I found myself...
Sleeping in a grave-size space, defined by two walls touching both my head my and feet, and surrounded with human bodies touching me from both sides, in a way that hardly leaves any chance to move at all during the long… long night, in a 12 square meters room stuffed with 35 people trying to sleep, and to hold themselves together in order not to fight…
The whole thing started when I went to the university to pay my tuition fees, the thing is that the engineering campus is separated from the rest of the university with few kilometers, but for such administrative issues, students should go to the headquarter, and this is what I did. I entered the main campus and went to the financial department to pay money. I started the paperwork process, and then reached to a point where we needed the director’s signature to finish the paperwork, but she was in a meeting. So, the employee asked me to go and waste an hour inside the campus till the meeting is over, and I did.
What would you do in such a case? Go to the café? I tried, but was totally bored after less than 15 minutes, and then I don’t remember how an idea flashed in my head like a big light bulb: internet!
Of course, what is better than the internet to kill time?
I remembered there was an internet café inside the campus. I rarely came to this campus during the last five years. I think I came like three or four times only. Anyways, so I went to the internet café and did my regular tour: raed in the middle, riverbend, etc etc..and then I was bored again. I left the internet café heading towards the financial department again.
In my way, I was stopped by an old man, with a hateful face. “tfa`6al” he said (it means something like: “how can I help you?”) I was a bit surprised, I said “inta tfa`6al!” (meaning: “how can I help you?”) he said: where are you going? So I knew that he must be some kind of a security guy. I should have guessed from his tone, he sounds like a typical saddam-style security-man.
“to the financial department, to pay my tuition money” I said.
“where were you right now?”
“ in the internet café !”
“where is your ID?”
“at the campus entrance reception, with my mobile phone” (this is common now, in all governmental buildings you have to leave your mobile phone in the reception, you cant take it with you).
Please people; don’t be surprised because of all these questions. It used to be very common in “Saddam’s Iraq” and it’s very common in today’s Iraq.
Anyway, the old hateful man decided to escort me to make sure I was telling him the truth. Once we entered the financial office, the employees there talked to me spontaneously, so he knew I was there before and he left. I paid the money, took the receipt, and left. When I went back the campus entrance reception to take my mobile and leave, I found out that the mobiles’ closet was “mistakenly locked” as I was told. They were waiting for the guy that has the key. “He’ll be here in any moment” I was told.
I sat there waiting for my mobile phone to be freed. Then suddenly, after few minutes, someone came and asked “where is the detained guy?”
The other security guard pointed at me!!!
I was like: ehhhhh..sorry there is misunderstanding here, I am not detained, its only that the mobile phones closet is mistakenly locked!
“come with us, we have some questions please” they said, and I went with them, searching for answers inside my head…
They searched me very carefully; they took my shoes off and searched them, and even took my watch. They read every paper I had in my pockets, and asked me questions about my origin, nationality, and many other questions. Then they asked me to unlock my mobile phone so that they can check it out. At that particular point I had had enough, I said I wouldn’t unlock it except if it was in front of “the person” who is hiding somewhere in the campus, the one asking all these questions through messengers.
They didn’t like my response.
Another guy came after a while, and asked me: who did you contact on the internet?
“my mother and brothers” I said.
He didn’t look satisfied.
“keep him” he said.
Next thing I know, a very fat policeman entered the small room, asked me to face the wall, searched me again, took my money and glasses, put a bag on my head and handcuffs in my hand (I still have the marks on my hand till now). While my hands were behind my back and my head in a bag, he made me run for about a minute, till we reached a police van, where I was forced to get in. The car starting moving towards an unknown destination…
You don’t want to know the swearing and curses I heard all the way, but maybe you’ll want to know that no one beat me.
We reached a luxurious building, I could tell from the marble on the floor. The floor was the only thing I could see at that point through a very small space between the bag and my nose. Then I was led to a room after taking an elevator.
I was afraid to be taken to the torture rooms directly; I was praying to find someone to talk to, to explain to him that this all is nothing but a little silly mistake!
God answered my prayers.
Instead of being lead to some underground dungeon, I was taken to an air conditioned room with a lot of people. I could tell from their voices they were interrogating someone, I couldn’t see anything still, but they released my hands.
I understood that this person they were interrogating, (Sa’ib as I knew later, he was in the same cell with me), did a very awful thing. Sa’ib came to the ministry of interior, and went to the office of a high ranked officer, and tried to remind the officer of Sa`ib’s own father who served with this the officer long time ago, hoping to ask this officer for a favor. The Favor was to order the transferring of a friend of Sa`ib, a cop, to another governorate.
The officer didn’t remember sa’ib’s father, and refused to help him. Then he ordered his guards to take Sa’ib for interrogation!!!
Untill I left the jail, Sa’ib was still there!
They beat him a lot, “how dare you enter the office of an officer just like that?” they were telling him.
Back to the air-conditioned interrogation room, I was still facing the wall, my eyes were covered, and my brain working so fast, trying to see behind the darkness infront of my eyes.
Then it was my turn:))
“Finally!” I told myself!
They started by asking me: “What’s the connection between you and the London Bombs?” !!!
And I was like: “haaaaa???!!.”. I said: “London Bombs???! Nothing!”
BANG!!
A heavy hand landed on my neck, my brain was too busy to feel the pain, I felt my neck numbing for a while.
“SPEAAAK” he shouted.
“Turn around” he yelled.
I turned, facing the room now, but not seeing anything other than my nose and the shoes of the person who was interrogating me, standing so close.
“Why do you have a beard?” he asked.
“Because the prophet...” (I was trying to tell him that prophet Mohammad had one, and that I have one because I love to look like him...)
BANG
He slapped me on the face. It made a loud noise that the room became dead-silent for some seconds….
“May the prophet curse you” he shouted.
Again, my brain didn’t respond to the pain signals, I didn’t feel it.
For the next few hours, they asked me questions like “who are the other members of our terrorist cell, where does your fund come from? What operations did you have?”
“What do you have against Shia?”
I said: “nothing, my mother is Shia!”
He said” what do you have against Kurds? Why don’t you go blow yourself up and kill Kurds?”
I said: “Because God says in Quran…” (I was trying to tell him a part of Quran where God orders us not to kill any innocent soul) he interrupted me shouting, “We know Quran better than you”.
“My best friend is Kurdish!” I said.
“Of course he is, so that you can get information about Kurds from him, right?” he answered.
Nothing I said seemed to make sense to them. And nothing they said makes sense to anyone in the world.
Then finally I understood why I was there, after few hours. Security guards at the university had printed out all the websites I was reading while I was online there. They were accusing me of “reading terrorism sites” and “having communications with foreign terrorists”.
“Do you know what these pages are?”
I looked at them and figured out they were the comment section of Raed in the Middle!!
I opened the comments section while browsing in the university, read some comments, and didn’t even post anything. But these people don’t seem to know what the internet is, and they don’t speak English, so I was a major suspect of being an assistant of al Zarqawi maybe! Or that I have a terrorist group of my own, with foreign connections!
I was accused of terrorism, and sent to jail after they decided that I’m not helping myself because I am not helping them!!!
“Help you with what??!!”I asked “I am so willing to help you with anything you want, just tell me what exactly you want to know?”
“Tell us the name of the other members of your group, and where you get your fund from” then answered.
I entered the jail, and found people staring at me with curiosity, but with total silence.
“assalamo alaykom!” I said with a smile, and sat down on the ground, just like the others.
“alaykom assalam!” everyone said.
Then one of them couldn’t resist it anymore, so he asked: “why were you brought here?”
I told them my story, and they all looked very upset.
In the next few minutes, I learned about the stories of the other people that were there.
Then it suddenly hit me: “where are we? Do you know?” I asked curiously.
They all looked a bit afraid, I knew they had an answer but didn’t know whether they should trust me enough already to tell me or not, I have been there for a couple of minutes only.
Then someone whispered in my ears “istikhbarat il dakhliyya”, “but don’t tell anyone that we know”. Istikhbarat il Dakhliyya means the Mukhabarat, and that is the intelligence or the secret service police.
“Ohhh!!” I said “Do your families know you are here?”
They nodded with their heads: no.
There were around 35 people in that room, 4 of the arrested people in this floor were teenagers. I’ll tell you about some of their stories at the end of this post.
I made friends with almost everyone there that day, and then I slept, it was a long day, I was so worried about my family, how would I let them know that I wasn’t killed in a car bomb, or kidnapped? I’m sure they don’t expect that I ran away from the house to go party with my friends or join the circus!
Next day I was taken to interrogation again.
They asked me all the questions you can ask anyone, but they did it very fast. They took the name of my teachers, my friends, even my colleagues and the girls in my class. They asked me if I had ever had sex before, I said no. They didn’t believe me, they made fun of me and asked if I prefer men more, and I said no too.
Then they wanted me to write my “confession” finally, which is the paper that will go to the judge to decide my fate.
He asked: you are accused of attending terrorist sites (Did he say that they are sites that recruit young people for terrorism? I don’t remember) so what do you say?
I said, with my eyes covered: please write my answer “I deny that completely, I was practicing my democratic right of viewing people’s opinion about a certain topic on a site that people visit from all the countries around the world to give their opinions”
He said: what in the hell is that? Did I ask you to write me a composition? Answer my question Goddamn it! You are accused of visiting terrorist websites, what do you reply?
I repeated my answer, but I reformed it in a way that is less complicated for his simple brains to understand, they wrote something and made me sign on the paper.
I don’t know if any of them finished high school, they are uncivilized, they lack morality and education, the way they swear all the time and the words they say tells you what kind of people they are, I asked them about the things that were with me when I was arrested, they said that they have my mobile phone, and my IDs, but the fat policeman broke my glasses and stole some of my money, till now, they didn’t give me back my mobile phone or my IDs.
Since they don’t speak English, they didn’t even ask me one time about the content of the site, which my one and only crime was that I read.
The third day, I found a way to contact my family, “illegally”, to tell them that I am alive and that I am in the seventh floor of the ministry of interior affairs. By that time, my dad checked every hospital, police station and morgue in the city. He checked with the Iraqi army, the Iraqi militias, the US army, and even the ministry of interior which denied that I was there!
It was such a relief to know that my family knows where I was, I told them that I was very well, and that we eat well and sleep well and no one hurts us.
Eight days after I was arrested, I was sent to see the judge, in a court that is a bit far of the prison, when we reached the court they put cuffs on my legs too, and a chain that ties my cuffed hands with my body. I felt the humiliation to be treated like a criminal and sent to a court tied with all these chains. I cried for few seconds only, and held myself together before anyone noticed.
I was taken first to an interrogator who works for the court, where he re-wrote my confession in a way that makes it easier to be understood correctly. He said that the court will assign a public defender for my case. I asked him what did that mean and he replied “Nothing, just some formalities”. He asked me to sign the paper of my “confessions”, and then he called a big chubby man with cheap outfit. The strange man came from outside and signed on my paper: “The Lawyer I-Don’t-Know-What’s-His-Name”. Then after some waiting, I was taken to see the judge, finally.
The judge was a very elegant man in his 40s, sitting behind a fancy disk in his air-conditioned room, with a computer beside him and a cool mobile phone too, with guards outside and a secretary beside him.
He didn’t look at me in the beginning. He asked me while surfing the papers of my case: “What’s your case?”
I said: “I went to the university to pay the fees of…”
He interrupted me impatiently: “the website, tell me about the website”
I said: “It’s a forum, it’s a place where people discuss a topic written by the owner of a website. I visited it and I didn’t even post an opinion, I closed it and left the internet place, and then I was brought here.”
It seemed he was following me. He said: “Is it like chatting?”
I said: “Yes, your honor. This is more like a website than a chat room. You don’t have to sign in and be a part of what’s happening in the case of forums. I was just watching things there. For me, it was more like watch a TV with different channels; you go to a channel not knowing what will be there and without knowing the content. If you didn’t like the channel, you can change it”
He interrupted me: “ok ok I know I know.”
He had 37 translated papers of Raed’s Comments Section, that’s it, that’s my case. He asked me “What are these strange letters between the words here?” I said “Maybe the person who printed out the papers selected the wrong font, these strange characters appear when you pick the wrong encoding for the language”. He didn’t seem to be a computer expert, but at least he knows the basics.
He said “go, I will take the papers to read them at home, and will decide about them tomorrow”.
The chubby entered the room and sat on a chair in front of the judge. He was my “lawyer”, but he didn’t say a single word, not one single word. He only signed a paper that says that he is my lawyer.
I was taken back to the prison. That was my Wednesday.
On Thursday, the judge decided that I was innocent. He figured out that the papers were from a public forum, and he didn’t find any comments posted by me.
I wasn’t released till Saturday morning, after I was forced to sign a paper committing that I wouldn’t tell the families of the arrested people that they are arrested, and that I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything that happened while I was arrested or tell them what I saw inside the jail, and that I would report any case of breaking the law that I know about to the authorities (at this point I laughed and asked: even if someone drove his car through a red traffic light?), and that I wouldn’t visit terrorism websites.
I, of course, told all the families I could that their sons are arrested in the seventh floor of the ministry of interior in the hands of the Mukhabarat, and here I am telling you everything that happened with me, and I am planning to visit all kind of websites as much as I like as long as I want.
I was so lucky that I was taken to the Mokhabarat directly. Usually you have to go through a police station or a center of the national guards to get there, where the standard procedure of torturing is hanging people upside down and beating them with cables for hours, pinching their bodies with electrical drills, burning them with hot water, ripping out their finger nails, breaking bones, using acids on the wounds after whipping them, the dead bodies that are found in the dumpsters in Baghdad even had their eyes taken out of them, and a lot of these things happened with people that I know, or with people that were detained with the people that were with me in this jail, before they were brought here, and the list of torturing techniques is long, and you don’t want to hear them or know about them if you want to sleep at night.
In one of the floors in the same building, there is another prison, a bigger one called “The Palace of Hospitality” (doesn’t this remind you of 1984? The ministry of love and stuff?) Where recently a father and his son were arrested, and the son died at night because his rips were broken after they beat him, and then they spelled hot water on his body, he kept moaning of pain for the whole night, said Abo Ayid, who slept right beside him, and then he died. I’ll tell you more about Abu Ayid in the end.
The one thing in common between all the people that were there is that almost all of them were Sunnis. Interrogators told one of the prisoners during an interrogation session “you Sunnis are all terrorists” and during my interrogation, I heard a lot of racist remarks and questions. The Shia Iraqis who were there were mostly accused of non-terrorism crimes, like stealing, carjacking, etc…
If you were wondering how did we spend our time in jail… I’ll tell you.
We read Quran a lot, we prayed five times a day, we had three meals a day, and we praise God for long periods of time too. We sat all together talking and telling jokes and stories about our lives…
At night, while trying to sleep, I mostly was thinking of what I should write in my next post!
I always had the hope that I would leave that place, time goes really slow there, when I used to feel sad I would think of the nice places that I would go to when I leave, and all the other positive ideas that would keep me happy, I asked people: what is the first thing you want to do when you leave this place?
And we all sat thinking of the nice things we want to do… the things we want to eat, the places we want to visit; it was a hope-generating game.
My family played an important role to help me get out of the Mukhabarat’s jail faster than other people. Like any other corrupt system, you can get a better treatment by knowing the right people and giving the right “gifts”. My family didn’t pay anything to the judge because they believed I was innocent, they tried their best to get me a lawyer, but they couldn’t. I was freed because I was innocent, and I have the capabilities to defend myself in front of a judge.
The question is: what about the rest of Iraqis? The ones who don’t have the money or the power to leave places like that? The innocent people who were taken away from their families and loved ones and accused of false crimes? What happens to them? Who will stand for them? What about human rights? What about civil rights? What about humanity?
Here are just some of the people that were in the jail and their cases, as a sample to the cases. I hope that these people and all the other Iraqi prisoners will go back home safe. And I’ll work with my family to ask the US administration and the Iraqi authorities to improve the situation of the detention for the Iraqis. People should have the right to inform their families about their location, and they should have the right to appear in front of a judge very soon after being detained without being questioned and tortured, and they should have real lawyers in the court, they should at least know their charges!
Firas: a 26 years old light skinned guy, was walking in the street with grocery bags in his hands when a car attacked an American convoy, he ran away, in a normal reaction, so the police followed him and caught him, and beat him continuously for 7 hours with pipes while he was tied up to a chair, and when he didn’t confess of attacking the US troops or Iraqi police, his investigators wrote a report that he must have been trained in foreign terrorists camps to tolerate torturing, and sent him to this place, supposedly a place for more expert interrogators.
