Felicity Arbuthnot

A Few More ' Bad Apples'

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-11-01T11:10:00Z

In October 2005, when the Australian SBS network showed US troops in Afghanistan burning the corpses of two alleged Taliban fighters and a soldier named as Sgt Jim Baker taunting locals through a loud speaker, US Embassies round the world were instructed tell governments the actions 'did not reflect American values ... to counter a potential anti-American backlash ...at the mocking of some of Islam's most dearly held traditions.' (1.) Calling the local 'dogs' and 'lady boys' , Baker accuses (in the local Pashto language) them of '..being too scared to come and retrieve the bodies' and allowing them to : ' be laid down facing west and burned.' This presumably referring the the commonly held misunderstanding that Muslims are buried facing east. The last act for those lost, is that they are laid facing the holy city of Mecca. 'This alleged action is repugnant to our common values', said Major General Jason Kamiya, bunkered in Bagram air base, near Kabul. (...)

- / uruknet.info

Israel and total war

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-08-11T01:53:00Z

International law is rendered irrelevant as Israel, in Lebanon now as well as Gaza, targets whole populations for slow yet purposive extermination, writes Felicity Arbuthnot

The overwhelming consensus expressed in international law — here the 1st Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, 1977 — is explicit: "It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies such as irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying ... sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or any other motive."

Other articles of the 1st Additional Protocol forbid the destruction, closure (whether temporary or permanent) or knowing interruption of food, water, medicines or electricity to civilian hospitals and clinics, mobile or permanent. This is an absolute, only to be tempered if such facilities " ... are used to commit ... acts harmful to the enemy". Any military attack or incursion into medical facilities must only be undertaken after clear warnings and proof of "harmful acts" being undertaken from within. Is this finally explanation as to why doctors in Iraq, near weeping over their lack of ability to treat agonised, burned, bombed, shot and severed patients, are cuffed, beaten, locked in storerooms, their hospitals sealed off? (...)

[10 - 16 August 2006 | Issue No. 807]

- / Al-Ahram Weekly

"Welcome home Mr Kember" - a letter by Felicity Arbuthnot

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-03-26T23:59:00Z

Note: Felicity Arbuthnot has sent the following letter "to every letters editor I can think of"

The Editor,

The instantly orchestrated attack on Christian Peace Team's Norman Kember and his colleagues, James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden for failing to thank their rescuers, beggars belief.

Just when one thinks this Administration and their hangers on can sink no lower, they effortlessly plunge to new depths.

They would do well to remember that whatever about the Iraqi regime, Iraq was amongst the safest countries on earth for foreigners and overwhelming hospitality was extended by strangers to visitors and travellers.

The illegal US/UK led invasion and the foreign troops illegally squatting in Iraq's buildings and illegally on Iraqi sovereign soil, have brought about the distortion of the whole structure of Iraqi society. Kidnappings, summary executions, beheading were unheard of (as long, of course, the regime itself was not plotted against or targetted.) (...)

'Tortured, Shot Ambushed ... ' Iraq's Academics

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-03-10T06:35:00Z

Tortured, shot, ambushed, victims are found dumped outside morgues. What is happening to Iraq's intellectuals is chilling

Dr. Mohammed Tuki Hussein Al Talakani, Dr. Eman Younis, Dr. Jammour Khammas, Dr. Mohammed Washed, Professor Wajeeh Mahjoub, Professor Sabri Al Bayati, Professor Laila Al Saad, Professor Muneer Al Khiero, Professor Emad Sarsaan, Professor Mohammed Al Rawi, Professor Munim AlIzmerly, Dr. Ali Al NaasI.

The horrific killings of Iraqi intellectuals listed above have left suspicions that occupying forces may be behind some of the cases.

It is estimated that between 250 and 500 intellectuals have been killed or have disappeared since the fall of Saddam Hussein. There is a rising surge of anger over attacks on Iraq's intellectuals and many believe some of the killings may be part of a deliberate policy of targeting those who speak out against the "occupation". (...)

- / CommonDreams.org

Iraq: Academia's Killing Fields

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-02-28T21:45:00Z

Iraq, the land of ancient Mesopotamia, also known as the "cradle of civilization" to archeologists, gifted the world many of academia's "pillars of wisdom." Many who even came before Europe had built its first cathedral, or the Romans the Coliseum.

