Psyche, Science, and Society

Statistical tools help guide responses to human rights crises

Science News discusses the complexities of using statistics to guide humanitarian responses, using the issue of estimating Iraq mortality as an example:

Humanitarian Statistics
Statistical tools help guide responses to human rights crises

Julie J. Rehmeyer

In late 2006, a statistical study of deaths that occurred after the invasion of Iraq ignited a storm of controversy. This Lancet study estimated that more than 650,000 additional Iraqis died during the invasion than would have at pre-invasion death rates, a vastly higher estimate than any previous. But in January, a World Health Organization study placed the number at about 150,000.

The conflicting findings highlight just how difficult it is to gather reliable information in a war zone. But they also show the increasing involvement of statisticians in informing responses to humanitarian crises. In addition to the work in Iraq, statisticians have gathered evidence that has aided in the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, guided reparations for the civil war in Sierra Leone, and helped determine the needs of Katrina survivors, among many other projects.

“You can go to a congressional hearing or an international war crimes tribunal and you can hear the stories,” says Lynn Lawry of the International Medical Corps. “But how many are we talking about? How many people are at risk? How many people are affected?”

Statisticians are well-suited to answer these questions because they have the tools to put together partial information into a global picture. For example, even if complete records can’t be gathered, a statistician can survey a small number of randomly chosen people affected by a crisis and infer from their experiences the likely impact on the population as a whole. For example, Jana Asher of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., developed an estimate of the rates of rape across Sierra Leone by determining how many women from a national sample had been raped.

But humanitarian crises pose huge challenges. Little information may be available—even from before a crisis—about how many people live where. Even if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated. Areas within continuing war zones can be unsafe for survey workers.

“When you have a displaced population that has been forced to flee their homes, all the traditional census methods really break down very badly,” says David Banks, a statistician at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “The refugees don’t have addresses. They’re wandering from one camp to another. Communication is poor.”

These challenges have to be met with very carefully designed protocols. For example, the Lancet study of Iraq, with the shockingly high mortality rates, was initially criticized for not surveying people who lived in back alleys because the areas were too dangerous for surveyors. Les Roberts, who was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore at the time but is now at Columbia University, and his collaborators on the study argued that the critics had misunderstood their randomization technique.

Random surveys are not the only useful statistical method. To tally the number of deaths related to the conflict in Timor-Leste, Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group combined incomplete datasets to generate a broader picture of events. The Indonesian military claimed that its occupation of Timor-Leste had caused no deaths. Many stories had been told of killings and famine, but Silva and Ball wanted solid evidence.

Along with gathering about 8,000 personal accounts conveyed to the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, Silva and Ball conducted a census of public graveyards including 319,000 gravestones and a survey of a random sample of 1,400 households about displacements and deaths. The researchers found that the different lines of evidence corroborated one another strongly, adding to the strength of each approach. In addition, Silva and Ball could observe how often names recurred across the different databases and get a much better estimate of the total number of deaths across the country.

They found that Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste from 1974 to 1999 led to more than 100,000 deaths beyond what would have been expected in peacetime, through a combination of direct killings, famine, and illness.

The conflicting studies in Iraq show just how tricky it is to apply these methods in messy real-life situations. About the Lancet study, Asher says, “I don’t think there was anything obvious in what they did that someone can point to and say this method is flawed. But the WHO study used appropriate methodology too.”

The most suspect part of the Lancet study, Asher says, is that the researchers didn’t supervise the survey workers closely. On the other hand, the World Health Organization relied on government workers to administer the questionnaires. People can be intimidated by government workers and be less inclined to say much, a phenomenon that is particularly common in unstable countries. The only way to resolve the conflict, Asher says, is to do yet another study, with an even more careful design.

If you would like to comment on this article, please see the blog version.

References:

Asher, J., D. Banks, and F.J. Scheuren, eds. 2008. Statistical Methods for Human Rights. New York: Springer. See www.springer.com/statistics/social/book/
978-0-387-72836-0.

