One of Ours

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.

They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the Al-Amariyah security centre, in the city's south-western suburbs.

They say Dr Allawi told onlookers the victims had each killed as many as 50 Iraqis and they "deserved worse than death".

The Prime Minister's office has denied the entirety of the witness accounts in a written statement to the Herald, saying Dr Allawi had never visited the centre and he did not carry a gun.

But the informants told the Herald that Dr Allawi shot each young man in the head as about a dozen Iraqi policemen and four Americans from the Prime Minister's personal security team watched in stunned silence.

Iraq's Interior Minister, Falah al-Naqib, is said to have looked on and congratulated him when the job was done. Mr al-Naqib's office has issued a verbal denial.

[...]

There is much debate and rumour in Baghdad about the Prime Minister's capacity for brutality...

...the witnesses did not perceive themselves as whistle-blowers. In interviews with the Herald they were enthusiastic about such killings, with one of them arguing: "These criminals were terrorists. They are the ones who plant the bombs."...

JIM LEHRER: How can there not be occupation when there's still 140,000 foreign troops in Iraq?

REND AL-RAHIM FRANCKE: Well, there are troops in Japan, there are troops in Germany, until recently there were multi-national troops in Germany. There are troops in Korea, and in various other parts of the world. Do we deny that Japan is a sovereign nation? Do we deny that Germany is a sovereign state, or South Korea?

I do not think that the presence of troops in the country undermines sovereignty. The Iraqi government is sovereign to the extent that it determines the disposal of its resources, of its funds, it determines its own political development. And it also organizes its relationship with the multinational force that is in the country. And that is what sovereignty means to us.

In the late morning we took part in one of our ongoing detainee release missions. I remember reading some newspaper articles when we first started the large releases from Abu Ghraib but you don't hear too much about them anymore.

Our convoy left FOB DAGGER and drove to a link up point on the outskirts of Tikrit. There, after a short wait, we met an Iraqi bus carrying about 25 Iraqis that were being released from Abu Ghraib. We escorted the bus to a more secure location and then started to process the detainees. As we drove through downtown Tikrit the detainees on the bus were leaning out of the windows waving to everyone on the street. And everyone on the street was waving back, police men, iraqis on bicycles, kids, they were all waving smiling and yelling encouragement. Cars were honking their horns. They must all have known what was going on.

All of the detainees had been detained by 4ID before we had arrived in country so we didn't know too much about them. We were only supposed to release eleven individuals here in Tikrit and the rest were going to go up to Kirkuk...

After getting the bus sorted out we sat our eleven guys in some bleachers, gave them water and a new dishdasha (the robes that are popular here) and an Iraqi National Guard major welcomed them back to society. The speech wasn't translated into english but I imagine he told them that, now that they are free again, they needed to keep out of trouble and help support the new government's efforts at establishing security.

At previous releases we've had Al Jazeera and CNN reporters present and filming the release. Yesterday we had two Iraqi reporters for Agence France Presse. They were videotaping everything and got to interview a number of the released detainees. I would be curious to see if it makes it on the air and what kind of angle they put on it.

...it would be nice if they could become less selfish, less hypocritical, less addicted to lying, treachery and jealousy. That would be nice. And perhaps they could show a little more concern about the murder of our people, the destruction of our livelihood, the sabotage of our national assets and infrastructure. It would be even nicer if they could actually stop perpetrating these rather unfriendly acts.

Also, somewhat it seems to us that cutting the heads of hostages is not a particularly good way of illustrating the Arab and Islamic nobility of spirit; especially if it is done in the name of Allah. I mean we are puzzled, because we thought that Allah was The Merciful; the Compassionate. But hard as we try to understand our brothers, we don’t seem to be able to comprehend the merciful nature of their actions. Perhaps we are not sufficiently well trained philosophically and too ignorant to appreciate the finer points of theology and the relationship between beheadings and various forms of murder to monotheism and Jihad in the name of The Merciful, the Compassionate.

