Casualties of War II:

[Guest Arnold_OldSchool]

Maybe they can get Micheal J Fox to play in the movie

 

GIs May Have Planned Iraq Rape, Slayings

Investigators Believe U.S. Soldiers Suspected of Raping Iraqi Woman Plotted Attack for Days

By RYAN LENZ

The Associated Press

BEIJI, Iraq - Investigators believe a group of U.S. soldiers suspected of raping an Iraqi woman, then killing her and three members of her family plotted the attack for nearly a week, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

 

Up to five soldiers are being investigated in the March killings, the fifth pending case involving alleged slayings of Iraqi civilians by U.S. troops.

 

 

The Americans entered the Sunni Arab's family home, separated three males from the woman, raped her and burned her body using a flammable liquid in a cover-up attempt, a military official close to the investigation said. The three males were also slain.

 

 

The soldiers had studied their victims for about a week and the attack was "totally premeditated," the official said on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. The family had just moved into the home in the insurgent-riddled area around Mahmoudiya, 20 miles south of Baghdad.

 

 

The U.S. military issued a terse statement about the killings Friday, saying only that Maj. Gen. James D. Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, ordered a criminal investigation into the alleged slaying of a family of four in Mahmoudiya.

 

 

U.S. officials said they knew of the deaths but thought the victims were killed in sectarian violence. But Mahmoudiya police Capt. Ihsan Abdul-Rahman said Iraqi officials received a report on March 13 alleging that American soldiers had killed the family in the Khasir Abyad area, about 6 miles north of Mahmoudiya.

 

 

There were some discrepancies over how many soldiers were being investigated. The U.S. military official said it was at least four. Two other U.S. officials said Friday that five were under investigation but one already had been discharged for unspecified charges unrelated to the killings and was believed to be in the United States.

 

 

The four still in the Army have had their weapons taken away and were confined to a U.S. base near Mahmoudiya, officials said. If convicted of premeditated murder, the soldiers could receive a death sentence under U.S. military law.

 

 

The suspects were from the 502nd Infantry Regiment and belonged to the same platoon as two soldiers kidnapped and killed south of Baghdad this month, another official close to the investigation said Friday. The soldiers' mutilated bodies were found June 19, three days after they were abducted by insurgents near Youssifiyah southwest of Baghdad.

 

 

The military has said one and possibly both of the slain soldiers were tortured and beheaded. The official said the mutilation of the slain soldiers stirred feelings of guilt and led at least one member of the platoon to reveal the rape-slaying on June 22.

 

 

One soldier was arrested after admitting his role in the alleged attack on the family, the official said on condition of anonymity because the case was under way. The official said the rape and killings appeared to have been a "crime of opportunity," noting that the soldiers had not been attacked by insurgents but had noticed the woman on previous patrols.

 

 

One of the family members they allegedly killed was a child, said a senior Army official who also requested anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. The senior official said the alleged incident was first revealed by a soldier during a routine counseling-type session. The official said that soldier did not witness the incident but heard about it.

 

 

A second soldier, who also was not involved, said he overhead soldiers conspiring to commit the crimes and then later saw bloodstains on their clothes, the official said.

 

 

The allegations of rape could generate a particularly strong backlash in Iraq, a conservative, strongly religious society in which many women will not even shake hands with men who are not close relatives.

 

 

The case is among the most serious against U.S. soldiers allegedly involved in the deaths of Iraqi civilians. At least 14 U.S. troops have been convicted.

 

 

Last week, seven Marines and one Navy medic were charged with premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi man near Fallujah west of Baghdad.

 

 

U.S. officials are also investigating allegations that U.S. Marines killed two dozen unarmed Iraqi civilians Nov. 19 in the western town of Haditha in a revenge attack after a fellow Marine died in a roadside bombing.

 

 

Other cases involve the deaths of three male detainees in Salahuddin province in May, the shooting death of an unarmed Iraqi man near Ramadi in February and the death of an Iraqi soldier after an interrogation at a detention camp in Qaim in 2003.

