One of Ours

...even though the United States is not part of the ICC [International Criminal Court] and Iraq is not a member, we might still find our troops wrangled into ICC jurisdiction by a provision that lets non-ICC member states refer cases to it anyway. Once the Iraqi government takes sovereignty on June 30, it might decide to do just that, especially if the Iraqi people demand international justice for the crimes at Abu Ghraib. The United States will surely lobby the future Iraqi government not to refer charges to the ICC. But once we hand the reins of sovereignty to the Iraqi government, this decision will be theirs to make.

So, the United States must now make a difficult choice: It can continue to prosecute a fraction of those involved, with the risk of an ugly ICC prosecution in the future. Or, take a more aggressive stance toward the abuses at Abu Ghraib, in order to preempt ICC jurisdiction. "More aggressive" here means that the United States should do three things immediately: We must prosecute the military and civilian leadership involved, in addition to the junior soldiers who allegedly carried out the abuses at Abu Ghraib; second, we should appoint an independent commission (not just a Pentagon-sponsored panel, as suggested by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Congress) to investigate these abuses and make recommendations on how to prevent these staggering breaches in military discipline from recurring in the future; finally, we should evaluate our stance toward prisoners of war and enemy combatants generally, with particular attention to how cases like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed around the world, and how this stance may create ambiguity in the field for soldiers charged with physically dealing with prisoners.

Even if the United States acts only to keep its own soldiers off the ICC docket, the interests of justice will be served...

...While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Japanese tourists are welcome in Asia everywhere today because the Second World War ended in 1945. And if by contrast Palestinians hand out sweets whenever a Jewish orphanage and Old Folk's home is bombed it may be because the UN refugee camps there celebrated their 50th anniversary in 1998. If the outrages at Abu Ghraib hasten the end of war it will not have been in vain, but if they lead...to a Vietnam-like stalemate, it will be not the last but the first of many sad mileposts...

A senior aide of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told worshippers during a Friday sermon in southern Iraq (news - web sites) that anyone capturing a female British soldier can keep her as a slave.

The aide, Sheik Abdul-Sattar al-Bahadli, also called on supporters to launch jihad, or holy war, against British troops in this southern city...

...He also accused British forces in Basra of failing to honor agreements not to patrol inside the city and to stop harassing al-Sadr supporters in Basra.

Al-Bahadli said 250,000 dinars — about $350 — will be given to anyone capturing a British soldier and 100,000 dinars — or $150 — to anyone killing one...

He also called on government departments in Basra to display pictures of al-Sadr in their offices.

...Fallujah is now caught in a time warp. Iraqi soldiers wearing their crisp, olive-green army uniforms -- a sight unseen since former president Saddam Hussein's government was toppled more than a year ago -- now man checkpoints on roads leading into the city. Stout generals, their lapels adorned with stars and crossed swords, stroll around the mayor's office with the same imperious air they projected when Hussein was president...

...U.S. Marines have pulled out of positions in and around Fallujah and handed over responsibility for security to an untested militia led by a group of generals who had been barred from military service by the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq. The agreement to give the generals a chance was negotiated by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, the top U.S. Marine commander in Iraq, who was eager to avoid an all-out attack on the resilient insurgency here...

...the [Republican Guard] generals appear to be opting for a strategy of co-optation instead of confrontation. They have recruited scores of young men who fought against the Marines last month...The officials said they believed that most members of the brigade participated in the fighting.

"Many of the guys who were shooting at the Marines have simply put on their old army uniforms and joined the Fallujah Brigade,"...

...the Iraqi generals...had been officers in Hussein's Republican Guard, an elite army unit dominated by Sunni Muslims and accused of human rights abuses against Shiite Muslims and Kurds.

The generals, whose return to power has angered many Shiite and Kurdish leaders, do not pretend to hew to the U.S. military message about the insurgency in Fallujah. They have joined residents in proclaiming a victory over the Marines. They have publicly dismissed American claims that foreign militants are holed up in Fallujah. They have also urged U.S. troops to stay away from the city.

Mohammed Latif, a former official in Hussein's intelligence service who was named the brigade's leader, proclaimed to reporters on Thursday that "there are no insurgents" in Fallujah.