...We have yet to appreciate that the true way of the Lord calls for drenching the earth with human blood. We seem to remember that the Gods of paganism craved for human sacrifice; “The Gods are thirsty – Les Dieux Ont Soif”. Do we have sneaking suspicions that these ancient creeds have crept back into your system of belief?...

In May 2003, Washington state passed a law that prevented sale of video games to minors that portrayed "realistic or photographic-like depictions of aggressive conflict" against law enforcement officers. Retailers would have been subject to a $500 fine per violation of the law. The ban never went into effect after Judge Robert Lasnik ruled the law was likely unconstitutional and issued an injunction against its use. Now, a year after that injunction was handed down, Lasnik has ruled the law is a violation of free speech. The judge called the law too narrow because it banned violence against police officers and not violence against others. He also called the law too broad because the law guidelines were unclear on what would trigger a ban. Would Yosemite Sam be considered a law enforcement officer?

"Would a game built around 'The Simpsons' or the 'Looney Tunes' characters be 'realistic' enough to trigger the act?" he wrote. "The real problem is that (a store) clerk might know everything there is to know about the game and yet not be able to determine whether it can legally be sold to a minor." Lasnik also noted that violence against tyrannical or oppressive police officers would likely fall under the ban.

To obey the law, he said, store clerks would tend to be overly cautious in selling games to minors and game makers would tend to be overly cautious in designing them - resulting in a chilling effect on free speech.

The state had argued that the law was important in helping curb violence among youths, including that against law enforcement officers.

Identity theft has become one of the fastest-growing crimes in the United States. Depending on the source, it is estimated that between 7 million to 10 million Americans are victims of identity fraud at a cost over a billion dollars a year. For victims of identity fraud, it may mean months of headaches trying to recover monetary losses and repair credit. For perpetrators, if caught and prosecuted, it may only mean probation with restitution. That may change with today's signing of the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act (ITPEA). The new law strengthens penalties against identity fraud by setting up sentencing guidelines for those who possess another's identification-related information with intent to commit a crime.

When you become bilingual in a second language, you actually develop a second personality that's "turned on" when you speak that language. My Japanese personality is much more humble and polite than my English one, and I get laughs by the J-List staff when, during phone conversations in Japanese, I accidentally bow to the person on the other end of the line. I've noticed a strange development in the Japanese side of my brain, too: a ridiculous sense of humor. For some strange reason that I can't comprehend, my brain comes up with incredibly corny jokes in Japan (called "ojisan gag" or jokes that a middle-aged man would make), which I constantly torment the J-List staff with. For example, I'll observe that "Pyramids are zig-zag shaped" (in Japanese, "Piramiddo wa giza giza suru"), marginally funny because "giza giza" describes the zig-zag shape and the most famous pyramids are in Giza. Or I'll use the word for "properly" ("kichin to," which sounds like the English word "kitchen") on purpose when asking someone to clean the J-List kitchen, thus making a really bad gag. The word for manual transmission in Japanese is "mission" and when my wife complained that she couldn't drive my stick-shift car, I made a bad joke involving the movie "Mission Impossible." I don't make these lame jokes in English, but the Japanese side of my brain can't help spitting a few out every day. I guess I must be an "ojisan."

All language is fluid, and when a word is passed from one country to another, it's common for meanings to change slightly. In Japan, for example, the term manga can describe both comics and anime on TV, but in English, the meaning has been redefined to refer only to Japanese comics. When I came to Japan I was surprised to see advertisements recruiting girls to work as "companions." This seemed vaguely unsettling to me -- was it some kind of prostitution? I learned later that attractive girls who work at various public events, serving customers or working at information counters (or in one case I saw, smiling while holding a no smoking sign for several hours), are called companions in Japanese. Also, when men have a party, they'll often hire pretty girls who smile and pour drinks for them and act interested in their conversations -- these girls are also called companions. Although the concept of girls being paid to smile and look pretty isn't the most progressive one, at least there was nothing nefarious in the concept.