Mohammed: a very dull 23 year old dark skinned guy, works in a very poor traditional café in a very poor neighborhood, the owner of the café was high on drugs and reported that Mohammed killed 4 policemen and 4 national guards, Mohammed is hardly smart enough to form a sentence, he can read and write, but besides serving tea and coffee, don’t expect much of him. One minute with him and you will discover that he has a heart of a 6 year old child, he thinks that an imaginary bird comes to him everyday and tells him the news of his mother, the only family member he has. When they were interrogating him they asked him: “did you kill eight men?” He said “sayyidi ya 7aras wa6ani ya kharyan istor 3alena” hahahaJ (meaning: “me? I killed no national guard and no shit at all, don’t put me in trouble” which makes sense in English, but its extremely funny in Arabic and tells you that a person isn’t sane at all), since Mohammed is accused of killing eight men, we called him Mohammed the wolf, haha, and that was his nick name for the rest of the time, till I left, and God knows what will happen to him. All what it takes to put someone in jail is to call anonymously and claim that he is a terrorist, and that’s it, he will be tortured and put in jail for 45 days, so you, “the secret informer” can chose to come to the court during this period and swear that he is a terrorist, if so, that’s it, he will be legally accused of terrorism and might spend the rest of his life in jail, or he maybe executed, or maybe set free, its totally up to the judge to decide that, or maybe its up to the CIA, which I knew later that they occupy the floor that was above us in the building, where the orders come from.
Maysam And Nathom: two brothers, in their twenties, very poor, amazingly good looking, if there was an Arabic version of Hollywood, they would sure be Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
When I was in jail I cried twice, one of them was when Nathom came to the toilets from an interrogation session, and I was in the toilets at that time, and he started crying hard, he said that they beat him so much to the point that he had to say that his brother killed 300 people and stole many cars.
He came to the toilets while they started to torture his brother to make him confess of these crimes, I went back to the cell and cried for minutes, it was so unfair, so unfair.
That night we made jokes about it, and that since we all are supposed to be “terrorism experts” we knew that a sword can kill up to 50 people, so he must have used so many swords, or maybe he used chainsaw? How else would anyone kill 300 people with his own hands?
Yes, we made jokes about that, in prison, and when it’s such a silly situation, you learn to joke about it.
So the interrogator said: “so he killed 300 people?”
“yes sir” Nathom answered, and the interrogator writes the confession.
“and he stole an Opel Car?”
“yes sir”
“a yellow one?”
“yes sir”
And then the interrogator put down the pen and said “you son of a b****, it has been more that two years since the war and I never saw one yellow Opel car”
(And it’s true, for some reason all Opels in Iraq are grey, some are black or blue but it’s rare, but no yellow ones!) All of that interrogation happened while Nathom is hanging upside down, and being hit at the same time.
I left the jail and the two brothers where still there.
Abo kamal, and his nephews: a sheikh of a tribe, had an appointment with a friend to have dinner, and they agreed to meet in front of a well known police station in that area, so they waited there in their car, with the four hazard lights flashing, and the light inside the car turned on, on the side of the road right in front the police station waiting for their friend, and then some cops came out of the station, arrested them and accused them of killing a man, till I left, abo kamal and the others weren’t told the name of the person that was killed, how and when he was killed.
Abo ayid: you know that in our region we call people “abu something” and abu means “the father of” so for example my dad would be abu raed, cause raed is the oldest son, and if your oldest son is called james for example, you would be called abu james ok?
OkJ
Abu Ayid is a nick name that is used, rarely, to call someone that is married in long time but doesn’t have children, for any reason, cause its rude to call people with their names, calling them abu – is a formal and respecting way, so if you know someone that doesn’t have children you call him abo ayid, ok?
Ok!
Now abu ayid has been in prison for about three months, he was tortured a lot, his fingernails were taken out, his toes were broken, he was beaten so much, because someone thought that the name abo ayid sounds like a name of a terrorist, maybe a leader of a terrorist group, it SOUNDS like that, so they tortured him, and they are keeping him till he confesses and tells them about the other members in his group and their fund etc…
Kathom: a dark skinned man in his late 40s walking late at night passed by a governmental building while he was drunk. After a while, an explosion happened in that building, so the police picked him up walking not far of that building, and needless to say that they weren’t nice to him.
And so on, so many sad stories, sad because they are stupid, sad because they aren’t fair.
Whenever someone new arrives, I had this bad feeling in my stomach, its sick, and it keeps happening to other people everyday.
One of the guys there, Msaid, was so sad, he has been there for about 50 days, he never says a word, he never speaks to anyone, no one knows what he is accused of cause he wouldn’t talk, and I wouldn’t tell you about this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, Msaid haven’t eat a bite since over 40 days, we all live in the same place and its easy to keep track of that, people there watch him and be him to eat every now and then, all they hear from him is: I don’t feel like eating.
Guys I haven’t lost my mind in jail, its true, and I saw it myself, Msaid drinks water only.
I really learned that yama fissign mazaleem!
Which is an Egyptian saying says that many of those in prison are really innocent.
I learned also the value of freedom, now just looking from the window or going out in the street is a lot of fun to me, I learned to appreciate freedom.
May God free everyone that is under such great injustice, and send them back home to their families and friends, about us, we will do what we can to make sure that happens, any kind of help that you can offer, any legal help or support from human right groups will be much appreciated and evaluated, we must do all we can to try to get some rights to those arrested, and being arrested in occupied Iraq, everyday.
The whole thing started when I went to the university to pay my tuition fees, the thing is that the engineering campus is separated from the rest of the university with few kilometers, but for such administrative issues, students should go to the headquarter, and this is what I did. I entered the main campus and went to the financial department to pay money. I started the paperwork process, and then reached to a point where we needed the director’s signature to finish the paperwork, but she was in a meeting. So, the employee asked me to go and waste an hour inside the campus till the meeting is over, and I did.
What would you do in such a case? Go to the café? I tried, but was totally bored after less than 15 minutes, and then I don’t remember how an idea flashed in my head like a big light bulb: internet!
Of course, what is better than the internet to kill time?
I remembered there was an internet café inside the campus. I rarely came to this campus during the last five years. I think I came like three or four times only. Anyways, so I went to the internet café and did my regular tour: raed in the middle, riverbend, etc etc..and then I was bored again. I left the internet café heading towards the financial department again.
In my way, I was stopped by an old man, with a hateful face. “tfa`6al” he said (it means something like: “how can I help you?”) I was a bit surprised, I said “inta tfa`6al!” (meaning: “how can I help you?”) he said: where are you going? So I knew that he must be some kind of a security guy. I should have guessed from his tone, he sounds like a typical saddam-style security-man.
“to the financial department, to pay my tuition money” I said.
“where were you right now?”
“ in the internet café !”
“where is your ID?”
“at the campus entrance reception, with my mobile phone” (this is common now, in all governmental buildings you have to leave your mobile phone in the reception, you cant take it with you).
Please people; don’t be surprised because of all these questions. It used to be very common in “Saddam’s Iraq” and it’s very common in today’s Iraq.
Anyway, the old hateful man decided to escort me to make sure I was telling him the truth. Once we entered the financial office, the employees there talked to me spontaneously, so he knew I was there before and he left. I paid the money, took the receipt, and left. When I went back the campus entrance reception to take my mobile and leave, I found out that the mobiles’ closet was “mistakenly locked” as I was told. They were waiting for the guy that has the key. “He’ll be here in any moment” I was told.
I sat there waiting for my mobile phone to be freed. Then suddenly, after few minutes, someone came and asked “where is the detained guy?”
The other security guard pointed at me!!!
I was like: ehhhhh..sorry there is misunderstanding here, I am not detained, its only that the mobile phones closet is mistakenly locked!
“come with us, we have some questions please” they said, and I went with them, searching for answers inside my head…
They searched me very carefully; they took my shoes off and searched them, and even took my watch. They read every paper I had in my pockets, and asked me questions about my origin, nationality, and many other questions. Then they asked me to unlock my mobile phone so that they can check it out. At that particular point I had had enough, I said I wouldn’t unlock it except if it was in front of “the person” who is hiding somewhere in the campus, the one asking all these questions through messengers.
They didn’t like my response.
Another guy came after a while, and asked me: who did you contact on the internet?
“my mother and brothers” I said.
He didn’t look satisfied.
“keep him” he said.
Next thing I know, a very fat policeman entered the small room, asked me to face the wall, searched me again, took my money and glasses, put a bag on my head and handcuffs in my hand (I still have the marks on my hand till now). While my hands were behind my back and my head in a bag, he made me run for about a minute, till we reached a police van, where I was forced to get in. The car starting moving towards an unknown destination…
You don’t want to know the swearing and curses I heard all the way, but maybe you’ll want to know that no one beat me.
We reached a luxurious building, I could tell from the marble on the floor. The floor was the only thing I could see at that point through a very small space between the bag and my nose. Then I was led to a room after taking an elevator.
I was afraid to be taken to the torture rooms directly; I was praying to find someone to talk to, to explain to him that this all is nothing but a little silly mistake!
God answered my prayers.
Instead of being lead to some underground dungeon, I was taken to an air conditioned room with a lot of people. I could tell from their voices they were interrogating someone, I couldn’t see anything still, but they released my hands.
I understood that this person they were interrogating, (Sa’ib as I knew later, he was in the same cell with me), did a very awful thing. Sa’ib came to the ministry of interior, and went to the office of a high ranked officer, and tried to remind the officer of Sa`ib’s own father who served with this the officer long time ago, hoping to ask this officer for a favor. The Favor was to order the transferring of a friend of Sa`ib, a cop, to another governorate.
The officer didn’t remember sa’ib’s father, and refused to help him. Then he ordered his guards to take Sa’ib for interrogation!!!
Untill I left the jail, Sa’ib was still there!
They beat him a lot, “how dare you enter the office of an officer just like that?” they were telling him.
Back to the air-conditioned interrogation room, I was still facing the wall, my eyes were covered, and my brain working so fast, trying to see behind the darkness infront of my eyes.
Then it was my turn:))
“Finally!” I told myself!
They started by asking me: “What’s the connection between you and the London Bombs?” !!!
And I was like: “haaaaa???!!.”. I said: “London Bombs???! Nothing!”
BANG!!
A heavy hand landed on my neck, my brain was too busy to feel the pain, I felt my neck numbing for a while.
“SPEAAAK” he shouted.
“Turn around” he yelled.
I turned, facing the room now, but not seeing anything other than my nose and the shoes of the person who was interrogating me, standing so close.
“Why do you have a beard?” he asked.
“Because the prophet...” (I was trying to tell him that prophet Mohammad had one, and that I have one because I love to look like him...)
BANG
He slapped me on the face. It made a loud noise that the room became dead-silent for some seconds….
“May the prophet curse you” he shouted.
Again, my brain didn’t respond to the pain signals, I didn’t feel it.
For the next few hours, they asked me questions like “who are the other members of our terrorist cell, where does your fund come from? What operations did you have?”
“What do you have against Shia?”
I said: “nothing, my mother is Shia!”
He said” what do you have against Kurds? Why don’t you go blow yourself up and kill Kurds?”
I said: “Because God says in Quran…” (I was trying to tell him a part of Quran where God orders us not to kill any innocent soul) he interrupted me shouting, “We know Quran better than you”.
“My best friend is Kurdish!” I said.
“Of course he is, so that you can get information about Kurds from him, right?” he answered.
Nothing I said seemed to make sense to them. And nothing they said makes sense to anyone in the world.
Then finally I understood why I was there, after few hours. Security guards at the university had printed out all the websites I was reading while I was online there. They were accusing me of “reading terrorism sites” and “having communications with foreign terrorists”.
“Do you know what these pages are?”
I looked at them and figured out they were the comment section of Raed in the Middle!!
I opened the comments section while browsing in the university, read some comments, and didn’t even post anything. But these people don’t seem to know what the internet is, and they don’t speak English, so I was a major suspect of being an assistant of al Zarqawi maybe! Or that I have a terrorist group of my own, with foreign connections!
I was accused of terrorism, and sent to jail after they decided that I’m not helping myself because I am not helping them!!!
“Help you with what??!!”I asked “I am so willing to help you with anything you want, just tell me what exactly you want to know?”
“Tell us the name of the other members of your group, and where you get your fund from” then answered.
I entered the jail, and found people staring at me with curiosity, but with total silence.
“assalamo alaykom!” I said with a smile, and sat down on the ground, just like the others.
“alaykom assalam!” everyone said.
Then one of them couldn’t resist it anymore, so he asked: “why were you brought here?”
I told them my story, and they all looked very upset.
In the next few minutes, I learned about the stories of the other people that were there.
Then it suddenly hit me: “where are we? Do you know?” I asked curiously.
They all looked a bit afraid, I knew they had an answer but didn’t know whether they should trust me enough already to tell me or not, I have been there for a couple of minutes only.
Then someone whispered in my ears “istikhbarat il dakhliyya”, “but don’t tell anyone that we know”. Istikhbarat il Dakhliyya means the Mukhabarat, and that is the intelligence or the secret service police.
“Ohhh!!” I said “Do your families know you are here?”
They nodded with their heads: no.
There were around 35 people in that room, 4 of the arrested people in this floor were teenagers. I’ll tell you about some of their stories at the end of this post.
I made friends with almost everyone there that day, and then I slept, it was a long day, I was so worried about my family, how would I let them know that I wasn’t killed in a car bomb, or kidnapped? I’m sure they don’t expect that I ran away from the house to go party with my friends or join the circus!
Next day I was taken to interrogation again.
They asked me all the questions you can ask anyone, but they did it very fast. They took the name of my teachers, my friends, even my colleagues and the girls in my class. They asked me if I had ever had sex before, I said no. They didn’t believe me, they made fun of me and asked if I prefer men more, and I said no too.
Then they wanted me to write my “confession” finally, which is the paper that will go to the judge to decide my fate.
He asked: you are accused of attending terrorist sites (Did he say that they are sites that recruit young people for terrorism? I don’t remember) so what do you say?
I said, with my eyes covered: please write my answer “I deny that completely, I was practicing my democratic right of viewing people’s opinion about a certain topic on a site that people visit from all the countries around the world to give their opinions”
He said: what in the hell is that? Did I ask you to write me a composition? Answer my question Goddamn it! You are accused of visiting terrorist websites, what do you reply?
I repeated my answer, but I reformed it in a way that is less complicated for his simple brains to understand, they wrote something and made me sign on the paper.
I don’t know if any of them finished high school, they are uncivilized, they lack morality and education, the way they swear all the time and the words they say tells you what kind of people they are, I asked them about the things that were with me when I was arrested, they said that they have my mobile phone, and my IDs, but the fat policeman broke my glasses and stole some of my money, till now, they didn’t give me back my mobile phone or my IDs.
Since they don’t speak English, they didn’t even ask me one time about the content of the site, which my one and only crime was that I read.
The third day, I found a way to contact my family, “illegally”, to tell them that I am alive and that I am in the seventh floor of the ministry of interior affairs. By that time, my dad checked every hospital, police station and morgue in the city. He checked with the Iraqi army, the Iraqi militias, the US army, and even the ministry of interior which denied that I was there!
It was such a relief to know that my family knows where I was, I told them that I was very well, and that we eat well and sleep well and no one hurts us.
Eight days after I was arrested, I was sent to see the judge, in a court that is a bit far of the prison, when we reached the court they put cuffs on my legs too, and a chain that ties my cuffed hands with my body. I felt the humiliation to be treated like a criminal and sent to a court tied with all these chains. I cried for few seconds only, and held myself together before anyone noticed.
I was taken first to an interrogator who works for the court, where he re-wrote my confession in a way that makes it easier to be understood correctly. He said that the court will assign a public defender for my case. I asked him what did that mean and he replied “Nothing, just some formalities”. He asked me to sign the paper of my “confessions”, and then he called a big chubby man with cheap outfit. The strange man came from outside and signed on my paper: “The Lawyer I-Don’t-Know-What’s-His-Name”. Then after some waiting, I was taken to see the judge, finally.
The judge was a very elegant man in his 40s, sitting behind a fancy disk in his air-conditioned room, with a computer beside him and a cool mobile phone too, with guards outside and a secretary beside him.
He didn’t look at me in the beginning. He asked me while surfing the papers of my case: “What’s your case?”
I said: “I went to the university to pay the fees of…”
He interrupted me impatiently: “the website, tell me about the website”
I said: “It’s a forum, it’s a place where people discuss a topic written by the owner of a website. I visited it and I didn’t even post an opinion, I closed it and left the internet place, and then I was brought here.”
It seemed he was following me. He said: “Is it like chatting?”
I said: “Yes, your honor. This is more like a website than a chat room. You don’t have to sign in and be a part of what’s happening in the case of forums. I was just watching things there. For me, it was more like watch a TV with different channels; you go to a channel not knowing what will be there and without knowing the content. If you didn’t like the channel, you can change it”
He interrupted me: “ok ok I know I know.”
He had 37 translated papers of Raed’s Comments Section, that’s it, that’s my case. He asked me “What are these strange letters between the words here?” I said “Maybe the person who printed out the papers selected the wrong font, these strange characters appear when you pick the wrong encoding for the language”. He didn’t seem to be a computer expert, but at least he knows the basics.
He said “go, I will take the papers to read them at home, and will decide about them tomorrow”.
The chubby entered the room and sat on a chair in front of the judge. He was my “lawyer”, but he didn’t say a single word, not one single word. He only signed a paper that says that he is my lawyer.
I was taken back to the prison. That was my Wednesday.
