Terrorizing Those who are Praying…
Source: ICH

Dahr Jamail

11/19/04 "ICH" -- Abu Talat calls me, frantic. The deafening roar of hundreds of people in a confined area yelling, “Allahu Akbar” (God is the Greatest) reverberate behind his panicked voice.

“I am being held at gunpoint by American soldiers inside Abu Hanifa mosque Dahr,” he yells, “Everyone is praying to God because the Americans are raiding our mosque during Friday prayer!”

He makes short calls, updating me on the atrocity. After a few sentences of information he hangs up because he is trapped inside the mosque and trying to let me know what is happening. Being Friday, the day of prayer and holiday, this was supposed to be an off day for us.

I just finish typing what he told me before he calls back.

“They have shot and killed at least 4 of the people while they were praying, and at least 20 are wounded now! I cannot believe this! I can’t let them see me calling you. I am on my stomach now and they have our guns on everyone, there are at least 1,500 people inside the mosque and it is sealed. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation.”

Several Humvees and Iraqi National Guard (ING) vehicles showed up and 50 soldiers and well over 50 ING sealed and entered the mosque with the goal of detaining the Imam, Shaikh Muayid al-Adhami.

Abu Talat calls back, “We were here praying and now there are over 50 here with their guns on us,” he said. ”They are holding our heads to the ground, and everyone is in chaos. This is the worst situation possible. They cannot see me talking to you. They are roughing up a blind man now.”

The soldiers eventually released women and children along with men who were related to them. Abu Talat was only released because a boy approached him and told him to pretend to be his father.

Shortly thereafter he phones me from his home in tears.

“Dahr I cannot believe what has happened,” pausing to collect himself, “I will go back to see what is happening now.”

I urge him not to go, but he insists.

“This is my mosque and my people. I must go see what is happening to them.”

It is now 2:15pm and the mosque is still sealed. We begin to interview people he is with via the mobile as he describes the scene.

“People were praying and the Americans invaded the mosque,” Abdulla Ra'ad Aziz said, who had been released along with his wife and children. “Why are they killing people for praying? After the forces entered they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns. There were wounded and dead, I saw them myself.”

Some of the people who had been at prayer were ordered by soldiers to carry the dead and wounded out of the mosque.

“One Iraqi National Guardsmen held his gun on people and yelled, ‘I will kill you if you don't shut up’,” said Rana Aziz, a mother who had been trapped in the mosque. She was now waiting outside for her brother, who was still inside.

She said someone asked the soldiers if they would were hostages. “A soldier yelled at everyone to ‘Shut the Fuck Up,” she said. Suddenly, she laughed amid her tears. “The Americans have learned how to say shut up in Arabic, ‘Inchev’.”

Hammad Mohammed, a 20 year-old man, said, “My uncle’s coffin was taken inside the mosque to be prayed on, and the Americans raided the mosque and went to the Imams’ room. Then they went to the back doors and we heard so many bullets of the guns-it was a gun bigger than a Kalashnikov. There were wounded and dead, as I saw them myself. I saw 4 killed and 9 wounded.”

Abu Talat then breaks the interview and tells me, “Doctors and staff are standing outside but the Americans refuse to let them inside. They can do nothing, and the Americans are not letting them inside while there are wounded people inside the mosque.”

Just like in Fallujah, soldiers denied Iraqi Red Crescent ambulances and medical teams access to the mosque. As doctors negotiated with U.S. soldiers outside, more gunfire was heard from inside the mosque.

About 30 men were led out with hoods over their heads and their hands tied behind them. Soldiers loaded them into a military vehicle and took them away around 3.15 pm.

A doctor with the Iraqi Red Crescent confirmed four dead and nine wounded worshippers. Pieces of brain were splattered on one of the walls inside the mosque while large blood stains covered carpets in several places.

Later Abu Talat comes to my hotel to see me. He is distraught, crying while he recounts the story. After listening to the tape he recorded inside the mosque during the atrocity, he says…

“I am in a very sad position. I do not see any freedom or any democracy. If this could lead into a freedom, it is a freedom with blood. It is a freedom of emotions of sadness. It is a freedom of killing. You cannot gain democracy through blood or killing. You do not find the freedom that way. People are going to pray to God and they were killed and wounded. There were 1,500 people praying to God and they went on a holiday were people go every Friday for prayers. And they were shot and killed. There were so many women and kids lying on the ground. This is not democracy, neither freedom.”

After several weeks of relative calm in Adhamiya, the detention of the Imam of Abu Hanifa and killing of worshippers inside their mosque is sure to ignite the fires of revenge in this area, which is already known as the Fallujah of Baghdad.

Sometimes, when you feel down, you need to let it all out. To vent.

A friend of mine wrote this.

Feel so depressed. Feel so down. Feel I'm losing my Iman. missing salah, not reading quran. didnt take advantage of Ramadan. slept through lailatul qadr. i feel i've been denied these blessings. am I being punished or am i being tested? only He alone Knows.
i really despise going to skul. i hate the subjects, bt not as much as the teachers and not half as much as the students. I hate them all. [--]
I hate the conventions of society. its all worldly. its all wordly. i hate it all.

There's people being killed in Fallujah, yet here people are worrying about non-uniform days and biotechnology tests and retakes and courseworks and exams and unis.
wat is all this 4? so u can spend the rest of ur life as an optician? confined to ur office? a researcher? a pharmacist?
work 9-4, come home, too tired 2 talk to your family. watch TV, become desensitized with all the killings and murders and tortures talked and shown on tv. de-sensitized. no senses, no morals, lack of care, lack of compassion.

