen.

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he'd brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he'd promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.

People are staying in their homes in the area and no one dares enter it so the wakes for the people who were massacred haven't begun yet. I haven't seen his family yet and I'm not sure I have the courage or the energy to give condolences. I feel like I've given the traditional words of condolences a thousand times these last few months, "Baqiya ib hayatkum… Akhir il ahzan…" or "May this be the last of your sorrows." Except they are empty words because even as we say them, we know that in today's Iraq any sorrow- no matter how great- will not be the last.

There was also an attack yesterday on Ghazaliya though we haven't heard what the casualties are. People are saying it's Sadr's militia, the Mahdi army, behind the killings. The news the world hears about Iraq and the situation in the country itself are wholly different. People are being driven out of their homes and areas by force and killed in the streets, and the Americans, Iranians and the Puppets talk of national conferences and progress.

It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence. It's gotten so that I dread sleeping because the morning always brings so much bad news. The television shows the images and the radio stations broadcast it. The newspapers show images of corpses and angry words jump out at you from their pages, "civil war… death… killing… bombing… rape…"

Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?

In the news they're estimating her age to be around 24, but Iraqis from the area say she was only 14. Fourteen. Imagine your 14-year-old sister or your 14-year-old daughter. Imagine her being gang-raped by a group of psychopaths and then the girl was killed and her body burned to cover up the rape. Finally, her parents and her five-year-old sister were also killed. Hail the American heroes... Raise your heads high supporters of the 'liberation' - your troops have made you proud today. I don't believe the troops should be tried in American courts. I believe they should be handed over to the people in the area and only then will justice be properly served. And our ass of a PM, Nouri Al-Maliki, is requesting an 'independent investigation', ensconced safely in his American guarded compound because it wasn't his daughter or sister who was raped, probably tortured and killed. His family is abroad safe from the hands of furious Iraqis and psychotic American troops.

It fills me with rage to hear about it and read about it. The pity I once had for foreign troops in Iraq is gone. It's been eradicated by the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, the deaths in Haditha and the latest news of rapes and killings. I look at them in their armored vehicles and to be honest- I can't bring myself to care whether they are 19 or 39. I can't bring myself to care if they make it back home alive. I can't bring myself to care anymore about the wife or parents or children they left behind. I can't bring myself to care because it's difficult to see beyond the horrors. I look at them and wonder just how many innocents they killed and how many more they'll kill before they go home. How many more young Iraqi girls will they rape?

Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape.

Buses, planes and taxis leaving the country for Syria and Jordan are booked solid until the end of the summer. People are picking up and leaving en masse and most of them are planning to remain outside of the country. Life here has become unbearable because it's no longer a 'life' like people live abroad. It's simply a matter of survival, making it from one day to the next in one piece and coping with the loss of loved ones and friends- friends like T.

It's difficult to believe T. is really gone… I was checking my email today and I saw three unopened emails from him in my inbox. For one wild, heart-stopping moment I thought he was alive. T. was alive and it was all some horrific mistake! I let myself ride the wave of giddy disbelief for a few precious seconds before I came crashing down as my eyes caught the date on the emails- he had sent them the night before he was killed. One email was a collection of jokes, the other was an assortment of cat pictures, and the third was a poem in Arabic about Iraq under American occupation. He had highlighted a few lines describing the beauty of Baghdad in spite of the war… And while I always thought Baghdad was one of the more marvelous cities in the world, I'm finding it very difficult this moment to see any beauty in a city stained with the blood of T. and so many other innocents…

(That is from one of the links in the article) :
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101034/ruth_rosen_on_sexual_terrorism_and_iraqi_women

Monday October 20, 2008, 4:05 pm
Cruel bastards!!! I can't stop crying, but now rage is setting in!!! I can't even imagine this happening! But I know it does, and people just seem to look the other way! What the hell is wrong with our world?????As I have always been a somewhat peaceful person, I would not have cared who these men were, I would have grabbed a weapon of some kind and ended the lives of these monsters, once and for all!!!!! I am as outraged as I have been in a long time! This is unforgivable!!!!! Awful, awful, awful!!!!!Horrific!

Monday October 20, 2008, 4:18 pm
Anita

I gave you a star because of your insight, I gave you a star because of your dedication, I gave you a star because you deserved it, I gave you a star because I respect your opinion, I gave you a star because you may have more knowledge on this issue than I do (which is why I said "I" needed to investigate it more, I gave you a star because I learned more from you, I gave you a star because it was right to do so. I am sorry that your anger towards me wanting mearly to investigate more, learn more about the issue and not take anything for granted, caused you to ask me not to send you a star.

I have not discounted this story, I have not claimed there are no attrocities, I have not claimed all our soldiers to be "sweet", I have not claimed wrongdoing is never heard of by our military.

I merely said I wanted to investigate more. Do I believe that coverups are done in some cases, YES, do I believe the media reports everything, NO. But when someone quotes that photo's come from CBS, I would like to be able to find the photo's with CBS, I would like to see a link posted.