 

 

 

 

AP correspondent Ryan Lenz is embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Beiji, Iraq. He was previously embedded with the 502nd Infantry Regiment in Mahmoudiya. AP correspondent Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.

 

 

 

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[snuffbox 0]

Theres some good MikeSC joke potential here.

[SuperJerk 0]

Don't look at me.

[Dr. Zaius 0]

You were disqualified the second he used the word "good" to describe the jokes.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

Yes, because incidents like this have never happened in any war before, ever. Most wars are waged with complete thought to leaving innocents alone, and only the bad guys get hurt.

 

Of course, our media is going to run this story into the ground and not report on most of the good stuff our soldiers are doing in Iraq.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

I just found out today a guy I graduated with was shot and killed by an Iraqi sniper. I didn't really know him outside of just knowing who he was back then, and hadn't seen him since high school, but still, pretty weird.

[dubq 0]

Yes, because incidents like this have never happened in any war before, ever. Most wars are waged with complete thought to leaving innocents alone, and only the bad guys get hurt.

 

Of course, our media is going to run this story into the ground and not report on most of the good stuff our soldiers are doing in Iraq.

 

Just because incidents like this have happened in previous war campaigns, doesn't mean that a blind-fucking-eye should be turned to it and that it should be disregarded when it happens during this one.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

I'm not saying it should be disregarded, but taking one incident and making it representative of the entire US campaign in Iraq is a complete disservice to the men and women we have fighting and dying over there.

 

And I'm someone who thinks we need to get out of there sooner than later...especially since Bush is clearly not giving the troops adequate personnel and supply support. I mean, some of these soldiers are on their THIRD tour of duty in Iraq. Many troops have mental issues and need therapy after only one...yet we except them all to do their job completely perfectly when they've already been way overworked, and are still in a hostile environment. I'm not saying that excuses incidents like the above, but to be surprised by it is foolishness at this point.

[snuffbox 0]

Yes, because incidents like this have never happened in any war before, ever. Most wars are waged with complete thought to leaving innocents alone, and only the bad guys get hurt.

 

Of course, our media is going to run this story into the ground and not report on most of the good stuff our soldiers are doing in Iraq.

 

Thanks for posting, Sean Hannity.

[cbacon 0]

Of course, our media is going to run this story into the ground and not report on most of the good stuff our soldiers are doing in Iraq.

 

Maybe we should be asking the Iraqis about all the good the soldiers are doing.

 

Incidents like this are inexcusible and should be investigated and reported to the fullest extent. It would be a great disrespect to the family if it wasn't. The fact your trying to brush this episode off as something thats "not surprising" is totally reprensible. I guess we should have seen the My Lai massacre coming too.

[NoCalMike 0]

...I mean, some of these soldiers are on their THIRD tour of duty in Iraq. Many troops have mental issues and need therapy after only one...yet WE expect them all to do their job completely perfectly when they've already been way overworked, and are still in a hostile environment...

 

 

Who is "WE"? I don't expect them to do the job perfectly on their third tour of duty, but obviously guys like Bush, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz etc.....think it is no big deal seeing as how shitty they managed to plan the occupation.

 

I think a lot of the left's very argument is that these soliders should not be on their third tour of duty in Iraq and should be HOME. If you listen to a lot of the vocal left such as Murtha, he is essentially saying that because the Soliders have been over there for so long under these shit conditions, without proper equipment and without a clear plan to "win" these types of incidents are going to start happening.

[Guest Arnold_OldSchool]

Ex-soldier pleads not guilty in Iraq crimes By ELIZABETH DUNBAR, Associated Press Writer

23 minutes ago

 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - A former Army private charged with raping an Iraqi woman and killing her and her family entered a plea of not guilty through his public defenders Thursday.

 

Steven D. Green also waived a detention hearing and a preliminary hearing, and agreed that his case would be prosecuted in the Western District of Kentucky.

