From Alberto to the Insurgency

[struggle4progress]

An Iraq War veteran explains why Alberto Gonzales has already done enough damage.
By David DeBatto
Web Exclusive: 01.06.05

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As someone who served from March 2003 through October 2003 in Iraq with the U.S. Army, I have strong feelings about how national policies affect the troops in the field. Alberto Gonzales, who has recommended a policy that has allowed the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, is now being considered as the new attorney general.

His recommendations have led to the brutalization of prisoners in our own custody. In this way, we may be putting our own servicemen and women in danger if they are captured.

One blisteringly hot afternoon in June 2003, outside Balad, Iraq, I saw a farmer working in a field. He was a short, weathered man in his mid- to late forties, and he was holding the reins of oxen. He said he was angry over the mistreatment of women in his village at the hands of American servicemen during a recent early-morning raid. On that morning, the women were rounded up in a room at gunpoint. Soldiers yelled at them, and they were physically searched and kind of roughed up. Several women were shoved and knocked to the ground. Local insurgents had told him, the farmer said, that they were going to kidnap female American service personnel and treat them in the same way that Iraqi women had been handled -- and even worse. It would be payback, he said.

And in late August, I was having chai tea with an Iraqi shiek at his home in Ad Dujayal, Iraq. The sheik, who had once served as an agent for the mokhabarat -- the Iraqi intelligence service -- was disheartened at the treatment Iraqi women were receiving at the hands of Americans. He said he had thought that when Americans first entered Iraq, things would be very different. "I always held the Americans in very high regard," he told me. But what he'd seen since the invasion in March 2003 had changed his opinion. Specifically, he told me he was disgusted and appalled at the way American soldiers would physically abuse Iraqi women. He warned me that American soldiers were in greater danger than ever before. <snip>

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