iraq

X-Rated Film Boom In Iraq: April 27, 2005

“Twenty-five-year-old Nawzad was looking at a poster advertising a racy Turkish film. After 15 minutes of staring at the poster, which featured sex scenes, he went to the al-Rasheed cinema counter and bought a movie ticket. ”I’m a young unmarried man and I’m not in a relationship,“ said Nawzad, who declined to give his full name. ”It’s my second time here to watch this film.“ Movies featuring sex scenes and nudity are becoming more popular across Iraq because of the end of Saddam-era censorship, when officials would regularly visit cinemas to make sure they were not showing porn and other banned films. But because Sulaimaniyah is free of religious extremists and other militants - who target liquor stores and other ”immoral“ commercial enterprises in other parts of Iraq - business is even more brisk. Noori Jameel al-Madfa'i, general manager of the al-Rasheed cinema, said his most popular films are those with sex scenes. He shows these titles three to four days a week, with 150-200 people turning up for each viewing. He said his customers are men between the ages of 17 and 45. ”We can show any film in the hall, as there is no censorship of films from any government parties,“ he said.”
[Institute for War & Peace Reporting]

“Shocking and Awful” [Deep Dish TV]: March, 2005

“'Shocking and awful' is the way many people view the current situation in Iraq and the United States. The war continues to take its toll on Iraqi civilians, international aid workers, journalists and U.S. troops. Here at home we are seeing how waging a ”perpetual war“ is affecting our own lives as well. Deep Dish TV has collected and produced thirteen programs about the war and the occupation, which are being distributed to communities all over the United States on Free Speech TV and on community access channels. These programs address the implications and consequences of this country’s recent military actions. The series also shows how people are mobilizing through art, actions, and international law.

SHOCKING AND AWFUL was produced by independent video activists who do not buy into the lies, who are not cowed by the threats, who believe that building a just world is the way to combat terror. They are speaking out and organizing to counter the waves of propaganda and deceit that continue to dominate the mainstream airwaves.”
[Deep Dish TV]

Saudi Law To Jail Phone Porn Users: April 16, 2005

“Anyone using camera phones to distribute pornography may face up to 1000 lashes, a 12-year jail term and a 100,000 riyal ($26,670) fine under a proposed Saudi Arabian law, newspapers have reported. The law comes after a Saudi court in January sentenced three men to jail and up to 1200 lashes each for orchestrating and filming the rape of a teenage girl using telephones equipped with cameras and distributing the footage via the telephones. The conservative Muslim kingdom’s consultative 150-member Shura council was expected to endorse the new law soon, local newspapers said on Saturday. The state telecommunications regulator this year warned against using third generation (3G) mobile phones for immoral purposes. The 3G mobile phones can access the internet, which is strictly controlled in Saudi Arabia, and receive high-quality video clips from adult sites.”
[AlJazeera]

A “Sim” That's Dead Serious“: April 13, 2005

“Gator Six is more dazzling than a PowerPoint presentation, yet not quite a video game. It’s a collection of 260 video clips on two CDs that, in essence, serve as an interactive film of the Iraq war. It represents a small shift in how the military girds its leaders. It’s divided into three phases: pre-deployment (How do you say goodbye to your spouse?); rolling into combat (Do you leave a broken-down ammo truck on the side of the road?); and transition to a post-conflict environment (Do you involve the local interpreter in your planning?). There are different possible outcomes for most of the scenarios: Take this road instead of that one, for example, and you’ll lose precious time. For today’s technologically savvy U.S. captain — versed in video games, instant messaging, e-mail — Gator Six is an ideal ”sim,“ military-speak for simulation.

Sims are a part of life now. Everybody’s playing some kind of simulated reality, from popular culture to mapping political outcomes to still dreaming of virtual sex. Think of the potential pilots training with flight simulators. Think of the 11-year-old fifth-grader who spends her entire weekend playing The Sims online. Gator Six was created with captains — the Army’s middle managers — in mind. Still, officials at Fort Sill, the Army’s field artillery center, say the sim is being shown up and down the chain: from majors to second lieutenants. The military has been using sims since before World War II, with some of the early flight simulations pioneered in the 1930s. Right up to the post-Cold War era, the Air Force and the Navy were sim geeks. Troops needed to be trained in operating equipment, and sims were mostly vehicle-centric — the big tanks, the big helicopters, the big submarines. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Then came the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today’s soldiers still need to operate the Bradleys and Humvees, but they also need to maintain stability, restore infrastructure, promote the merits of democracy after elections. To a surprising degree, military officials say, complex decisions are falling on low-level officers. As Iraq has brutally shown, fighting a war on the ground also means struggling to win the peace. It’s easy to teach soldiers how to fire a weapon, these officials say, but how do you teach them to win the confidence of a neighborhood? This is a sim of judgment calls. There is no right or wrong answer. There’s only a particular situation — as a captain, what will you do about it? Gator Six was designed with the help of 20 veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Dave Henderson, deputy director of the Directorate of Training and Doctrine at Fort Sill, commissioned a Potomac company, Will Interactive, to develop it. Henderson is regarded as the sim god of the base. ”Gator Six teaches captains not what to think but how to think,“ he says. ”That’s a critical distinction.“
[Washington Post]

2005 Pulitzer Prize Winners: April, 2005

Pulitzer Prize winning photography for 2005 in the category of “breaking news story.”

