The judge gave him three months.
Another prisoner stepped up.
“Yes, your honor, I have been tortured.”
“Why didn’t you file a medical report?”
The man smirked. “A medical report? To who? It was they who tortured me.”
“But you have no evidence of the torture,” the judge said.
“The evidence is on my body,” the prisoner replied.
A five-minute deliberation.
“Guilty, life in prison,” the judge said.
“I was hung up from my hands and beaten with cable wires,” one prisoner claimed, “and I’m not even the right man.”
“What do you mean?”
“The man who they claimed I killed is still alive. My cousin saw him yesterday.”
“Do you have any evidence of that? That the man they say you killed is still alive?”
“I have a witness.”
An older Iraqi woman, his mother, was called to the microphone to testify on his behalf. Yes, the man whom her son is accused of killing is in fact still alive, she said.
“But what about the four other men you are accused of killing?” the judge asked.
“I am not a killer.”
The judge deliberated.
“Guilty, but we’ll give you seven years.”
And so on.
There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no CSI moments. The confession was the evidence. An American military lawyer told me that the actual trial wasn’t important. The investigation before the trial was what counted. It was more like the French system, he told me, where prosecutors gathered the evidence and presented it to the judges before the trial actually went to the courtroom. There was no trial by jury. What mattered was whether the judge believed the detainee was guilty or innocent, based on the confession. And the confessions were coerced with torture. The Iraqi justice system seemed to have a flaw.
A recent U.N. report had called attention to the “widespread and systematic” human rights abuses taking place in Iraq. Those doing the abusing and the torturing were mostly in the Iraqi police, which was overseen by the Ministry of Interior, which was being propped up by us. The Iraqi security forces were being trained and funded by the Americans; officially, they were under the command of the top American general in Iraq, George Casey, though there was no real control. It was all completely screwed up. In November 2005, U.S. troops raided an Iraqi police base known as the Jadriya Bunker, where they found about eighty Sunnis who’d been detained by the Shiite police force. The detainees didn’t look good. Three investigations were launched—one by the Americans and two by the Iraqi government. No results were ever made public. But the U.S. did say they were instituting new training procedures for the Iraqi police. From that point on, they’d receive thirty-two hours of classes on human rights and the rule of law.
That didn’t seem to solve the problem.
I described all of this to Andi, including the strangest case I had watched.
michaelmhastings: 21:54:12
then we go into the court room, where there is a buzz about two female detainees
michaelmhastings: 21:54:22
turns out they are sisters, and the brother is also on trial so the three are standing there
they are accused of killing two of their cousins, and trying to kill a third, the husband of one of the women
michaelmhastings: 21:55:47
her name is Zeena
michaelmhastings: 21:56:38
anyway—the prosecutor says—here is what they are accused of, but there is not enough evidence, as the confessions for the women were made after torture.
Andi: 21:56:47
god
I lay it all out for her. There is one piece of physical evidence. Zeena gave a picture of her husband to a neighbor. The neighbor allegedly gave that picture to a group of terrorists, so they’d know who to kill. Zeena denies this. The prosecutor finishes presenting his case.
Zeena’s defense attorney says, essentially: “This is all bullshit.”
The three were all up for the death penalty. An Iraqi lawyer sitting next to me and watching the proceedings told me that the brother, Ziad, would get life in jail, and the two women would be let off.
I followed them outside the court and interviewed Zeena while the judges deliberated. She told me she was an American citizen, who had lived in Phoenix and San Diego.
“Why did you come back?”
“I came back in 2003 after the invasion. I have been locked up for nine months, and the conditions are terrible.”
She told me she wanted to go back to the States. She had wanted a divorce, and her husband didn’t. He took the children with him to Diwaniya. A few months passed, and the husband wanted to meet her in Baghdad to convince her not to divorce him. On the way to the meeting, her husband was ambushed by two carloads of men with AK-47s. Two cousins, also in his car, were killed. The husband was wounded but lived.
Zeena was arrested.
michaelmhastings: 22:03:57
zeena is in the police station with her sister in west baghdad (the same neighborhood where the reporter was kidnapped last week)
michaelmhastings: 22:04:09
the police threaten her
michaelmhastings: 22:04:20
they bring her brother to the station
michaelmhastings: 22:04:24
they say to her brother:
michaelmhastings: 22:04:33
we will rape your sisters in front of you unless you confess
michaelmhastings: 22:04:44
they start to take off the sisters’ hijabs
Andi: 22:04:46
jesus
The five-minute break was up. The judges called us back into the courtroom and began to read out the sentences. Zeena: not guilty. The other woman with Zeena: not guilty. The brother, Ziad: sentenced to death.
michaelmhastings: 22:07:41
the courtroom gasps
michaelmhastings: 22:07:44
like a movie
michaelmhastings: 22:07:50
the two girls start screaming
michaelmhastings: 22:08:04
the brother starts crying and they escort him out
michaelmhastings: 22:08:19
the other sister won’t let go of his wrist
Andi: 22:11:15
god
Outside the courtroom, I had a chance to ask Zeena what she was feeling. She didn’t answer. Her eyes were wide, her mouth opened and closed. Some kind of noise came out, a groan and then a scream.
