Dutch Iraq Torture: Documents show it really happened

The Dutch prominent daily "NRC" today confirmed that Dutch army security agents tortured Iraqi detainees in 2003.
The paper obtained documents from the The Hague Defense Ministry (under a Law for Government Transparency, the "Wet Openbaarheid Bestuur" or "WOB") that tell a part of the story that was left out of the comments of Dutch Government in November, when the scandal broke.
The Dutch Marine Batallion that controlled the southern Al-Muthanna Province during eighteen months in 2003/2004 had a particular status. It was not part of the occupying powers (the "Coalition"). It had to restore and maintain law and order in the province under British supervision. Eventual detainees had to be handed over to Iraqi authorities (common criminals) or to the British army with headquarters in Basra (insurgents, Baath people, intruders from other countries).
The Dutch miltary Intelligence "MIVD" ("Militaire Inlichtingen- en Veiligheids Dienst") people were also subject to those rules. In spite of that, they set up their own headquarters in the "Coalition" post in the provincial capital, where they "interviewed" detainees for some days, between their capture and their transfer to the British military in Basra.
When the Dutch commander was alerted about the "robust" methods of interrogation being used by the MIVD, he asked expanations, which he got.:

• Waterboarding of detainees was explained in that report as "the need to keep the detainee awaked" during nocturnal interrogations,
  
• while the use of deafening sound was justified by the need of avoiding communication between detainees.
  
• The use of darkened ski-goggles on detainees (as blindfolds) was needed to avoid identification by them of their interrogators.

The man accepted this, until he got another report from his liaison officer in Basra, saying that the MIVD had explained to the British, that the mentioned interrogation "techniques" had been used as a means of coercion. That was not only in contravention to the Dutch rules of engagement, but also of the Geneva Conventions.
The commander alerted the General Staff in The Hague. An inquiry was ordered by the Minister to be done by the Military Police.

And, after that, NOTHING. The stories differ. The Minister (still in office as caretaker after the general elections lost by his party, and the fall of the Balkenende III government), says that he got no further information and assumed, that a conclusion had been reached that there had not been any reprehensible conduct. The (former) Commander in Chief says that Military Justice did not see a reason to act in this case, while the Chief of the MP thinks, that the report wasn't even transmitted to Military Justice.

Our opinion is, that this is not merely a sad story of overzealous intelligence people.
It shows a state of mind that points to:

1. Contamination by the Guantanamo methods, transmitted by the American Commander of that camp to Iraq during his 2003 mission;
2. an undisciplinary attitude of the intelligence agents
3. their probable coverage by elements within the armed forces and, perhaps, the minister himself;
4. and, as their exactions remained unpunished, a probable continuation of those practices in Afghanistan during the Dutch "commando" support to the American campaign "Enduring Freedom", and:
5. a documented follow-up of these doings during the Dutch "reconstruction" mission in Afghanistan (Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan), where they effectively terrorize the populations, thus making any effort by the regular Dutch troops to do some peaceful reconstruction work, ineffective and impracticable.

My supposition is, that the actual General Staff provoked the "leak" about Iraq, in order to get rid of these undisciplined contingents in Afghanistan, and, probably, at the same time, of the Minister, who condoned tacitly this devious practice, in order to please the US, without hurting the Dutch Parliament, that had insisted on a peaceful mission, completely separate from the "Enduring Freedom" campaign.

The cunning Government Minister, Mr. Henk Kamp, may expect a similar fate as has befallen to his colleague Rumsfeld. The mewly chosen Parliament has a tiny progressive majority, and it seems improbable, that his party will take part in Government during the coming four years.

Dutch demand 'Iraq abuse' probe

Well, if you did not understand my French, or did not believe me - here is the CNN version of the Dutch torture in Iraq story:

Dutch demand 'Iraq abuse' probe - CNN.com: "Dutch demand 'Iraq abuse' probe
POSTED: 1339 GMT (2139 HKT), November 17, 2006

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) -- A report that Dutch military intelligence abused prisoners in Iraq in 2003 prompted calls on Friday for an investigation, as opposition politicians alleged a government cover-up just days before a general election.