Conway's aides said they were not alarmed by these developments...

...Although Marine commanders insisted that Conway's superiors were fully briefed about the arrangement and signed off on it, the unorthodox nature of the deal has led senior officials at the Pentagon, the U.S. military command in Iraq and the civilian occupation administration to react with skepticism. "It's Conway's thing," said one U.S. civilian official involved in the issue. "Either it works out, and he emerges as they guy who solved the Fallujah problem, or it turns into a big failure."...

...after four U.S. security contractors were killed and mutilated on March 31, the Marines were ordered to shift their strategy to an all-out attack on suspected insurgent positions...

...Hundreds of suspected insurgents were killed in the initial incursion...

...an interlocutor approached Conway with an enticing offer: A group of former Iraqi army generals was willing to assemble a force that would restore order in Fallujah...this overture piqued Conway's interest...

...While interested in the generals' plan, Marine commanders were also planning to resume offensive operations because local leaders had not held up their end of the peace deal...

...Neither the U.S. military command nor the civilian occupation authority thought that Conway was close to making a deal.

Later that evening, however, Conway did exactly that. He and the generals agreed to set up the Fallujah Brigade...

...Senior Marine officials said Conway had been authorized to reach a deal by his superiors, including Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the overall military commander in Iraq, and Gen. John P. Abizaid, the U.S. commander for the Middle East. The Marine officials said they conveyed details of the deal to both Sanchez and Abizaid.

The next morning, however, internal reports of the deal startled officials with the civilian occupation authority in Baghdad. Although they knew Conway was making arrangements to set up an Iraqi force, they were unaware of the details until the deal was done. The civilian officials were alarmed by the decision to work with former generals, who nearly a year ago had been excluded from participation in the new security forces by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq. Bremer reversed that policy only on April 23.

"It caught everyone by surprise," an official with the occupation authority in Baghdad said. "Here was this Marine general making security policy, and we knew nothing about it."...

...civilian and military officials in Baghdad remain wary. Among their biggest worries has been the schedule imposed by Conway, which called for Marine units to begin withdrawing before the new force was fully formed. "There's a lot of concern about the speed of implementation," the occupation authority official said. "We need to be very careful."

Coleman said Marine commanders opted to reposition U.S. forces right away because the Iraqi generals felt that doing so would encourage residents who had fled to return and evict insurgents who may have been holing up in their homes. "They said that some of the families would have been reticent to return until they see an Iraqi on the security perimeter," he said...

...[Maj. Majid Hamid] said he signed up for a simple reason: "I don't want the American soldiers to enter our city again," he said. "That's why I'm here."...

...at Hamid's checkpoint, enforcement was a lax affair. His soldiers failed to stop a single vehicle during an hour-long visit...

...Marine commanders said they intended to test the new brigade's success in combating the insurgency in a week or two, when they plan to send a convoy through the center of the city. "We're going to see whether anything has changed," one officer said. "If not, we'll just have to go back to where we were."

...This war is also about -- deeply about -- sex.

For the jihadists, at stake in the war against the infidels is the control of women. Western freedom means the end of women's mastery by men, and the end of dictatorial clerical control over all aspects of sexuality -- in dress, behavior, education, the arts.

Taliban rule in Afghanistan was the model of what the jihadists want to impose upon the world. The case the jihadists make against freedom is that wherever it goes, especially the United States and Europe, it brings sexual license and corruption, decadence and depravity.

The appeal of this fear can be seen in the Arab world's closest encounter with modernity: Israel. Israeli women are by far the most liberated of any in that part of the world. For decades, the Arab press has responded with lurid stories of Israeli sexual corruption.

The most famous example occurred in the late 1990s, when Egyptian newspapers claimed that chewing gum Israel was selling in Egypt was laced with sexual hormones that aroused insatiable lust in young Arab women. Palestinian officials later followed with charges that Israeli chewing gum was a Zionist plot for turning Palestinian women into prostitutes, and "completely destroying the genetic system of young boys" to boot.

Which is why the torture pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib prison could not have hit a more neuralgic point. We think of torture as the kind that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately death. We think of it as having a political purpose: intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation. What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.