Iraq Family Health Survey Study Group. 2008. Violence-related mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006. New England Journal of Medicine 358(Jan. 31):484-493. Available at http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/5/484.

Burnham, G. . . . and L. Roberts. 2006. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: A cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 368(Oct. 21):1421-1428. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9.

Silva, R., and P. Ball. 2006. The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-Leste, 1974–1999. A report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation of Timor-Leste. Available at www.hrdag.org/resources/timor_chapter_graphs/
timor_chapter_page_01.shtml.

March 31st, 2008

Coltrane: My Favorite Things

[h/t Crooks and Liars]

March 31st, 2008

Bennis: Iraqi Government Fails in Challenging al Sadr Militia

Phyllis Bennis provides further analysis of the current intra-Shia Iraq conflict:

Iraqi Government Fails in Challenging al Sadr Militia: “Surge” Exposed as Failure But New Dangers Rise

By Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies
30 March 2008

** The Iraqi government’s military offensive in Basra was designed to undermine Prime Minister al-Maliki’s major Shi’a political rival, Moktada al Sadr, but the offensive appears to have failed, and instead is strengthening Sadr’s forces and significantly weakening Bush administration strategy in Iraq.

** The inability of Iraqi government forces to defeat or even halt Sadr’s militia in Basra, Baghdad or elsewhere even with massive U.S. military support, and the resulting escalation of overall violence in Iraq, also proves the failure of the so-called “surge.”

** This power struggle between Maliki and Sadr is important because it represents Iraq’s linchpin fight between supporters and opponents of the U.S. occupation and the government kept in place by the occupation; it is particularly important in Basra because almost all of Iraq’s oil these days is exported through Basra.

** The current fighting escalates the danger of a U.S. attack on Iran, because the undeniable failure of the “surge” strategy makes it much harder for the Bush administration to continue claiming “victory” in Iraq.

*****

The Iraqi government’s U.S.-backed offensive that began on March 25 was not designed to go after “criminals” and was not limited to Basra. It was designed to eliminate the military and political power of Shi’a cleric Moqtada al Sadr, Maliki’s most powerful Shi’a rival, ahead of the provincial elections set for October. The U.S. knew about the planned attacks long ago, and has played a major role in the fighting; Britain has played some role as well. Large-scale desertions among government troops, especially in Baghdad, have been reported. Despite a curfew imposed on Baghdad, huge protests against the offensive broke out in the streets of the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. Direct U.S. involvement – including attacks by helicopter gunships (killing 78 “bad guys” on one day in Basra alone, according to the Pentagon), coordinating attacks and calling in air support – was acknowledged on the 28^th. But that support has been insufficient, and the U.S.- and UK-trained Iraqi government troops are still losing against Sadr’s forces. With Maliki having to be evacuated under fire from the Basra palace where he was “directing” the offensive, and the Iraqi government forces collapsing before the stronger Sadr forces, it is clear Maliki miscalculated his own capacity. As the BBC reported it, “Maliki binked first.”

Instead of strengthening the unpopular Maliki government, the offensive provides a very different “defining moment” than that Bush claimed. It showed that Maliki could not take on the Sadr forces either in Basra, or in Baghdad or a host of cities surrounding Baghdad. And Sadr’s decision on Sunday to call on his forces to stand down, thus reinstituting the ceasefire that he ordered last year but which had collapsed in the face of the Maliki-U.S. offensive, demonstrated once again that the recent decline in violence rested very much in Sadr’s hands. It wasn’t primarily the “surge” that brought about the dramatic decrease in violence from late spring of 2007 till about last November, but rather Sadr’s ceasefire – a choice that could, as recent actions show, be reversed at any time. Sadr’s very public demonstration of his power to unleash or rein in his military forces may well provide a new kind of “defining moment” indeed.