I said I had no knowledge of that website. Anyone can make up a website about anything and claim truth. I never said these kinds of atrocities never happen, I merely said this one "may" be a fabricated one. I am not familiar with the webisite, the people running it, so therefor do not know how credible they are!

There are movies out with extremely realistic rape scenes in them. Yes those pictures look quite real, frighteningly real, but are they real is another question.

I am not naive, I am not pro-war, But I don't believe everything everyone tells me right off the bat either, not without further investigattion. And just because something similar happened elsewhere that was truth, does not mean this one is.

I am not against you, I am not against Uhoud, I am not against the Iraq people. I am not pro-Bush. I do not condemn ALL soldiers for actions of a few, nor a whole country for the actions of a few. I don't lump anything into one big pot to stew.

I want to be more aware, I want to investigate more. And if you shove me aside, condemn me for not believing in this completely, then you lose someone who does care, who wants to see wrongs righted and wants justice for oppression and truths to be known. You don't know me, my politics, my morals. You bash me because I want to know more, there is something very very wrong with that picture Anita.

Uhoud, thank you for posting this, and keeping our eyes open to such potential terrorism upon people. Thank you for making me more aware. I hope I can continue to learn more from you at least on this issue since Anita has written me off.

Blessings and Peace to all

Monday October 20, 2008, 4:29 pm
It's too bad people react with emotion before even researching the basic facts in the case.

Nobody here has denied that these kinds of crimes occur.

Merely the overall effectiveness of posting information that may discredit the larger movement.

May Knowledge Reign Supreme Over Nearly Everyone.

Monday October 20, 2008, 4:37 pm
I would be very very shocked,if US military personnel hadnt raped and tortured civilians and prisoners in Iraq.Despite the Rumsfeldt rhetoric about liberation,this the Iraq war was an act of defilemant and invasion,and history shows time and time again,that numbers of male troops see women of a "conquered" country as being a "perk",or "the spoils of war".This is a power thing,we F***ed your country ,we will f*** you.
Anyone who has witnessed the clips, of US troops preparing to go into Iraq,would have seen a few brainstem men among them..ie not much activity going on in the cerebral cortex (necessary for higher brain functions)..these examples weren't programmed for liberation,they were wired and dehumanised for a war, on each and every Iraqui.
With neo-con fuelleddelusions of Saddams men,flying planes into the twin towers,rushing through their bomb-like brains,emptied of logic,filled with bogus patriotism,it was now "payback time,wooooohhhhoooooo..USA USA".
It would bring at least a little justice if blame for this,went right to the top..instead of some semi automaton taking the blame,just cos he aint so bright.
donald Rumsfeldt made the pyramid of Muslim prisoners,not Lyndie English,she was just the fall girl..he was the torturer,as Bush and Cheney are rapists..Maximum deniability always ensures that some little turd takes the flak,and that is wrong and sick.

Monday October 20, 2008, 5:08 pm
I am sorry 'Angel' if i offended you..or anyone else. I am afraid i don't have much patience for people who even question this kind of thing when it is so obviously taking place.
Yes i am angry. I am thoroughly disgusted with the apathy and ignorance of the US citizens in general. So please stop focusing on me and spread the word about what is really going on in Iraq. You can find things on You tbe too.. Truth is always available if you seek it.

Monday October 20, 2008, 5:20 pm
I do seek it, continually. And I am not one of the apathetic US citizens at all. I don't question that this kind of thing goes on at all, I know it does. I was questioning one website, with photo's with no source posted, that I had never ever had dealings with. You didn't offend me. you saddened me. You judged me as quickly as you wanted me to judge this story. You put me in a box, a box I am not in. I am a potential allie, not at war with you over anything.

I lose patience myself, we all do from time to time. All I ask is that you take what I said at face value and not read into it more than is there. I want to know more, I want to seek truth. I want a wwebsite that cares about a topic to be precise and cover their butts with sources. Especially if they quote something like they came from CBS, if they are going to say that, post the link, post the story CBS had on it.

I'm not angry at you at all Anita. Angry at the situation, yes. Angry at that website, yes. But not angry at you.

Monday October 20, 2008, 5:26 pm
Angel i don't care if you are angry at me...I couldn't give a damn in fact. What i am angry about is what has happened to the Iraq people, You are angry at the website..Ok...be angry at the website but move on and read the story.
I posted a lot of information here today and from very reliable sources..please read it.

Monday October 20, 2008, 5:50 pm
If you don't care about one person, how can you claim to care about all Iraq people? I to care about them, but I care about individuals as well. I am angry at the website because they themselves brought the story into question, which lends discredit to the story itself.

Yes, I did read....

As far as what you posted, I never said Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Guantanamo, and other occurances never happened or happen.. I am outraged about it. I never said these things do not happen, I merely questioned this one story, and you presumed I felt it never happens.

I want the injustices stopped, I want crimes to be treated as such, I want truths to come out. I want military that witnesses such things and are angered and outraged to speak up instead of fearing what will happen to them.

People need to walk carefully when they are investigating these kinds of things. Things that may deal with coverups, need covert investigation, quiet inspection. Or the truth can be buried ever tighter. And in war there is propaganda that comes from all sides and it takes time to sort out truth from propaganda.I am not one who declares someone guilty before a trial and an investigation.

