Or what I really wanted to post before getting worked up about busted code - TIC

Two Fisk articles from July 3 and 4 about the "handling" of journalists in the courtroom with Saddam Hussein.

U.S. Military Tried to Censor Coverage of Saddam Hearing

By Robert Fisk
Independent U.K.
Saturday 03 July 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=537630

A team of US military officers acted as censors over all coverage of
the hearings of Saddam Hussein and his henchmen on Thursday, destroying
videotape of Saddam in chains and deleting the entire recorded legal
submissions of 11 senior members of his former regime.

A US network cameraman who demanded the return of his tapes, which
contained audios of the hearings, said he was told by a US officer: "No.
They belong to us now. And anyway, we don't trust you guys."

According to American journalists present at the 30-minute hearing of
Saddam and 11 former ministers at Baghdad airport, an American admiral
in civilian clothes told camera crews that the judge had demanded that
there should be no sound recording of the initial hearing. He ordered
crews to unplug their sound wires. Several of the six crews present
pretended to obey the instruction. "We learnt later," one of them said,
"that the judge didn't order us to turn off our sound. The Americans
lied - it was they who wanted no sound. The judge wanted sound and
pictures."

Initially, crews were told that a US Department of Defence camera crew
would provide the sound for their silent tapes. But when CNN and CBS
crews went to the former occupation authority headquarters - now the US
embassy - they found that three US officers ordered the censorship of
tape which showed Saddam being led into the courtroom with a chain round
his waist which was connected to handcuffs round his wrists. The
Americans gave no reason for this censorship.

"They were rude and they didn't care," another American television
crew member said. "They were running the show. The Americans decided
what the world could and could not see of this trial - and it was meant
to be an Iraqi trial. There was a British official in the courtroom whom
we were not allowed to take pictures of. The other men were US troops
who had been ordered to wear ordinary clothes so that they were
'civilians' in the court."

Three US officers viewed the tapes taken by two CNN cameras,
'Al-Djezaira' (a local, American-funded Iraqi channel), and the US
government. "Fortunately, they were lazy and they didn't check all the
tapes properly so we got our 'audio' through in the satellite to
London," one of the crew members told The Independent yesterday. "I had
pretended to unplug the sound from the camera but the man who claimed he
was a US admiral didn't understand cameras and we were able to record
sound. The American censors at the embassy were inattentive - that's how
we got the sound out."

The only thing the Americans managed to censor from most of the tapes
was Saddam's comment that "this is theatre - Bush is the real criminal."

Television stations throughout the world were astonished yesterday
when the first tapes of Saddam's trial arrived without sound and have
still not been informed that the Americans censored the material. "What
can we do when an American official tells us the judge doesn't want
sound - and then we find out that they lied and the judge does want the
sound?" an American camera operator asked.

Video showed the face - and audiotape revealed the voice - of Judge
Raid Juhi, whose name was widely reported in the Arab press yesterday.
According to the camera crews, Judge Juhi wanted the world to hear
Saddam's voice. Nevertheless the Americans erased the entire audiotape
of the hearings of the 11 former Saddam ministers, including that of
Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, and "Chemical" Ali,
Saddam's cousin accused of gassing the Kurds at Halabja. The US
Department of Defence tape of their hearings has been taken by the US
authorities so there is now no technical record of the words of these 11
men, save for the notebooks of "pool" reporters - four Americans and two
Iraqis - who were present.

Judge Juhi said not long ago that "I have no secrets - a judge must
not be ashamed of the decisions he takes."

The Americans apparently think differently.

—————————————————————

So this is what they call the new, 'free' Iraq? Americans hold Saddam Hussein. Americans ran the court in which he appeared. Americans censored the tapes of the hearing. Who do you think is running the country?

Robert Fisk
Independent U.K.
Sunday 04 July 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/story.jsp?story=537843

In his last hours as US proconsul in Baghdad, Paul Bremer decided to
tighten up some of the laws that his occupation authority had placed
across the land of Iraq.

He drafted a new piece of legislation forbidding Iraqi motorists to
drive with only one hand on the wheel. Another document solemnly
announced that it would henceforth be a crime for Iraqis to sound their
car horns except in an emergency. That same day, three American soldiers
were torn apart by a roadside bomb north of Baghdad, one of more than 60
attacks on US forces over the weekend. And all the while, Mr Bremer was
worrying about the standards of Iraqi driving.

It would be difficult to find a more preposterous - and chilling -
symbol of Mr Bremer's failures, his hopeless inability to understand the
nature of the debacle that he and his hopeless occupation authority have
brought about. It's not that the old "Coalition Provisional Authority" -
now transmogrified into the 3,000-strong US embassy - was out of touch.
It didn't even live on Planet Earth. Mr Bremer's last starring moment
came when he departed Baghdad on a US military aircraft, with two
US-paid mercenaries - rifles pointed menacingly at camera crews and
walking backwards - protecting him until the cabin door closed. And Mr
Bremer, remember, was appointed to his job because he was an
"anti-terrorist" expert.

Most of the American CPA men who have cleared out of Baghdad are doing
what we always suspected they would do when they had finished trying to
put a US ideological brand name on "new" Iraq; they have headed off to
Washington to work for the Bush election campaign. But those left behind
in the "international zone" - those we have to pretend are no longer an
occupation authority - make no secret of their despair. "The ideology is
gone. The ambitions are gone. We've no aims left," one of them said last
week. "We're living from one day to the next. All we're trying to do now
- our only goal - is to keep the lid on until January 2005 [when the
first Iraqi elections are supposed to be held]. That's our only aim -
get past the elections - and then get the hell out."