The surge was never the primary reason for the decline in violence. The combination of factors included Sadr’s ceasefire, the creation and paying off of the U.S.-backed and largely Sunni “awakening councils” (who are now accepting money not to attack occupation troops, but who could, like Sadr’s forces, reverse that decision at any point they choose), and finally the horrifying “success” of the ethnic cleansing that was the goal of so much of the violence. Especially in mixed areas such as most of Baghdad, the escalating sectarian violence of 2005-2006 into 2007 largely aimed to force people out of their heterogeneous neighborhoods and into separate Sunni or Shi’a communities. That has largely been accomplished, with much of Baghdad’s population (those who haven’t fled altogether…) now having been forcibly herded into walled-off enclaves kept separate by armed sectarian militias. So the raison d’être of the brutal violence that created that new sectarian reality has ended.

The recent offensive by Maliki’s Shi’a-dominated government troops against their Shi’a rivals was not just one more example of jockeying for power or influence within the Shi’a community. Political fighting has been going on within and among Shi’a communities including both sectarian organizations and Shi’a components of secular or national forces, since the U.S. invasion. This offensive was a specific effort to use the power of the U.S.-trained, U.S.-armed Iraqi army to destroy Moqtada al Sadr’s militia, and thus undermine his political power, once and for all. That effort has failed.

There is particular significance, beyond demonstrating the weakness and unpopularity of the Maliki government even among fellow Shi’a, of the failure of this offensive. One is that a majority of Iraq’s exported oil today is sent from Basra into the Persian Gulf and out into the world. With Maliki’s influence collapsing and Sadr consolidating his hold on Basra, control of oil and the revenue it brings will be much more difficult for the weakened Maliki government. Second, Sadr represents one of the most powerful voices in Iraq against the occupation. It is that political choice – between support for and opposition to the U.S. occupation – that is at stake in this fight. A clear victory by Sadr’s forces – even if the offensive ends with the reinstatement of the cease-fire at Sadr’s own choosing – will strengthen the national mobilization against the U.S. occupation and the Maliki government that it props up.

The current offensive also holds significant dangers in the region. The Bush administration moved early in the offensive to declare it a “defining moment.” General Petraeus is scheduled to come to Washington on April 8 -9, to brief Bush and to reassure congress and the people that “the surge” is working. But in the face of an incontrovertible failure of Maliki’s surge-backed army, that will not be easy. If they had waited, they might have chosen to respond to Maliki’s failure by attempting to diminish the significance of the offensive overall. But having already staked out a position on its importance, the consequences of the offensive’s failure for Bush’s position could be dire. U.S. desperation is evident in the words of Lt. Col. Steve Stover, military spokesman in Baghdad. Describing the 78 unidentified Iraqi “bad guys” the U.S. admitted killing in Basra, where they probably lived, the occupation forces’ mouthpiece said, “They are violating the rule of law. They are firing rockets indiscriminately. They are criminals and terrorists, and they deserve to die.”

There is a rising danger that ideologues in the White House, driven by unilateralism and militarism as points of principle and led by Dick Cheney, could use this moment to escalate or even implement military threats towards Iran – hoping to thereby distract Americans from their failing Iraq policy. Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East, ostensibly talking to Israeli and Palestinian leaders about the so-called “peace process.” She may have another agenda as well; Cheney’s regional “peace process” visit last week primarily focused on pressing Arab governments to back U.S. threats against Iran. (In fact the day after Cheney left Riyadh, the Saudi and Arab Gulf press announced that the Saudi government’s powerful Shura council would “secretly discuss national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors.” Even if that report is factually false, its deliberate announcement in the government-controlled press indicates unease among Bush’s top Arab allies.) We should be watching for any deliberate provocation aimed at Iran, or even a completely false Tonkin Gulf-style “incident” which might be designed as a pretext to military strikes against Iran.

1 comment March 31st, 2008

NYT reports Mahdi Army in complete control of Basra

A New York Times article by Iraqi reporter Qais Mizher describes his visit to Basra from Thursday through Saturday. He makes it clear that the Mahdi Army was in near complete control and that the “government” did not have total control of any areas. No wonder the “government” agreed to stand down:

Firsthand Look at Basra Shows Value of White Flag

By Qais Mizher

BASRA, Iraq — I walked, ran and crawled into central Basra on Thursday, constantly dropping to the ground because of gun battles between Mahdi Army militiamen and the Iraqi Army and the police.

