Motherly Love Brought Her to Base in Tikrit

[M Dogg™]

A Tucson woman joins a group of parents, led by an antiwar group, who traveled to Iraq to see their children on active duty with the Army.


By Patrick J. McDonnell, Times Staff Writer

 
TIKRIT, Iraq - Anabel Valencia crossed oceans, deserts and half the globe to see her daughter, Spc. Giselle Valencia, a truck driver with Task Force Iron Horse here in Saddam Hussein's old neighborhood.

 But you just don't drop in at a heavily guarded U.S. military base in a war zone, even if your kid is on active duty inside.

 "Your daughter's on a mission," an incredulous military police officer holding a fierce German shepherd advised Valencia on Friday.

 "I can wait," came the reply from the Tucson teacher's aide and mother of three. "I came this far. I can wait a bit longer."

 Valencia, 51, born in Boyle Heights, was one of a handful of parents who traveled to Iraq this week to see their active-duty children. Another parent, Fernando Suarez del Solar, from Escondido, gathered sand from the spot where his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar, was killed in March.

 The trip was sponsored by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based activist group that opposed the U.S. invasion and is eager to spread its antiwar message. None of the parents had formal military clearance to visit their soldier children.

 Anabel Valencia's trip provided an offbeat glimpse into the U.S. occupation in this former Baath Party stronghold.

 "I'm glad we came and got rid of Saddam Hussein - he was a dictator and oppressed his people," said Valencia, who also has a son, Chuveny Valencia, 22, who is deployed in Baghdad. "But now I think it's time for the troops to come home and for the Iraqis to govern themselves."

 The mother says she hasn't seen her daughter, Giselle, in three years. Giselle was stationed in Germany before being deployed to Kuwait and then Iraq this spring. Giselle dropped out of community college and worked part time at Kentucky Fried Chicken and a discount clothes outlet before joining the Army, her mother said.

 Valencia informed both of her children of her intention to travel to Iraq. Both had the same reply: Stay home.

 "They thought it was a crazy idea," Valencia said.

 Valencia left her Baghdad hotel Friday after breakfast accompanied by two veteran activists, one of them Medea Benjamin, a former California Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate and the founding director of Global Exchange. They set out for the two-hour drive to Tikrit on what has become one of Iraq's most dangerous roads, a major north-south artery for U.S. military convoys that is the site of frequent attacks and ambushes targeting soldiers and Westerners in general.

 On the way up, the car carrying Valencia passed what appeared to be a military vehicle ablaze off the side of the road. "I hope no one was hurt," she said.

 The entourage arrived without incident slightly after midday at the gate of the sprawling compound of Task Force Iron Horse, led by the Army's 4th Infantry Division force that occupies some of the toughest turf in the so-called Sunni Triangle. The MP with the German shepherd informed Valencia that her daughter had just decamped, driving a truck with a convoy en route to Baghdad.

 "I came all this way to see her," Valencia pleaded with the officer, who was polite, but unyielding.

 "She's in the military, ma'am," said the MP, who declined to give his name. "She's doing very well. She's in excellent health." Valencia was determined to stay put until her daughter arrived, even though she was warned about the danger of traveling after dark.

 "I'm not leaving," she declared, her entourage now expanded as journalists working out of the base joined the scene. "We can stay right here tonight."

 Officers from the U.S.-trained Iraqi police arrived in blue and white cruisers after hearing of the incident.

 "We have orders to arrest any protesters," explained Capt. Mohammed Ali Hussein of the regional police in Tikrit.

 His demeanor soon softened. A dialogue ensued.

 "I think it's terrible that the Americans will not let you in to see your beloved daughter," Capt. Hussein said. "This is the way they treat their own people! Imagine how they treat us." As the conversation continued along such lines, military convoys lumbered into and out of the gates. Black Hawk and Apache helicopters buzzed overhead, following the route of the nearby Tigris.

 Valencia was soon sharing with the police photos of her daughter in uniform - in one Giselle is behind the wheel of a military semi; in another she is seated on a plush red couch in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

 Valencia became teary-eyed. Two cops offered tissues. They were U.S.-trained and are paid by the ruling U.S.-led coalition, which regularly praises Iraqi police as the coalition's crucial ally. But these two weren't exactly with the program.

 "The Americans promised so much: democracy, freedom, security - now we have none of these things," said Capt. Mazen Ayash Youssif. "We were better off before. We all prefer the time of Saddam."

 The depth of their anti-U.S. conviction underscores the difficulties the military faces in winning over ordinary Iraqis, especially in the Sunni zone of central and western Iraq favored by the former regime.