On Thursday, the judge decided that I was innocent. He figured out that the papers were from a public forum, and he didn’t find any comments posted by me.
I wasn’t released till Saturday morning, after I was forced to sign a paper committing that I wouldn’t tell the families of the arrested people that they are arrested, and that I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything that happened while I was arrested or tell them what I saw inside the jail, and that I would report any case of breaking the law that I know about to the authorities (at this point I laughed and asked: even if someone drove his car through a red traffic light?), and that I wouldn’t visit terrorism websites.
I, of course, told all the families I could that their sons are arrested in the seventh floor of the ministry of interior in the hands of the Mukhabarat, and here I am telling you everything that happened with me, and I am planning to visit all kind of websites as much as I like as long as I want.
I was so lucky that I was taken to the Mokhabarat directly. Usually you have to go through a police station or a center of the national guards to get there, where the standard procedure of torturing is hanging people upside down and beating them with cables for hours, pinching their bodies with electrical drills, burning them with hot water, ripping out their finger nails, breaking bones, using acids on the wounds after whipping them, the dead bodies that are found in the dumpsters in Baghdad even had their eyes taken out of them, and a lot of these things happened with people that I know, or with people that were detained with the people that were with me in this jail, before they were brought here, and the list of torturing techniques is long, and you don’t want to hear them or know about them if you want to sleep at night.
In one of the floors in the same building, there is another prison, a bigger one called “The Palace of Hospitality” (doesn’t this remind you of 1984? The ministry of love and stuff?) Where recently a father and his son were arrested, and the son died at night because his rips were broken after they beat him, and then they spelled hot water on his body, he kept moaning of pain for the whole night, said Abo Ayid, who slept right beside him, and then he died. I’ll tell you more about Abu Ayid in the end.
The one thing in common between all the people that were there is that almost all of them were Sunnis. Interrogators told one of the prisoners during an interrogation session “you Sunnis are all terrorists” and during my interrogation, I heard a lot of racist remarks and questions. The Shia Iraqis who were there were mostly accused of non-terrorism crimes, like stealing, carjacking, etc…
If you were wondering how did we spend our time in jail… I’ll tell you.
We read Quran a lot, we prayed five times a day, we had three meals a day, and we praise God for long periods of time too. We sat all together talking and telling jokes and stories about our lives…
At night, while trying to sleep, I mostly was thinking of what I should write in my next post!
I always had the hope that I would leave that place, time goes really slow there, when I used to feel sad I would think of the nice places that I would go to when I leave, and all the other positive ideas that would keep me happy, I asked people: what is the first thing you want to do when you leave this place?
And we all sat thinking of the nice things we want to do… the things we want to eat, the places we want to visit; it was a hope-generating game.
My family played an important role to help me get out of the Mukhabarat’s jail faster than other people. Like any other corrupt system, you can get a better treatment by knowing the right people and giving the right “gifts”. My family didn’t pay anything to the judge because they believed I was innocent, they tried their best to get me a lawyer, but they couldn’t. I was freed because I was innocent, and I have the capabilities to defend myself in front of a judge.
The question is: what about the rest of Iraqis? The ones who don’t have the money or the power to leave places like that? The innocent people who were taken away from their families and loved ones and accused of false crimes? What happens to them? Who will stand for them? What about human rights? What about civil rights? What about humanity?
Here are just some of the people that were in the jail and their cases, as a sample to the cases. I hope that these people and all the other Iraqi prisoners will go back home safe. And I’ll work with my family to ask the US administration and the Iraqi authorities to improve the situation of the detention for the Iraqis. People should have the right to inform their families about their location, and they should have the right to appear in front of a judge very soon after being detained without being questioned and tortured, and they should have real lawyers in the court, they should at least know their charges!
Firas: a 26 years old light skinned guy, was walking in the street with grocery bags in his hands when a car attacked an American convoy, he ran away, in a normal reaction, so the police followed him and caught him, and beat him continuously for 7 hours with pipes while he was tied up to a chair, and when he didn’t confess of attacking the US troops or Iraqi police, his investigators wrote a report that he must have been trained in foreign terrorists camps to tolerate torturing, and sent him to this place, supposedly a place for more expert interrogators.
Mohammed: a very dull 23 year old dark skinned guy, works in a very poor traditional café in a very poor neighborhood, the owner of the café was high on drugs and reported that Mohammed killed 4 policemen and 4 national guards, Mohammed is hardly smart enough to form a sentence, he can read and write, but besides serving tea and coffee, don’t expect much of him. One minute with him and you will discover that he has a heart of a 6 year old child, he thinks that an imaginary bird comes to him everyday and tells him the news of his mother, the only family member he has. When they were interrogating him they asked him: “did you kill eight men?” He said “sayyidi ya 7aras wa6ani ya kharyan istor 3alena” hahahaJ (meaning: “me? I killed no national guard and no shit at all, don’t put me in trouble” which makes sense in English, but its extremely funny in Arabic and tells you that a person isn’t sane at all), since Mohammed is accused of killing eight men, we called him Mohammed the wolf, haha, and that was his nick name for the rest of the time, till I left, and God knows what will happen to him. All what it takes to put someone in jail is to call anonymously and claim that he is a terrorist, and that’s it, he will be tortured and put in jail for 45 days, so you, “the secret informer” can chose to come to the court during this period and swear that he is a terrorist, if so, that’s it, he will be legally accused of terrorism and might spend the rest of his life in jail, or he maybe executed, or maybe set free, its totally up to the judge to decide that, or maybe its up to the CIA, which I knew later that they occupy the floor that was above us in the building, where the orders come from.
Maysam And Nathom: two brothers, in their twenties, very poor, amazingly good looking, if there was an Arabic version of Hollywood, they would sure be Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
When I was in jail I cried twice, one of them was when Nathom came to the toilets from an interrogation session, and I was in the toilets at that time, and he started crying hard, he said that they beat him so much to the point that he had to say that his brother killed 300 people and stole many cars.
He came to the toilets while they started to torture his brother to make him confess of these crimes, I went back to the cell and cried for minutes, it was so unfair, so unfair.
That night we made jokes about it, and that since we all are supposed to be “terrorism experts” we knew that a sword can kill up to 50 people, so he must have used so many swords, or maybe he used chainsaw? How else would anyone kill 300 people with his own hands?
Yes, we made jokes about that, in prison, and when it’s such a silly situation, you learn to joke about it.
So the interrogator said: “so he killed 300 people?”
“yes sir” Nathom answered, and the interrogator writes the confession.
“and he stole an Opel Car?”
“yes sir”
“a yellow one?”
“yes sir”
And then the interrogator put down the pen and said “you son of a b****, it has been more that two years since the war and I never saw one yellow Opel car”
(And it’s true, for some reason all Opels in Iraq are grey, some are black or blue but it’s rare, but no yellow ones!) All of that interrogation happened while Nathom is hanging upside down, and being hit at the same time.
I left the jail and the two brothers where still there.
Abo kamal, and his nephews: a sheikh of a tribe, had an appointment with a friend to have dinner, and they agreed to meet in front of a well known police station in that area, so they waited there in their car, with the four hazard lights flashing, and the light inside the car turned on, on the side of the road right in front the police station waiting for their friend, and then some cops came out of the station, arrested them and accused them of killing a man, till I left, abo kamal and the others weren’t told the name of the person that was killed, how and when he was killed.
Abo ayid: you know that in our region we call people “abu something” and abu means “the father of” so for example my dad would be abu raed, cause raed is the oldest son, and if your oldest son is called james for example, you would be called abu james ok?
OkJ
Abu Ayid is a nick name that is used, rarely, to call someone that is married in long time but doesn’t have children, for any reason, cause its rude to call people with their names, calling them abu – is a formal and respecting way, so if you know someone that doesn’t have children you call him abo ayid, ok?
Ok!
Now abu ayid has been in prison for about three months, he was tortured a lot, his fingernails were taken out, his toes were broken, he was beaten so much, because someone thought that the name abo ayid sounds like a name of a terrorist, maybe a leader of a terrorist group, it SOUNDS like that, so they tortured him, and they are keeping him till he confesses and tells them about the other members in his group and their fund etc…
Kathom: a dark skinned man in his late 40s walking late at night passed by a governmental building while he was drunk. After a while, an explosion happened in that building, so the police picked him up walking not far of that building, and needless to say that they weren’t nice to him.
And so on, so many sad stories, sad because they are stupid, sad because they aren’t fair.
Whenever someone new arrives, I had this bad feeling in my stomach, its sick, and it keeps happening to other people everyday.
One of the guys there, Msaid, was so sad, he has been there for about 50 days, he never says a word, he never speaks to anyone, no one knows what he is accused of cause he wouldn’t talk, and I wouldn’t tell you about this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, Msaid haven’t eat a bite since over 40 days, we all live in the same place and its easy to keep track of that, people there watch him and be him to eat every now and then, all they hear from him is: I don’t feel like eating.
Guys I haven’t lost my mind in jail, its true, and I saw it myself, Msaid drinks water only.
I really learned that yama fissign mazaleem!
Which is an Egyptian saying says that many of those in prison are really innocent.
I learned also the value of freedom, now just looking from the window or going out in the street is a lot of fun to me, I learned to appreciate freedom.
May God free everyone that is under such great injustice, and send them back home to their families and friends, about us, we will do what we can to make sure that happens, any kind of help that you can offer, any legal help or support from human right groups will be much appreciated and evaluated, we must do all we can to try to get some rights to those arrested, and being arrested in occupied Iraq, everyday.
posted by Khalid at 8:46 PM
149 Comments:
7amdila 3al salama (hamdila ala al salama) , Thank God you're safe and free and can tell the whole world about the injustice , cruelty that you have seen. I am so sorry that you had to go through this terrible experience... but inshalla t3eesh and ti7kee lawladak :) ! The real terrosists are either in hiding or blow themselves up and die... and they take in innocent people to look good ?!? As if there were some prisoner quotas they need to meet ? Incompetent and untrained police ! It makes me so angry !
I am full of sadness at your story. I apologize for my country's terrible treatment of you and your people. People of good will in the United States will stop this if we possibly can.
Khalid, I just found your blog, but in the short time I've spent reading it I can say my heart sincerely goes out to you. I am an American, and I am so saddened by the actions of my country. My hope is that we somehow, some day, realize we are all part of the family of humanity and stop this insanity.
Many blessings to you~
Thank God that you came before a judge with half a brain. It depressese me but does not suprise me that this is happening one floor below an office of the United States CIA.
"He asked: you are accused of attending terrorist sites (Did he say that they are sites that recruit young people for terrorism? I don’t remember) so what do you say?"
LoL, they got that part right. Raed's site is the worst terrorist site on the net. You should have confessed right away!
I hope every Bushie (like Alberto Gonzales) who promotes 'torture'(a worthless concept for intelligence work) reads your post and THINKS. Maybe the ACLU(American Civil Liberties Union)can help the helpless people trapped in the Ministry of Hospitality,etc.
Can do a spot on it with the BBC?
I wonder if anyone of those constitution writers is thinking of putting a no-torture clause in it?
Wow!! I am so sad after reading your blog. Check out my site www.lovesbible.com I hope you find comfort in it.
Madtom
Disgusting lies like yours are the sort of things that make problems for decent, innocent people. Your outrageous lie about Raed's blog should be deleted and you should be committed to a mental hospital for washed up Cuban liars who persistently go around blogs making false accusations.
You really are a disgusting apology for a human being. And a cowardly liar.
K, ya akhi, if you delete his lying post then delete this one too as I don't see any need to leave a reference to it here if you scrub his lies.
Allah ma3ak
Khalid, you story was incredible! I love your blog, your writing, your heart, and your courage. I'm an American Christian (and was an American soldier in Operation Desert Shield in 1991). I have to tell you that, here, people have a lot of misconceptions about Muslims, the Qumran, and the way your faith impacts your lifestyle. Would you consider writing an entry describing to your Christian/western readers what most Muslims think and believe? We only hear what the radical, murderous, extremists claim, and obviously, you're quite different. For example, you quoted the Qumran as saying that it's wrong to kill innocents, sadly, I think that would surprise most Americans. I was also moved when you described praying, praising God, and reading the Qumran while you were detained. Wow, this is getting long, sorry.
Anyway, I'll be checking in regularly, would you mind if I linked to you from my blog?
Good evening,
Firstly, welcome back. Judging by your entry today, you are a very brave young man. You should be proud of yourself. Hell, I wouldn't want anyone telling me which sites to go to either. So, 'back into the breach, my friends.'
I believe your main obligation is to write down your experiences in detail, and shop it around. I was totally enthralled by your description of your ordeal. Your story deserves to get heard, especially by Iraqi's.
Good luck!
I hope you are recovering from you terrible experience. I hope that you know that most Americans want their country out of Iraq, and they are appalled by the tales of torture at abu ghraib and elsewhere. I will link to your blog. I want Americans to know what kind of regime our tax dollars are supporting.
Raeds is certainly not the hotbed for terrorist sympathy that it used to be. It's like the guy 'got religion' when you went to jail. You can just about eat off the floor in that blog now. No more 'Not' with his links to insurgent video. Amazing what a dose of reality will do for a fella.
Glad you are home safe. Perhaps Iraq will get it right some day. Hopefully the present is like the Saddam era only because of the deviance and brutality of the insurrection.
Elie
The gloating videos of U.S. military killing Iraqi people and the photographs of dismembered bodies of dead Iraqis that are routinely posted by your friends on Raed's blog, or maybe you post a few of them yourself Elie, you're happy with them presumably?
I don't think you'll find that anyone has stopped posting anything there, except some of your friends' ugly talk and flooding gets deleted. There has never been anything illegal posted at Raed's, or anything that isn't from established media sources. If you have a problem with information being posted that reflects reality, that's your difficulty. As for videos, stay tuned, when they are posted on legitimate news sites they'll no doubt get posted.
So you post them in retaliation of others stupidity? Which came first, your ignorance or theirs?
In no way is the legality issue in question. It is the context in which your 'stories' are posted.
Don't go to Baghdad. You'll get a few nights in jail and a slap about the head.
Elie
I have no way of knowing if your story is true, partially true, or a complete fabrication. I do know that there are far more blogs from Iraq in which gratitude and joy for the opportunity for a new free democratic Iraq is being expressed, than those such as yours. War isn't pretty. You're in a war zone. Bitterness about it will not serve you well. Look to the future-- I wish you and your countrymen a glorious, prosperous, free and peaceful one.
To Godfrey Daniel, It's amazing what you have wrote. "Look to the future"???, I mean, "Khalid, don't get bothered if you almost got killed, look to the future"!!! "and if that happens again remember, war in your country is worth it, look to the future and smile!!" ... WTF Godfrey!!! what do you have in your mind?? Life is now!! the pain is now!, the crimes are now! the murders are now! and all this are happening in iraq NOW!!, try to take a look out of your bubble and see what all the world already know, Bush it's not fighting for freedom or democracy, they don't care about that, all this war it's for oil, Why Americans are soo blind???
I just read your whole post and I feel sad reading it.
I am from the USA, thousands of miles from you, but your story affected me. I'm sorry for how our country has treated your country.
I also apologize for Godfrey Daniel, he is one of the many stupid people here in the USA. People like him have no respect, and I'm sorry that he is representing our country on this blog. I want to let you know many many people disagree with how this war is going. We are trying to make our leaders listen to us. But please understand there will always be short-sighted people like Godfrey Daniel that have no heart.
To continue from above...
I just want to also say that these kinds of stories are not on the TV. I want to thank you for sharing this on your web page. Perhaps the internet will help us all be a little closer and understand each other a little better.
One more note: You probably see our soldiers more than we do. Soldiers by their profession arent the nicest people. So please do not judge us all by our soldiers. We have poets and authors and schoolteachers and a lot of people who care deeply about all human tragedy.
Peace
How in the HELL did that bunghole bush get elected.... a really, really sad day for the united states, a sadder day still for the entire planet...
Too bad.
I'm glad you're home and safe, Khalid. Your account fills me with sadness (for you and the many innocents caught up in this shitstorm of a war) and shame (for my country gifting yours with said shitstorm). I'm happy to know that your blog will still be there, a window on your world. :-)
I send you warm wishes for love, peace and safety.
So what, you ninnies, did you find so objectionable or untrue about my comment?
Are you saying...
That neither I, nor any of you have any way of knowing whether tales posted in blogs on the Internet are true, partially true, or entirely false?
That there aren't numerous positive and hopeful Iraqi blogs?
That war is pretty?
That he is not in a war zone?
That bitterness will serve Khalid well?
That he should not look to the future, but rather live in the past?
Or is it that I shouldn't have wished him a glorious, prosperous, free and peaceful future?
It's about what you didn't say, not what you did.
man... you have the heart of a lion. keep on keeping it real over there and watch your back. you're an inspiration to us all.
Oh. That's cool. I was thinking it was something that I said. My mistake.
Completely understandable that I would be reviled for things I didn't say.
I could have said some really awful things, after all.
Just because I didn't doesn't make me any less guilty.