 

U.S. Magistrate Judge James Moyer set an arraignment date of Aug. 8 in Paducah for Green, who was arrested Friday by FBI agents in Marion, N.C. Green appeared in baggy shorts and flip-flops, and was wearing the same Johnny Cash T-shirt he wore to a hearing Monday in Charlotte, N.C.

 

Green answered Moyer's questions about his inability to pay for an attorney, saying he has about $6,000 in a checking account and owns a 1995 Lincoln Town Car.

 

"I don't have anything else," he told the judge.

 

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Butler said the case would be presented before a grand jury sometime in mid-July, probably in Paducah. Butler and Assistant U.S. Attorney Marisa Ford declined to comment on where Green would be held before his arraignment.

 

Green, who served 11 months with the 101st Airborne Division, based at Fort Campbell, Ky., received an honorable discharge and left the army in mid-May. He was discharged because of an "anti-social personality disorder," according to military officials and court documents.

 

A psychiatric condition, anti-social personality disorder is defined as chronic behavior that manipulates, exploits or violates the rights of others. Someone with the disorder may break the law repeatedly, lie, get in fights and show a lack of remorse.

 

President George W. Bush, speaking on CNN's "Larry King Live" Thursday, said the Iraqis should understand that the allegations will be handled "in a very transparent upfront way."

 

"People will be held to account if these charges are true," Bush said.

 

But he also defended the U.S. military overall.

 

"What I don't want to have happen is for people to then say, well, the U.S. military is full of these kind of people. That is not the case. Our military is fabulous."

 

According to a federal affidavit, Green and other soldiers targeted the Iraqi young woman after spotting her at a traffic checkpoint near Mahmoudiya. Green is being tried in federal rather than military court because he no longer is in the Army.

 

Military officials concluded Thursday that since Green had received his final discharge papers, he was no longer under the control of the Army and would not be subject to a court martial.

 

No other soldiers have been charged yet in the case.

 

On Thursday, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey, and U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, said the investigation would be pursued in a "vigorous and open process."

 

"Coalition forces came to Iraq to protect the rights and freedoms of the Iraqi people, to defend democratic values, and to uphold human dignity. As such, we will face every situation honestly and openly, and we will leave no stone unturned in pursuit of the facts," the statement said.

 

"We will hold our service members accountable if they are found guilty of misconduct in a court of law," it added.

 

___

 

Associated Press Writers Kim Gamel in Iraq and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

[Dobbs 3K 0]

...I mean, some of these soldiers are on their THIRD tour of duty in Iraq. Many troops have mental issues and need therapy after only one...yet WE expect them all to do their job completely perfectly when they've already been way overworked, and are still in a hostile environment...

 

 

Who is "WE"? I don't expect them to do the job perfectly on their third tour of duty, but obviously guys like Bush, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz etc.....think it is no big deal seeing as how shitty they managed to plan the occupation.

 

I think a lot of the left's very argument is that these soliders should not be on their third tour of duty in Iraq and should be HOME. If you listen to a lot of the vocal left such as Murtha, he is essentially saying that because the Soliders have been over there for so long under these shit conditions, without proper equipment and without a clear plan to "win" these types of incidents are going to start happening.

 

I agree 100%. It is the Bush administration's fault, and also Congress' for not calling them on it. John Kerry and John McCain should be stepping up as veterans and talking about this, and ask Bush why some of these soldiers have been there for so long.

 

Again, I'm not excusing what these soldiers did, if its true. But, I think its dishonest to not expect things like this to develop.

[cbacon 0]

Another Iraqi massacre. This time a farmhouse

 

BAGHDAD — He was the first to enter the charred farmhouse where the bodies of his relatives lay strewn about the floor, shot and bludgeoned to death.

 

And he watched more than three months later as a U.S. Army officer took the two surviving children in his arms, barely able to hold back tears as he told them that the people who had killed their family would be punished.

 

"Never in my mind could I have imagined such a gruesome sight," Abu Firas Janabi said of the day in March when his cousin, Fakhriya Taha Muhsen; her husband, Kasim Hamza Rasheed; and their two daughters were slain and their farmhouse set ablaze.