 "If this is the way the people think here," concluded Valencia, "then we're in a lot of trouble."

 One officer said he now has two likenesses of Saddam Hussein hanging in his home, one up from before the U.S. invasion. All said the former strongman would easily triumph in any democratic election - a perception not much evident beyond the borders of Tikrit, even among many other Iraqis fed up with the occupation.

 "But you were liberated from a dictator," said Benjamin, the activist, taken aback at the direction the dialogue was taking.

 Replied another officer, Mohanan Majeed Taha: "We never asked anyone to liberate us. What right did the Americans have to liberate us?"

 With the day slipping away, Army Lt. Nathan Carver approached. He informed Valencia that her daughter might not return until late, or perhaps the next day. The officer suggested that she go back to Baghdad for the evening and return today, when a visit probably could be arranged.

 "I'm so happy," said a relieved Valencia. "Now I believe I will see her."

 As nightfall approached, Capt. Hussein offered to put Valencia up at the police station and invited her to his home for a dinner of roasted sheep. "If the Americans won't let you in, we will show you Arab hospitality," he explained. But Valencia turned him down and headed back to Baghdad.

 "I hope your daughter treats our people well, not like the other Americans," said Capt. Hussein before leaving. "Then she will be treated well in return, and God willing, remain safe."

[Lincoln]

"The Americans promised so much: democracy, freedom, security - now we have none of these things," said Capt. Mazen Ayash Youssif. "We were better off before. We all prefer the time of Saddam."
t bey
 The depth of their anti-U.S. conviction underscores the difficulties the military faces in winning over ordinary Iraqis, especially in the Sunni zone of central and western Iraq favored by the former regime.

 "If this is the way the people think here," concluded Valencia, "then we're in a lot of trouble."

 One officer said he now has two likenesses of Saddam Hussein hanging in his home, one up from before the U.S. invasion. All said the former strongman would easily triumph in any democratic election - a perception not much evidenond the borders of Tikrit, even among many other Iraqis fed up with the occupation.

 "But you were liberated from a dictator," said Benjamin, the activist, taken aback at the direction the dialogue was taking.

 Replied another officer, Mohanan Majeed Taha: "We never asked anyone to liberate us. What right did the Americans have to liberate us?"
 

Try and defend the war now Bush supporters.

[ecrazy]

Try and defend the war now Bush supporters.

Well Put

[Woodrow]

Iraq behind the cameras: a different reality
By TARA COPP
Scripps Howard News Service
December 05, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq - It's a little-known footnote in postwar Iraq that an unassuming Army Civil Affairs captain named Kent Lindner has a bevy of blushing female fans.

Every time Lindner checks in on the group of young, deaf Iraqi seamstresses at their factory here, the women swarm him with admiration. "I love you!" one of them writes in the dust on Lindner's SUV.

Such small-time adoration is not the stuff of headlines against the backdrop of a country painfully and often violently evolving from war. So on this day, when Lindner and his fellow soldiers are cheered as they fire the deaf workers' boss, a woman who has been locking the seamstresses in closets, holding their pay and beating them, the lack of TV cameras on hand is no surprise.

But later that night, mortars hit nearby. Cameras are rolling, and 15 minutes later folks back home instead see another news clip of Baghdad's latest violence. It's a soda-straw view that frustrates soldiers, like those in Lindner's Civil Affairs unit, who are slowly trying to stitch together the peace while the final stages of the war play out on television.

"We've got a lot of good things going on, but when I went home (on leave), people were just like 'We never hear that stuff,' " said Civil Affairs Pvt. Amy Schroeder. "That's what makes the families worry."

What Iraq looks like on TV, and what Iraq is like for the 130,000 troops living here, sometimes feels like two different realities.

That's especially true for the Army's Civil Affairs soldiers, reservists who often serve as civil engineers in their "real life" jobs, and who are here working in Iraq's schools, hospitals and factories. There are thousands of Civil Affairs soldiers in Iraq, and their daily missions take them into all regions of the country, from the water plants in Basra to the south, to canning factories up north in Irbil.

"Our stories aren't the sexiest," says the 432nd Civil Affairs Brigade commander, Gary Beard. "But what we do will build the success of this country."

For the soldiers, the morning typically starts inside their compounds with a breakfast of coffee and thick, rubbery bacon substitute from one of the contractor dining halls, or sometimes just a cigarette and a Coke. It's cold now, but the sun is still white-bright, so most still wear hats or sunglasses.

Outside the compounds, Iraqis who have become full-time employees wait to get their IDs checked. The regulars know the MPs by name, and the soldiers and Iraqis exchange the same kind of morning greetings heard at job sites everywhere.