The first written records, domestic laws, astronomy, mathematics, pharmacology, and the wheel are believed to have been developed at Ur, the earliest civil society in the world. It is also believed to be the site of the Garden of Eden.

In between numerous invasions in the turbulent region, knowledge has been lost or destroyed, only to reemerge triumphant with an advanced enhanced civilization. Learning has long been central in Iraq. The first question by a prospective bride's parents, if they are educated, that is always asked is, "What did he study? What level is his degree?" said Sana al Khayyat, the author of Honour and Shame: Women in Modern Iraq. (...)

- / IslamOnline.net

Samarra: There Are No Tears Left

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-02-26T21:57:00Z

Samarra.

Travelling in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein required permits to requested destinations and often wheedling, begging, boxes of baqlawa - a day's calorie intake in one mouth watering, sticky delicacy - and, when all else failed, tears. Requesting a detour en route to a planned destination would me met with refusal and stern: ' you have not the permit ...' Except for Samarra. Travelling to and from northern Mosul, sighting the golden domes of the Askari shrine, glinting in the sun, thirty kilometres from the main road, the driver's face (whether Shi'a, Sunni, Christian) always lit at the request.Permits forgotten, we would speed towards the great, golden spheres, growing ever, magnificently, shimmeringly larger, the closer approached. Samarra is in Salahuddin Governorate, named for the warrior credited with driving the Crusaders from Eqypt, Palestine and Syria.

From 836 A.D. to 891 A.D., Samarra was Mesapotamia's Abbasid Capitol. Though the city's prominece as first city was short, it's scientific, literary and artistic splendours,remain legendary in Arab history. The tenth and eleventh Imams, Ali al-Hadi and his son Hassan al-Askari are entombed under the golden dome. The twelfth Imam, Muhammed al-Mahdi, who Shi'a believe will return as the world's saviour, is believed born in Samarra. The spiral minaret (malwiya) a 'syntheis of Babylonian ziggurat and Islamic architecture', was described by British archeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler as having ' ..9th century qualities which bridge the centuries. The Malwiya is a truly great and rather lonely masterpiece ' of '.. startling originality.' (Karen Dabrowska: Iraq, the Bradt Travel Guide.) US soldiers were unaware this haunting thousand year old structure was a great masterpiece and used it to snipe from, leading to it being irreperably damaged. Another gem of humanity's history which survived the Mongul hordes, but not GI Joe. (...)

- / CommonDreams.org

Reporting Iraq: liberation's limits

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2006-02-17T17:27:01Z

While Western journalists in trouble in Iraq hit the headlines, Iraqis who work in the service of truth face tremendous risks, writes Felicity Arbuthnot

The Geneva Conventions afford special protections to journalists in war zones, legally entitling them to greater autonomy than other civilian non-combatants. In particular, they can only be detained "for imperative reasons of security". If held, they must be given the same legal protection as a prisoner of war. The Pentagon seemingly does not have a copy of the Conventions to hand. A week before the invasion of Iraq, veteran BBC correspondent Kate Adie, in an astonishing interview with Irish television, revealed that the Pentagon had intimated that it would target the satellite transmission uplinks of journalists not embedded with the military. They would be, "targeted down... who cares... they've been warned," a spokesman was quoted as remarking.

Veteran ITV News correspondent Terry Lloyd, the invasion's first journalist casualty, had just celebrated 20 years with the network when he was fired on by US marines near Al-Zubayr in southern Iraq, 22 March 2003, according to a subsequent investigation by the Wall Street Journal. Reports are confusing, but US troops were quoted as recalling firing on a car marked "TV". Belgian cameraman Fred Nerac and Lebanese translator Hussein Othman travelling with Lloyd disappeared and cameraman Daniel Demoustier, also Belgian, was injured but survived and said he saw nothing of what happened. Lloyd's body was subsequently found in a Basra hospital. Nerac's wife approached then US Secretary of State Colin Powell at a NATO press conference. Powell promised to do all that he could to find the missing men, as did the British Ministry of Defence. Three years on, nothing is much clearer. (...)