The rest of my stay in the city went like this: On Friday evening, the hotel I had somehow found open was showered with bullets, smashing glass on several floors and knocking pieces out of the stone facade. The next morning, Iraqi Interior Ministry forces in a part of the city they supposedly controlled were ambushed with heavy weapons at a hotel 50 yards from mine. On Sunday morning, after I had hired someone to drive me out of the city, an Iraqi soldier fired at our tires but missed. We did not stop.

Iraqi forces started their assault on the Shiite militias in Basra on Tuesday. Whatever the initial goal of the operation, by the time I arrived in Basra it was a patchwork of neighborhoods that were either deserted or overrun by Mahdi fighters. There were scattered Iraqi Army and police checkpoints, but no place seemed to be truly under government control.

Early last week, when the assault started, I happened to be in Diwaniya, another southern city, as part of my work as a reporter and translator for The New York Times.

Calling on my experience as a captain in the Iraqi Army before the 2003 invasion and essentially a war correspondent since then, I headed to Basra to see if I could make my way into the city and see what was happening there.

Traveling anywhere was difficult because of the violence that the Basra fighting had caused all over the Shiite south and the curfews that the government had imposed. Somehow I made it to Nasiriya, about 100 miles northwest of Basra, and persuaded a taxi driver with a GMC truck to take me to Basra.

The driver knew the road well. He took the old highway south; he knew that a checkpoint at a small town along the way would not let anyone through. So he turned off the road and drove several miles through the open desert to another road, and continued south.

That is when we started to see terrible signs of the conflict in Basra. I counted about 20 civilian cars coming north with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. My driver and I were unsure about the road ahead, so we flagged down a family driving in the opposite direction. As we did so, a woman in the passenger seat began frantically waving a piece of white cloth — a white flag — out her window.

It turned out that she was terrified that we might be members of the Mahdi Army, who she said had put bombs and snipers all along the road where the family had just passed. Once we calmed her down, she suggested another way.

Before we drove off, my driver had an important thought, asking the woman: “Could you give us your flag? You left the city, and you don’t need it anymore.”

She kept her flag but gave us another piece of white sheet. We used it often. At one point, we passed a huge plume of smoke at a place where a major oil pipeline had been bombed. We drove slowly into what looked like a deserted city, and at a certain point my driver refused to go any farther. I said fine and got out, but before I left he had one request: could he have the white flag?

I tore it down the middle and gave him half.

Somehow I found another driver to take me within a couple miles of the city center, which I had been told government forces controlled. When that driver would go no farther, I had to walk, but by then I saw trucks filled with Mahdi Army members speeding through the streets wearing black masks and carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades.

Gun battles broke out unpredictably, so I ran or walked when it was quiet, then dropped down and sought cover when I could hear shooting. After 45 minutes or so, I came upon the Rumaila Hotel in a central neighborhood called Ashar. Amazingly, it was open, with six or seven guests inside and a couple of employees. I was so exhausted I didn’t think twice, just checked in.

The next day I moved around as much as I could. The common observation was this: There was nowhere the Mahdi either did not control or could not strike at will.

I am not sure what gunfight poured bullets onto the hotel on Friday. I just heard the gunfire and the windows shattering; as far as I know, no one in the hotel was hurt.

On Saturday I was talking with a colleague on my cellphone when a gun battle started right outside the hotel. It was so loud I couldn’t hear the voice on the other end of the line anymore. I dived into a corner of my room and waited for it to end.

A while after the shooting stopped, some other residents of the hotel and I went outside. The street was littered with the shells of heavy machine guns where the Mahdi Army had fired toward another hotel, the Meerbad, where Ministry of Interior officials were staying, perhaps 50 yards away. We could see their pickup trucks, now full of bullet holes, in the parking lot of the hotel.