"Amin! What's up, man?" the 352nd Civil Affairs commander, Maj. Michael Maguire, says to contractor Amin Ahmed. The Iraqi businessman works with vendors in the city to get equipment for Maguire's men. Over the months, a bond has formed. When Ahmed was worried about car bombs hurting his daughter at school, Maguire helped get heavy barbed wire to wrap around the school's perimeter.

With their translator ready to go, Lindner and 352nd Lt. Col. Jim Otwell don bulletproof vests and Kevlar helmets and drive out of the compound to visit the state-run sewing factory for deaf Iraqis.

"We want to find out what your working conditions are, anything that we can do to help you," Otwell tells the young women at the factory. He speaks in English slowly, for the benefit of an Arabic translator, who then turns to an Arabic-speaking sign-language translator to sign Otwell's questions to the seamstresses.

The girls' hands start flying as they tell Otwell about their hated boss.

"She would beat us, and pull our hair!" signs Nadia Jabar.

"What about working conditions ... do you have hearing aids? Books you can read?" Otwell asks.

"Nothing!" they sign back.

Otwell and Lindner tour the building, which is cold and dusty. But inside several of the rooms are old products they can sell - hundreds of Iraqi flags they've sewn, dresses and pillowcases. Already the team has arranged for the factory to produce all the uniforms for Iraq's civil defense forces, and piles of cut brown pant legs line the floor.

Now the workers are getting $60 a month, part of which is spent on housing them at the factory. Otwell and Lindner promise to come back soon, and ask the workers to make a list of things that they really need, so maybe next year the factory can get some upgrades. On the way out, the workers jump and clap, as Lindner and Otwell escort the old boss - who had come back to the factory despite a previous arrest by Iraqi police for beating the workers - away from the building.

Across town, another mission is under way.

"Welcome, welcome to our school," chants a line of 7-year-old girls in Arabic at the Abu Ghuraib Primary School, which the 490th Civil Affairs Battalion took under its wing to restore after it was badly looted postwar.

The now-bright-blue school has new equipment and new electrical wiring that feeds bright bulbs by the teachers' blackboards.

As each soldier walks through the entrance to the official ribbon-cutting, the girls chant louder in Arabic, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Inside, headmistress Ibistam Mahdi cuts a yellow ribbon, and thanks the men through a translator.

"For the 350 girls here, it is a lot better," Mahdi says.

Despite the violent news images seen most often at home, these soldiers say it's more common to see boys selling water jugs of gasoline to passing cars than it is to see a roadside bomb.

In the cities, the convoys pass through marketplaces where women walk, arm in arm, to shop for trendy beaded skirts that sparkle in the sun. They pass blocks of electronics stores where men carry home boxes of MP3 players and satellite TV dishes. On busier streets, hundreds of roadside "money exchanges," where Iraqis trade dollars for dinars, pop up like lemonade stands.

"Oh, I'm an Ali Baba now," says Staff Sgt. Justin Lockhart to a squirming 11-year-old Iraqi boy named Aaday. Aaday has the sergeant's handcuffs and is busy playfully locking Lockhart up.

"It sounds bad, but I try and play with the kids as much as possible," says Lockhart, of the 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion. "It's safer with them around. The only times I'm scared are when there are kids around us, and they leave. Or when adults come get them - it's right after that that we leave a place," because it may signal a coming attack, he said.

Even in Fallujah, a city 30 miles west of Baghdad that in the last month has become characterized as one of the more hostile cities in Iraq because of recent attacks, Civil Affairs teams still make daily trips out of their compound to help get the city's day-to-day needs functioning. And the men and women stationed there say it's just not as violent as it looks.

"I go out every day," says 432nd Civil Affairs Battalion Sgt. Bill Belongea. "I have not had to raise my weapon yet. It's not as bad as the media portrays it."

On another mission in Baghdad, soldiers from the 352nd Civil Affairs command pull up to the Ministry of Labor and Social Services to follow up on victims of a recent police-station bombing. By the gate, hundreds of needy Iraqis line up for welfare payments.

The soldiers of the 352nd have stopped in to pick up food and clothing for a family of 26. The family members survived the attack on the Adamiyah Police Station, but the explosion destroyed their apartments.

"All they have left is what they pulled out of the rubble," says Capt. Chuck Timney. "These people could have a long wait for a new home, so we're going to try and make it as comfortable as possible."

As the soldiers wait, news of a nearby roadside bomb comes in through the static on the Humvee's radio. A command post dispatches rescue helicopters, and a few minutes later two Black Hawks buzz past.