Leading Dutch daily Volkskrant said intelligence officers had abused dozens of prisoners by hosing them with water to keep them awake, exposing them to bright light and blasting them with loud noises during heavy-handed interrogations.

A defense ministry spokesman said the reports were being investigated. He expected the government to make a statement later in the day.

'If these facts are true, they are shocking,' Christian Democrat Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told reporters as he entered his office for the regular Friday cabinet meeting.

Balkenende supported the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and sent Dutch troops to the country in 2003. He withdrew the troops two years later as violence escalated and opposition parties -- which had supported the initial engagement -- grew skeptical.

Although there was originally a broad political consensus in favor of involvement in Iraq, the abuse reports could prove damagingo Balkenende -- leading his Labour rivals in opinion polls just five days before a general election on November 22.

"There is a smell of a cover-up coming off this," Labour leader Wouter Bos was quoted as telling Dutch radio.

Femke Halsema, leader of the opposition Green Left, told Dutch television: "We take it very, very seriously. We can probably all remember the situation in Abu Ghraib.

"If this has indeed been hushed up since 2003, then we must look into what happened."

Since photographs of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq first emerged, scandals have also erupted in Britain and Germany over the behavior of their troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Who knew?

The alleged mistreatment took place in November 2003 in the Al Muthanna province in southern Iraq where about 1,300 Dutch troops were stationed, Volkskrant said.

"Things took place which don't comply with the rules," the newspaper quoted Defense Ministry spokesman Joop Veen as saying, adding he did not know whether Defense Minister Henk Kamp was made aware of what happened. "It was a long time ago and you can't remember everything," he added.

Dutch soldiers are currently involved in a NATO peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, and this year agreed to send further troops to the area after a protracted parliamentary debate.

Despite a well-equipped military and a tradition of punching above their weight on the international stage, the Dutch have been nervous of risky military engagements since the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.

Lightly-armed Dutch U.N. soldiers, lacking international air support, were forced to yield the Srebrenica enclave to Bosnian Serb forces, who then killed up to 8,000 Muslims who had sought protection from the Dutch troops.

Copyright 2006 Reuters. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed."

.....

Dutch Iraq torture scandal in 2003: Is it going on in Afghanistan?

De Volkskrant, Dutch national daily, had a scoop today: Nederlanders martelden Irakezen. ("Dutch tortured Iraqis").
It happened in November 2003, during the 1,5 year Dutch pacification mission in the Southern Iraqi province of Al-Muthanna. Although the Dutch general Command in The Hague was alerted by the Military Police (marechaussée), it did not inform the miltary court, as it should have.
The description of the torturing methods ressembles awfully the Abu Ghreib practices that happened at the same time.

• Was the Dutch Defence Minister Henk Kamp informed?
• Is the Dutch Military Intelligence (MIVD) continuing those practices in Afghanistan?
  

The then Commander-in-Chief, Lieutenant-Admiral Kroon, retired, indirectly confirmed the facts.

As the coming 22 November Dutch Parliamentary elections are heating up the political climate in the country, a proposed parliamentary debate (Monday), if it takes place, will be dominated by the need for the Government parties CDA (Christian Democrat) and VVD (Conservative Liberal) to limit the damage to their election results.

The Balkenende Government got in 2002 and in 2005 a faltering parliamentary green light for its military support to the American-British interventions in respectively Iraq and Afghanistan, by declaring its position as "political, not military" support and as an UN-conform pacification-reconstruction mission.

It becomes clear now, that, from the beginning, both missions were also meant as a (stealthy) delivery of unconditional human and material reinforcements to the US (and the UK).

The Dutch MIVD torturing of Iraqis happened in a "Coalition Provisional Authority" facility in As-Samara, capital of the province Al Muthanna. The CPA was the American-led provisional Government of occupied Iraq at that time. It ended in 2004. It was utterly corrupt and its books are still under scrutiny.

A possible line of defence for the Dutch Government and its defence minister, is saying that they were not responsible for what the British, who led that CPA facility, did or commanded. That, however, would contradict many statements of the same Government, that the Dutch troops were exclusively governed by the Dutch rules of engagement. Rules that explicitly confirm the Geneva Agreements and make any transgression punishable.

