barnabé

Like a rolling stone

Christian Parenti é jornalista, um dos poucos que estando no Iraque tratou de fazer reportagem tanto do lado das tropas americanas como da resistência iraquiana. Numa entrevista recente à MotherJones descreve o que era a normalidade do quotidiano de Abu Ghraib. Os dois parágrafos que transcrevo são contundentes em relação à inexistência de uma estratégia para o período de ocupação e descrevem o ambiente de terror que se vivia dentro da prisão.

"More recently, I went to Chicago to interview an interrogator who works with the 10th Mountain, which is stationed at Camp Victory surrounding the Baghdad Airport. The interrogators routinely grill people who are completely innocent of anything and snatched at random and brought to Abu Ghraib. This source wouldn’t tell the entire story to me. He was too scared to tell it because he had to go back to Iraq and continue in this position. But he did describe an intelligence system that was in complete chaos -- where all intelligence has equal value and people are indiscriminately imprisoned. He also discussed an operation called “Clean Sweep” in advance of the January 30th election, which basically rounds up every male in the area between 18-40.

This is just pathetic and ridiculous. It represents a blatant admission of defeat -- they have no idea how to fight the resistance, so they are just going to round up Iraqis and throw them into Abu Ghraib. That’s not a strategy and this soldier, who is completely pro-war, was extremely worried about that. Imagine if you were pro-war and wanted to invade Iraq, which is what this soldier believed, the way they are doing it is just insane. You grab a bunch of civilians and then throw them into prison camps where there are actually people active in the resistance. You basically allow people who are pissed off to associate with those active in the war and the prison becomes this massive recruiting center."

Quanto à liberdade, Akeel, iraquiano de 26 anos, residente em Baghdad, disse isto quando interrogado sobre a nova vida no novo Iraque livre: "Ah, the freedom. Look, we have the gas-line freedom, the looting freedom, the killing freedom, the rape freedom, the hash-smoking freedom. I don't know what to do with all this freedom."

So how does it feel?

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