I want justice for it all as much as you do Anita and that's the point you keep missing with me. And I will not judge our entire military body to all act in accordance. There are bad people, there are good people everywhere, Iraq, US, military.

Monday October 20, 2008, 5:57 pm
This does not suprise me at all for if they would take a innocent puppy and throw it over a hill to its death that they were not doing other things to childern and women. They need to take these men and castrate them leave them just so they can use the bath room and thats it. They also need to go to prison over there not here its to easy for them here. There it would be a lot harder for them and this is what they deserve. I'm sorry you have experince that kind of horror for yes I too know what your talking about. No one knows until they have walked in there foot steps. Thanks Uhoud

Monday October 20, 2008, 6:49 pm
White Male Imperalism!

Monday October 20, 2008, 7:43 pm
Damn! those Jewish Pornographers!

Monday October 20, 2008, 7:46 pm
Yes, its terrible that US Soldiers commit heinous hate crimes in our names.

It is also terrible that the website linked to blames the jews for this.

Monday October 20, 2008, 7:50 pm
There really aren't words that could really explain what I felt when I saw these horrific pictures. This atrocity of rape is a highly complicated crime. People in our society and most societies don't understand how complicated this crime really is. This crime is attack on women. When one woman has been raped all women have. Rape is an attack on our person stripping us of our power, our respect, of our minds. It is not shocking that this crime has taken place against these women. This act was probably more of a "good time" for these men than it was supposed to be torture for these women. That is just the mentality that provokes these acts. I am truly disgusted with these pictures. I pray that these women will be able to survive, and overcome these attacks. I pray that these "men" will be given the highest level of punishment that God could give, may they pay the price for their crimes for all eternity. It is unfortunate that because of our society they will probably only get slapped on the wrist in the courtroom and high-fived behind closed doors. It truly sickens me that these cowards will live to see another day in the free world.

Monday October 20, 2008, 8:46 pm
An eyewitness female detainee at Abu Ghraib, who identified herself as ‘Noor’, told Al-Jazeera that ‘U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison raped women and, in many occasions, forced them to strip naked in public’. She admitted seeing ‘many female detainees got pregnant’. Iraqi lawyer Iman Khamas, of International Occupation Watch Centre, said; "One former detainee had recounted the alleged rape of her cell mate in Abu Ghraib." "[The detainee] had been raped 17 times in one day", said Khamas.

Professor Huda Shaker Al-Nuaimi, of Baghdad University Political Science Department, told Luke Harding of the Guardian on 12 May 2004, that; ‘U.S. soldiers in Iraq have raped, sexually humiliated and abused several Iraqi female detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison’. Al-Nuaimi told Harding that she knows of ‘Noor's’ case and other Iraqi females that were arrested, taken to Abu Ghraib prison and raped by the US Military Police. ‘Iraqi women here are afraid and shy of talking about such subjects’, she added. Crimes of rape were very rare before the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rape is shameful crimes, and was introduced to the Muslim World by Western colonialists as a tool of coercion and intimidation.

The U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoners abuse by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba (the Taguba Report) confirmed these accounts, including ‘Noor's’ account and said that U.S. guards sexually abused female detainees at Abu Ghraib. The report found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" constituting "systematic and illegal abuse of [Iraqi] detainees" at Abu Ghraib.

Monday October 20, 2008, 8:51 pm
oh..here's the link
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c

Monday October 20, 2008, 8:53 pm
I used to be proud of our troops but now i feel only shame and utter disgust.

Monday October 20, 2008, 10:04 pm

Thank you Uhoud, though I don't need photos to know this is happening.

Monday October 20, 2008, 11:10 pm
***"Crimes of rape were very rare before the US invasion and occupation of Iraq" I can't believe this was written here and that the writer actually believes that statement. ***** "Rapes are shameful crimes" I am totally, unreservedly in agreement with that statement. Rape is worse than shameful -there are no words to adequately discribe such foul actions - so "shameful" will have to suffice.***** "and was introduced to the Muslim World by Western colonialists as a tool of coercion and intimidation" WRONG!!! Rape and pillage has been part of Islamic way of life since the beginning of it's existence. Read the history of Islamic invasions of Spain, the western world and the Balkan regions. It's enough to make ones stomach turn and blood curdle. Rape is, in one form or another a daily way of life i.e marital rape, little girls being forced to marry old men who rape them constantly and impregnate them as young as 9 years old, etc etc etc.***** This baseless accusation should not have been introduced into the issue at hand.

The only reason for any nation to feel proud of their troops is, if and when they defeat an evil enemy. Unfortunately that's not all they do and it's their capacity to commit those OTHER DEEDS that brings shame on themselves, their families and their nations. IMHO

Monday October 20, 2008, 11:17 pm
Vile and disgusting. They need to be punished, severely! I am ashamed of the monsters that do this!

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:13 am
Jesus How awfull and digusting,i know what these woman have to go trough !!! Good that you posted it here Uhoud !!!

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 3:34 am
British journalist Yvonne Ridley flew to Pakistan on a whirlwind trip this week to highlight the plight of a woman who has been held in US custody for more than four years.