I decided to leave Basra. I took the white flag with me.

This article was reported by Qais Mizher in Basra and written by James Glanz in Baghdad.

March 31st, 2008

60-Minutes interviews another US torture victim

60 Minutes last night carried an interview with German citizen Murat Kurnaz, who was picked up in Pakistan at age 19, sold to the US, and tortured. Even though the US and German intelligence cleared him of any involvement in “terrorism,” he was held for 3 1/2 more years.

Here is his interview:

Here is a summary:

Ex-Terror Detainee Says U.S. Tortured Him
Tells 60 Minutes He Was Held Underwater, Shocked, And Suspended From the Ceiling

At the age of 19, Murat Kurnaz vanished into America’s shadow prison system in the war on terror. He was from Germany, traveling in Pakistan, and was picked up three months after 9/11. But there seemed to be ample evidence that Kurnaz was an innocent man with no connection to terrorism. The FBI thought so, U.S. intelligence thought so, and German intelligence agreed. But once he was picked up, Kurnaz found himself in a prison system that required no evidence and answered to no one.

The story Kurnaz told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley is a rare look inside that clandestine system of justice, where the government’s own secret files reveal that an innocent man lost his liberty, his dignity, his identity, and ultimately five years of his life.

---

60 Minutes found Murat Kurnaz in Bremen, Germany, where he was born and raised. His parents emigrated there from Turkey. His father works in the Mercedes factory. Kurnaz wasn’t particularly religious growing up, but in 2001 he was marrying a Turkish girl who was. And he decided to learn more about Islam.”I didn’t know how to pray. I didn’t know anything,” Kurnaz says. “So I had to study more about Islam so I could go to the mosque and pray.”

In Bremen, he met Islamic missionaries who urged him to go to Pakistan for study. As he was planning the trip, 9/11 happened. He told 60 Minutes he was horrified by the attacks, and had never heard of al Qaeda. He decided to go ahead with his trip anyway.

“You went to Pakistan several weeks after 9/11,” Pelley remarks. “Did you begin to think that that wasn’t a great idea?”

“Today, I know it wasn’t a great idea,” Kurnaz says.

Kurnaz told 60 Minutes his story using the English that he learned from his American guards. If he seems a little distant, reserved, you’ll understand why as his story unfolds. It begins in 2001, when he was at the end of that trip to Pakistan. He was headed to the airport to fly home to Germany when his bus was stopped at a routine checkpoint.

“They stopped the bus and because of my color, I’m much more different than Pakistani guys,” says Kurnaz, who is lighter-skinned. “He looked into the bus and he knocked on my window.”

“He” was a Pakistani cop who pulled Kurnaz off the bus. The reason Kurnaz was singled out may always be a mystery. But at the time, the U.S. was paying bounties for suspicious foreigners. Kurnaz, who’d been rambling across Pakistan with Islamic pilgrims, seemed to fit the bill. Kurnaz says that he was told that U.S. intelligence paid $3,000 for him. He ended up bound and shackled on an American military plane.

“I was sure soon as they would find out I’m not a terrorist, they will apologize for it and let me go back home,” he says.

But the plane flew him out of Pakistan and to a U.S. base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where he was mixed with prisoners fresh off the battlefield. His new identity was “number 53.” He was kept in an outdoor pen, in sub-freezing weather and interrogated daily.

“They asked me, ‘Where is Osama bin Laden,’ and if I am from al Qaeda or from Taliban. Questions like that. I told them, ‘I don’t know where is Osama bin Laden, I never saw him and I don’t know anything about al Qaeda. I don’t know what it is.’ And I spent all my time in Pakistan,” he says.

Asked what happened next, Kurnaz says, “I told them just they can call Germany to ask who I am and they can ask anybody in Germany who I am.”

Back in Germany, Bremen police were investigating, and what they were hearing made matters worse: Kurnaz’s worried mother told them her son had recently become more religious, had grown a beard and was attending a new mosque; schoolmates said that Kurnaz might have been headed to Afghanistan.