The Dutch Governments' position is the more lamentable, while the same British, in contrast to the Americans, actively pursue in justice their soldiers and officers who have been engaged in torturing or indiscriminate killings. Several severe condemnations of British troops are already definitive.

And in Afghanistan?

Since 2004, a mistery-clouded Dutch commando-engagement is going on at the side of the American Enduring Freedom operation in South-East Afghanistan. After the Bush proposals on the legalisation of torturing, and their partial acceptance by Congress, there is no more doubt that those practices have been going on (and still are) in that region.

• Is Dutch Military Intelligence still engaged in it?

It is more than probable. The Dutch commando units, even after the takeover by NATO, are being advised by an embedded American officer and are roaming around in the neighbourhood of the Dutch "reconstruction" mission at Tarin Kowt in Uruzgan.

Several witnesses confirm, that they are terrorizing the population and provoking engagements with "Taliban". In doing so, they minimize any chance of effective "reconstruction" in the region. It is an outright example of sabotage and American stubbornness.

The Afghan Government of Karzai itself, has objected to those practices. To no avail.

As we said earlier, NATO has become nothing more than an US frontshop for hiring mercenaries to do the dirty work.

Now, there is a clear-cut choice for the Dutch parliament: Either to go overtly along with the Bush-Cheney style terror, or to opt out, as the Poles, the Spanish and the Italians did before, and seek an European platform for military intervention on a civilised basis, and in the interests of collective European security.

[An earlier version in Dutch and Netherlands-oriented, appeared in De Lage Landen and in In Europa Thuis, this version is cross-posted from At Home in Europe]

Iraq: Coalition of the Drilling (2)

(republished on Oct. 31, because of site problem)

Continued from Iraq: Coalition of the Drilling (1)

Joshua Holland on Alternet:

During the 12-year sanction period, the Big Four [Oil Companies, HR] were forced to sit on the sidelines while the government of Saddam Hussein cut deals with the Chinese, French, Russians and others (despite the sanctions, the United States ultimately received 37 percent of Iraq's oil during that period, according to the independent committee that investigated the oil-for-food program, but almost all of it arrived through foreign firms).

The German weekly Der Spiegel published (October 7, 2004) that list of "profiteers" of the Oil-for-Food programme. It is a list, probably forged by the CPA, where the (biggest) American profiteers are left out or made anonymous, so as to incriminate exclusively other countries (like France) and, of course, the UN itself. Here it is:As you may see, even in this heavily "edited" document, by far the biggest player is a an American (made anonymous).

Cheney's energy Task Force (2001), where it all started...
Back to the oil companies and the year 2001:

In February of 2001, just weeks after Bush was sworn in, the same energy executives that had been lobbying for Saddam's ouster gathered at the White House to participate in Dick Cheney's now infamous Energy Task Force. Although Cheney would go all the way to the Supreme Court to keep what happened at those meetings a secret, we do know a few things, thanks to documents obtained by the conservative legal group JudicialWatch. As Mark Levine wrote in The Nation($$):

… a map of Iraq and an accompanying list of "Iraq oil foreign suitors" were the center of discussion. The map erased all features of the country save the location of its main oil deposits, divided into nine exploration blocks. The accompanying list of suitors revealed that dozens of companies from 30 countries -- but not the United States -- were either in discussions over or in direct negotiations for rights to some of the best remaining oilfields on earth.

Levine wrote, "It's not hard to surmise how the participants in these meetings felt about this situation."

I have indeed seen that map when it was published, in 2004. When I find it, I'll publish it here again.

Secret memo: Security = Oil
Joshua Holland digged up one of the few evidences, that there is really a strong link between the "energy strategy" and the national security strategy:

According to the New Yorker, at the same time, a top-secret National Security Council memo directed NSC staff to "cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy."
The administration's national security team was to join "the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."