She referred to the woman, known only by her prisoner number 650, as The Grey Lady of Bagram.

More than 100 journalists attended the press conference hosted by Pakistan political leader Imran Khan who pledged his full support to Ridley's mission, which is part of a Cage Prisoner Campaign to help the female detainee.

A statement of support from British MP and RESPECT Party leader George Galloway was also read out during the conference.

Details of Prisoner 650 are being kept secret by the U.S. military.

On Monday night she said, “I think everyone was shocked to hear that the Americans were holding this woman at Bagram in Afghanistan. From the information coming through I am told she is being held in exactly the same conditions as the men and has absolutely no privacy when it comes to toilet and shower facilities.

“This would never happen to a Western woman and it shows just how women are viewed by the US military. There is even a suggestion she has been molested and sexually abused by her captors. We need to demand the truth,” added Ridley who was held captive herself in Afghanistan for 11 days in September 2001.

“I was released on humanitarian grounds. Mercifully my treatment was good, respectful and decent, although still terrifying,” she added.

Ridley, also a patron of the organization Cage Prisoner, revealed how she first read about the woman in a book written by ex-Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg called Enemy Combatant.

“I remembered Moazzam telling me about the woman's screams and how he first imagined they could be from his wife. In truth, I thought maybe he had just been listening to a tape recorder as part of a form of mental torture.

“However, we now know the screams came from a woman who has been held in Bagram for some years. And without compromising anyone, we can also reveal from impeccable sources that her prison number is 650.

“This information has been enough to scramble the Pakistan media into action by demanding the return of this woman to her homeland immediately,” added Ridley.

Joining her at the open air press conference in Islamabad at the headquarters of Khan's PTI party was Saghir Hussain, a lawyer and member of Cage.

He handed over a dossier prepared by Cage which reveals the full extent of the Disappeared from Pakistan… individuals who have been literally kidnapped from the streets.

“Prisoner 650 is just the tip of a very nasty iceberg of human rights abuses, illegal detentions and rendition flights. It is a shameful episode in Pakistan's history which must be put right.”

Amina Masood Janjua, chair of the Defense of Human Rights, also joined the platform along with other supporters whose husbands, sons and brothers have disappeared without trace. She thanked Cage for its dossier and the supporting work it had conducted on the Disappeared.

“I wonder how can we hand over our sister to the non-Muslims for their illegal trial by men whose history is full of rape and other abuses to prisoners,” the Pakistani daily Dawn quoted Ridley as saying.

Ms. Ridley read the text from the book's section covering Mr. Begg's stay in Bagram, “I began to hear the chilling screams of a woman next door… Why have you got a woman next door? They told me there was no woman. But I was unconvinced. Those screams echoed through my worst nightmares for a long time. And I later learned in Guantanamo, from other prisoners, that they had heard the screams too.”

She said the account had been corroborated by four Arabs who had escaped from Bagram in July 2005. “While on the run, one not only confirmed he had heard a woman's screams, but said he had seen her.”

Ms. Ridley said, “My story made international headlines, front page pictures and major stories on TV. But there has not been one word, not one paragraph about Prisoner 650 -- the 'grey lady' of Bagram, a murderous detention facility under control of the U.S. military and intelligence services.”

She urged every Pakistani to ring America, and ask them who Prisoner 650 is. What was her crime? Who else was being held illegally? How many secret detention centers were there?

Ms. Ridley's colleague Saghir Hussain gave details about other people of the country who had 'disappeared'.

“All, like the grey lady of Bagram, have been illegally abducted by secretive intelligence agencies. They began disappearing in 2001 during the so-called war on terror,” he said.

Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf Chairman Imran Khan demanded that the government hold an investigation into the case. “What has the sovereign parliament done about the missing persons?” he asked.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=63032§i

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 3:44 am

Dateline: August 2008........but this never became prominent in the news.....


Los Angeles, Alta California - August 14, 2008 - (ACN) It appear that the Bush Administration may have another "Abu Ghraib Prison" type torture scandal in its hands that it is desperately attempting to cover up. The disturbing human rights case involves a Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University educated Pakistani national that mysteriously disappeared, along with her three children, in Afghanistan in 2003. This past week the seriously injured, bleeding, frail, traumatized and confused Dr. Siddiqui re-appeared in a wheel chair in a New York federal court accused of terrorism and to face charges that she attempted to kill FBI and US soldiers in Afghanistan.

No one would have known about what some Pakistanis are calling "one of the most deplorable crimes against womanhood" if it had not been for human rights organizations speaking out against the rape and torture of "Prisoner 650" that was being held at the US Bagram Theater Internment Facility, a miserable prison that was previously utilized as air base hangers by the Russians during their occupation of Afghanistan. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) just recently picked up the story and the Bush Administration seems to be acting quickly to cover up what many consider to be a war crime.

