| In a city plagued by suicide bombers and renegade[1] militias, the Americans and the Iraqi government have turned to an unusual measure to help implant the rule of law: they have erected a legal Green Zone, a heavily fortified compound to shelter judges and their families and secure the trials of some of the most dangerous suspects. The Rule of Law Complex, as it is known by the Iraqi government, is in the Baghdad neighborhood of Rusafa and held its first trial last month. |
If this article were a fiction, one might complain that the euphemisms should have been reversed, with Son of Guantánamo called "the legal Green Zone" in Neoliberated South Semitic, and "the Rulalaw complex" in Party Chinese rather than vice versa.[2] But apart from that, it's esthetically perfect.
The set-up seems not to be practically perfect yet, though. The perps have still a long way to go with their own program:
| The utility of the fortified complex, however, depends on more than a single high-profile case. Ultimately, it will depend on the Iraqis’ ability to expand their capacity to try cases at the complex as well as their track record in applying justice evenhandedly to Shiites and Sunnis alike. The notion of helping the Iraqis establish protected legal enclaves is an important element of the American campaign plan prepared by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq. The hope is that a network of legal complexes will be established in other parts of Iraq, starting with the capital of Anbar Province, Ramadi, where work is expected to begin in the next several months. |
Let Congress and Televisionland think twice before cutting off this supralegal equivalent of Johnny Appleseed! If "we" don't uphold GOP military supremacy in the former Iraq for another decade or so, almost certainly the landscape of invasion will never become dotted with "protected legal complexes" at all. The indig politicians have their faults, admittedly, but at least they'd never have thought of anything as swell as this. If they were deprived untimely of PetraeoCrockerian guidance, they doubtless would not waste ten dinars on perpetuating it.[3] Like many imports associated with the paleface Party crusaders, this one is so alien that it might as well have come from Mars instead of from Greater Texas. No other (indigenous) state in the Greater Levant has anything the least bit like it. The new Johnny Appleseed might as well be scattering pineapple plants all across Alaska and the Yukon.
Still, "the utility of the fortified complex" cannot be evaluated until we decide what the gadget is supposed to do:
| Since the court began hearing cases in June it has tried 43 suspects, a rate of about one suspect a day. (...) The Rusafa prison’s capacity, which started at 2,500, will expand by more than 5,000 by the end of the summer. The main detention building at Rusafa is cleaner and less malodorous than many Iraqis jails, but with 15 detainees in each cell the conditions had reached maximum capacity under international standards. |
Five thousand kidnap victims and only forty-three trials? Surely what we have here is only a concentration camp with slightly unusual trimmin's?
The Boy-'n'-Party stumblebums are, I suppose, genuinely blind to how bad the Gitmo Gimmick makes them look. It throws up in everybody's face the fact that the GZ collaborationist pols they back do not control "their own" country, that the sixth occupation neorégime can neither protect its subjects' lives and property nor do justice among them, matters usually right at the top of lists of What Government Is Good For. (One strain of Republican Party extremism likes to pretend that government is no good at all, but Planet Dilbert cannot have had any hand in these doin's. Just ask Congressman R. Paul!) [4]
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[1] Hmm. Do the employees of the New York Times Company know that this insult used to have a definite meaning?
[2] The underlying expression "Green Zone" has been officially purged from Party Chinese, as you'll perhaps remember. On the other hand, why should you remember? Few neocomrades, however loyal to Boy and Party, recall that they are supposed to speak of the fortified enclosure surrounding the Proconsular Palace of the Party as "the International Zone." One may speculate that this particular rectification of language has failed to catch on with the base-and-vile, and even most of the presiding GOP geniuses, because it would be a move towards accuracy. The seat of the Occupyin' Power and its native neorégime is undoubtedly international rather than Iraqi. Whether it is "green" in the sense of safe and secure is far more open to dispute.
[3] Was the Gitmo Gimmick really "an important element of the American campaign plan prepared by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker"? Did the Party of Original Intent originally intend this as part of its Ever-Victorious Surge of '07™? Consider that we have to do with a crew of stumblebums who retrospectively offered six dozen "real" reasons why they aggressed their way into the former Iraq, once the real "real" reason had became unworkable because Tony Blair's terror-tipped 45-minute-specials were concealed so cleverly that they've never yet come to light.
Might they not be up to their old tricks again? All indications are that the auditors will find a serious benchmark deficit in the Big Management Party's occupation accounts a couple of months from now. Perhaps they are tryin' to fadge up a few Potemkin benchmarks of their own to distract attention with, "But Dad, the report card wouldn't look half so bad if extracurricular activities counted too ...!"? A good many Democrats are likely to agree that the Gitmo Gimmick is indeed a swell idea, but hopefully they'll manage to notice that it is a distraction even so.