[16 - 22 February 2006 | Issue No. 782]

- / Al-Ahram Weekly

The Release of 'Dr Anthrax'

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-12-21T05:04:17Z

On Saturday, eight 'high value' Iraqis held without charge for over two years by the United States were released. They included Dr Huda Ammash, a distinguished internationally renowned, environmental biologist, Professor at Baghdad University, whose earned her PhD at the University of Missouri. Her father, former Iraqi Ambassador to the US, under the government of Abdul Karim Kassem (1958-1963) was executed in a purge to stamp authority by Saddam in 1981. In the 1990's Dr Ammash was, ironically offered a seat in the Legislature. When Saddam offered a position to say: 'No thanks, I've my career plan mapped out, was not an option', but her academic career remained her passion and primary focus.

Arrested by US troops, this brave, gentle woman suddenly became 'Mrs Anthrax' and featured on America's asinine playing cards of their 'most wanted', in the wild west, last chance saloon Iraq became after April 2003. (...)

- / CommonDreams.org

Thinking the Unthinkable

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-12-15T18:31:00Z

When Saddam Hussein announced to the US-inspired kangaroo court in Baghdad that he was “Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq,” he was ridiculed in the media. He was right. Iraq's “sovereignty and territorial integrity” were guaranteed by the United Nations, whose founding Charter deems illegal the invasion of another UN member state.

Since the supine secretary general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, finally stated 20 months after the invasion that it was “illegal,” it is worth addressing what Saddam Hussein and his co-defendents are being tried for and whether they are owed apology rather than prosecution.

After the horrors rained on Iraq under occupation-torture in hidden prisons, Abu Ghraib's unspeakable depravities at the hands of US personnel, destruction throughout Iraq of countless thousands of homes with their occupants buried alive within them, uncounted thousands of families shot by troops for simply driving on their country's roads-Saddam's crimes against humanity, while appalling, hardly compare. (...)

- / IslamOnline.net

Iraq's 'Year Zero'. Pol Pot visits Mesapotamia.

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-11-26T04:27:00Z

The continuing destruction of Iraq's history - ancient and modern - of homes, lives and civil society under the watch of and at the hands of US and British troops - in defiance of a swathe of international law - is an uncanny and chilling mirror image of Pol Pot'sYear Zero.

In 1975 : 'Society was to be purified ... throughout Cambodia, deadly purges were conducted to eliminate remnants of the old society: the educated, the wealthy, the (religious elders) police, doctors, lawyers, teachers, former government offiicials, soldiers .... Education, health care... was halted, cities forcibly evacuated....The country sealed off from the outside world.' History, monuments, ancient and modern, world heritage sites, were erased from the earth. Newspapers, radio and television were banned.

Secret prisons were built, Moslems 'were forced to eat pork.' 'Up to twenty thousand people were tortured into giving false confessions in a schoolin Phnom Penh,converted into a jail ... elsewhere suspects were often shot before being questioned.'(1) Think Abu Ghraib (and don't forget Guantanamo) and all those other centres where Iraq's disappeared are incarcerated, now admitted - but not where. Think the shootings at road blocks, the 'cleansing' of Iraq's towns and cities. Add to Pol Pot's horrific regime only the the killing of nearly eighty journalists in thirty months,the bombing of two television stations - Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, whose map grid reference had been trustingly given to the Pentagon - so any light falling on the slaughter and destruction of a nation and it's heritage, becomes impossible - and the all is Iraq, writ with succint accuracy. (...)

- / uruknet.info

Hotel Palestine: 'Welcome Home, Welcome Home....'

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-11-04T01:37:00Z

The Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad and its sister hostelry, the Sheraton, across the road, attacked on 24th October - and by US soldiers at the time of the invasion - encapsulated, during the grinding misery of the embargo years, the unique warmth of an Iraqi welcome - and reflected equally uniquely, the descent from the impossible to the apocalyptic, as stratospheric inflation denied many the basics even to sustain life. Denied entry to Iraq by the US/UK driven UN sanctions, in place between Hiroshima Day 1990 and 2003, was just about anything one could think of, in a country which, embracing modernity and development from the 1970's and ironically, encouraged by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, imported seventy percent of virtually everything.

A reporter does a stand-up piece in front of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.