The production of Saddam Hussein in a Baghdad "court" last week - he
was actually sitting in one of his former palaces - was therefore the
occupiers' last card. After this, there is going to be no more "good
news" in Iraq, no more devices, no more tricks, no more captures to
brighten our eyes before the November elections in the US. Yet even the
court melodrama was symptomatic of how little power the West is prepared
to cede to an Iraq to which it last week falsely claimed to be handing
"full sovereignty".

Americans continue to hold Saddam - in Qatar, not in Iraq - and
Americans ran the court in which Saddam appeared. American soldiers in
plain clothes were the "civilians" in the court. American officials
censored the tapes of the hearing, lied about the judge's wish to record
the sound of the trial, and marked the videotapes "cleared by US
military"; three US officers later confiscated all the original tapes of
the trial. "The last time that happened to me," one of the reporters
involved said afterwards, "was when the Iraqi government took my tapes
in Basra during the 1991 Gulf War."

But it's not just the crude handling of the start of Saddam's show
trial - where he had, of course, no defence counsel. For if he is ever
to be given a fair trial in the future, the "muting" of the tapes last
week will have set an important precedent. For he can now be "silenced"
again - if, for example, he deviates from the script and starts telling
the court about his close association with the US rather than his
non-existent contacts with al-Qa'ida.

But America's occupation continues in many other ways. Its 146,000
soldiers are still all too much in evidence in Iraq, its tanks guarding
the walls of the US "embassy", its armour littered throughout Baghdad,
its convoys humming - and sometimes exploding - along the highways
outside the city. The "new" and "sovereign" government cannot order it
to leave. Mr Bremer's raft of reconstruction contracts to US companies
ensures that American firms continue to cream off Iraq's money,
described quite accurately by Naomi Klein in The Nation as "multibillion
robbery". And Mr Bremer managed to institute a set of laws that the
"new" and "sovereign" government is not permitted to change.

One of the most insidious was the re-introduction of Saddam's 1984 law
banning all strikes. This piece of folly was intended to muzzle the
so-called Federation of Iraqi Trade Unions. Yet the trade unions are
among the few secular groups in Iraq opposing religious orthodoxy and
fundamentalism. A strong trade union movement could provide a vital base
of political and democratic power in a new Iraq. But no, Mr Bremer
preferred to protect big business.

And all the while, the power of the mercenaries has been growing.
Blackwater's thugs with guns now push and punch Iraqis who get in their
way: Kurdish journalists twice walked out of a Bremer press conference
because of their mistreatment by these men. Baghdad is alive with
mysterious Westerners draped with hardware, shouting and abusing Iraqis
in the street, drinking heavily in the city's poorly defended hotels.
They have become, for ordinary Iraqis, the image of everything that is
wrong with the West. We like to call them "contractors", but there is a
disturbing increase in reports that mercenaries are shooting down
innocent Iraqis with total impunity. US military and diplomatic
officials have now set an 80/20 ration target for "security" details -
80 Iraqi mercenaries for every 20 Western mercenaries.

And even if President Bush can forget it, the Abu Ghraib scandal burns
on in a country where the filth and nudity and humiliation inflicted by
US soldiers will take a generation to erase from the memory. One leftist
group in Baghdad now claims that several women, allegedly raped by Iraqi
policemen at the jail while Americans watched, have been murdered by
their families for their "dishonour".

Large areas of the country are now effectively outside any government
control - even America's. Fallujah is a virtual people's republic and
lynch law is occurring even in Baghdad. The so-called "Mehdi Army" of
Muqtada al-Sadr publicly executed a 20-year-old man in the slums of
Baghdad's Sadr City last month for "collaboration" with the Americans.
Understandably, few journalists dare to travel outside Baghdad - much to
the pleasure of the US military. "They killed all those poor people at
the wedding party near the Syrian border and our military sources told
us there'd been a fuck-up," an American correspondent complained last
week. "Then [Brigadier General Mark] Kimmitt says that all the dead were
terrorists and he knows we can't go and prove he's wrong."

Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister, we must recall, was a CIA man, an
MI6 man and a former Baathist. Indeed, he boasted to journalists that he
had taken money from 14 intelligence agencies while he was in exile.
However "free" Mr Allawi thinks Iraq is, he will not turn against his
American protectors - nor against the glowering figure of John
Negroponte, the new US ambassador of Honduras fame.

Ironically, the only real hope for the new government would be to do
what a majority of its people say they want: to tell the Americans to
leave. This, of course, Mr Allawi cannot do. His "sovereign" government
needs those American troops to protect it from the people who don't want
the American troops in Iraq.

And so we boil our way on to those January 2005 elections, the lid
dangerously lifting from time to time to horrify us with little glimpses
of the future. Many Iraqis believe that there will be a new dictator, a
"democratically minded strongman" in the creepy expression of American
neo-conservative Daniel Pipes, to bring about the security that we have
failed to give them.

For after the elections, if indeed they are held, we shall
self-righteously claim we can no longer be blamed for anything that goes
wrong in Iraq. We liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, we shall say. We
gave them "democracy" - and look what a mess they made of it.