And then they were all gone, the orange jumpsuits disappearing across the lobby. Mohammed looked at me. “Mike, I have never seen anything like this. This is all very emotional for me. To see my people tortured. To hear about the torture and the killing.”
michaelmhastings: 22:28:37
so that’s the summary of it, basically
michaelmhastings: 22:28:44
nothing big—no blood or guts
Andi: 22:28:45
jesus
Andi: 22:28:59
emotional blood and guts though
michaelmhastings: 22:29:07
yeah—
Andi: 22:31:13
it’s an incredible story
Andi: 22:31:51
I can’t even fathom it
Andi: 22:35:45
baby how are you though?
Andi: 22:36:00
after seeing and hearing all that?
michaelmhastings: 22:36:03
baby, i’m fine how are you?
Andi: 22:36:12
ok ok
Andi: 22:36:16
just making sure
Andi sent me this email shortly after our IM exchange ended:
That’s why I can’t imagine what you see every day; the level of such extreme torture and gross indifference toward human life. And that’s why I worry about you and wonder if you are ok and how you are holding up because it is a lot to take in and you are such an empathic sponge. You
absorb it all, and I know it weighs heavy on your mind and heart even if you don’t admit it. It’s hard to be a witness to human suffering and even harder to realize there is no clear plan, or even hope, to put an end to it. Twain once said trying to establish peace is nearly impossible because you have to be able to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done. And particularly, in this war alone, it seems that that cannot be done.
My twenty-sixth birthday comes, January 28. Andi and I talk late into the night about how we’ll celebrate it when we see each other in Vienna in March.
CHAPTER11
March 2006
BAGHDAD
It’s Thursday, March 2, 2006. Eleven days ago the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed, kicking off Iraq’s civil war. Officially, the civil war is being denied by the Americans and most of the Iraqi government. Unofficially, and in real life, everything is rapidly going to shit.
I am pacing around the driveway at theNewsweek bureau, talking on my T-Mobile to Andi. I’m trying to save our vacation plans.
“There’s a civil war,” she says. “It’s on Google News. I know the airport is closed. You won’t be able to get out. I’m not coming.”
“The airport will be open. I’ll be there.”
“No, and I can’t rebook the ticket—I checked. It costs like three thousand extra.”
“I’ll pay for the ticket. Just come. I’ll be there, I promise.”
“You can’t do anything about it. The airport is closed, there’s a curfew. I get CNN here, you know.”
“God, please, baby, I’ll be in Vienna. I may be late a day, but I’ll make it there. A car will pick you up at the airport and take you to the hotel.”
“You don’t understand—I can’t imagine going to Vienna and you not being there. It would be too sad. You don’t understand.”
“This is crazy—I know what’s going on here better than you. I’m telling you I’ll make it out on time. And if I’m late, you can see Vienna. Go to a museum or something, it’s a beautiful city. Plan our trip for the next day. Do whatever you need to do. I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m on the flight for tomorrow.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
“Baby, it’s a fluid situation.”
“Yeah, right.”
At the moment, I happen to be taking the government’s tack and denying the civil war, too. It’s not that bad, I’ve been telling Andi, my flight will be leaving on time. Civil war? What civil war? Everything is great here. The vacation will go on.
I am supposed to see Andi in Vienna on Saturday. I have two days to get there.
I walk inside to the office. Munib comes to talk to me.
Munib is twenty-six years old and works as our cook and houseboy. The previous bureau chief discovered him at a nearby chicken restaurant. He dresses much more stylishly than I do. I describe him to friends as an Iraqi metrosexual. He wears slick pointed-toe boots, knockoff designer T-shirts, and tight jeans flared at the bottom. His facial hair is always immaculately groomed and he likes more than one dab of cologne. He used to drive a cherry-red BMW, but because of a few recent incidents (he was chased by a local militia with his fiancée in the car) he is looking to trade in the car for something less conspicuous. No one really knows how he has the money for a Beamer, but he is such a likable kid we don’t hold it against him.
Munib gets a kick out of working with us crazy foreigners. His view of our culture is amusingly distorted, but he gets the gist of America. His favorite movie isJackass . We watched the DVD the other night, and we’ve been calling each other jackasses since. He once bought a pink flowered apron and wore it around the house while doing his chores. He was dead serious, figuring that Americans like those kind of things.
Since the mosque bombing, on February 22, Munib has been stuck inside the Green Zone with me and anotherNewsweek correspondent. When at the bureau, he lives in a small shack outside the house. He wanted to go home, but we said it wouldn’t be safe. The Iraqi government had declared martial law, and it looked like the government might mean it. We figured there was a pretty decent chance that curfew violators would be shot or detained.