Its all money money money. Money wont save u from the narrowing, rib-crushing grave.

its all about money.
the depression, the stress. the school work, exams pressure, ppl u despise.
it's all about pleasing the lower nafs in the end. The idol within.

its all a viscious cycle man.


Break the cycle. Break the mould.
Live. Breath. Travel the world, help the poor, treat the wounded. Teach the illiterate. There's so much that needs to be done.
Regular prayers, regular quran recitation. regular Arabic learning. Regular dhikr.

Live a life of happiness. contedness. Peace.

But first, eat.

There's a story behind every word there. But I can't be bothered to explain. Plus, me mate won't like her life story being splattered all over the net for the world to read.

So, I'm off to follow her advice and go eat.

You all should too.

-----------------------------------

Just posted this for the sake of updating.

This blog's rubbish. I vote I close this darned thing down. Who's with me?

US Accused of ‘Torture Flights’
Source: TimesOnline

Stephen Grey

AN executive jet is being used by the American intelligence agencies to fly terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture in their prisons.

The movements of the Gulfstream 5 leased by agents from the United States defence department and the CIA are detailed in confidential logs obtained by The Sunday Times which cover more than 300 flights.

Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out “torture by proxy” — a charge denied by the American government.

Some of the information from the suspects is said to have been used by MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence services. The admissibility in court of evidence gained under torture is being considered in the House of Lords in an appeal by foreign-born prisoners at Belmarsh jail, south London, against their detention without trial on suspicion of terrorism.

Over the past two years the unmarked Gulfstream has visited British airports on many occasions, although it is not believed to have been carrying suspects at the time.

The Gulfstream and a similarly anonymous-looking Boeing 737 are hired by American agents from Premier Executive Transport Services, a private company in Massachusetts.
The white 737, registration number N313P, has 32 seats.

It is a frequent visitor to American military bases, although its exact role has not been revealed.
More is known about the Gulfstream, which has the registration number N379P and can carry 14 passengers. Movements detailed in the logs can be matched with several sightings of the Gulfstream at airports when terrorist suspects have been bundled away by US counterterrorist agents.

Analysis of the plane’s flight plans, covering more than two years, shows that it always departs from Washington DC. It has flown to 49 destinations outside America, including the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba and other US military bases, as well as Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, Afghanistan, Libya and Uzbekistan.

Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the planes, which do not have special facilities for prisoners but are kitted out with tables for meetings and screens for presentations and in-flight films.

The US plane is not used just for carrying prisoners but also appears to be at the disposal of defence and intelligence officials on assignments from Washington.
Its prisoner transfer missions were first reported in May by the Swedish television programme Cold Facts. It described how American agents had arrived in Stockholm in the Gulfstream in December 2001 to take two suspected terrorists from Sweden to Egypt.
At the time of what was presented as an “extradition” to Egypt, Swedish ministers made no public mention of American involvement in the detention of Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who was later cleared.

Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository. The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Despite liberal Swedish laws on freedom of information, diplomatic telegrams on the case released to the media were edited to conceal the complaints of torture. Hamida Shalaby, Agiza’s mother, said: “The mattress had electricity . . . When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity.”

A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of links to Al-Qaeda, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men wearing masks. The jet took Gasim to Jordan, since when he has disappeared.

“The entire operation was so mysterious that all persons involved in the operation, including US troops, were wearing masks,” a source at the airport told Anwar.

On another mission, in January 2002, a Gulfstream was seen at Jakarta airport to deport Muhammad Saad Iqbal, 24, an Al-Qaeda suspect who was said by US officials to be an acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British “shoe-bomber” jailed in America for trying to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami.

An Indonesian official told an American newspaper that Iqbal was “hustled aboard an unmarked, US-registered Gulfstream . . . and flown to Egypt”, where almost nothing has been heard of him since.

The CIA Gulfstream’s flight logs show it flew from Washington to Cairo, where it picked up Egyptian security agents, before apparently going on to Jakarta to take Iqbal to Egypt.
Another transfer involved a British citizen. On November 8, 2002, the Gulfstream took off for Banjul in Gambia. On the same day Wahab Al-Rawi, a 38-year-old Briton, was among four people arrested at the airport by local secret police and handed over to interrogators who said they were “from the US embassy”.

Wahab said he had previously been questioned by MI5 because his brother Basher, an Iraqi national, was an acquaintance of Abu Qatada, the radical London-based cleric.
When Wahab asked the CIA agents for access to the British consul, as required under the Vienna convention signed by America, the agents are said to have laughed. “Why do you think you’re here?” one agent said to Wahab. “It’s your government that tipped us off in the first place.” Wahab was later released but Basher was sent to Guantanamo and remains there and has yet to be accused of any specific crime.

Some former CIA operatives and human rights campaigners claim the agency and the Pentagon use a process called “rendition” to send suspects to countries such as Egypt and Jordan. They are then tortured largely to gain information for the Americans who, it is alleged, encourage these countries to use aggressive interrogation methods banned under US law.
Bob Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, said: “If you want a serious interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear . . . you send them to Egypt.”

Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital.
The details bolster claims by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador, that America has sent terrorist suspects from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan to be interrogated by torture.
In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to Murray’s removal, he told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in Tashkent had “readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence”.

The CIA and Premier declined to discuss the allegations over the planes. The American government, however, denies it is in any way complicit in torture and says it is actively working to stamp out the practice. [they must think the world is plain stupid]