On Tuesday, they chose their front man, Brian Ross of ABC News, to begin propagandizing against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in order to justify to the American people the gruesome treatment of the Pakistani neuroscientist at the hands of US authorities in Afghanistan and their lackey Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. Many of you may remember that Brian Ross was also the Neocon front man in the national news concerning the Anthrax Terrorist Attacks in 2001. He was reporting that the anthrax sent to U.S. political and media figures was linked to Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program. That was a lie. No tests ever revealed any such thing. Like Colin Powell, he was attempting to create the perception in the public's mind that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks and that it possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Rest of the Storly:

http://www.aztlan.net/strange_case_of_dr_siddiqui.htm

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 3:51 am
Rape deserves the most severe punishments, no matter who purpetrates the acts. But please, don't hate ALL the troops for indivudal actions, that would be no different than blaming all Iraq people for Sadam Husain's actions.

I personally know of a group of sailors who went to an orphanage there and brought gifts and donated paychecks to the orphanage. There are good and bad everywhere. We cannot blame every troop for the actions of some. Yes, they need to be held accountable, yes they need the most severe punishment.

Some of troops, individuals are doing some good things over there, and they don't even think we belong there. And there are troops who do turn in their fellow soldiers for misconduct.

Not every troop agrees with what we are doing over there, not every troop is a rapist.Look to our government, Bush and be outraged, but don't lump all the troops into one group. Many, simply joined the military to protect our shores.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 8:44 am
That I AGREE with. But condemning them all as evil people who rape, No.
I am not evil or mean so I cannot condemn those who did nothing wrong. There are good men and women in the military, who care and want to help.
I have no room for bigotry in my heart towards anyone.

As I told Uhoud earlier today. If anyone condemns an entire group for the actions of a few, then you are no better than the few. I will never be like that no matter how angered over a situation I am, I will not just lump everyone into one big cataegory and say they are evil or bad.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 9:00 am
I apologize if what I just wrote offends anyone, my sentiments were not directed at anyone. I just cannot tolerate hatred, it's not in my nature. I will continue the fight to get better leadership in our white house, therefor a better leader over our military, and fight the fight against abuses like this story, but will not be what I call a biggot and say our military is evil or filled with bad people.

Let kindness guide your heart
Let light show the way to good judgement
Let justice be served swiftly
Let peace and love prevail where all else fails

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 9:43 am
These photos do not in any way look fake, horrific yes! Denial is quite usual when confronted with such atrocities. But not in the least helpful...I see a sick society venting all its rage and inhumanity on the innocent and those unable to defend themselves..total cowardice. When voting this time checkout 1st the canditate's policy on WAR...OBAMA WANTS TO MAKE WAR ON PAKISTAN (actually they already are).
here on care2 is a petition for Grey lady 650 as she is known her name is Dr Aafia Siddiqui. http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/liberate-the-prisoner-650---the-grey-ghost-lady-of-bagram-jail
its hard to find try google if you have a problem.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 11:18 am
I never sai they looked fake, they look quite real.
And I am not in denial over anything other than the sources.
If I placed pictures up on the internet, I would expect them to be in question.

I have checked out his policies
My vote for Obama is one of the lesser of two evils I am afraid. No matter what one of them will be elected. They are the candidates and neither do I back completely.

I signed the petition you posted Jackie and have added it to my list for re-posting (I do two bulk e-mails a day usually).

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 11:18 am
I blame the Jewish Pornagraphy Consipracy, just like this website does.

I think this website is merely porn.

With that said, it would be nice if people would actually research the website in question instead of attacking those of us here who encourage journalistic integrity.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:11 pm
I've seen these photos before. It is indeed from a porno.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38589

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:26 pm
You guys got what you wanted didn't you? You had AniTa's comments removed because they critized the military..and you are trying to to discredit all the information Anita put here because you know it to be true.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:27 pm
Monday October 20, 2008, 2:16 pm

In Iraq, rape remains a crime largely kept out of the sight of a society that finds it almost too heinous to imagine (which doesn't necessarily make it uncommon). Consider, for instance, the comments of an Iraqi journalist, Raheem Salman, who works for the Los Angeles Times and who interviewed the first relative to enter the house of the 14 year old victim after she had been raped and murdered, and her body partially burned by American soldiers:


"Well, indeed, to tell you frankly that it has a great impact upon the whole society, upon all Iraqis. This is one of the worst crimes, you know, to be committed against a girl in this age. Some people describe this murder and rape as horrible and gruesome and disgusting, indeed. Others describe it even as a brand of shame, even in the American Army's history. Others consider it as example of the atrocity of some of the soldiers. Among the lawmakers here in our parliament, some female lawmakers, you know, protested strongly under the dome of the parliament. They asked the parliament to call the prime minister and the minister of interior. They also asked for a real participation of the Iraqi side in the investigation, and not only the Americans."