This didn’t really bother Munib. On the day of the bombing, when the rest of the country was starting to kill each other (dozens of mosques were attacked; hundreds were reported dead) and when most other Iraqis dared not leave their homes, he decided he wanted to cook spaghetti Bolognese for us for dinner. It was one of his five rotating dishes, along with a baked eggplant dish, roasted chicken, a chicken curry with potatoes, and two variations of a thick beef stew. He didn’t have the right ingredients for the spaghetti sauce, though, so he told us he had to go shopping in the city. He said he would take theNewsweek scooter, a black moped. We warned him against it, saying that there was a curfew and that we’d be happy with chicken curry instead, but he smiled and sped off down the road.
When we didn’t hear from him for a few hours, we started to get worried. He wasn’t answering his phone. That afternoon, he pulled back into the house, plastic grocery bag in hand.
“You’re okay?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said.
“How was it out there?”
“Okay, okay,” he said.
“Did you have any trouble?”
“No,” he said, pausing.
“No trouble at all?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“So no police or soldiers stopped you?”
“Yes,” he said, his grin getting bigger. “The soldiers says, ‘Stop. Where you go? We shoot.’”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘I go shop for spaghetti!’”
I pictured him giving the Iraqi soldiers a wave and not slowing down on his moped, with the redNewsweek sticker on its side, and the soldiers just shrugging rather than shooting as he rides off, laughing hysterically.
Today, Munib is smiling as he comes into the office, like he has this really great joke to tell. He knows I want to get out, bad, and that already my flight has been canceled for the last three days.
“On TV…”
“What?”
“Curfew tomorrow!” he taunts.
“Fuck! You bastard!”
“Mike is never go home. You stuck in Baghdad.”
“Yeah, I’m stuck, but you’re stuck, too—Munib curfew in the Green Zone. Munib never go home if Mike never go home!”
He laughs and backs out of the room.
“Jackass!” he yells at me.
“Jackass!” I yell back.
“Jackasssss!” he sings, closing the door.
It’s a fluid situation.
I have to tell Andi this, but I wait. Perhaps the curfew will be lifted by morning. Perhaps I will be able to make it out anyway. And if there is a curfew, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the airport will be closed. On other days when the government has declared a state of emergency and the U.S. military has instituted a “no roll” policy, as they call it when no cars are allowed on the streets, the airport has remained open. So there’s still some chance that I might get out, and I discuss this possibility with Jack Tapes. Can I leave tomorrow if there is a curfew? Can we get to the airport?
Positives: There is likely to be little traffic, so you can drive fast and won’t be a target. Negatives: There is likely to be little traffic, so you will be the only car on the road, an obvious target.
“And how do we find out if the airport is open?”
“Hard to say,” Tapes says. “We’ll have to wait until morning.”
The signs had been appearing for at least eight months, probably longer. In July 2005, John Burns of theNew York Times prophetically asked: Is Iraq in a civil war? At the same time, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, as he was taking office, broached the subject, saying one of his goals was to prevent a slide into civil war. “Sectarian violence” was the new buzzword to describe the kind of attacks occurring in Iraq, the frequent fighting between Sunnis and Shiites. I started to hear st
ories from our Iraqi staff. Our Sunni office manager had to move out of his house to live with his parents because Shiite militias were targeting Sunnis in his neighborhood. Most of his Sunni neighbors were fleeing, too. Flyers containing death threats were posted on houses and littered on the street. Both Shiites and Sunni groups were doing it. An American officer showed me a flyer he’d found saying that if a Shiite family didn’t leave their home, they’d soon be killed. Executions and kidnappings at illegal checkpoints were on the rise. There were now an estimated thirty kidnappings a day in Iraq. Our staff had taken to carrying two forms of identification, orjinzya. One ID had a Sunni family name, the other a Shiite family name. The purpose of the fake IDs was to increase their chances of survival at a checkpoint. You had to guess what group was doing the checking. Was this a Sunni or a Shiite roadblock? There were an estimated one thousand checkpoints in Baghdad alone.
In the media, we were trying to make sense of what we were seeing and hearing. I spoke to a U.N. official who in the early nineties had interviewed refugees from the Balkans. The stories she heard at the time seemed incredible; it was only in the years that followed that the scope of the massacre became clear, she said. She wondered if the same pattern was repeating itself in Iraq. Four months earlier, I had asked an analyst from a Washington think tank if he thought Iraq was in a civil war. He told me he preferred the term “low-intensity ethnic conflict.” It reminded me of the semantic wrangling that had occurred during Rwanda—was this a genocide or just a lot of killing? In the months following the Samarra bombing, U.S. military officials twisted and turned to find their own definition of what was happening in Iraq without calling it a civil war. At one press conference in Baghdad, Major General William Caldwell, in response to repeated questions from CNN’s Michael Ware, said Iraq wasn’t in a civil war because “all the governmental functions are still functioning, and we don’t see an organization out there that’s trying to overthrow and assume control of the government.” This was an odd definition. Most civil wars throughout history occurred while there was some kind of functioning government and to call the Iraqi government functional was itself kind of laughable. And, on top of that, there actually were a number of organizations trying to overthrow and destroy the government—Iraqi insurgents, Al Qaeda–linked terrorists, Shiite militias. The standard definition of civil war seemed to apply to Iraq: “war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country.”
I Lost My Love in Baghdad Page 11