Maj. Jeff McKone is listening in the Humvee's front seat, and his reaction is one of relief - that this particular bombing is not one he has to worry about. He continues to snack on an MRE through the dispatches, and then hops down from the Humvee to help load boxes for the family.

As the soldiers arrive at the displaced family's temporary quarters, the parents and children rush out to open the gate and help carry the packages.

Both Timney and Capt. Mike Self, who has brought colored paper and pens sent by his church back home for the kids, check specifically on the youngest child. The toddler stopped speaking or moving after the car bomb. Although still mostly listless in her mother's arms, the girl wails during this visit. It's the first noise they've heard from her, and it's a sign of relief for the soldiers, who have clearly bonded with the family.

As they say their goodbyes, the soldiers look happy, accomplished.

"If you can't feel good about today," McKone says, "then you shouldn't be here."

http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=IRAQ-REALITY-12-05-03&cat=II

[Woodrow]

61,000 Baghdad residents 'executed'
From correspondents in Baghdad
December 09, 2003
SADDAM Hussein's government may have executed 61,000 Baghdad residents, a number significantly higher than previously believed, according to a survey obtained today by The Associated Press.

The bloodiest massacres of Saddam's 23-year presidency occurred in Iraq's Kurdish north and Shi'ite Muslim south, but the Gallup Baghdad Survey data indicates the brutality extended strongly into the capital as well.

The survey, which the polling firm planned to release tomorrow, asked 1178 Baghdad residents in August and September whether a member of their household had been executed by Saddam's regime. According to Gallup, 6.6 per cent said yes.

The polling firm took metropolitan Baghdad's population - 6.39 million - and average household size - 6.9 people - to calculate that 61,000 people were executed during Saddam's rule. Most are believed to have been buried in mass graves.

The US-led occupation authority in Iraq has said that at least 300,000 people are buried in mass graves in Iraq. Human rights officials put the number closer to 500,000, and some Iraqi political parties estimate more than 1 million were executed.

Without exhumations of those graves, it is impossible to confirm a figure. Scientists said during a recent investigation that they have confirmed 41 mass graves on a list of suspected sites that currently includes 270 locations.

Forensic teams will begin to exhume four of those graves next month in search of evidence for a new tribunal, expected to be established this week, that will try members of the former regime for crimes against humanity and genocide. More graves will later be added to the list.

But nobody expects all the mass graves to be exhumed, and nobody expects to ever know the full number of Iraqis executed by their government.

Richard Burkholder, who headed Gallup's Baghdad team, said the numbers in Baghdad could be high for two reasons: People may have understood "household" to be broader than just the people living at their address; and some families may have moved to the capital from other areas since the executions occurred.

"Anecdotal accounts start to support it, but they don't get you to 60,000," he said in a telephone interview from Princeton, New Jersey.

Even reducing the numbers slightly because of those possibilities, however, Burkholder said the number of executions the data suggest is higher than previously estimated, in the low tens of thousands.

The deadliest atrocity associated with Saddam's government was the scorched-earth campaign known as the "Anfal", in which the government killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in Iraq's far north. Many were buried in mass graves far from home in the southern desert.

Another 60,000 people are believed to have been killed when Saddam violently suppressed rebellions by Shi'ite Muslims in the south and Kurds in the north at the close of the 1991 Gulf War.

Sandra Hodgkinson, director of the US-led occupation authority's human rights office, estimated that some 50,000 others were executed during Saddam's reign, including Kurds killed in chemical attacks and political prisoners sent to execution.

That 50,000 figure also would include prisoners killed in Baghdad.

The survey, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, was conducted in face-to-face interviews in Baghdad residents' homes from August 28 and September 4.

The people were selected at random from all geographic sectors of the Baghdad metropolitan area, and more than nine in 10 agreed to participate. That's at least double the response rate for many US telephone polls.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8110691^1702,00.html

[Woodrow]

Here's Bill Clinton talking about how he thinks we should go to war with Iraq:

http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/17/transcripts/clinton.iraq/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/#2

It's strange to me that none of these people disagreed with war with Iraq when Clinton was supporting it, but when Bush did, it's time to get the panties in a bunch.

[ecrazy]

Here's My Position:
I Dont Really Care If We Go To War....As long as I am not sent out there, and there are people that are volunteering themselves to go, well im all for them going if its for good reason...Im not really political or anything, only when it comes to economy stuff and taxes...i dont think i really have to worry bout anything else untill i get older (im only 18)....

[M Dogg™]

took long enough.

Anyways, the way both parties did it was different. Clinton HAD proof of weapons of mass distruction, Bush talked about it but never gave proof, Clinton went through the U.N., Bush just kicked in the door like a Texas cowboy, there are ways to go to war to get results, Bush didn't do that.