@godfrey daniel What you said was you understand this fellow's situation in Iraq better than he does because you believe that most Iraqis like having no power, getting shot at and having their national treasures and resources stolen. You didn't say that perhaps the majority of Iraqi bloggers only say good things (not my experience but obviously yours) that this may be because if they don't they will get rounded up tortured and maybe killed. Lets not forget the only reason Khalid was released was he could prove he hadn't made a post. Not that they couldn't prove he HAD made a terrarist post but He could prove that he hadn't made ANY post. Now the last time I looked BushCo were claiming that the real reason Iraq was invaded was to introduce democracy. Is this democracy? Is this the rule of law you live under? Or do you piously hope that if you get rounded up that being US and male will enable you to some 'special' treatment ie innocent till proven guilty.
People of good will in the United States will stop this if we possibly can.
Substitute, you're rather naive. Americans don't even give a shit that US soldiers are dying in Iraq. They could give a fuck about an Iraqi, unless it's serves some Hollywood happy ending.
We Americans care about money, getting our big fucking house on debt, putting 2 million of our countrymen in jail. A Christian nation that regards the insane ramblings of Leviticus (only own a slave from a different country ?!) as more important than the Gospels.
Americans worship greed, domination and their own pathetic ignorance.
No Godfrey Daniel, the problem with your post is that is was trite and cliche and as a result flat out insulting. If a tragedy happens to someone you don't just say "Ah buck up!" and expect to get a positive response.
And if a story may have dubious sources, it is a matter of common sense NOT to say so. If the story did happen, how much of a jerk would that make you to call Khalid a liar?
Get a clue.
I have to say that I do not necessarily believe the stories Khalid told...
Not that he is lieing or anything... he was innocent, and sent to court and released as he should have been.
If this whole thing is a true story... I think it is. But you never know. It is the internet afterall...
Yeah the police were a bit heavy handed but it is part of the norm... Every nation in the region is the same and we can't expect it to change over night...
I question mainly two things
1. All prisoners always maintain their innocence many of those who spoke to Khaled telling innocent stories may well have been lying. My own experiences with detainees show this to be true. In some cases with mutiple witnesses on a crime scene having seen the individual commit the crimes.
There is no way to know if the stories he tells are true or not... and he has no way to tell...
The facts simply is that prisoners lie... that is the way it is. That is life... every prison in the world is 99% full of people who claim to be innocent...
Sorry... but no dice.
2. The junk about him "knowing" the CIA was on the next floor that issues orders was probably prisoner rumor... he never says how he knew... if he gave that info maybe we could believe it... but since he never claims to have seen or talked to or heard a member of the CIA talk... we can assume this was junk made up by other prisoners... many of whom may well have been guilty... and had already lied...
3. He's lucky they didn't figure out the website is his and Raed's was his brother's... he could have been indicted for participating in propaganda.
salaam
Abu Yusef
'Abu Yusef'
CIA hangs on to control of Iraqi intelligence service
Trying not to let the facts get in the way of your rush to try to diminish the truth of someone's reality, eh?
Thank God you are back from this hell.
Many of us thought you were arrested for expressing yourself in your blog...how ironic that the truth was you were arrested for READING Raed's blog.
oh khalid, what can I say? are you alledging that the men who "interrogated" you were American??
We have just caught four men who tried to blow up the london underground in Britain. But we do not treat people quite like this.
I remember the emails exchanged between us a few months ago. Try and hold on to your youthful enthusiasm, as well as your international tolerance.
starliz
Mr. MadTom @ 7/30/2005 07:09:26 PM
email: thisfckingwar@yahoo.com
URL: Http://thisfuckingwar.blogspot.com/
I'm publicly informing you that I'm planning to ask my lawyer in the US to start the appropriate legal actions against you. I'm planning to sue you for both libel and slander, for the things you published on khalid's site, and your blog.
I'll give you the next 4 weeks as a break to either delete your comments and posts and apologize for your lies, or prove your false accusations.
If you believe you're doing the right thing by accusing me of supporting terrorism, you shouldn't be afraid of sending me your personal contact information, or of publishing them in public, to make it easier for us to go to the US court and solve this small misunderstanding legally.
I assure you, Mr. MadTom, that the US courts would be fair to both of us, you shouldn't hide your identity from me. I won't publish your contact info if you didn't want me to.
Delete the comments and apologize, or prove that I support terrorism.
I challenge you.
Raed and MadTom,
The American aggression against Iraq was by definition "terorrism."
I follow Khalid and Raed very closely and not only have they not supported our (American) terrorism but they have not supported any of the terrorism that comes from Saddam's regime or the insurgency.
Madtom, you have shown support for the American terrorism, which means you are making a charge against someone that you are guilty of.
Raed,
I'm afraid your mistaken. It was the Iraqi judge in Khalids story that made the allegation as you can see for yourself.
""He asked: you are accused of attending terrorist sites (Did he say that they are sites that recruit young people for terrorism? I don’t remember) so what do you say?""
All I have done is agree with the Iraqi Judges. As any same person can see by my comments:
"they got that part right."
So I think you would have better luck if you turn your attention to the Iraqi Judicial system. I would even support your efforts, as I believe that people should have access to all the web site, even yours, and that just reading a site should not be a reason for anyone's detention, nor an excuses to persecute anyone. We here at This Fucking War support the right of free expression and association, and will continue to support the Iraqi people in their quest to achieve these basic and fundamental human rights. You can count on us to continue to support you in this regard.
Thank you for your attention.
Your story is starting to get attention from many people in America. I was referred to it by a friend; I will in turn send it to others. I think your words may accomplish more than you may expect. Change comes from outrage, built brick by brick from stories like yours.
What you may not know is that Americans really have no idea at all what you are going through. Zero! So you are doing much more than you think by telling your story here. It's pretty sad that a compliment I can give my country is that many only support our leaders because they are ignorant.
America is a very large nation, with an antique and flawed democracy. For many decades we have been letting our schools be ruined (through both apathy and "sabotage" by religious parties who hate public education that doesn't include religion), and as a result, we are losing economically, but more importantly we are also becoming ignorant. Worse yet, we lost the rules that keep our television unbiased - now our television news is run by giant corporations and political parties (sometimes the same thing now!).
The rest you will understand immediately. The less educated and more ignorant people are, the worse their government gets. Ours is now very, very bad. For me, and the rest that remains of the old liberal intellectuals that are still involved in politics, every day is a horrifying fight against Christian fascist organized criminals that we sometimes call Republicans and sometimes "conservatives" or other things. You talk about 1984 - these guys could have taught Orwell new things. Anyway, it seems like you've met some of them here. There are lots of things wrong with them, not the least is that they believe in the style of justice you experienced. It's funny, because America was started by people fed up with being treated that way, but ignorant people are never safe anywhere.
I've learned over the years that our words are always a little more powerful than we think they are. All the people in power in both America and Iraq don't rule with guns and bombs - they rule with words. Guns and bombs come after, when people hear words and form beliefs, take actions, follow orders. All war is actually about words - and humanity is at endless war.
Never stop fighting.
Greetings from America.
I can think of few things more vile than the people who feel the need to act "superior" in the comment sections of Raed's and ESPECIALLY Khalid's blogs w/r/t the righteousness of the US invasion of Iraq, and especially the whole "Khalid didn't get tortured he's lucky what a baby with rich parents blah blah blah."
The only people who post such comments are people who know nothing about what is going on in Iraq and what a complete failure the "attempt to bring democracy" sham has been. Don't try to blame all this mess on those crazy "insurgents". The US invaded Iraq illega;;y, and if the US truly had "bringing democracy" as its agenda, it wouldn't have done it so shoddily, with so little respect for Iraq's citizens, who are no different from any other citizen of any country, who just want to go about their own business and have a halfway decent life. There is no diffrence between Timothy McVeigh and Atta; between the messed up perpetrators of Columbine and the teenage jihad recruits of tomorrow -- extremists all, looking for personal redemption through the destruction of their personal crazy "causes".
Khalid was detained because of what ANYONE POSTING TO OR READING THESE COMMENTS WAS DOING RIGHT NOW! If you POST to the comments section about how LUCKY he was, you should be locked in an Iraqi mukharabat jail RIGHT NOW, since that is what you obviously believe.
-- Lillet
i'm glad you are home i have been praying for you since i had found out that you had been arrested.i will continue to pray for others not as fortunate as you.
Khalid, I am glad that you are okay. You are extremely lucky that you weren't tortured and killed. I have on my blog many examples of the Ministry of Interior's "police" torturing Iraqis, usually Sunnis. The dogs have learned well from their masters.
Please put up as many stories from your experience as you can remember.
Glad everything turned out OK for you; I'm surprized you were treated so humanely under the present circumstances in Iraq.
Such would not be the case if my ill-informed and ill-intentioned "liberal" friends here in the States had their way...they are pampered and have every comfort that life has to offer here in America, and that's enough for them. If they had their way, they would gladly turn your country over to Zarqawi.
The "liberals" don't represent America, they fancy themselves as world citizens, where all problems are solved for them by the shuffling of their masters papers...poor stupid naive Leftists.
Porter Goss,
I said nothing about CIA involvement in the Iraqi police or otherwise...
Stop dishonestly trying to make it sound like I did.
What I asked was why Khalid thinks that there was CIA on the next floor and I suggested it was prisoner rumor and not based on first hand info. IF he would tell us why he thinks the CIA control the next floor... then that is fine too. MAybe he has solid info for it... but he was so detailed about everything else...
He is telling a story that is based on first hand info... and I was just pointing that this particular piece of info was most likely not from first hand info...
His mother does the same when she said "we now know that US forces are mostly made up of foreign nationals trying to get citizenship" as if it were true...
But it is based on a common Iraqi street rumor that I can say for a fact is not true.
The other things that he assumes is that those people telling their stories to him are all truely innocent. I do not find that believable either. He can speak for himself... but does not account for the fact the prisoners almost always declare their innocents...
Also who was so daft as to say Khalid said that the CIA interrogated him?
He never said that...
Maybe you need to learn to read.
What he suggested was that the CIA decided who gets released... I find that info questionable unless he can tell how he came to his conclusions... You see when you have Iraqis who spread rumors that the white civilian trucks they see moving around are Mossad and CIA... and they are actually KBR (Haliburton) trucks... then it leads me to suspect any suggestion that people make not based on their own first hand knowledge.
Abu Yusef
Hi everyone:) and thank you for your comments.
i saw the Americans with my own eyes, and i saw the top Officials in the ministry moving away for their cars to get it, and i heard one of these officials saying " ohh, americans again, we are humilated in our own country, we have to clear the way for them" and i saw their big flashy GMC cars that has these strange flashing lights just like the ones we see in American movies:), and i know they are exactly on the eleventh floor, the only thing i dont have is pictures and home addresses of the American officers working there, when i meet James Bond next time i will ask him to teach me that last lesson about how to know these missed bits of information while kept in a high security prison like that.
btw "abu yousif" how come you are so concerned about denying the CIA presense there, while i havent heard one word from you about the incredibly sick torturing that Iraqis are going through everyday ha? makes you wonder, what's for you in this? who are you really?
me*
Ohhh..
needless to answer that question abou yousif, i just checked your profile, you are an American soldier, and to quote from your profile: "and that eventually we can stabilize and get the hell out of this foreign place that we are out of place in" that would be Iraq, where you are now, according to your place.
i need no deeper answers to my questions, thank you, i wish you to go back to your wife and daughter, and all your colleagues. and just leave this foriegn place that you are out of place in.
Best of luck.
me*
Khalid,
I was not saying I didn't believe... or denying the CIA... I just wanted to know how you knew. Your answers were sufficient... maybe they were from other orgs than the CIA (FBI, NSA) but to you and others it matters little... they are all the same in terms of effect... as far as you are concerned, I am sure. Take into account what I say though... many of those SUVs... at least outside Baghdad... (I can't speak for Baghdad) are KBR trucks.
anyway
Just wanted to get clarification... Sometimes some of the bloggers like riverbend and your mother and raed say things that are based on rumor... I wanted to make sure whether or not that was the case with you... on these issues...
Just remember it is not distrust in your honesty that causes me to ask questions... If that were the case to ask for clarification would have been pointless... for any answer would have been insufficient...
Please take care if you come back here again... though I would suggest staying in Amman... I would much rather be there myself in all honesty. It is far safer currently.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
kngdhtn,
Average americans don't care about your oil, or about build bases, or anything like that.
I must disagree. Average Americans care very much about oil. We buy the biggest gas guzzler we can afford, and then we gripe about the price of gas. We elect and re-elect two oil men for the highest offices in our land.
We remain willfully ignorant about where the oil comes from and what the consequences of our using it are but by our actions and our votes we VERY MUCH care about cheap oil.
I'm getting a little tired of the willful ignorance and fake innocence of many Americans. We really have no excuse for our buying and voting habits any more.
First of all I’m very happy to “see” you back. I’ve been reading the blogs of your family since “Where is Read” at the beginning of invasion in Iraq.
Living in a “new democracy” I can see some things common in our countries, although we overturned our (communist) regime (15 years ago) in an “inner way”, without foreign interference and with only 3 deaths, thankfully.
The old habits – torturing by police, for example – changes very slowly here too. After 15 years there (eastern European, "new" EU country) you still can be badly beaten by police if they arrest you. But nobody can't hold you for months in prison without bringing charges. Still in the last couple years there was a few cases when people were beaten to death by policemen. There was also a case when suspects were sentenced based on their confessions, but they confessed to these crimes after severe beating.
Policemen there generally are not very smart and a part of them worked in police also in soviet times, when beating of suspect was “normal” practise. As they don’t get paid well, all the people who are smart enough to get another job are quitting.
The first years of independence was a little bit chaotic, but there was no bloodshed, as we didn’t have any foreign troops (yes, we did have Russian army there, but it was different situation,) and we are not “a hot tempered southern nation”, but more like cool northern type :) a little bit slow maybe.
The situation there after 15 years (and there was no bloodshed during change of regime) is still not perfect – you can get beaten by police, corruption level is very high (in government institutions, police and medical care – my mother had to bribe the doctor to get breast cancer operation), there are some ethnic tensions.
But things are slowly changing and getting better.
Although I must admit that situation in Iraq at times seems so hopeless and desperate to me.
b.
Hi Khalid,
Welcome back. I'm so glad all this came to a happy ending for you, your mother and your family.
Abu Yussef,
Although you ask questions politely, you sound quite hypocrital. You pretend that you just want to know, but in reality you are trying to smear the credibility of Faiza and the Raeds. I'm regularly reading Faiza's blog since she begun to post and I don't remember that she ever wrote that "all the US military were foreigners trying to get naturalized".
In any event, there are many foreign born in the US army. They amount to almost 70'000 and built about 5% of the active duty personal in december 2004. They did even form 8% of the Navy. More than half the foreign born (57%) are naturalized Americans and among those 16'000 have been naturalized under executive order.
Ordinary foreigners have to wait 5 years before asking naturalization. For the military the period was reduced to three years untill July 2002 when the waiting period was abolished (it takes about ten months to become a US citizen after the demand is issued). More info on this here in a report of the Migration Policy Institute
So the fact that many foreigners engage in the US military in order to get naturalized is not a myth as you would like to imply. Same thing apply for many Americans of poorer extraction who engage in the military in order get a better education (it's not free in the US, unlike in most countries).
Christina
do not presume to know what my intentions are or my intent.
Do not psychoanalyze me based on the little bit of info by which you can accomplish it... I assure you that you nor even the greatest expert in the world is capable of it..
Do not take what I say out of context.
I don't care about your statistics. They do not support Faiza's comments, nor contradict a single word I said. I suggest rereading what I said very carefully...
What I state is fact. Some of what everyone say is rumor. Some is not. What kind of a fool would I be if I were one of the ilk who didn't try to differentiate the two? I am questioning no ones honesty. Only the basis for their statements. If someone asked similar questions of me I would certainly answer if I were legally aloud to do so. Khalid answered the question. I did not question further.
Should we simply accept everything at face value? Has Khalid Raed and his family become for some some sort of unquestionable holy book, that we can not ask inquire or doubt anything in it?
I am sure that while Khalid disagrees with me on many issues that he would agree that we must ask questions and think critically.
YOu talk about me wanting to discredit them... but what you do not know is that in my opinion... if one is going to be anti-occupation... then if they are going to have the attitude and principles that faiza shows then they deserve my respect.
on 1 May Faiza said the following statement.
"never the less, we discovered that the majority of the "New Army" that came to Iraq were mercenaries, by high, tempting salaries, with promises of being granted the American citizenship when they finish the duty in Iraq)."
OOPS...
I would like an apology.
I did not make anything up... and that should be clear to you.
That statement is entirely untrue and as I said before is based on street rumor.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
Khalid, you must report your story to Human Rigths Watch, that could help the prisioners still inside, bringing to the light all that is happaneing there.
Abu Yussef,
Is that the only quote you were able to make up ? that's qutie different than what you wrote earlier aka that "His mother does the same when she said "we now know that US forces are mostly made up of foreign nationals trying to get citizenship" as if it were true..."