It was not a sufficiently important element in the Ever-Victorious Surge of '07™ to have been prominently mentioned before this morning. Whether it was mentioned unprominently somewhere, who knows? In any case, "the American campaign plan prepared by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker" is presumably not something written up in Party Chinese or PowerPoint and conveniently available in any one document. The EVS07 has been gettin' vaguer and vaguer ever since Rear Colonel F. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute first conceived it and explained it in meticulous detail to the readership of the Weekly Standard in about May 2006. Obviously what the perps are surgin' for, and what they are surgin' against, can change almost minute by minute, and this would have been the case even if benchmarks had never been invented.
In these circumstances it is natural enough that Boy and Party should rely so heavily on autoleakage as they have been doin' recently. If they don't tell us where they'd prefer the goalposts to be located today, we may fail to give them proper credit when K. Rove assures us that "we" just scored a touchdown. It won't do the PetraeoCrockerians any good to parade the Gitmo Gimmick in September to an audience that utterly never heard of such a thing, so clearly they had to invite Mr. Michael R. Gordon into their lair and hand him a press release about it at the end of July. As happened last week at the NYTC, the Rancho Crawford press release is reproduced more or less as is, though doubtless rearranged and reworded to taste. The only bit that might have been added runs as follows:
| An Iraqi investigator at the Rusafa complex raised another concern: sectarian agendas at the Interior Ministry. The investigator, who cannot be identified under the complex’s security procedures, said ministry officials had made him the subject of an inquiry when he expressed his intention to marry a Sunni woman. “What kind of investigation is that?” he said with undisguised contempt. |
(Not a hard question. It was a loyalty investigation, obviously, rather like what Joe McCarthy used to do.)
It seems more likely that some kind paleface colonel or general introduced Mr. Gordon to Ibn Fulán, Esq., however, since he is extremely ben trovato for Boy and Party on a slightly different propaganda front, not to mention being exactly the sort of neo-liberated they wish there were many more of, nominally a Twelver, but really a member of the rootless cosmopolitan theocommunity, a "secularist." The authors of the press release perhaps intended us to conclude that part of the niftiness of the Gitmo Gimmick is that it allows invasion-based Rulalaw to be untampered with by evil sectarian influences. Inside "protected legal complexes" one can practice Protected Law, as it were. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of Protectorate Law.
Had Mr. Gordon cared to venture some investigative journalism, he might have tried to determine exactly how much influence the GZ quasiministry of justice actually has over what happens inside this cage. Or any other indigs, for that matter. The authors of the press release were, unsurprisingly, not much concerned about what sort of law it is that gets protected, although elements of Civil Law procedure briefly emerge from the murk:
| Under Iraqi procedures, the main phase for recording evidence takes place before the trial when an investigative judge questions witnesses and prepares a report for the panel of judges to review. The trials themselves seem relatively brief to observers familiar with the American system. With the extensive security at Rusafa, it is not easy for Iraqis to attend the trials, so videotapes of the proceedings are made. |
No doubt we were not intended to wonder exactly how relatively brief trials fit together with only one trial per day. Somebody seems not to be tryin' very hard! Yet of course if the concentration camp aspect is the cake and the production of couutroom video products only icin', everything makes sense, and the resemblance to the Big Party's Guantánamo Bay legal kangarooism becomes blatant.
[4] It seems unlikely that the stumblebums are applyin' the Leninist maxim about "The worse, the better" here, although in theory they might fortify their contention that the happy Land of Peace and Freedom is not to be abandoned any decade soon lest genocide break out in the wake of the GOP by pointin' out that without Party troops and Party barbed wire and Party videotape &c. &c., ordinary criminal justice cannot be carried on in it. Not even in the capital of it!
In Baghdad, Justice Behind the Barricades
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
Baghdad, July 26 — In a city plagued by suicide bombers and renegade militias, the Americans and the Iraqi government have turned to an unusual measure to help implant the rule of law: they have erected a legal Green Zone, a heavily fortified compound to shelter judges and their families and secure the trials of some of the most dangerous suspects.
The Rule of Law Complex, as it is known by the Iraqi government, is in the Baghdad neighborhood of Rusafa and held its first trial last month.
For Iraqi officials, working at the compound is so fraught with risk that it often requires separating themselves and their families from life outside the complex’s gates.
“Our work is really a challenge,” said a judge who lives in the compound with his wife and children and whose identity is protected by the court’s security procedures. “I have not seen Baghdad for three months.”
The court’s first defendant was a Syrian militant, Ramsi Ahmed Ismael Muhammed, known by the nom de guerre Abu Qatada. Tried on charges of kidnapping, killing his hostages and carrying out other bloody attacks, he was convicted in the complex’s high-surveillance courtroom and sentenced to death.