Or consider the young Sunni blogger, Riverbend, who writes Baghdad Burning and now seems to live as a semi-shut-in in an Iraqi capital caught in a heightening state of civil war. ("It's like Baghdad is no longer one city, it's a dozen different smaller cities each infected with its own form of violence.") In a post in which she discusses the death of a friend -- a twenty-six year-old civil engineer caught in sectarian violence in his neighborhood -- she also turns to the rape case in this fashion:


"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Finally, consider the fine reporter Nir Rosen, who has spent much of the last three years as an independent journalist in Iraq -- and who looks Iraqi enough (his father was Iranian) to have been able to experience both sides of the occupation. He has been embedded with U.S. troops, but also embedded with ordinary Iraqis. ("My skin color and language skills allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were just another haji, the "gook" of the war in Iraq.") At the Truthdig website, he writes a summary account of the American occupation ("creating enemies instead of eliminating them") as he encountered it that has to be read to be believed. He concludes:


"In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

In a similar way, the now highly publicized rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by American soldiers focuses attention on one horrifying case of sexual terrorism, but not on the larger issue of what has actually happened to the majority of Iraqi women in the wake of the American invasion and occupation of their country. Ruth Rosen, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, as well as the author of a superb history of the modern women's movement, The World Split Open, explores this distinctly under-reported but crucial topic: What, in fact, has the Bush administration's "liberation" of Iraqi women meant since 2003? Tom


The Hidden War on Women in Iraq
By Ruth Rosen

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 fuck 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 breasts, 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."

In 2005, Amnesty International also interviewed abducted women. The story of "Asma," a young engineer, was representative. She was shopping with her mother, sister, and a male relative when six armed men forced her into a car and drove her to a farmhouse outside the city. They repeatedly raped her. A day later, the men drove her to her neighborhood and pushed her out of the car.

As recently as June 2006, Mayada Zhaair, spokeswoman for the Women's Rights Association, a local NGO, reported, "We've observed an increase in the number of women being sexually abused and raped in the past four months, especially in the capital."

No one knows how many abducted women have never returned. As one Iraqi police inspector testified, "Some gangs specialize in kidnapping girls, they sell them to Gulf countries. This happened before the war too, but now it is worse, they can get in and out without passports." Others interviewed by Human Rights Watch argued that such trafficking in women had not occurred before the invasion.

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.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/101034/ruth_rosen_on_sexual_terrorism_and_iraqi_women Why is this inapropriate?

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Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:31 pm
Lisa, there's an organized "clique" here on Care2; they band together 5-10 of them, flag the posts they don't agree with and have them removed.

Republicans ... this is how they behave.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:38 pm
Thank you for your bravery,OMG WHAT HAS HUMANITY BECOME!!!! THIS IS ...I FIND NO WORDS......

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:52 pm
Apparently they had AniTa's account suspended Blue.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 12:57 pm
Lisa, check your PMs/email.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:11 pm
Thats not fair why they had AniTa's account suspended Blue. Is that the freedom and democracy ??? AniTa account must return

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:15 pm
Rape has happened in Iraq. I don't doubt that. However, these photos are like seven kinds of fake. If that makes me a Republican, then okay. Whatever you say. :/

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:28 pm
I wasn't in on anything to get her suspended or her messages deleted. I am a free speech kind of person, even if I don't like what I see or hear. If there is anything we can do to get Anita back, please let me know.

I admit, people like that frighten me, they have as much hate in them as the people they fight against, but have her suspended or kicked out, NO.

Porn princess speaks out
on 'rape' photo flap
Lawyers for filmmaker examining misuse, misreporting on porn pictures

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: May 21, 2004
1:00 am Eastern


By Sherrie Gossett
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com





The 27-year old porn filmmaker behind the fake rape photos that sparked an international controversy spoke out today on the flap from her office in Budapest, Hungary.

The bogus 'gang-rape' photos that were published around the world in newspapers and websites and presented as evidence of U.S. crimes in Iraq or as alleged evidence, were still shots taken from porn movies produced by Andrea Marchand. The movies and still shots appear on the Hungarian website "Sex in War."

In many cases, the perpetrator of the hoax and its variations has remained unidentified.

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The Budapest-based filmmaker has been making graphic movies for the past two years. Marchand produces films for "Buy Film Ready," a production house that has outlets in Paris, Budapest and Lausanne, Switzerland.

"I heard about this and saw those articles in some newspapers and on the Internet and I really don't understand how people can use pictures that they don't have any rights to and without asking me," said Marchand. "I heard also that a lot of Arabic newspapers published my pictures also and reported that they are true pics."

The photos were published, and in some cases enlarged, in several prominent Arab newspapers, with no blurring of nudity or shielding of the alleged rape victims' identities. Following WND's expose of the fake photos, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo demanded retractions from the newspapers.

Marchand was especially surprised that the Boston Globe repeated the allegations of rape associated with the photos, as WND first reported, and published images of four of her most graphic photos. The Globe also made no attempt to shield the identity of the purported rape victims or blur the nudity, although in the second edition of the May 12 production run, the images, contained in one larger photo, were reduced in size.

The photos were given to the Globe by Boston Councilman Chuck Turner at a press conference where he distributed prints of the alleged 'rape' photos, in an attempt to get President Bush to release all known photos of abuse perpetrated by U.S. troops in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Turner told reporters, "We cannot document their authenticity. But you have the ability to do that."

"Many other journalists also looked at the pictures and dismissed them immediately as fakes," Marchand said, "So really it was bad judgment on the part of the Globe."