Life at the Palestine seemed to reflect every twist and turn of the embargo's screws, the small triumphs of uniquely Iraqi inventiveness - and a hospitality which always triumphed even when sheets were near transparent with wear, food was in short supply, water brown from the taps, the electricity supply near terminal and telephones on the blink. Spare parts for essential services were constantly vetoed and even Iraqi creativity in cannibalizing one installation to get another half way working could only work, at best, half a miracle.

The Palestine encapsulated the looking glass world of embargoed Iraq, nothing ever as it seemed in the land of mirages which Iraq -ancient Mesopotamia - became. (...)

- / CommonDreams.org

London Bombings - 'We are all ....'

Felicity Arbuthnot, Luci Carolan — 2005-07-12T03:15:00Z

The innocent always bear the scars, suffer the ultimate sacrifice, of mistaken political policies.

However, the sadness of the deaths and casualties of 7/7 have been compounded by the reckless language of lawyers who should know better. Prime Minister Blair and Foreign Secreatry Jack Straw near instantly pointed the finger in intemporate language, at Islam. The pieces, the injured, the bodies and body parts were still being treated, accounted for and retrieved - there is no evidence as to who committed these acts. 'Guilty until proved innocent' is a new facet to British justice. (...)

- / CommonDreams.org

Mesopotamia - Now an Endangered Species - Official.

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-07-02T03:10:00Z

A year on from the 'handover' to a US handpicked 'independent Iraqi administration' - few of whose leaders have Iraqi passports or allegiance - and the skulking departure of US 'Viceroy' Paul Bremer, who said few farewells, gave no press conference and slunk out at dawn, surreally, reportedly, to 'take cookery lessons'- a little noticed and truly terrible Report has been released.

The World Monument Fund has, for the first time, named an entire country -Iraq - on its list of endangered sites. The Fund, which publishes every two years, an inventory of the world's most endangered historical and archeological sites and monuments, lists the 'cradle of civilisation' as, effectively, in danger of extinction. The illegal invasion, built on monumental lies, from Whitehall to Washington, has not alone 'destroyed the village in order to save it', it has destroyed the country,the land of the biblical Tigris and Euphrates - described by Gertude Bell, writer, colonialist - never the less captivated by this 'land between two rivers' - in the 1920's -'... great twin rivers gloriously named, The huge Babylonian plains, now desert, Which were once the garden of the world...' (...)

- / GlobalResearch.ca

Scorched Earth Policy

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-06-16T03:00:00Z

Further evidence of US scorched earth policy in Iraq . From Year Zero, to scorched earth. The Vietnam bluprint has surely been dusted down for re-use in this 'liberating' war. Liberated from life, electricity, water, movement, all legaliities, education, Mesapotamia is now being liberated from its ancient agriculture and date palms.

Additional Protocol of Geneva Convention Article 35, 1977 states that ' .. it is illegal to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected to cause long term damage to the environment ..' 'Care shall be taken ... to protect the natural environment against wdespread, long term and severe damage ..' and ''attacks against the environment by way of reprisals are prohibited.' (...)

'The Gate of God Opens Wider'

Felicity Arbuthnot — 2005-04-10T03:01:00Z

It is two years since the illegal invasion, destruction of humanity's history, the subsequent slaughters, the attempt to dehumanize Iraqis, the people of Mesopotamia which brought the world all we call civilized. A people whose deaths, in the words of the inimitable Major General Mark Kimmitt, 'it is not productive to count' and who, when asked about US carnage in the cradle of civilization responded 'change the channel ...'

For those of us unable to 'change the channel', the beauty, the generosity and the horrors of Iraq's suffering under embargo and occupation will forever haunt. As will the literal and cultural rape of a nation from Mosul to Basra in the lie of 'liberation'. 'History will judge ..' said Britain's Prime Minister Blair, President Bush's bag carrier in his 'crusade'. History will indeed judge. The words of Denis Halliday come to mind - the former UN Assistant Secretary General and UN Co-ordinator in Iraq who resigned in disgust at the 'genocide' of the embargo - 'history will slaughter those responsible' he said of the sanctions, a 'slaughter' which equally eloquently applies to America's temporary coup - and abduction of a sovereign government whose status was guaranteed by the U.N. - in the 'land between two rivers'. It is two years since Iraq's Year Zero. (...)

- / CommonDreams.org