The case of the foreign mercenaries is very different. A few hundreds came along with Chalabi and were present when the statue of Saddam was toppled for a big psy op in front of the medias. And there are many mercenaries in IRaq, coming from many different countries.. doing security jobs for all kinds of US offficial or aid agencies or foreign ambassies etc.. Some works for the US military doing other jobs which were ealrier done by the army itself. May be there are something like 40'000 (I'm too lazy to check right now, but a google search may tell you the number). This is not few compared to the 140'000 US troops.
hamdulillah ala as-salaama, ya bash muhandis! I've been following your story on the edge of my seat. The chap who said words were what mattered was right.
- Um Amal in London.
Heh. You're lucky the judge was a fair man who didn't have an ax to grind or quota to fill. I'm sorry for your troubles and hope it never happens again.
Khalid,
What happened to you was a crime, it is disgusting. I am incredibly ashamed that my country (the US) is responsible for the crimes occurring throughout Iraq. I'm sorry. Decent Americans do what we can, we write letters to the media, to our elected officials, and we talk about how cruel this war is with anyone that will listen. I am so sorry. For all Americans that are appalled by what happened to Khalid, don't forget ALL OUT ON SEPTEMBER 24TH IN EVERY CITY ACROSS THIS NATION TO PROTEST THE WAR IN IRAQ!
To Khaled,
From Palestine we sent your our prayers for your safe return to your family every night. Praise be to God that you are finally home. We wish you peace, we wish you prosperity and we wish for you an end to this terrible occupation and that you do not suffer the same fate as us with our long Israeli occupation. Inshallah, Inshallah, Inshallah the Iraqi people will be free very soon.
Nimr Kobti, Bethlehem.
Masochist site is a better description!
Madtom > Raed's site is the worst terrorist site on the net.
You mean there is a lot of rightwing terrorists (like Michael and Madtom) spreading their brownish manure in the comments sections of that blog? The rest of us must really have strong masochist traits to endure wading through that manure...
RobinH
You live in interesting times, Khalid.
May you have a happy homecoming.
Nice to see you safe Khalid. I have been a visitor to Raed site for a time now.
I am so sorry for what has happened to you and all of the Iraqis. I am also sorry that Americans can be so cruel. I used to be a proud american but my country has been taken over by Republicans who wish to demean people not in their class.
The powers that lay before us is not a true representation of America, the free. Some of us feel like Hitler has returned from the grave. The people had a choice and they chose bush unfortunately. This is the consequence we all must pay.
Raed in the Middle is exactly what it means...in the middle. Even the americans who want the troops pulled out are called UNPATRIOTIC or UNDEMOCRATIC at this point in time. They claim we are commiting treason. "They" have blinders on.
It is so hard for people who love war to grasp the concept of "peace" and "live and let live".
Like Read once mentioned....the common man helping the common man.
Raed web site has helped alot of Americans because we do not get news worth watching. I learn from Raed's cite about the war that america is trying to hide from the people in the united states...which is the truth about the war. They do not televise coffins or injured troops returning because they are afraid of "public opinion". They are ashamed to show the TRUTH.
Bush has no exit plan.
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Christina...
"finished reading a new book about the Iraq war: " THE IRAQ WAR : A MILITARY HISTORY", by the Harvard university Press…
I like reading such books, to identify the mentality of those who waged the war on Iraq, and how do they write history, from their view point.
Well, the writer says that war on Iraq gave confidence to the American army and people, compensating them on the frustrations of the Vietnam War, and its bitter memories. He says that drugs addicted, and weak soldiers no longer have a place in the new U.S army…
Hummm… so, they came upon us to boost their self confidence, ( never the less, we discovered that the majority of the "New Army" that came to Iraq were mercenaries, by high, tempting salaries, with promises of being granted the American citizenship when they finish the duty in Iraq)."
http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/2005_05_01_afamilyinbaghdad_archive.html
You can read it here.
I don't understand you antagonism towards me. Khalid is able to talk to me in a civil tone and answer my question... and he was in a prison... and hold those I work for responsible... You have absolutely no reason for your antagonism.
I note how you said "that was tghe only quote you could make up" I hope further quoting the passage to show that Faiza was not talking about private "mercenaries", or the IRaqi expatriate Army but was calling the US Army Mercenaries...
I am not calling her a lier. But she is wrong all the same. Nothing you said contradicted anything I have and my points remain as valid as they were before you started trying to show that they weren't.
So far you have accomplished nothing except annoy me... I advise you actually read what people who disagree with you actually said before trying to prove them wrong simply because they are coming from a different position than you are from the get go.
If you want to worship Faiza, and Raed and Khalid... I am not going to stop you... But I am sure that they would be opposed to that... and that they would prefer that you used you mind when reading it to interpret it rather than simply be an organic tape recorder that takes it all in wrote.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
Salaam ya Habibi,
Your story is touching and I am glad that Allah most compasionate and mercifull has granted you safety. I do not however condone your anti American comment on your Bio. The policies of the current administration do not reflect the views hopes and desires of every American. That would be comprable to me being anti Iraqi becasue of the cowardly terrorists killing Americans and Iraqis everyday.
I live and work in Iraq. Iraq is beautifull. I have forged many life long frienships in Iraq. Life began in Iraq. I am white and from small town America, and I love Iraq.
Salaam ya Habibi,
Your story is touching and I am glad that Allah most compasionate and mercifull has granted you safety. I do not however condone your anti American comment on your Bio. The policies of the current administration do not reflect the views hopes and desires of every American. That would be comprable to me being anti Iraqi becasue of the cowardly terrorists killing Americans and Iraqis everyday.
I live and work in Iraq. Iraq is beautifull. I have forged many life long frienships in Iraq. Life began in Iraq. I am white and from small town America, and I love Iraq.
this is unfortunate, but i also feel that justice was served by the official who found you innocent. he does not seem an idiotic man, and that is an encouraging sign of democracy. you may not understand the reasons for your detainment, but i dont have to explain to you the situation your country faces everyday. it is not the time for you to be a smug young man- for example, when you said in response to the 'mean old man', "how can i help you?". you feel you are innocent, yet even in my own country that is not at war and under constant threat of terrorism, i could not say such things without arousing suspicion, and/or ire. i am not blaming you, but rather just pointing out that if you were wise, you would not do something so idiotic in your situation. can you not see how your own actions brought this upon you? it doesnt matter that you read a blog, that old man just didnt like your attitude and found a way to make you pay for it.
there are injustices to be sure, but such is the nature of war. i am sorry it is for you to endure it, but you should understand that you endure it because we will not. i feel terrible about all the death and destruction being brought to your country, but in some ways you must accept that it is partly the responsibility of Saddam Hussein. we were at war with Iraq since 1990 and Saddam chose to defy the international community. he shot at our planes regularly for years. war was inevitable. i do not totally agree with the nature of this particular war, but i am not leading my country either. i do agree that we should do all we can to make your country free from terrorists and oppression, but i also understand that we are bringing those things into your country in our attempts. in my country there is an expression, "freedom is not free". it is not free for you. if you want freedom, you should do what you can to get it, despite the present circumstances. do you think you are the only person who has ever suffered the evils of war? all through history, people have learned to overcome evil and reestablish peace again. your detainment was not unique, nor was it especially horrible given the circumstances.
Iraq is your country, not our's. if you dont fix things, who will? our country cannot make your country right with thugs and militias disrupting our attempts, yet you blame us for the problems you face? you blame us for Saddam invading Kuwait and shooting at our pilots? you blame us for his violation of peace agreements and the war that ensued? no, its not our fault. we had little choice but to remove him from power, as he was a threat to our people. it should have been done much sooner in my opinion, but left to Bush the war has been handled poorly. i personally believe we should have a million or more troops in your country so that we could secure your infrastructure and improve your quality of life as much as possible, but i am not Bush. you have to live with Bush's decisions. either way, it is up to you to make Iraq the kind of place you want it to be, despite the present situation. complaining is not making your tomorrow any better, is it? if you so despise the Iraqi forces we are forming, why don't you join them and try to make them better? would you behave as they do, even with orders? i think its because you are scared of trying to help make your country a better place. instead you come here to give stories of your 'injustices' to people who feign caring for you because it suits their political persuasion. you are here because you dont care about your country, you just want someone to blame. there is no one to blame but yourself and people like you who are too weak to attempt to make anything better, despite the circumstances.
Ah, the anonymous poster above has stated the same points that Bush will make when we withdraw from Iraq.
Bush (or his press lackeys) will say we brought freedom to Iraq and they blew it.
As the poster above says, the US invasion was inevitable. We had little choice. It is not our fault.
Well how convenient for us. We are totally blameless. The Iraqis should do this and do that and then this. Too bad they are weak.
This is such a load of face-saving crap.
Anonymous said...
Glad everything turned out OK for you; I'm surprized you were treated so humanely under the present circumstances in Iraq.
Such would not be the case if my ill-informed and ill-intentioned "liberal" friends here in the States had their way...they are pampered and have every comfort that life has to offer here in America, and that's enough for them. If they had their way, they would gladly turn your country over to Zarqawi.
The "liberals" don't represent America, they fancy themselves as world citizens, where all problems are solved for them by the shuffling of their masters papers...poor stupid naive Leftists.
8/01/2005 02:02:05 AM
Hey dumbass who protected Zarqawi during Saddam's reign? If the liberals were in power Khalid's detention in Iraq over reading a blog would not be the case since we would not have illegally invaded his country on completely false pretenses. You accuse leftists of being stupid while you still believe all the lies told to you by dubya and Co. even though your own 911 commission has stated that no connection to 911. I guess al qaeda has infiltrated the 911 commission in order to force this conclusion. How many Iraqis were involved with 911? What connections are there between Iraq and al-qaeda before this illegal war started? Where are the WMD?
And to the rest of dubya groupies you keep on saying war is not pretty and Iraqis should just live with that situation. What don't you understand about this war in Iraq being illegal since no connection to 911 and no WMD found? You can justify this war based on the reasons given to us before it was started. Some dubya groupies say Saddam was in the process of acquiring WMD from other countries which is also untrue since we were told Saddam could reach the US in 45 minutes with his nuclear weapons which by the way don't exist. Another reason dubya groupies have come up with is that we wanted to remove a tyrrant who killed innocent people, this sounds great, but what about the rest of the world's tyrrants? Why not clean our own back yard first ex: Castro? Why ally ourselves with other tyrrants of the world sauch as the leaders of uzbekistan and sudan? Maybe since they are on "our side" (they do not restrict their resources to us). So its ok to support a tyrrant as long as they benefit us. This sounds exactly like when we supported saddam while he was killing his own people.
talldave
the same goons that took Khalid away used to work for saddam the difference is they fork for us now. So you are saying it's ok if goons mistreat people while working for us.
Khalid,
Do you think it was easy for people in America when we had to fight for our freedom and democracy against the British. I think if you study history some you will see that change does not come easy in any Country. Ultimatly it will be the people of Iraq that decide to either become enslaved to another dictator/religion or to stand and fight for democracy and open Government. Of coarse nothing is clear cut in this world. The bad always precedes the good. I hope the best for you and your people but know that it is your people who will decide your future not us.
Salam Khalid,
Hamdillah 3al salama ehbayeb wu inshaAllah Allah yefookna min hal awbash ib asra3 wakit! Ma elna 3*eer el du3a2 elak wu el ahaleena bil Iraq... Allah yee7futkum wu yeesaburkum inshaAllah...
And to anyone who complains they cannot understand what I've put here, one word: TOUGH! Learn some internet Arabic!
Abu Yusef: Shut the FUNK up!
Khaled, I happy that you are back home. God bless you for never being intimidated and for speaking the truth no matter what.
Majid-Ein il-Hilwah
not everyone who supports this war is a Dubya supporter. war sux all around, but it is sometimes necessary.
you know what i find disgusting is that a guy in Iraq vents his frustrations against the USA, as if we are the sole cause of his misery. weren't you miserable under Saddam? maybe not as miserable as now, but how is that our fault? we brought a war, but that war was coming one way or another. we planned to rebuild your country, but circumstances are not working in our favor, or your's. we have tons of contractors ready to repair your country but they won't go into an unstable environment. so we get the blame for blowing up stuff in the first place, right? i dont think you can blame us for bringing war that your leader brought on your country.
you know who is really brave? that judge who found you innocent. you see, he has a set of balls. there is probably some risk to his life, being a government official, and yet he was there doing his duty to see that you were not unjustly incarcerated. he is a true patriot of your nation, and you owe him a lot. maybe you could learn something from him? stop complaining, and start doing something to make your situation better. stand up to the forces who make things miserable and make a difference. we just want to see you take things into your own hands and be free. whining on the internet is not helping much, now is it? be a patriot and risk your own safety to make a better tomorrow.
I see an anonymous poster's only response to my remarks was an attempt to silence...
how daft.
No one tells me to shut up...
Abu Yusef:
I shall not tell you to SHUT DA FUNK UP again and will try to reason with your highness! Come on, lets talk about the so called "Liberation"... What do Baghdadis enjoy in temperatures of 45+ Centigrades... HHhhmmm lets see... No security, no electricity (Oh, sorry, am being naive on this one: one hour of electricity during every 12 hour interval), no water, overflowing sewage!!! Need I go on?
But no, Iraqis are meant to be thankful for the instillation of "democratic institutions" and "freedom", more like a jungle or as the American jargon goes: the wild wild west... You talk about this blog, Raed's, their mothers' and RiverBend pumping out anti American sentiment or whatever, but seeing you are on the ground, do you not find that life has actually become more miserable ever since you guys turned up?! Mind you that is a silly question because you weren't in Iraq when Saddam was around... Are they meant to nod in agreement to and say "Oh thank you American for making our lives a misery"?! The thing is, if you got out of your airconditioned Portacabin and actually lived like an Iraqi does for say seven days... Nah actually, that is too much for you to bare, try three... AM sure you'd be writing worse things than them... So lets put everything into persepctive ahey Mr Abu Yusef before spouting rubbish! As much as we would love to beleive that the sun shines out of your backsides, but unfortunately it doesn't!
if you are unhappy about the heat, don't you think enlisting in the Iraqi forces would be a good idea? someone has to safeguard the power plants from attacks, you know? if sewage is in the streets, why dont you become an engineer and learn how to fix it? that would require some effort and responsibility though- obviously much harder than whining on a blog. see, that is the difference between Americans and Iraqis. if our country was blown apart, we would fix it or die trying. we would not tolerate insurgent attacks on our facilities without shooting back at them. you guys seem content to whine and complain, as if that is going to make life any better for you. do you expect the French or Germans to come rushing in and build you some power plants, for all their feigned outrage at our actions? lol, they dont have the balls to help you. we do, but our people get beheaded or abducted. our contractors have died trying to get your power working properly. there are attacks against your infrastructure by insurgents everyday, and yet you blame us for these problems. our soldiers die for your country everyday, and what thanks do they get for their deaths? nothing. you are a bunch of ingrates who are too weak to even attempt to do anything but whine. when will you wake up and see that your country will never get back to normal until the best of your citizens are as willing to die as our's are?
Here is some neutral questions I have been dying to ask an Iraqi who is not part of Deerborn.
1) Do you perfer living in the new or old Iraq? (Freedom vs Security)
2) You don't like the American troopers, but do you like the fact Saddam is gone?
3) If you could go back in time, would you want the US to invade Iraq?
Very enlightening blog. Thanks so much for sharing your story. I just find it so funny to read comments blaming Bush and the US for the situation in Iraq when the post clearly states that this kind of treatment and interrogation is classic "Saddam-Iraq"
-----
"Please people; don’t be surprised because of all these questions. It used to be very common in “Saddam’s Iraq” and it’s very common in today’s Iraq."
-----
Kalid, like many others represented here, I have followed Salaam Pax, Riverbend and your blogs since the war began. I have no doubt about the truthfulness of what you say…mainly because over a long time people reveal their characters through their writing. It would have to be an awfully well thought out conspiracy were you all to be lying. I was first aware of your detention through Riverbend’s blog…and I am relieved that you are OK and admire you for your courage in putting your story on the line.
I was against this war from the beginning. I sensed that it was opportunist and like many others could see that while Saddam was a monster, a pre-emptive war on no visible grounds would be a terrible precedent and open a Pandora’s box of competitive ‘religious’ aspirations. Our ‘leaders’ have been idiots in doing it at all and in additionally in doing it so catastrophically badly. I am amazed that Blair remains in power (to say nothing of Bush …well, that’s religion for you…everyone thinks God is on their side … and he did seem to help Bush!) and that people seem so complacent about what is happening. Not everyone is complacent; a lot of us have struggled to make our voices heard. People like you with the courage to risk speaking out at least makes it possible for people to find out the truth. Sorry, on behalf of a great many of the English, who seem under-represented here. Julia
Hey Khalid,
You would not happen to have the name of that Judge, would you? Maybe his e-mail would also be helpful.
And another question, why did you dish your brother?
I would hope that put into a similar circumstance my own brother would not disavow any knowledge of me, or completely distance himself, like you did. I would hope that my own brother would defend me against such slanderous accusations, as those made by the police and the court. Do you think that judge knew you were Raed brother when he found you innocent of having any connection to his blog?