That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that the jihadists believe...

...It is no accident that jihadists around the world are overwhelmingly male. It is very rare to find a female suicide bomber. And when you do, as with the young woman who blew herself up in Gaza, killing four others in January, it turns out that she herself was a victim of sexual subjugation -- a wife accused of adultery, marked for death, who decided to die a martyr rather than a pariah...

...pictures of female U.S. soldiers mocking, humiliating and dominating naked and abused Arab men. One could not have designed a more symbolic representation of the Islamist warning about where Western freedom ultimately leads...a uniformed American woman holding a naked Arab man on a leash...

...The American offenders should surely be judged by our standards, not by others'. By our standards, these were egregious violations of human rights and human dignity. They must be punished seriously. They do not, however, reflect the ethos of the U.S. military, which has performed with remarkable grace and courage in Iraq, or of U.S. society...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Not long ago in my little mosque around the corner from a McDonald's, a student from the university here delivered a sermon. To love the Prophet Muhammad, he said, "is to hate those who hate him." He railed against man-made doctrines that replace Islamic law, and excoriated the "enemies of Islam" who deny strict adherence to Sunnah, or the ways of Muhammad...his words echoed the extremist vocabulary of Wahhabism...

...only months earlier at my mosque, my mother, sister-in-law, niece and I prayed in the main hall, an act of defiance that led to a reversal of the policy that women had to pray in a secluded balcony. Sadly, I have learned that the realization of an inclusive Islam is a fragile thing, even in this country. Americans need not look elsewhere to hear hate-filled rhetoric preached by fundamentalists. It resounds in our own back yards...

...These men rally around strict interpretation of the Koran and Sunnah, which last week entailed a sermon that criticized women working outside the home and called women who have lost their chastity worthless. The group has packed the mosque's bookcases with fundamentalist publications...

Even though a majority of the mosque's membership...is moderate, passivity...has allowed extremism to take hold...

...It saddens me that these Muslim organizations and my mosque leadership are reluctant to take a strong stand, because ending hate begins at home. If Muslims in America and elsewhere expect religious tolerance, we must ourselves enforce a zero-tolerance policy against preaching hatred and bigotry...

...The goings-on in my small mosque may seem inconsequential, but we are a microcosm of the challenges moderate Islam faces throughout the world. If tolerant and inclusive Islam can't express itself in small corners like Morgantown, where on this earth can the real beauty of Islam flourish?

Since 9/11/01, conspiracy theories against the U.S., the Jews, and the Zionists have been rampant in the Arab world. These notions are spread not only by marginal personalities and media outlets, but, more important, by prominent members of mainstream governments and media.

Some of last year's most far-fetched conspiracy theories in the Arab world include: U.S. soldiers cannibalized Iraqi civilians; the U.S. was responsible for the car bomb that killed Iraqi Shia leader Muhammad Bakir Al-Hakim; the Jews were behind the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia; the U.S. was behind the SARS virus; and the Iraq war was launched to coincide with the Jewish holiday Purim. The following highlight the top ten Arab conspiracy theories in recent months:

10...the Riyadh bombing...is a Jewish and American conspiracy against the mujahadeen and al Qaeda.

9...editorial in the...Yemen Times, the Istanbul bombings...could not have been committed by Muslims, as...no Muslim in his right mind could ever condone such crimes."

8...the U.S. captured Osama bin Laden in a tribal region of Pakistan...the U.S. will announce the capture shortly before the November presidential elections.

7..."There is still doubt that the September [11] attacks were the outcome of Arab and Islamic terror...

6...the Madrid bombings: "I claim with certainty that the ones who attributed all evil to the Arabs and the Muslims are the Zionists, those who are closest to carry out such an operation like the other operations [that they carried out]."

5...blamed the Madrid bombings on the Jews...criticized Arab intelligence services for being "incapable of discovering the hidden Zionist fingers planning many terror operations in order to entangle the Arabs and Muslims."