After the story of alleged rape photos ran in the Globe, similar photos, also from Marchand's films, were sent to Media Watch, a news program produced by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. This week, ABC asked WND for help in verifying the photos.

Commenting on the controversy as a whole, Marchand said, "Some people also said that those photos were true pictures and movies [or rape] and I am the person who stole them."

Indeed, La Voz de Aztlan and Jihad Unspun, two political websites that produce "independent news," published the rape photos and now are floating conspiracy theories that the porn filmmaker(s) and assorted mercenaries instigated real rape in Iraq in order to gain material to post on porn sites for profit, and to torment the imagined victims. The "news reports" produced by the two sites are carried by many other sites, some registered in the Middle East, which sped the propagation of the hoax.

Bruce Kennedy, writing for Jihad Unspun, mentioned the Globe's publication of the images, and he used phrases from WND's exposes of the photos out of context in order to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory that insisted there was no proof the photos were fake. "We call for an immediate full-scale investigation into the Sex in War," wrote Kennedy, "the alleged creators of these pictures. In fact, considering the controversy surrounding these photos, it is amazing that this 'legitimate' business has not come forward with details of the photos in question."

Kennedy concludes his stories on the "rape" photos with this phrase: "If you have any information, concerning these photographs, please contact bkennedy@jihadunspun.com."

Marchand told WND that at no time has Kennedy or Aztlan made any attempt to contact her or question her about the photos.

Marchand has copious documentation available to be viewed, of the "models," including signed contracts, and their passport information. None of the models were Iraqi or American.

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. That site shut down after WND reported on the fake photos. Marchand says that "Even iraqbabes.com stole my content and used it illegally on their website."

WND could not contact the owner of Iraq Babes for comment since the registrant denied involvement in the website and declined to name the owner .

Marchand said that the accompanying controversy has generated increased interest in the Sex in War site: "It's now quite hot, and we'll be producing new material for it."

In the meantime, as the fake photos continue to circulate, Marchand says her lawyers are examining what has been said and how the photos have been misused.

"I'm examining options at the moment," the young filmmaker said, "and will not speculate what legal action I will take. We do however expect to receive compensation for the unauthorised use of our pictures and the failure to correctly state the copyright ownership."

Related stories:

Bogus 'rape' photos used in call for jihad

Fake 'rape' photos sent to TV show

Globe blames councilor for bogus 'rape' photos

Globe publishes apology for fake 'GI rape' photos

Boston Globe publishes bogus GI rape pictures

U.S. calls for Arab retractions

Fake rape photos infuriate Arab world

Porn site depicting 'GI rapes' shut down

Bogus GI rape photos used as Arab propaganda




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Sherrie Gossett is associate editor for Accuracy in Media and a contributing reporter for WorldNetDaily. Her original news stories have been widely cited by the press, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Boston Herald, Agence France-Presse, London Times, Fox News and Inside Edition. She is based in Washington, D.C.

I knew I had seen those photo's before. Not very fair or democratic to accuse anyone off of a hoax. This is why I make sure of credentials and authenticity of photo's, news, and websites.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:30 pm
Douchey, that name suits you. The photos by the way "DEPICT" obviously you didn't read what AniTa posted about rape in Iraq.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:31 pm
Uhoud, I have no way of knowing that Anita's acocunt was suspended until I hear from her and I haven't heard from her one way or the other, so I can't assume that her account was suspended.

Duchey, we haven't even seen a minute portion of the Abu Ghraib photos of torture and rape of women and children ... so don't assume the photos are fake; there are horrendous things happening to Iraqis by the "occupiers" of their sovereign territory. Bu$h's illegal war has been a disaster for the world and eveyrone in it.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 1:48 pm
Are any of you angry at the thought that people used these photo's for propaganda to get what they wanted, doesn't that seem wrong to you, even with the abuses and torture going on elsewhere. It's a slap in the face to the real and true tortured prisoners.

As I said in the beginning, I want truth and justice. You don't get truth by7 adding more lies and more decpetions. It just makes the real cause look like a bunch of liars and hypocrites.

Have you guys gone to Anita's account at all to see if her page is still there?

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:05 pm
AniTa page not found and her name not found with my friend list AniTa page must return is that the freedom and democracy of America America must be proud of AniTa if all pepole like AniTa then there is no blood no rape no wars love and peace will found only I joined care2 because there pepole si,iller to AniTa in that world ok if that strory is fack then what about Abeer the young girl that she raped and burned in Almahmodeya I know her family is that facke also I will publish her too .

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:24 pm
AniTa contacted me and yes her account is suspended, but she said please do not pay attention to these people who consistently detract from what is going on..she doesn't want you upset Uhoud..just keep posting the truth. she'll be back soon.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:39 pm
Just because one is fake does not mean all are. Anita scares me not because of her determined nature, but because of her willingness to lump everyone into one category. That is what scares me. The people in those photo's were deemed guilty. But all the facts were unknown. And yes there are soldiers who do wrong, but there are those who do right as well, and Anita deems all soldiers as bad. That scares me. I understand her passion to bring justice, and her determination to right the wrongs but you can't judge a whole group by what a few does wrong. That is my only problem with her.