"you go to a channel not knowing what will be there and without knowing the content"
How sad for Raed.
After reading the post I was really upset about some of the things that they made you go though, it wasn’t fair. And as a Muslim I was really hurt about hearing what the Arabic society was going. It wasn’t rite that they kept assuming that you were a suspect of the London bombing, and if they didn’t understand English or the internet then they should have gotten someone that did understand it. There is a saying that they use in America “innocent until proven guilty”. The world has been turned upside down because of war.
Khalid, I can almost feel the pressure and situation you were under. I feel that you had your rights to deny the accusations of having contacts with terrorists. They had no right to keep interrogating or hurting you as a result of what you did not do. I am so mad that they had no other evidence other than that of the websites you browsed to accuse you of such a big crime! I also don’t understand why the old man from Saddam, the security guard couldn’t sympathize with you. You are both from the same culture and he should have some trust in you, and if he didn’t, he didn’t have to have such a hateful expression.
@Madtom who is pressing on and is asking Raed to recognize his internet-devil brother before the judge. It seems to me that either you are insane, or you are a Christian American who is associating with Peter's "betrayal" of Jesus and putting this crap into Raed's lap.
Man, man, man..... go go go go get the stick please, and stay in Arkansas.
Khalid:
I glad to hear that you have been released. Your story does seem to illustrate that the Iraqi judicial system is working to some extent since the Judge recognized your innocence and released you.
Obviously, the torture and abuse of prisoners that you recounted is immoral and not defensible on any level. However, your account lacks credibility on at least one score, that is, you assert that the Iraqi police arrested roughly 35 relatively high priority suspects and not a single one of them had any links to the insurgency. It is frankly very hard to believe that by casting such a wide net the authorities, at the very least, didn't luck into the arrest of at least one insurgent among the 35 young male, Baghdadi Sunnis you reported were detained with you. If your report is accurate, that none of these apprently randomly selected Sunni young men had any links to the insurgency, then it can't be very wide spread or have nearly the popular support that I have seen you intimate in your other posts.
Mark-In-Chi-Town
Mr. Anonymous.
Your rant is off topic and is deflecting. The fact is that there are a lot of people in Iraq with a lot of different opinions. Raed and Riverbend and them only represent one group...
Most Iraqis didn't have air conditioning before Saddam and don't now either... So the question is pointless...
Further there are differing opinions as to whether life was worse under Saddam or now. It depends on who you ask and where they are from. To assume that only one group of connected Bloggers with one set of opinions are representative of the whole of a nation containing 26 million or so people is in my mind ridiculous. They express their personal stories. I find value in that. Thus I read. Your points about living like common Iraqis falls on deaf ears. Riverbend and Faiza's families are by no means "common" it seems quite clear that they have money...
I guess the "common" Iraqi is fluent in English to a degree that embarasses even many native English speakers. There is nothing wrong with being educated, having money or speaking English... But do not try to tell me their story is of the "common" Iraqi.
They seem like decent people, and as I said their story has value... but they do not represent the "common" Iraq... nor do I believe they claim to. Some of their readers seem to think so but that is certainly not their fault.
You can make attempts,
Mr. anonymous to shut me up... or to rant about politics... and about things that are of no concern to me because I have no control over them...
You can attempt to discredit my story...
But it will get you no where.
I know that I am just another person seeing things from another slant. One of millions... But it is foolish to take a small agreeing party out of those millions and assign them the status of infallible prophets and discount anyone who does not fit into your narrow minded view of reality.
I talk about what happens to me and my situation... and what I am told by others in their situation. I am not a weak minded fool whose opinions are changed by the glamourous or rustic nature of my situation as you claim.
I accuse no one here of being a lier. I recognize what I am sure they recognize. That they are mouth pieces for what they have learned and what they see hear and believe just as I am. Their opinions have merit in my quest to figure out the truth, as witnesses to situations.
Yours do not.
If they need your help defending themselves I am sure they will ask for it.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
Despite what all has been said here and otherwise, I think that most people involved in this have a genuine interest in a peaceful, vibrant, future for Iraq and other unstable countries in the Middle East. It seems we all have a passion for what we prefer and believe, whether it comes from the internet or first person accounts.
If this story is true, then I have compassion for Kahlid. However, I can not apologize for my countries actions. There will always be the ones who will abuse any power given. However, with the latest methods of terrorism, we are all afraid. I cannot imagine life in Iraq as an America or Iraqi soldier, a policeman, or even a mother. The only certain is that nothing is truly safe.
It's true I live in America in my house on partial credit, and I want to have a good life, but the picture is not so simple as implied. Our country like most is not without its issues. Considering the mosaic of differing cultures and values we have here it is amazing we have not all killed each other yet.
The future may look bleak today but there are some certainties. Most Americans in Iraq would rather come home, and most Iraqis would rather us go home. I personally wish we could pull out and focus on many of our own issues in the States (there are many). It is only a matter of time before all this becomes reality.
I wish you well on your journey. May you have many blessings. It is my hope for you that you can also see that there are many who work to help repair some of the current weaknesses, including infrastructure changes, water, sewage, and economic hope for the future of Iraq.
KM - Dallas, Texas, USA
To Abu Yusef:
My "rant" maybe off topic, however this entire situation is happening because of your presence, pure & simple. You'll tell me "this happened underneath Saddam"... True, but if you stayed out of politics you'd live a normal life!
I think the blogs of Riverbend, Raed & Co. portray the situation that is prevalent on the ground... Again, regardless of social class, people dislike your presence there! True one gets a varrying array of opinions when asked which is better pre invasion or post invasion, however, dare I ask if you're asking the normal person on the street or are you asking the Iraqi contractor inside your camp, who will obviously say things are better now as they're making money, which there is nothing wrong with, but their opinions won't be representative... I speak to Iraqis who rue the days you boys marched in and are reminscent of the days of Saddam! Do you not find that to be funny? And I can tell you now, these are both Shiites & Sunnis! At least the bloggers are giving you the sample of opinions of lets say over 50% of the population. Why is it that the majority of Iraqis want to see the back of your troops?!
You are gravely mistaking when you say "but they do not represent the "common" Iraq". What do you need to be a blogger? Electricity, knowledge of English and a computer! Ok the purchasing power differs here and there, but don't make it out to be some kind of luxury item only accessible to the rich and wealthy! There are internet cafes!
To get a gist of what I am trying to say to you, try wearing a dish-dasha and hopefully speak Arabic and go to the streets and ask for yourself and see who is in the "narrow minded view of reality"! I know that is fanciful thinking, because it will never happen.. Maybe one day you guys can come back when Iraq is peaceful and experience a different side of IRaq and to ask these sort of questions... However, take it from me, their opinions are representative of a LARGE segment of the population! You think of it this way... Before the invasion everyone wanted you guys to go in, take the dictator out and build the country... 2 1/2 years later, when the simplest of things haven't been achieved i.e. electricity and water, off course people are not going to be satisfied and will be talking in the fashion Raed, RiverBend & Co. talk...
I know for a fact that you need about 5 BIG mama generators to restore electricity in Baghdad; I've spoken to people & I work in this field so I know what I am talking about... However, with all the might and power of the US (to be fair the rampant corruption and neopitism of the puppets the US has instilled has taken its toll on this issue as well), even this simple task seems distant (it is not about Iraqis whinning as the other guy accused me of)... To me the bare minimum seems to be getting for the people while there is lots of building in the Camps etc. and ensuring that the oil is steadily flowing, but the people, well they can go to hell!! I find that tragic!
Anyway perhaps you might want to tell me how I am to view things from your view point! Regardless of the things that you have no control over i.e. infra structure work etc. how has your prescence alleviated the suffering of the Iraqi people? I am ignorant and am barking up the wrong tree, but please do me a favour and inform me of how I should see things. Perhaps I am wrong!
Lastly: "If they need your help defending themselves I am sure they will ask for it." It is not about that Mr.!!! You are on the ground and yet you seem to be living in your own cosy world and disregard the Iraqi peoples' suffering! People like you and the other guy who told me to go and become an engineer to fix the sewers really do make me wonder! You don't seem to be that ignorant! However the other guy, man is he ignorant or what? Or is he not aware of the rampant corruption that is taking place in the so called "Rebuilding"!!! More like "Looting"!!! Anyway, I think I've said enough Mr. Abu Yusef and we will probably never agree! I wish you a pleasant stay and I sincerely do hope that you do find the truth!
Salam from me...
I read of your arrest/abduction on Riverbend's blog first two weeks ago, and I am very relieved to read you survived it and seem to have all your nails and bones in one piece.
What you said about that jail bothers but does not surprise me, sadly. It's just what I'd expect - behold the new American-style Democracy: Freedom is Slavery.
anonymous,
Thank you for taking me a bit more seriously now.
When I say there are a lot of opinions... I am not just talking about contractors... But IRaqi Army, Police and even some of the common people, a few of who have even been wrongly injured by US forces etc.
Has suffering gotten worse in Iraq?
Like I said it depends who you ask... I have talked to a lot of people who have very differing opinions... some like Faiza... some the opposite... I have no access at all to militant haters of America and occupation... so I don't know what they think...
But I have heard opinions that range from Raeds... to Omar's and in person.
Personally I hope we can get out of here in the next two years... I don't know if that will equal success or not... Maybe it won't be anything close to success... but wouldn't you want that which you are taking part in to eventually lead to success? I know I do.
No matter how much protest occurs... everyone needs to be realistic regardless of their politics. We will not be leaving Iraq in the next year no matter what happens. That is reality. We are probably not leaving completely in the next two years no matter what happens. If you don't like that, if Faiza, and Khalid don't like that that is fine...
But they do need to admit that that is the reality... regardless of what they think of occupation... or how well it is going... or how poorly... does that mean they should be quiet? Of course not. They should continue expressing their opinions. They do not need to be realistic... they are activists. I am not an activist, I am a soldier I therefore have to be realistic. We are here right now. We are not leaving right now. We will never leave all at once... any pullout we do will be gradual.
That is reality.
As for Faiza and Riverbend...
LEt us remember that according to the Zogby poll 18% of Sunni Arabs don't want a time table or an instant pullout... and 31% of Shia and 51% of Kurds (at least this was true in January) are not for either a time table or an instant pullout. Rather these want the US to stay until security returns.
thus a sizable portion of the Iraqi population want security restored before a pull out.
(about a third of the Iraqi populous)
I am quite certain that Faiza and Riverbend and khalid do not represent the opinions of this very large minority.
I wish I knew what his data said for percentage wanting a timetable... vs instantaneous pullout. I imagine you would find that a third also want an instant US pullout and another third a time table. If you have other info... please tell me.
these also do not agree entirely with Faiza, and riverbend... and are actually closer to my own opinion... I also want a timetable... So in that respect... Most Iraqis are very close to my own point of view on that...
As for contractors...
I met a Christian Contractor from Mosul who told me life was better under Saddam, because they were not targeted and persecuted but now are... That being said I didn't ask him if he favored a withdrawl or not... I am no pollster...
What I mean to show is that contractors have varying opinions as well...
I imagine the strongest advocates of a pullout are from baghdad, and as we have seen from the resistance the golden triangle.
Indeed Baghdad has suffered the most.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
Yusef-
Maybe freaking you and Zogby polls should be running Iraq? Find me "a majority" of bloggers who support a US occupational presence. You suggested that and it is a lie. Iraqi's will accept policing efforts from wherever it is offered, but never occuption.
You insensitive hypocrite. The idea that anyone so myopic, self-justifying, arrogant, ignorant of history and an obedient tool of long standing murderous US policy is in the US forces, means the US and Iraqi's both have much to fear from the threat of our incompetence.
You dare to call on logical analysis after taking part in this FARCE? You now have no credibility. US forces now have no credibility, and their only prior reference is freaking Vietnam- something you should read more about.
I don't know what you think you are fighting for, but events in the old USA may surprise you in the next ten years, and maybe not for the better.
I was about to ask the same thing...can Abu Yusef supply the blog-sites of all these Iraqis he claims are happy about the situation. I would be truly interested. Julia
Thank you for posting this story. My heart breaks for those innocent still being held.
I wouldn't have credibility to you anonymous... unless I agreed with you on every single thing. The Zogby poll is readily accepted in both the Arab world, Europe and Liberal America. Further it is quoted by numerous anti occupation sites... so don't get lippy with me about the Zogby poll. My experience in Iraq has validated for me the Zogby poll. Sorry...
The fact is that Faiza and her family and riverbend represent the 1/3 or more that want occupation over now... right now, today.
I have been polite to you... I am sorry you keep slipping.
As for Blogs on Iraq that go the other way? There are mutiple...
Omar for one...
He links to others...
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/
But I do not think he is right either...
All I am trying to say that Iraq is a place where many different people have many different opinions... and ideas... and wants and desires... It is not a solid mass of photocopies...
There is a lot of difference of opinion about everything from occupation... to socialism... to religion and its role in society...
Any one who says this isn't true... has no credibility. Not the one saying that it is.
I do not live in an imaginary world where I believe everyone thinks in group think...
The Jarrars and riverbend represent and explain the position of a sizable population of IRaq... but they are not the only opinions... So why pretend they are... why ignore and try to discredit opinions of the other Iraqis that have been proven to exist in mass along side their view? I am sure if you asked them they would not deny that there are many views in Iraq... but that they believe based on their knowledge and experience that theirs is the correct one.
Salaam
Abu Yusef
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
I am so glad that you are out of there and safe. The stories you tell made me cry and wish there were something I could do to help...I feel so impotent and helpless.
I'm very pleased that you are out though.
Look I don't want to argue anymore...
Lets all just be glad that we got a source of info with a winning personality back... and that he was unscathed... generally speaking...
Like I suggested...
Stay in Amman...
Much safer... wish I was their sipping tea in a dishdasher chatting with the locals myself honestly...
salaam
Abu Yusef
Hi Khalid -
I just wanted to let you know that I'm happy you were released. Thank you for taking the time to write this up and share it with everyone. I will make sure to pass it around and get as much attention possible to it.
I also want you to know that the Americans using your blog to defend the actions of our nation do not speak for the majority. The ranks of those who support the war in Iraq are rapidly diminishing with each day, and fewer than half of the country supports our President. It's not just the polls. You hear it when you walk around and talk to people. All but the most knee-jerk ignorant fools with their heads in the sand think we are perpetuating an atrocity on your people and that our president is a war criminal.
So despite what the media, the US military and these cold-hearted boneheads posting on your blog say, most of the US is not in favor of what we are doing to you, your country and your people.
Best of luck to you in the future. We are fighting for you over on this side of the world.
"the blog-sites of all these Iraqis he claims are happy about the situation"
"happy about the situation" is a very subjective criteria, but try these on for size.
A free writer
Free Iraqi
Free Iraq
Hammorabi
Healing Iraq
Ibn Alrafidain
Iraq & Iraqi's
Iraq at a Glance
Iraq the Model
Iraq Today
Kurdistan Bloggers Union
Kurdo's World
Iraqi in America
Medya Daily Iranian Kurd -still counts
Nabil's blog
Neurotic Iraqi Wife A personal favorite, it's like I've known her all my life.
No Pain No Gain
peshmerga Women
Road of a Nation currently closed. Truly a casualty of the war!
The Mesopotamian
Nadz online
Dear Baghdad
This is not the whole list. I apologize for all the ones I left off, but I got tired of typing. If people out there can't find you, you did not want them around anyway.
this is some serious shit
you inspired me
Woah... I dont think i have ever felt this sick in my life... I knew there was lots of injustice in this Earth here, but hearing this story in such detail... cant really trust the media anymore!
thankyou...
Now all i need is a credit card to support thy amnesty
Khalid,
Suck it up! You lived. You are in a war zone, and you can't expect the Iraqi police to comport themselves with the fairness and proffesionalism of the American soldiers: afterall, these are people who were raised in an environment of squalid and brutal corruption just like yourself.
These things will improve in time. In the mean time, make some freaking effort not to look so suspicious. You mentioned your long beard, than you seek to emulate the "prophet". Well, that's just what the murdering terrorists think too. Shave it. Why would you want to look like that man anyways? A murderer and thief, a widely known child molestor and bigot...
Step out of the sixth century dude. (Ya that's sixth century A.D. - Anno Domini)
One thing comes to mind as I read your blog and those of your family: people are basically the same all over. There are smart, ethical people in all cultures, and crooks and villains as well. I read Iraqi blogs to get a sense of what really goes on, at least in some limited perspective from Iraq. I write to give you the impression that there are educated, peace-loving people in the US who wish for more power against our own corrupt government.
I have this question, though: Would it be better if the US withdrew? wouldn't that leave mayhem and lawlessness? How could Iraq succeed in having a new government? what, in your opinion, would be the right course of action?
Also, do you think this insurgency is all about Palestine?
Glad you are safe... thanks for writing... and best wishes to you.
-Euphoria
Seattle, WA, USA
I find it completely hilarious that so many post as anonymous on here. You DEFINITELY need to filter out the anonymous posters. When I heard Khalid was in trouble due to comments on Raed's blog, I knew immediately it was because of the 3 or 4 obssessed Bush-bots that we've all known for a long time are not dealing with a full deck. TURN OFF the anonymous posts and you and your family will be much safer.