4...accused the Jews of perpetrating every terrorist attack throughout the world. Regarding the Madrid bombings..."It is obvious that the Jews are the ones who placed these things, in order to prove to the entire world that the Arabs and Muslims are behind the bombings."..."It is they who are behind the events of September 11."

3...as part of a "born-again Christian" scheme that included 9/11, the CIA controls Osama bin Laden.

2...the series of bombings that hit Damascus...were "a bid to force Iraq's neighbors to submit to their Iraq policy, the U.S. and the Zionist regimes orchestrated such terrorist attacks." He noted, "This is not the first time that the U.S. and Israel have employed al Qaeda elements to help them reinforce their terrorist objectives."

1...bombing in Yunbu, Saudi Arabia...Crown Prince Abdullah stated: "Zionism is behind terrorist actions in the kingdom. I can say that I am 95 percent sure of that."

The governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, under intense pressure from his bishops, has said he will no longer receive communion. McGreevey opposes abortion but does not believe the government should make it illegal in all cases. This topic is complicated in many ways. It's no violation of the separation of church and state, in my view. It's about how a church deals with its members in public life. But that doesn't make this new shift any less momentous. What's particularly stunning about the McGreevey case is that his withdrawal from Communion was not, apparently, simply about abortion. It was also about his support for domestic partnerships for gay couples and stem-cell research. To bar someone from Communion for that array of beliefs strikes me as new territory. Bottom line? From now on, I think, it will be harder and harder for any sincere public Catholic who is a Democrat to continue to be a part of the sacramental life of the church...Very few leading Democrats are pro-life. If those issues are the criteria for allowing someone in public life to receive Communion as a Catholic, then the Church, in effect, is endorsing one political party over another...This is the dream of the religious right: to destroy the Catholic base of the Democratic party, create a hard-right rump of true believers, and integrate the latter into the G.O.P. I can barely believe that the Catholic hierarchy is doing Karl Rove's work for him...

FBI agents arrested a Portland lawyer Thursday as part of the investigation into the deadly train bombings in Spain, federal officials said.

Brandon Mayfield, a U.S. citizen, was taken into custody on a material witness warrant, said a senior law enforcement official in Washington D.C., speaking on condition of anonymity. The arrest is the first known in the United States with connections to the March 11 bombings in Madrid.

The FBI also searched Mayfield's home...

...Mayfield's fingerprints were found on materials related to the Madrid bombings...

...I decided to offer you some of the responses I saw on the BBC Arabic which offers a comment section for Arab readers to post their opinions about the hot topics...As usual, the comments from Iraqis-in general-contradicted those from other Arab countries, especially Palestine, Syria and Saudi Arabia...about 40% of the total number of comments was positive (sorry, I mean they were supportive of the CIA propaganda)...

"...here we have the president of the greatest nation on earth apologizes for what a small group of pervert soldiers did. And here, the American press proves that it's free to show the truth. We lived with similar pictures for years until they became the basics of every prison's daily life and we never heard an Arabic paper point them out. These are lessons from the western culture entering the hearts of Arabs, whether the Arab leaders liked or not".
Sa'eed - Diwaniyah/Iraq

"I'm very happy to see Iraqis condemning the abuse and defending the rights of the prisoners and this is the first time they do something like this, which was impossible for them to do under the dictator's regime. I think that our Arab brothers should mind their own business and take a look at their own prisons".
N - Jordan.

"I think that president Bush was honest in what he said. Those abuses do not represent the American people. As a matter of fact, we can find cruel men with no morals in any country; that's why we should not judge a whole nation for the violations of a small group of people and I'm sure that these will get the punishment they deserve. Here I'd like to direct my question to the Arabic media "where were you when Saddam mass-executed my people and used all kinds of torture against us?".
Reemon A'adel Sami -Iraq

"I think that President Bush's statement will find acceptance from some of the Arabs, while the majority will not be satisfied with his words whatever apologies they included just because he is BUSH and he is AMERICAN. I'm sure that the American officials are more upset by the event than the Iraqis themselves because this doesn't belong to their culture or their ethics as a civilized nation. I think that the event took more space than it actually deserves and the media are creating a mountain from a grain. It's enough for us to remember Saddam's doings to comment on what recently happened".
Sameer-Jordan.