The utility of the fortified complex, however, depends on more than a single high-profile case. Ultimately, it will depend on the Iraqis’ ability to expand their capacity to try cases at the complex as well as their track record in applying justice evenhandedly to Shiites and Sunnis alike.
The notion of helping the Iraqis establish protected legal enclaves is an important element of the American campaign plan prepared by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Iraq. The hope is that a network of legal complexes will be established in other parts of Iraq, starting with the capital of Anbar Province, Ramadi, where work is expected to begin in the next several months.
The Rusafa complex, across the Tigris River to the east of the government Green Zone in central Baghdad, is still in its early days. Since the court began hearing cases in June it has tried 43 suspects, a rate of about one suspect a day.
The United States provides criminal investigators, lawyers and a paralegal staff to train the Iraqis to run the complex, which also includes accommodations for witnesses, investigators, the Baghdad Police College and an expanding number of detainees. The 55-member American team includes Justice Department and military personnel as well as contractors, and there are only four Iraqi investigators.
But an additional 26 Iraqi investigators are being trained by the F.B.I., according to Michael F. Walther, a senior United States Justice Department official who runs the American military’s Law and Order Task Force. And by next March, the small courtroom where Abu Qatada was tried is to be replaced by an $11 million court built with American reconstruction funds.
The Central Criminal Court in Baghdad is expected to conduct about 5,000 trials this year. Col. Mark S. Martins, the staff judge advocate for General Petraeus’s military command, estimates that once the new Rusafa court is built the complex will be able to handle about one third of that caseload. The Iraqi government will take over the cost of protecting and operating the complex next month and has approved $49 million for the effort.
Despite its status as a protected area for trying Iraq’s most infamous terrorists and militants, the Rule of Law Complex is not immune from the many problems roiling Iraq’s legal system. They include the crush of detainees that has emerged with the surge of American and Iraqi military operations. To try to reduce the backlog of cases, detainees from overcrowded jails in Kadhimiya and elsewhere have been transported to Rusafa, where they are fingerprinted and given retina scans.
The Rusafa prison’s capacity, which started at 2,500, will expand by more than 5,000 by the end of the summer. The main detention building at Rusafa is cleaner and less malodorous than many Iraqis jails, but with 15 detainees in each cell the conditions had reached maximum capacity under international standards.
When a reporter was escorted by the Iraqi prison director through one of the newly erected tent-covered jails a short drive away, a detainee who gave his name as Dawood Yousef, 46, pressed his way to the bars and yelled that he had been picked up in a sweep of Abu Ghraib and had spent five months in various jails, including a month in Rusafa, without being told why he had been arrested or when his case would go to trial. Colonel Martins took down the details.
An Iraqi investigator at the Rusafa complex raised another concern: sectarian agendas at the Interior Ministry. The investigator, who cannot be identified under the complex’s security procedures, said ministry officials had made him the subject of an inquiry when he expressed his intention to marry a Sunni woman. “What kind of investigation is that?” he said with undisguised contempt.
Under Iraqi procedures, the main phase for recording evidence takes place before the trial when an investigative judge questions witnesses and prepares a report for the panel of judges to review. The trials themselves seem relatively brief to observers familiar with the American system. With the extensive security at Rusafa, it is not easy for Iraqis to attend the trials, so videotapes of the proceedings are made.
In a legal system that has relied heavily on confessions and less on forensic investigations at the crime scene, there are often allegations of torture. In a July 3 trial at the Rusafa court, the judges acquitted four defendants of murder and rape on the grounds that their confessions appeared coerced. Medical reports pointed to possible torture, and physical evidence was lacking. The stunned defendants received the verdict with enormous relief, according to a videotaped record of the trial.
The Americans say they have been encouraged by the tenacity with which the investigators pursued Abu Qatada, in particular. “We called him the wolf,” said a judge who was involved in investigating the case. “It was not easy to get him to talk.”
The investigators relied heavily on witnesses, who were taken through a special entrance in the court offices so they could be interviewed confidentially. Their statements were entered in a file that only the judges were allowed to read. The evidence in the file was enough to persuade the panel of three judges, one Sunni and two Shiites, to convict Abu Qatada on two counts: possessing weapons as part of an armed group opposing the state, which led to a 30-year sentence, and terrorist crimes, which were deemed a capital offense. His conviction and punishment are being appealed.
A more demanding test of the impartiality of the system will come soon when a Shiite national policeman comes to trial. Identified only as Lt. Col. A, he is being tried on charges that he assaulted and tortured dozens of Sunni captives in his custody on behalf of a Shiite militia.
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