Here is an article from the Guardian about more of the atrocities committed in Iraqi prisons today, including the seventh floor of the Ministry of Interior where you were held:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1520253,00.html
Thank God you were able to prove your innocence and were released from there before anything more terrible happened to you. Many others were not so lucky and until changes are made, there will be many more casualties. I have read the information posted on your brother, Raed's website about some of the places we can write to. I have not yet done any writing but I will start doing something this weekend. The more people of the world who participate, the better the chances that together we can make a difference. I hope to see more in the comments section about what others are doing to help in your campaign and if anyone has any other suggestions about how to go about it or other links to places we could write to, please let us know.
All the best to you and your family and all the good people of Iraq.
Khalid,
Do you think I'm a "Bush-bots"?
I apologies to anyone if I have given them that impression.
I said, with my eyes covered: please write my answer “I deny that completely, I was practicing my democratic right of viewing people’s opinion about a certain topic on a site that people visit from all the countries around the world to give their opinions”
Khalid,
While you were praying in jail, I certainly hope you THANKED GOD FOR THE U.S.A!!
Can you imagine the smirks if you had made the above defense during the Saddam era? (A defense which apparently freed you, by the way)
But that would be absurd since you would not be able to read a blog in Iraq prior to Iraq's "humiliating" liberation from it's Stalinist dictator, let alone HAVE one.
I'm glad my country could help you out there. No need to thank us.
:)
K,
I have come to know you through Raed, Riverbend and the likes...Im glad you made your way home. I was glued to the screen reading what transpired to you and wanted you to know that I commend you for your courage and thank you for your candid recount of the events. We do not get the news of what is happening on the ground through conventional media and I wish we did so that the world can see the 'shock and awe' of what is happening to the everyday citizen.
I pray that things change for the better for all Iraqis everywhere.
sad days .. i feel for you soldier and the trials your people are induring may god bless you and keep you safe thru it all ... it is a horrible thing to have you exicetence so tried from "saddam" who we were told was madman to the "bush regime" wich we know is full madmen ... they send our sons and daughters over to your country to fight and die in a war without borders and no real defined cause or purpose over things no one understands .. i could not tell you why we are at war over there .. SURE OIL AND CONTROL OF THE OIL TRADE ... really makes little since because they used the whole 9/11 and WMD b.s. thing as a springboard for the invasion of iraqq but really what kinda threat could saddam have posed to us ... the guy was hiding in a whole in the ground .. he did not even have the resources to get his butt outta baghddad ... and you bet if someone did to america what we are doing over there in iraq .. YES PEOPLE WOULD BE SHOOTING AT THEM , YES PEOPLE WOULD WANT THEM OUT , YES PEOPLE WOULD BE VERY UPSET AND DON'T THINK THERE WOULDN'T BE OUR OWN GROUP OF AMERICAN INSURGENTS ------> peace and many blessing to you .. my prayers go out to you and yours may we all make it thru these dark days .
Here's something of which everyone should become aware:
The "official" 9/11 story is the biggest lie ever perpetuated and patently will not stand up to scrutiny.
Consider:
1.If the "official" story was true then when Bush was given the news of the second plane crash, he of course knew it was no accident at that point and would have HAD TO ASSUME he was a possible target as well. His Secret Service staff would have IMMEDIATELY hustled him out of the elementary school where his presence was well-publicized, to a much safer location. But they didn't. Instead, he sat there for several minutes being read to by schoolkids before milling about talking to teachers, THEN he carried out the pre-scheduled press conference on the "No Child Left Behind" act, not leaving the school until about an HOUR after Andy Card whispered the news in his ear. It is not possible for this to mean anything except that Bush KNEW he WAS NOT a target on 9/11. The ONLY way this would be possible would be if Bush knew the plans for the 9/11 attacks, meaning IT WAS AN INSIDE JOB. This is really all the proof necessary, but there is fortunately quite a mountain of other evidence all pointing to the same inescapable conclusion.
2.Take for example the matter of the "hijacked airliners" after turning completely around had OVER AN HOUR to make it to their targets, all with NO INTERFERENCE at all from the world's most expensive air force in the country's most well-watched airspace (the northeast sector), with one even hitting America's military headquarters the Pentagon!
The one that hit the South Tower of the World Trade Centre even had enough time to fly PAST his target all the way to Newark (New Jersey) and turn around, fly back to New York and hit the South Tower!
3.Or that the Pentagon fired NO surface-to-air missiles in its own defence.
4.Or that the part of the Pentagon hit was under renovation at the time, having few military personnel present, mostly civilian construction workers.
5.Or that the renovations just prior to 9/11 included strengthening it so a large fire i nthat wing of the building wouldn't easily spread elsewhere in it.
6.Or that the F.B.I. within five minutes of the Pentagon crash seized two nearby civilian security cameras' tapes such as one in a filling station across the street from the part of the Pentagon hit.
7.Or that the "airliner" that hit the Pentagon didn't leave an airliner's wings, tail section, luggage, body parts, etc. on the lawn.
8.Really, all one has to do to see 9/11 was an inside job is to simply watch the video footage of the World Trade Centre's towers "collapsing". This can be found, among other places, at http://wtc.macroshaft.org/mov/ and also at http://www.plaguepuppy.net/public_html/collapse%20update/#videos
Watch the footage and it becomes fairly obvious it was a controlled demolition for both Twin Towers and the smaller WTC # 7 building. A good one for that is http://www.wtc7.net/
Watch any of these and one cannot help but notice that they come down in about ten seconds each, the rate an object falls unopposed through air, impossible according to the laws of physics UNLESS all forty-seven core support columns had been disintegrated (by explosives). You can even see the flashes of the cutting charges just below the smoke and "squibs" or dust plumes jetting out of windows from the charges going off.
In a clip of footage close to the towers, the camera (on a tripod) visibly shakes from the massive explosives going off in the sub-basement levels, then seconds later the charges on a floor level with the bottom of the smoke are detonated and the North Tower goes down like a stick of butter melting in ten seconds. This can be nothing but a controlled demolition.
9.Remember the large pools of molten steel under the Trade Centre rubble, the so-called "hot spots" that were still hot weeks after 9/11? That is consistent with massive use of thermite explosives.
10.No Middle Eastern names were on ANY of the four flight manifests
11.At least seven "hijackers" turned up alive and well days after 9/11. Some were mentioned on I think 23 September 2001 in the "Daily Telegraph" and BBC.
12.Remember the passport of one of the "hijackers" that was "found" [read: planted] near the rubble of the Trade Centre? The passport we were told to believe had miraculously survived the "intense fire" that we were told incinerated all the passengers, the plane and the fight recorder "black boxes" (How could his name not be on any of the flight manifests if his passport was "found" near the rubble? This here is all the proof one needs that the "official" story is garbage).
13.What about the record amounts of "put" orders (betting a stock will lose value) purchased on American Airlines, United Airlines and Merrill Lynch (located in the Trade Centre) stock, all in the week before 9/11? Why won't the Securities & Exchanges Commission do anything about this obvious example of foreknowledge?
14.What about the obvious foreknowledge of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and several others who were warned the day before to avoid the airlines and World Trade Centre?
15.Real airliners will most certainly NOT be able to pull the high-G force turns necessary to crash into the Pentagon and World Trade Centre as per the "official" fable.
16.The "suicide pilots" were, by all accounts, not proficient at even flying Piper Cubs or Cessnas. In fact they were terrible. There's no way they could have flown those "airliners" like fighter pilots even IF it were possible for airliners to make those kind of manoeuvres, which it is not.
17.All the rubble from the World Trade Centre was quickly collected and shipped off to China and India to be melted down. Isn't this destruction of evidence?? Wouldn't they want to study it and analyze just how "fire" caused the massive skyscrapers to "collapse"?
18.After many New York city firemen who survived 9/11 began mentioning that they heard explosions right before the towers came down, a court-mandated gag order was placed on them to not talk about what they saw or heard on 9/11. Much of their tapes of their radio communications are also classified.
19.Federal Aviation Administration air trafic controllers are under a similar gag order to not speak of 9/11.
20.What are the odds that the C.I.A. and the air force would have scheduled for 11 September 2001 an "exercise" involving "hijacked airliners" false radar injects and an "airplane crashing into a building"? While the Federal Emergency Management Agency had an "exercise" scheduled for the day before and "just happened" to still be in Manhattan. Also "coincidental" is the presence in New York City on 11 September of Controlled Demolitions Incorporated, a company specializing in removing debris from, you guessed it, controlled demolitions (like the World Trade Centre). The odds of all this being a coincidence are about one in a googolplex.
21.Bush refused to talk to the 9/11 whitewash commission that "invistigated" the attacks in open session before Congress. Instead he "testifying" behind closed doors with Dick Cheney and his weasel attorney Alberto Gonzales present, with no tape recording and no notes taken. Sound like a man with nothing to hide?
Yes, the passengers really did die on 9/11 but not in the way the "official" story has it. When the real airliners took off from their airports, four unmanned drones took off and flew at a higher altitude but mirroring their flight paths. One drone was a Boeing 757 air force tanker and this one hit the South Tower (hence the giant Hollywood-style fireball). The other three were smaller drones, about the size of a large fighter or a small civil airliner. All four were painted in United Airlines' and American Airlines' livery. NORAD told the real airliners' pilots to turn off their transponders because of a nonexistent "terrorist attack" at some airports, and loiter over the Atlantic until they could figure out which airports are safe to land at. So they did. Meanwhile, as part of the air force exercises, fighters were patrolling over the Atlantic and were told the approaching aircraft (the real airliners) were drones simulating "hijacked airliners headed for targets" and to shoot them down. So they did as they were told, probably to this day (if they're still alive) thinking they were shooting down drones in target practive on 9/11. So the real airliners are in small pieces on the bottom of the Atlantic. The drones, instead of flying over the Atlantic, turned and headed for their targets, steered by an E-3A Sentry A.W.A.C.S. aircraft, a smaller drone hitting the North Tower first, then the tanker drone hitting the South Tower, then a smaller drone hitting the Pentagon. The fourth, probably intended for the White House or Capitol Building, was unneccessary as all three others had hit perfectly. So NORAD had a different fighter pilot, this one from North Dakota air national guard, shoot down the drone but certainly told him it was "a hijacked airliner" headed for the nation's capital and he had to save the day and prevent further loss of life. So if he's still alive he probably thinks he saved the White House or Capitol. This is how it happened, a false flag operation, an inside job by the C.I.A. and the highest levels of the military and executive branch. A hamfisted attempt to make everyone believe a malicious, racist lie.
If you cannot bring yourself to accept this, then you should look at these interesting websites:
http://www.wtc.macroshaft.org/mov/
http://plaguepuppy.net/public_html collapse%20update/#videos
http://www.wtc7.net/
http://www.serendipity.li/wtc.htm
http://www.members.surfeu.fi/11syys kuu/soldier5.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2004/121104easilywithstood.htm
http://www.rense.com/general66/pre1 1.htm
http://www.911weknow.com/
http://www.question911.com/
http://emperors- clothes.com/indict/indict-1.htm
http://emperors-clothes.com/news/airf.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/article s/june2005/270605insidejob.htm
http://www.pej.org/html/print.php? sid=2736
http://washingtontimes.com/upi- breaking/20050613-102755-6408r.htm
http://www.public- action.com/911/robotplane.htm
http://911review.com/means/remoteco ntrol.html
http://www.sysplan.com/Radar/CTS
http://thewebfairy.com/killtown/pen talawn.html
http://www.pentagonlawn.net/home.ht m
http://www.americanfreepress .net/12_24_02/America_Pearl_Harbored/america_pearl_harbored.html
http://www.shout.net/~bigred/PHarbo r
http://ww.antiwar.com/orig/weiner6. html
http://whatreallyhappened.com/wtc7. html
http://whatreallyhappened.com/therm ite.htm
Raed, I strongly suggest you sue Jeffrey and MadTom for damages and libel. Not only for their slanderous hateful websites, but for the severe comments they've left on your blogs...They are both the antithesis of pyschotic Americans in the vein of Bill O Really, Sean Vannity, and Ann The Man COulter.
Oh dear, dear nascarblue. You need to "edumacate" yourself. "Severe comments" are not lawsuit-worthy. (Neither are hurt feelings, nor "mean words from people who disagree with me", in case you were wondering).
I think you also need to consult a dictionary and see if "antithesis" is what you really wanted to say. :-)
Wow, you went before a judge, explained your case, he consulted the evidence and made the correct, legal decision in your favor, throwing out the case and upholding your democratic rights to free speech and thought. Sounds like a victory for a democratic, responsive, accountable legal system.
As cmar said, what would have happened to you if you had been caught on an anti-Saddam blog (not that you would have been) and hauled before his mukhabarat prior to 2003? Hmmmm??
Iraq has come a long way.
You're welcome. :-)
I am thrilled that you came out in one piece! I was sending my own prayers in my own form of praying, hoping that it would somehow help you.
As an American opponent to the Iraq war since before it started, I can say that millions of us oppose it and want it to stop. We want it ALL to stop though, so how do we untrain the people we trained in torture under Saddam - or those who learned torture techniques that were used on them by Saddam's regime?
The USA has systematically been torturing inside and out of the US, and training other countries to do it too for a long time - decades at the very least. Some are the unoffical abuse of our citizens by police forces across the country, some are official things that we try to keep quiet - Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo spring to mind. George W has failed to speak out against torture and appears to consider it valid interrogation - he and his administration have tried to refine the definition of torture so that we could keep using it.
Iraq may have come a long way in some respects, but I think that chaos does quite a bit to cover up "illegal" actions. Khalid's only crime appears to have been that he looked at the internet from an internet cafe. Oh, and having a beard and saying he is a Muslim. What a strange thing to be in a Muslim nation! And someone here in the comments dares to say that everyone has access to the internet due to internet cafes? Yes, as long as they only view offical propaganda.
Even the US soldiers have many anti-war sites blacked out for them, it's not like we have no censorship.
And of COURSE people are commenting anonymously. Who wants the US Army, the CIA, and the current puppet Iraqi government knowing their name? People have opinions, but most of them aren't stupid.
Well, when we have destabilized the place enough, Iran will come in and then the "fun" will really start. Has anyone read "Reading Lolita in Tehran"?
I'll be off to donate to Amnesty International now...
Phyllis
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
"By the way, don't believe everything you hear in jail, ok?"
I agree, although I believe there are probably some in the jails that do not deserve to be there, the vast majority of them are habitual liars, what would you expect them to say "Yeah, I did it! I exploded the bomb that killed 30 civilians!" Just look the captured London bomber in Italy, he is now saying "I just wanted to scare people, not hurt them" yet his back pack was filled with nails. What do you think would have happened to you under Sadam's rule? Do you think you would have been freed or taken out back and shot like the 100,000's of others? Admittedly the system in place now is not perfect but you can't expect it to be perfect at first, it takes time and with some luck it will get there soon and I hope it does for all our sake.
I also wanted to make note of a previous post above this one in regards to 911. I worked at the Pentagon and live in the Washington area for many years and I can tell you that the post is full of errors and is just a bunch of garbage, no truth to it at all but there are some people that will believe anything…. Yes, Elvis is dead too.
"No madtom is not that bad."
Why, thank you. Nicest thing said about me on this blog.
Hmmm...anonymous said "I worked at the Pentagon and lived in Washington for many years and I can tell you that post about 9/11 is full of errors" (like what? care to point them out? exactly what part of the damning evidence against the Bush regime for the 9/11 inside job do you take exception with?) saying it's "just a bunch of garbage and no truth at all"... Can you elaborate? Mr. Pentagon worker, I suppose you should be able to tell me that the magic "airliner" that hit the Pentagon hit the part under renovation, the farthest part from Rumsfeld and the top brass? Do you dispute this indisputible fact?? Do you dispute that the Pentagon fired no SAMs in its own defence or are you claiming that it did?? If you admit it didn't then WHY didn't it? Why wouldn't the imaginary "suicide hijackers" aim for the part with the Secretary of "Defense" and the top military brass?? Are you disputing the fact that the F.B.I. seized at least two civilian security cameras' tapes within five minutes because they were pointed so as to inadvertantly record the "airliner" crashing?? Where is all the footage from the AT LEAST FOUR cameras on that part of the Pentagon itself?? Are you disputing that the wing of the Pentagon that was hit had just before 9/11 had its side walls reinforced so a large fire couldn't easily spread from that wing into the rest? Have you seen the numerous photos that show the tiny 16' wide hole in the Pentagon (the original hole, not the one made a half hour later by explosives)? Have you noticed that no real airliner could disappear into that hole or will your brainwashing (or brainlessness?) not allow you to realize this?? How do you explain the Pentagon's lawn having exactly NO gouges in it from an "airliner" crashing on it? Not even an engine scraped the ground?? What about its wings?? Where are those?? Where is its fuselage and where is its tail section?? Certainly not on the Pentagon's lawn, so where are they genious?? Come on, you retard, you talk about people that will believe anything, look in the mirror Einstein. You believe the steady morphine drip of the "official" propaganda your murderous government is daily feeding you. You believe it because you WANT TO believe it. Thank you for being a sterling example of abject moral cowardice. Can you respond to my questions or is the best you can do to call something "error"-ridden and "garbage" because "you worked at the Pentagon" at some point, making you, what, an expert on 9/11 or something? How about either 1.trying to intelligently answer the multitude of points made here and in the above post about 9/11 or 2.shutting the fuck up because you have shit for brains and nothing to add to the conversation? If you believe the "official" story about 9/11 you would seem to be an excellent potential buyer for my fancy bridge I have up for sale, cash up front, no paperwork needed.