As far as this story goes, I just don't think fakery lends credence to the real issues. I think the people that posted fake photo's to get people to believe in the real abuses that go on, just made themselves look like liars, and made the real people who are suffering rape and torture seem meaningless, it was a mockery of the real problems. I would have looked like a fool to stand up and say those people in those photo's were raped, when they weren't.Whoi then would listen to me?? If I supplied a lie and was found out, who would then believe anything I ever say???

Please post the other story, I want to help where I can with the real issue.

As far as Anita goes, let me know what I can do to help. If you hear from her please let me know. Shutting her out was wrong whoever did it. Her beliefs that the injustices must be stopped has to be heard! I told you what my only problems with her are. And that's what makes my heart ache is that I believe in her cause, just not the things I mentioned above.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:40 pm
Did they tell her why they suspended her?

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:50 pm
Uhoud, why have you blocked me and taken me off your friends list? You called me friend just a few hours ago, what has changed since then?

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:52 pm
She will return soon no truth in care2 with out real humans with white heart like AniTa Love you AniTa waiting for you my soule sister

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 2:53 pm
I will not be back to this story. I am an allie in this fight, but will not support propaganda. I pray for those who are truly abused and raped and will continue to fight for them. But this, this story, now we see what lies can do, can do to friendships, can do to nations.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 3:02 pm
Ok last post, just a reminder Uhoud that we were friends.

"First thank you second love you third I am proud by your friendship you are brave real human god bless you

Eng. Uhoud - from mess city Baghdad"

Original Message:
-----------------
Hi Uhoud,

Angel H.. left a comment on the following article:


Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women
Photos Show Rape of Iraqi Women

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 4:16 pm
Angel, with friends like you who needs enemies? Uhoud was trying to show people on C2 what is happening in Iraq but you persisted in detracting from the story..you have deliberately tried to sabotage it with your comments about the photos being fake. Whether the photos are 'fake' or not is irrelevant. It is the story of rape in Iraq which the embedded distorted media in the USA has witheld from the people of the united states. They have a right to know the truth.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 5:46 pm
Marena Chen's first reply, is what brings my response. I have a large military family who themselves have many military friends. Some of my family members are retired, and have in a few conflicts or wars that the United States has engaged in with their "techniques."

DO NOT say ALL military members do these autrocities, BECAUSE MOST DON'T!! My family and connections come back to tell us THE TRUTH. They need mental health care from the knowledge they have attained from serving in the Middle East. Many of us DON'T HAVE TO ASK, we are told through tears and panic attacks of what is really going on over there.... Breathe Dar...Breathe

As for this story, YES bring this truth out. These rapes and horrible acts are abominable. Thank you for posting this for others to see. There is a balance to everything, and nothing is black or white..., it never is that simple. Change is absolute. Let us bring Truth with our knowledge with CLARITY of "who" is doing "what"...., and I pray a draft isn't implemented on our people. I wish my family never entered the service, but they have been GOOD SERVING MEMBERS for our nation. It is too bad we can't eliminate organized military branches..., I have no answer in how we would protect our borders or people, but all the INSANITIES of WAR MUST STOP.

Namaste

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 7:13 pm
I would rather go to prison than go to kill innocent people because my government tells me to.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 7:54 pm
Here is a video everyone should watch:


http://video.aol.com/video-detail/war-crimes-in-iraq-disgusting-behavior-of-american-troops/1647317464

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 8:03 pm
Fine with me..., go to prison. That is your choice, and in that choice realize we can't control another's choice no matter, HOW LOUD WE YELL, SCREAM, AND INSULT. I accept anyone's choice, but I don't have to like it. I go through enough fights with my family, of "what would America do with NO military"....I Have No Answer. I guess we all will be murdered or taken as prisoners. Is that a better choice? Maybe..., if all these WARS and ATROCITIES from these WARS, keep continuing.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 8:48 pm
I'd rather die with a clean conscience and honour knowing that i had not killed innocents....wouldn't you? If people refused to fight the politicians wars then thy'd have to sort it out between themselves wouldn't they?!!

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 9:26 pm
Again, that is YOUR WAY. Being a martyr, isn't always productive for the cause, many have tried in the past. I do believe that humanity must UNITE to rise above this darkness. Your words will NOT unite the masses, this is why we must choose our words wisely. Our positive or negative thoughts, words, and actions....MANIFESTS our positive or negative results. Our good service people DEPEND ON US to get GOOD PEOPLE in Congress. We have to eliminate the corruption behind this shadow government.

I won't judge the whole lot of millions of our troops. I haven't walked their shoes. Our troops and the INNOCENT people of Iraqi, have pregnant women and children walking up to them strapped with bombs as human sacrafices happy to blow up MANY INNOCENT people. They were doing this to other enemies, long before the U.S. entrenched themselves over there.

Do I condemn all the people of Iraqi, NO. There are some very complex and disturbing people in this world, that function in dark ways..., FOR THE CAUSE. It seems like you use this story for an agenda of condemning ALL of our troops. I say go be your martyr, but that is YOUR CALL.

Tuesday October 21, 2008, 9:28 pm
Noted. Thank you Uhoud.