 

"Kasim's corpse was in the corner of the room, and his head was smashed into pieces," he said. The 5-year-old daughter, Hadel, was beside her father, and Janabi said he could see that Fakhriya's arms had been broken.

 

In another room, he found 15-year-old Abeer, naked and burned, with her head smashed in "by a concrete block or a piece of iron."

 

"There were burns from the bottom of her stomach to the end of her body, except for her feet," he said.

 

"I did not believe what I was seeing. I tried to fool myself into believing I was in a dream. But the problem was that we were not dreaming. We put a piece of cloth over her body. Then I left the house together with my wife."

 

At least four American soldiers from a nearby checkpoint are the prime suspects. The case, which includes the alleged rape of the older daughter, has caused a firestorm in the United States and Iraq. And the soldiers, including one charged Monday with rape and murder, have become lurid symbols of the American military at its worst.

 

The image has not been helped in recent weeks by the emergence of other accusations that U.S. soldiers had killed Iraqi civilians.

 

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki complained Wednesday that immunity from Iraqi prosecution had encouraged atrocities by American troops. And the U.S. military is clearly on the defensive. On Wednesday, Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the chief military spokesman in Iraq, defended the troops here, complaining that the "acts of a few outweigh the deeds of many."

 

Janabi, who has emerged as a potential witness, has been interviewed by a U.S. investigator.

 

He lives about half a mile from the scene of the killings, just outside the town of Mahmoudiya. It's agricultural country, where the small farms are divided by mesh wire fences and the people who toil on them make a subsistence living.

 

Janabi and his wife were home March 12 when a neighbor ran to tell him that the farmhouse of his cousin and her husband was on fire and that he could see slain family members inside the burning building.

 

Janabi said that when he arrived at the house, he began to call for others to help him.

 

"But nobody came," he said in a telephone interview Tuesday from Mahmoudiya, describing the eeriness he felt as he and his wife stood there. "I felt that I had made a disastrous decision. I felt I had made a mistake to rush so quickly to the house, because if the murderers were still there, they would kill me as well."

 

He and his wife had to douse some of the flames before they could enter the home.

 

The couple had found the two young boys in the family crying as they stood outside the farmhouse, where they could see the bodies inside. The boys had been at school when the killings occurred but were home by the time Janabi and his wife arrived.

 

Together, they went to a checkpoint guarded by Iraqi soldiers to tell them what had happened. Then they went back to the house and watched as the bodies were placed in nylon bags and taken to a nearby Iraqi base.

 

Janabi said Abeer was not in school and, like other peasant girls, seldom left the house. But he said that three days before the killings, the Rasheed family was at his house and his cousin was complaining that the American soldiers at the nearby guard post were constantly searching her house. Janabi said the parents believed that the "girl was the target."

 

"I suggested they come and live in the house beside mine that was empty," Janabi said. "But they said, 'There are a lot of families close to us, and nothing bad will happen.' "

 

Janabi said he returned to the burned-out house the day after the attack as villagers gathered to scavenge for furniture. He asked the villagers whether they knew of any enemies that Kasim had made. They answered no, saying he was just a poor farmer like them who barely made ends meet, working in a Baghdad factory to earn an extra $3 a day. But the villagers had heard stories about the slayings.

 

In one story, the killers wore black shirts and military pants. In another, they were wearing track suits, and in a third, there was a dog with them.

 

Janabi said he suspected the Americans because the dozens of shots fired would have been heard by U.S. troops at the nearby checkpoint. And from what he could gather, the killers were at the house for more than two hours, too long for them to have gone unnoticed by the Americans. He also said he suspected that whoever carried out the killings had used Kasim's AK-47 assault rifle, the only item that Janabi said was missing from the house.

 

Initially, U.S. military officials said the killings were the result of intra-Iraqi feuding, a plausible conclusion given the dozens of revenge killings that happen each day in the country. But a U.S. soldier came forward recently with rumors of American involvement in the alleged rape and killings.