The PSA's: Handing over sovereignty to the Big Four
New to us, but explaining, why the US invest so much into a long-term military occupation of the country, are the conditions of the new big contracts, that are secretly set up in Baghdad between the Big 4 and the American "advisers" who control the Iraq oil ministry:

But the execs from Big Oil didn't just want access to Iraq's oil; they wanted access on terms that would be inconceivable unless negotiated at the barrel of a gun. Specifically, they wanted an Iraqi government that would enter into production service agreements (PSAs) for the extraction of Iraq's oil.

What are PSAs?

PSAs, developed in the 1960s, are a tool of today's kinder, gentler neocolonialism; they allow countries to retain technical ownership over energy reserves but, in actuality, lock in multinationals' control and extremely high profit margins -- up to 13 times oil companies' minimum target, according to an analysis by the British-based oil watchdog Platform (PDF).

As Greg Muttit, an analyst with the group, notes:

Such contracts are often used in countries with small or difficult oilfields, or where high-risk exploration is required. They are not generally used in countries like Iraq, where there are large fields which are already known and which are cheap to extract. For example, they are not used in Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, all of which maintain state control of oil.

In fact, Muttit adds, of the seven leading oil producing countries, only Russia has entered into PSAs, and those were signed during its own economic "shock therapy" in the early 1990s. A number of Iraq's oil-rich neighbors have constitutions that specifically prohibit foreign control over their energy reserves.

And the Russians are struggling now, as in the case of Shell's exploitation of the Sakhalin Reserves, to get rid of them.

PSAs often have long terms -- up to 40 years -- and contain "stabilization clauses" that protect them from future legislative changes. As Muttit points out, future governments "could be constrained in their ability to pass new laws or policies." That means, for example, that if a future elected Iraqi government "wanted to pass a human rights law, or wanted to introduce a minimum wage [and it] affected the company's profits, either the law would not apply to the company's operations or the government would have to compensate the company for any reduction in profits." It's Sovereignty Lite.

If all this is true - why are Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq struggling so hard against one another for their share of future oil revenues? There will not be much left to share. The more so, as the US insist that Iraq continues to pay enormous sums to Kowait out of its oil revenues to compensate for the 1991 occupation and (Gulf-) war costs. A big part of that money also flows (indirectly) to the USA. The competition between three different Iraqi partners, of course suits enormously the American oil negotiators, who may choose in the end as a preferred partner that one of the three, who offers them most concessions on Iraqi control and Iraqi profit from the oil extraction.
Confirmed by this little peep into the negotiations:

The [PSA-, hr] deals are so onerous that they govern only 12 percent of the world's oil reserves, according to the International Energy Agency. Nonetheless, PSAs would become the Future of Iraq Project's recommendation for the fledgling Iraqi government.
According to the Financial Times, "many in the group" fought for the contract structure; a Kurdish delegate told the FT, "everybody keeps coming back to PSAs."

The harsh way in which, recently, Iraqi PM Maliki is being treated by the US, may point to a deep disagreement between the US and his govenment in this issue. That would mean, that the now dominating mainstream-Shiite majority is causing difficulties for the contracts that are being negotiated.

But it is difficult, to see what alternatives there are in Iraq, that might offer better conditions on a permanent (stability) basis to the big oil companies.

Perhaps, the Kurds could negotiate the inclusion of Kikuk and the Northern oil fields into a semi-independent Kurdish state, as their price for submitting to American PSA's. To them, it would be a win-win situation, for they have no oil revenues at all, up to now.

But, if this happens against the opposition of Sunni and Shiite Iraqis, which is very likely, and aginst the Turkish interests, which is for sure, - how could that oil be exported, then, either to the south, or to the (North-) West?

Less probable is a great "renversement des alliances", that could occur, if moderated Sunnis would trade their submission to PSAs with the US for a restauration of their role of dominating elite in Iraq. Allawi (himself a "secular" Shiite) could be an ideal vehicle for such a scenario. But it would need some sort of "coup" against Iraqi "democracy", that would be difficult to sell to the American public.

So, finally, we think, that within some months, the definitive deal will be concluded with the Shiites. The actual bickering, over the heads of the suffering Iraqis, is used to "soften" Maliki and his parties.

In a third post on this subject, more about the conditions for the oil negotations in Iraq, as prepared by the US.