“It was just guessing, just fear, no more. But the fear turns into a fact,” says attorney Bernhard Docke, who was hired by Kurnaz’s mother.

He says there was no reason to suspect Kurnaz knew anything about al Qaeda. But this was weeks after 9/11 and some of the hijackers had been living in Hamburg. “And so close after 9/11, and close after Germany realized that 9/11 started with the Hamburg cell in Germany, everybody in the secret services got crazy,” Docke says.

Docke says the police report was sent to the Americans. And Kurnaz claims his interrogations at Kandahar turned to torture. He told 60 Minutes that American troops held his head underwater.“They used to beat me when my head is underwater. They beat me into my stomach and everything,” he says.

“They were hitting you in the stomach while you’re head was underwater so that you’d have to take a breath?” Pelley asks,

“Right. I had to drink. I had to…how you say it?” Kurnaz replies.

“Inhale. Inhale the water,” Pelley says.

“I had to inhale the water. Right,” Kurnaz says.

Kurnaz says the Americans used a device to shock him with electricity that made his body go numb. And he says he was hoisted up on chains suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.

“Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,” Kurnaz says.

“The point of the doctor’s visit was not to treat you. It was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?” Pelley asks.

“Right,” Kurnaz says.

“I suspect you know that the U.S. military will deny this happened. The U.S. military will deny that you were shocked. It will deny your head was held in a bucket of water. It will deny that you hung from a ceiling for days at a time,” Pelley remarks.

“Doesn’t matter whatever they will say. The truth will not change,” Kurnaz says.

“And you’re telling me in this interview that this is the truth?” Pelley asks.

“This is the truth,” Kurnaz insists.

Kurnaz isn’t alone in these allegations: other freed prisoners have described electric shocks at Kandahar, and even U.S. troops have admitted beating prisoners who were hanging by their arms. Kurnaz’s story fits a pattern.

After six weeks in Afghanistan, Kurnaz was loaded onto another plane, this time bound for Guantanamo. The Pentagon labeled the prisoners “unlawful enemy combatants.” They didn’t have the rights of prisoners of war and were beyond the reach of any court.

At Guantanamo Kurnaz says he endured endless months of interrogations, beatings at the hands of soldiers in riot gear, and physical cruelty which included going without sleep for weeks and solitary confinement for up to a month in cells that were sealed without ventilation or were set up to punish him with extreme conditions.“It’s dark inside. No lights. And they can punish you in isolation by coldness or by the heat. They have special air conditioners over there. Very strong. They can turn it very cold or very hot,” Kurnaz says.

He says it went on year after year, always the same questions about al Qaeda, and the endless effort to break his will. He heard nothing from the outside and wondered whether anyone knew that he was there.

Then, in 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo prisoners did have the right to lawyers. And to his complete surprise, one day Kurnaz was told he had a visitor. It was Baher Azmy, an American lawyer.

“He was chained to a bolt in the floor around his ankle,” Azmy says, recalling his first meeting with Kurnaz. “And had an absolutely enormous beard that had marked the years that he was in detention. He looked like someone who had been shipwrecked, which, of course, in a sense, he really was.”

Azmy is a professor at the Seton Hall Law School. He dug into the case and found that the military seemed to have invented some of the charges. Military prosecutors said one of Kurnaz’s friends was a suicide bomber, but the friend turned up alive and well in Germany.

“How could they have gotten that so wrong? I mean, you’re either a suicide bomber or you’re not. There’s no in between,” Pelley remarks.

“This goes to the utter preposterousness of the government’s legal process that they established in Guantanamo, this tribunal system that was supposed to differentiate from enemy combatant and civilian. So in order to justify that he was an enemy combatant, they simply made up an allegation about someone he was associated with,” Azmy says.

But far worse than the false charges was the secret government file that Azmy uncovered.

Six months after Kurnaz reached Guantanamo, U.S. military intelligence had written, “criminal investigation task force has no definite link [or] evidence of detainee having an association with al Qaeda or making any specific threat toward the U.S.”