 

On Monday, Steven D. Green, 21, a former private with the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was charged in Charlotte, N.C., in the case. The Army has said that no other soldiers have been charged or detained, but that several were under close supervision in Iraq.

 

Janabi said he learned of the inquiry involving the soldiers last week, and an American investigator asked him to tell his side of the story.

 

"He was saying that he wants to find out the truth," Janabi said. "I told him I didn't want any money or compensation. The most important thing is that the criminal must be punished in a punishment in the same level of the crime he committed. He must not be imprisoned for four to six months and that is all."

 

Janabi said he asked the investigator why all this was happening now, when the killings took place three months earlier.

 

"He told me that a soldier confessed and we want to know the truth," he said.

 

Then, Janabi said, the investigator told him that a high-ranking U.S. officer wished to pay his condolences to the family. The next day, he brought Fakhriya's cousin, Mohammed, to the base along with the two boys to meet the commander.

 

"He hugged the children and kissed them several times," Janabi said. "It was hard for him to control his tears."

 

The discussions, Janabi said, now center on whether the bodies can be exhumed for autopsies. He said they received only a cursory examination when they were taken to the Mahmoudiya hospital in March.

 

Janabi said that the two boys were with their uncle in the village of Iskandariya, but that their faces told the effects of their misery.

 

"They lost their father and mother," Janabi said. "They lost their house and sisters. Basically their family was too poor and they have not inherited anything. Their life is deplorable."

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wo...-home-headlines

[Art Sandusky 0]

I agree 100%. It is the Bush administration's fault, and also Congress' for not calling them on it. John Kerry and John McCain should be stepping up as veterans and talking about this, and ask Bush why some of these soldiers have been there for so long.

They would, but anyone who does gets smeared into oblivion and summarily dismissed.

[Guest Hemme]

I said this in another thread, but it's apt here too-

 

As for the troops & all the rape stuff, just because these muppets are "defending our freedom" (dont even get me fucking started on that crock of shit) doesent mean that they are all nice guys. Sometimes, sadly, soldiers arent nice people & given the power & freedom they have, they abuse it. It's happened throught history, I can't believe people are surprised by some of the tings that go on, bad people are bad people, regardless of what flag they fight under.

[Jobber of the Week 0]

Last I heard about the rape, we were trying to tapdance with the new Iraqi government and convince them that military court was good enough for the punk, while the Iraqi government wanted to give him Iraqi-style trial and justice since it was on their land against one of their people.

 

Anything become of that?

[CheesalaIsGood 0]

Last I heard about the rape, we were trying to tapdance with the new Iraqi government and convince them that military court was good enough for the punk, while the Iraqi government wanted to give him Iraqi-style trial and justice since it was on their land against one of their people.

 

Anything become of that?

 

 

Interesting idea. Makes me wonder how long the holdouts who support this war would last if the Iraqis start putting American soldiers on trial. Maybe they'll want them to come home sooner in that case.

[EricMM 0]

There is no way an American soldier is ever, ever put onto an Iraqi trial.

 

Ever.

[Vyce 0]

Last I heard about the rape, we were trying to tapdance with the new Iraqi government and convince them that military court was good enough for the punk, while the Iraqi government wanted to give him Iraqi-style trial and justice since it was on their land against one of their people.

 

Anything become of that?

 

Interesting idea. Makes me wonder how long the holdouts who support this war would last if the Iraqis start putting American soldiers on trial. Maybe they'll want them to come home sooner in that case.

 

Seeing as no government on earth has authority over our military, I don't really think it will ever be a problem.

 

Our military is quite capable of handling its own. The men will be tried, fairly, and if found guilty, will be dealt with in the manner that they deserve.

 

Unless of course YOU in particular just want to see American soldiers executed by Iraqis. Which wouldn't surprise me.

[Guest Arnold_OldSchool]

A Wave of Sexual Terrorism In Iraq

By Ruth Rosen, Tomdispatch.com

Posted on July 14, 2006, Printed on July 16, 2006

http://www.alternet.org/story/38932/

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."

 

Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.