You poor bugger...thank you for sharing that ordeal with us...I hope that you can keep away from the evil men who would harm you for no reason.
This is a crazy world, and Iraq is the centre of a giant US-inspired shitstorm that attracts Evil like flies to dung.
Go in Light, Brother.
The Evil you refer to is the evil at the centre of it, Bush and the madman neo-cons of the P.N.A.C. who are Bush's advisors. Their 9/11 inside job was the mother of all false flag operations. Their Caspian Sea pipeline project (going from the Caspian across a couple former-Soviet central Asian countries, across Afghanistan to Pakistan and a port) has been several years in the planning. In June 2001 they made an offer to the Afghan government, the only fly in their ointment, saying "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we'll bury you under a carpet of bombs". The Afghans refused. So on 11 September of that year they pull off the 9/11 inside job to galvanize the country and give them an "excuse" to invade Afghanistan (and they tried to use it as an excuse to invade Iraq). Look up the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith-Perle P.N.A.C. and you'll see what I mean. They even badgered Clinton in 1998 to invade Iraq because of its massive oil wealth as the 2nd-largest oil producer. Remember all the bullshit fed to the public in the run-up to the Iraq invasion? The only thing Bush and company said that was true was that, yes, Iraq is sitting on a lake of oil.
I am so sorry to hear about that, however, don't tell me that all the people in the cell were innocent, and if they are then all what we hear about police activities are B.S.
sometimes this is the price we have to pay because we accepted injustice even during the old regeme.
I pray for a safe return of all the innocent, and I curse the guilty ones.
Khalid, I never post anonymously. In your case, however, I can't take the risk to to be ID'd.
I was horrified at your account. There's going to be a serious need for rebuilding your country on so many levels, when Bush gets tired of tramping it.
God bless you - protect yourself in the meantime.
B.
I don't know what to say except what you have written about being arrested and imprisoned was the most powerful writing I've seen on the internet.
I'm glad I live in a country where I don't have to live afraid of being arrested and tortured for blogging, surfing the web or being drunk in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was wrong right at the start when we invaded Iraq. Everybody knew it was wrong and would bring pain for no reason.
What Inks said.
Your account is truly chilling. You were busted by police units that are notorious for torturing and murdering suspects, for what, accessing your friend's websites?!? And being told that you can't tell the families of the people arrested where they are? That's so banal and sick.
I must admit I couldn't read all of it. And those twerpy Americans in the comments - "Gee, no need to thank us, Iraq's come a long way, burble burble" - ghaaa.
What can I say? My commiserations. Vaya con Dios. Hope you continue to survive. =:-\
8/12/2005 12:42:32,
You tell 'em, boy!
And don't forget the part about the Alien Mothership that beamed up all the people (and the jumbojet, too!) on the ghost flight that "supposedly" crashed into the Pentagon.
Nope, can't fool you guys. You're too damn edumacated.
:-)
assalamu alaik ya Khalid..I just found your blog.. I know just being sorry for what you've gone through and the rest of the others who went through worst! doesn't do much. The sad thing is the ones doing the shit work on you guys are muslim brothers themselves. Meat eating meat. Could I say "laknatullah" on them? Or pray that they don't get spared from the fitnah of Dajjal? Allahua'alam..
The best that we can do here (because we have so much inadequacies) is to be better Muslims so that hopefully God listens to our small duas that we make for our brothers in another side of the world. And may God remind us to always remember the rest of the ummah in our duas...:*(
thank god you are safe and home, i was so saddened to hear those stories. it is heartbreaking, orwellian. and here in america most people are more concerned with reality television and mtv, more concerned with brad pitts love life to know anything about the much starker and truly terrifying reality that you have just had to suffer through, and that so many others continue to suffer through. my heart goes out to you and yours.
Goddamn, what a thing to go through. Glad you made it out safely, Khalid.
What a strange world we live in. Seems things would be so much better if people had a bit more common sense, a bit more compassion, and a bit more love of truth.
-Akio
Hi guy!
thank you for your lovely comments:)
i deleted a bunch of spam comments and comments that aim to smear the reputaion of fine and truthful people with no evidences at all.
i wish you all a nice day.
:)
khalid*
ps: i cant deny that i love that delete-comment button!
Assalaamu alaykum ya Khalid,
Ya Allah, what you wrote disturbed me. I did make duaa for you when Riverbend announced what happened. I hope that you and your family stay safe and get justice. Subhan Allah that you are OK and spreading the word of the injustice.
Khalid,
I am very sad for what happened to you. And for that matter, I am very sad about the situation in Iraq today.
At the same time, I think many of your blog readers need to realize two things:
1) The people who did this are the agents of the government democratically elected by the people of Iraq.
2) That the people who were mistreating you are similar to, if not the same people, as the people who ran the Iraqi security services in before the US invasion. The difference being that this judge let you go, under Saddam you may have been kept for years or killed for a political crime. I don't think most Americans understand that.
3) If multiple bombs blew up and killed people in the US every day, would our justice system look more like the Iraqi one? I hope not, but I suspect it is human nature to tend that way.
A poster said "I truly hope the US leaves your country soon so that you and other good-hearted people from around the world can work to repair the damage."
Are Zarqawi and the foreign JIhadists the good-hearted people from around the world you are talking about?
"The judicial court of the Organization of al Qaeda in Iraq has ruled that it is a duty to uphold God's law and kill those who have declared themselves God's partners in drafting this constitution."
-- Abu Musab Zarqawi
I thank the Goddess that you are safe and well again. I have been reading your blog and several others coming out from Iraq since the war started and I was shocked when Riverbend told us what had happened. I have always been against injustice. What happened to you where wrong, the war is wrong and what Saddam did when he was in power was wrong. Piling more wrongs on top of this again will never make things right.
Bless you and please do not let the hardship kill your spirit as it shines strong through your sometimes rather cheeky posts :)
Khaled,
glad you're out and well and hopefully can put this behind you.
Keep hitting the delete button -- it's unbelievable how people even use this post comment to push their political agenda. Or desperate?
No one, least of all you, expected your country to change easily. To make a comparison, look at the former USSR and other eastern states; how much they still have to do but how far they have come away from totalitarianism. Progress is the only thing that matters, if it takes time that is bad but we don't speed it up by putting the blame in the wrong corner just because we feel we need to drive home our points at every occasion.
Just stick to the truth and work together. What I've seen of the comments here is immature, childish and irresponsible.
appreciate your blog and this space
ritzy
Hi,
Am happy that u r fine.. I will pray for u and ur country..
REgards,
An indian
I stand with you for freedom, justice, and peace for the people of the world. No one should have to endure what you went through. It is outrageous and disgusting! Stay free.
Thank you for sharing your experience. I hope things get better for all of Iraq.
God bless you.
now i understand why they regularly find groups of police men executed with single shots to the back of the head. were i there that would become my primary occupation.
K:
If only the true stories, the reality of life in Iraq would actually reach the eyes and ears of the American people... Unfortunately, even the media is bought here... And the money right now is in the pocket of the neo-cons who insist on maintaning and preserving the occupation.
It is only through efforts like your own, your brother, riverbend, and a handful of journalists with enough integrity to try to tell the truth, that the truth will indeed ever be known.
I can honestly say that right now most people will not want to hear it, because the lie is comfortable and convenient... But I believe that the tide is turning. I believe that every day, a handful of people open their ears and hearts a little more... and that soon, the truth will seep through and move the mass to act and bring true and positive change.
It is only with love and hope and trust and compassion that things will change.
I admire your courage. Keep your words coming...
Blessings!
Walk in Light always!
L.
Thanks for taking the time to tell us what happened to you.....with all the detail. It is really important that the world knows whats happening.
Best wishes to you and your family
Peter
That sucks! I couldn't imagine a worse place to be, glad you made it back home safe. That was the scariest story I've ever read.
What could be said, you said it all, even as a Blogger i don't have the nerves to tell stories like yours, you and Raed are brave men, Democracy by now you must agree is not totaly real Hate is in Our harts you can't change that but you can change it in the long term of education, or like what i'm planning, getting the hell out of this bloody country, its no use changes won't happen in uor lifetime niether our childrens.
I am an American and am grateful to read the blogs of Iraqi's to learn more about your people, your country, your conflicts and your culture. There is so much our people do not know about yours.
I am sorry to hear of your ordeal, and am relieved to hear you came out of it ok and that you have the courage to tell your story to the world through your blog.
I am also happy that the US liberated your country from Saddam so that the people of your country are able to open their mouths to the rest of the international community and speak your minds through the ability to have a blog... not to mention an internet connection.
question -do you suppose you would have been found innocent and set free, unharmed, had this happened in 2003? 2002?
Reading Iraqi voices throughout the web is sure a far cry from the time of Saddam's rule. Iraq has come a long way - - Khalid, what are your plans for the future to help your country progress in it's new found democracy?
I'm so glad to hear that you are ok, but so mad as hell that our CIA was directly above you, fully aware of what is going on. They most likley are orchestrating the whole tragic mess. Hardly surprising that Bush, Cheney, et al, were so against the anti-torchure legislation that was overwhelmingly supported by Congress. This is how we win hearts and minds? This is how we teach "democracy"? Oh, and as is evidenced by the story of your capture and detention, it is obvious that anyone accusing an Iraqi citizen of being a "terrorist" is endangering their lives. Therefore, the libel and slander being spread by the likes of "MADTOM" and others clearly causes a significant threat, and a lawsuit is definitely in order! Get em' Raid!
"MADTOM"... You are right.
BTW, nice blog, i'm still reading. Bye ;)
i am sorry.
i am sorry for what hppnd 2 u,m sorry 4 wat is hppning....2 other innocent ppl.
nd i mean it......m not muslim,or american..cristian.
iv always had muslim friends not out of choice but ........
i would do ne thing 2 u give muslims a life back.
God answered your prayers....
wow, any one who read taht hole story is crazy
I am left speachless by your account of what happened to you. Did this kind of random arrests occur when Sadaam was in power?
Khalid, I just found your blog. Thank you for posting your experience. It is important that everyone know what is going on. Many in the US still think you all are throwing parades and raining rose petals on us over there.
To all those who want Khalid to thank the US: Go suck a root.
He was arrested for going to a website that someone couldn't translate, apparently, which means they monitor what you do on the internet and assume you are guilty of terrorism (who's in your group, what's your funding) until you are either beaten to confession or found innocent. That is not a very democratic or freedom loving way to do things. I don't think he was arrested for having a beard, but that wouldn't be very democratic either. He was let go because he didn't post anything. That is not very freedom loving. What's wrong with you people?
I'd be suprised if all Iraqis weren't cursing the US right now, every day. I would be sad because all of us aren't like that, but not suprised.
Khalid,
Don't be fooled by all of the sympathetic bleeding heart voices writing from America. They seem to be attracted to this type of scenario. I suspect that they are trying to fill a void in their pathetic lives. Their point of view is ridiculed by mainstream Americans. Before the war, they were the ones crying over the spotted owl and the destruction of the rain forest. Their indignation over your supposed treatment is coming from one lonely voice looking for a cause to make their life seem to have a purpose. They are the same people who believe the bullshit that Al Gore is spewing about the end of the world due to global warming. They cannot see the forest for the trees. Mr. Gore lost an important election, then had to find a cause to redefine his image as a loser. It was a clever way for his people to try and get him back in the political game after being tagged a loser. Stupid Dems are definitely buying into Super Gore, saviour of the world. So Khalid, I hope that I have been able to enlighten you. I did not want you to believe that the average American even gives a shit about your experience. War is dangerous. I suggest that you should exercise some common sense about your activities until things settle down in your country. In closing, I hope the best for your countrty. You must feel honored that the greatest country in the world chose to end the reign of your past leader, who was trying to best Hitler, and Stalin in the number of countrymen killed contest. When the bleeding hearts cry about the conditions in Iraq, it is too bad they were not crying ten years ago for the hundreds of thousands who simply disappeared never to be seen again.
Khalid,
i think that the fact that you survived your ordeal proves that there is some justice in the world.
i personally believe your story but even if it isn't true and you are lying it is unimportant because stories like the one you outlined ACTUALLY HAPPEN, it is not important that this blog may be complete fiction which it may be because this is the internet and there are people who lie out there and the same reason that gives me the right to believe you gives others the right not to.
i think that the way that Iraqi's are treated is terrible, but that fact that there are terrorists out there who are willing to kill innocent people which i believe is against the Koran's teachings as much is at is against Buddhist and Christian teachings. Tells us that steps still have to be taken to stop terrorism not for any political reasons or for a religious reasons but to protect innocent people like Khalid who suffer everyday because of terrorists. This is NOT TO SAY that i agree with the American (or British) invasion of Iraq, i believe that that has caused more harm than good, and i DON'T agree with the way that prisoners are treated but i do agree with taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent terrorists from killing innocent civilians.
The problem with terrorists or any other criminals for that fact is that they don't tend to tell us that they are terrorists most don't just confess like i would prefer them, but that some people think that everyone is terrorist and that just visiting a website makes you one (all you need is a few months beating and a dodgy confession) IS TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE, this definitely takes us back a step in history right back to the medievals when witch hunts and inquisitions were common place with 9/10 trials led to a conviction and summary execution; HOW IS IT THAT WE CAN LET HISTORY REPEAT ITSELF OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
wow i think that, that is all i have to say,, if you have any further comments then feel free to contact me at: lamyman111@hotmail.co.uk
WHAT HE REPORTED
They put a bag upon my head
To bring me to the prison. There
On meager fare so I was fed,
The circumstances very spare.
One very prized of their techniques
As happened more than days and weeks
To tie a cinch around the penis:
So they would laugh when they had seen us;
Or they would urinate upon one,
And varied were the tortures done one,
Backdrop of other prisoners
Wailing in torment, theirs yet worse.
There was the sound of barking dogs
And we were treated less than hogs,
Till, after two years, give a day
Or take, so I was sent away:
Since I was not a terrorist
Nor from the outset did resist,
I wonder what the purpose was,
Why someone does the things he does.
An Arab, so I was a target,
This I believe; while men in war get
Treated to cruel injustices,
But never had I thought of this:
That the United States in turn
From petty dictators would learn,
But so, in all the world´s esteem
Must vanish fanciful that dream,
That former vision of a place
Where rule of law but men did trace
Within their actions, all beneath
The law. That image comes to death.
The soldiers took directives from
Men without uniform, as come
From private enterprising firms,
So I have learned, who set the terms.
Me they injected with syringe,
Stripped naked, and it makes me cringe
To think--who knows what it was for?--
I can´t have children anymore.
Ah, USA,
The stories are so many,
You threw away
A good name for a penny--
How ever shall
You get back reputation?
No, once let fall,
Though it were deputation,
It never will come back;
Derailed from virtue´s track.
ignorence is bliss it must be from what I have read he seams very well educated to have read 1984 as my kids didn't even have to read it in school(not that it's not a great book that everyone should read)as for shackles I've had to wear them going before the judge for a speeding ticket I've yet to here from the ACLU or any other group offering to help me nor were they in Mexico when I was arrested for not understanding a traffic sign that I found out was lane ending Americans that have not traveled have the right but not the brain to comment on things they do not know like local customs and laws of other countries try taking a bible to the middle east and see how far you get as an example look in your own back yards at your local officials and vote bush or clinton didn't start out at the top they were voted up the chain from local to state to national no one bitched untill they were on top as for our troops stop with the baby killers and not nice people they are us our husbands wifes sons and daughters they will do their 4 years and be teachers mechanics store workers and owners writers actors robbers bums and solders to train others to join they will be the first in after the storm or earthquake to help nomatter where and yes they are asked to enforce the policy that our ELECTED goverment decides ,they have basic human right and expectation not to have their heads sawed off on tv and will defend themselves as any living thing or being will if they don't seam nice stop shooting at them and see their attitude change my little girl is over there in the army and she is very nice as is all her classmates that joined not to kill but learn a trade a skill that they could use to get that better paying job and lastly nothing is fair in a fight no matter if it's countries or the school bully and if you hide behind others they will get hurt the faster and harder you hit the sooner it's over and in the end less killed understand your foe for they understand us and will tell us anything right or wrong knowing we belive only what we want to and that by the time history tells the truth it's too late
Hi have a great day I'd like to know more about found myself. that is very interesting for me a career I'm studying at university and this issue is very good.
greetings
generic viagra online
Post a Comment
<< Home