At the same time, German intelligence agents wrote their government, saying, “USA considers Murat Kurnaz’s innocence to be proven. He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks.”

But Azmy says Kurnaz was kept at Guantanamo Bay for three and a half years after this memo was written in 2002.

They kept him, Kurnaz says, by inventing new charges. In a makeshift courthouse, Kurnaz claims that a military judge charged that Kurnaz had been picked up near Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Ironic, since it was the U.S. that flew him to Afghanistan to begin with.“Have you ever in your legal career run across anything like this?” Pelley asks Baher Azmy.

“In my legal career, no,” Azmy says. “But in Guantanamo, no detainee has ever been able to genuinely present evidence before a neutral judge. And so as absurd as Murat Kurnaz’s case is, I assure you there are many, many dozens just as tenuous.”

And a U.S. federal judge agreed. She ruled the Guantanamo military tribunals violated the prisoners’ right to a defense, and she singled out Kurnaz’s case as an example.

60 Minutes asked the Department of Defense to talk to us about Kurnaz. Instead they sent 60 Minutes a statement, calling his allegations “unsubstantiated” and “outlandish,” adding that claims that the U.S. military “engaged in regular and systematic torture of detainees cannot withstand even the slightest scrutiny.” The statement didn’t address why Kurnaz was held to begin with. (Click here to read the full Department of Defense statement.)

The break in Kurnaz’s case came when the German chancellor asked President Bush for his release. In August 2006, a plane came to take Kurnaz home. On the way out he was asked to sign a confession his captors had written for him saying he’d been al Qaeda all along. He refused. On the plane he was chained and surrounded by soldiers. But by the end of the flight, he was free.

“There’s a picture of you hugging your mother. Tell me about that moment,” Pelley asks.

“She wouldn’t let me go. She wouldn’t let me, anymore. She just hugged me. Of course, she was so happy, she cried. And I would go to my father and my brothers, also, but she didn’t let me. And they had to wait,” Kurnaz remembers.

He was 19 when he went in, 24 when he returned to Bremen. His wife had divorced him. Kurnaz has written a book, just translated into English called “Five Years Of My Life.” And he told 60 Minutes he wanted to visit the United States, but can’t because the U.S. still considers him to be an unlawful enemy combatant.

March 31st, 2008

Sadr statement on ceasefire

McClatchy has more information on the Iraq ceasefire. It seems that members of the governing coalition went to Iran and negotiated with al Sadr behind Prime Minister Maliki’s back. Thanks to Juan Cole, here is the statement they agreed upon:

(Begins with passage from Koran)

“If two parties of believers have started a fight then try reconciliation between them but if one side was insisting on attacking the other then fight the attackers until they obey God’s law then do reconciliation according to God’s justice.”

Starting from the Sharia responsibility and to save precious Iraqi blood, the reputation of the Iraqi people, the unity of land and people and to prepare for the independence and liberation from armies of darkness and to put down the fire of sedition that the occupiers and their followers want to ignite among the Iraqi brethren, we are asking the Beloved Iraqi people to be on the level of responsibility and Sharia awareness of saving blood, Iraq and its stability and independence.

We have decided the following:

1. Cancel the armed manifestation in Basra and all over the governorates.

2. Stopping the illegal and random raids and arrests.

3. Demanding the government to apply the General Amnesty law and release all the prisoners that was not proved to be guilty and especially the prisoners of Sadr movement.

4. We announce our innocence from any one who caries the weapon and target the government and services apparatuses and establishments and parties offices.

5. Cooperating with the government apparatuses in achieving security and condemn criminals according to the legal procedures.

6. We assure that the Sadr movement doesn’t have any heavy weapons.

7. Working on returning the displaced people that moved due to security events to their original places.

8. We are asking the government to take care of the Human rights on all of its procedures.

9. Working on achieving the constructional and services projects all over the governorates.

[Signed and stamped Muqtada Sadr 22/Rabi Awal/1429]

March 31st, 2008