Text Messaging Is New Tool Of Political Underground: March 29, 2005

“...cell phone text messaging has become a powerful underground channel of free and often impolite speech, especially in the oil-rich Persian Gulf monarchies, where mobile phones are common but candid public talk about politics is not. Demonstrators use text messaging to mobilize followers, dodge authorities and swarm quickly to protest sites. Candidates organizing for the region's limited elections use text services to call supporters to the polls or slyly circulate candidate slates in countries that supposedly ban political groupings. And through it all, anonymous activists blast their adversaries with thousands of jokes, insults and political limericks. [...] At about 40 cents per missive, text messaging can be an expensive way to mobilize the masses, but the Gulf countries are lightly populated and afloat on record oil revenue. With political debate at a fever pitch this year, many of the region's well-heeled activists find it hard to resist the chance to compose their own uncensored statements and deliver their political wisdom to targeted audiences. [...] Text messaging is only the latest in a wave of border-hopping communication technologies to rewire patterns of Arab dissent during the past 15 years. Saudi exiles and Islamic activists waged an underground war of faxed pamphlets during the early and mid-1990s. Satellite television channels transformed the images and ideas available to Arab viewers during the same period. More recently, CDs, DVDs and the World Wide Web have dominated underground political publishing in the Gulf. As each new technology has spread, the region's authoritarian governments have tried to fight back. They have sent censors to license fax machines and block dissident Web sites, and they have pushed government-friendly investors to buy and manage satellite channels. But the Gulf's monarchies have not yet figured out whether or how to control text message channels.”
[Washington Post]

BBC Doc On Fallujah From January, 2005: “City of Ghosts”: April, 2005

“Two months after the US launched its biggest ever assault on Fallujah, what exactly happened inside the city has, until now, remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, Guardian films reveals the true story. It was billed as a resounding military success. Over 1,200 insurgents were meant to have been killed and another 2,000 trapped inside Fallujah. But now this version of events is being challenged. Far from being crushed, rebels claim they left the city in an organised withdrawal. ”It was a tactical move,“ explains insurgent leader Alazaim Abuthe. ”The fighters decided to redeploy to Amiriya.“ Before they left, fighters booby-trapped many bodies. People are too scared to move them so the corpses lie rotting all over the city. Rabid dogs feed off them and then attack returning residents. Far from stabilising Iraq in preparation for this month’s election, the assault on Falluja has fanned the flames of civil war. Today Fallujans are too busy trying to stay alive in freezing refugee camps to worry about ballot papers that haven’t arrived for an election they have no intention of voting in. As one resident comments, ”We’re not interested in this sort of democracy.“”
[View clip at Journeyman Pictures]
[Above quotation from Guardian Films; original link lost]

Iraq's New TV Hit: “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice”: March, 2005

Iraq’s wildly popular new television hit features a nightly parade of men, most with bruised faces, confessing to all kinds of terrorist and criminal acts. ‘’Terrorism in the Hands of Justice“ is the Iraqi government’s slick new propaganda tool; its televised confessions, police say, aim to discredit the armed resistance and advertise the government’s success at cracking down on gangs. If it is meant to showcase a brave new Iraq, the television show is starkly reminiscent of the bad, old Iraq. Part ‘’Oprah Winfrey Show” and part ‘’Cops“ — with a strong flavor of Saddam Hussein-era strong-arming — the show airs six nights a week on the state-run Iraqiya network. Since its debut a month ago, ”Terrorism“ has become a fixture in Iraq’s cafes and living rooms. Iraqi government officials brag that the show has ruined the image of jihad, or holy war, in the country, exposing the resistance as a racket of street criminals and thugs who attack Americans and Iraqi security forces for pay.

It also raises a host of questions about Iraq’s treatment of the suspects and the reliability of their confessions. The bruised, swollen faces and hunched shoulders of many of the suspects suggest they have been beaten or tortured. The neat confessions of terrorist attacks at times fit together so seamlessly as to seem implausible. And the suspects are presented to the public without any legal process to protect them, presumed guilty, with no word about rule of law as a weapon in the arsenal against terrorism. US officials have sidestepped questions about the program airing on Iraqiya, a network still run by an American contractor hired by US occupation officials nearly a year ago. There is no question, however, about the program’s popularity and wide reach. Men at cafes debate the details of certain gang members from ”Terrorism.“ Others interrupt soliloquies about recently murdered relatives to declare: ‘’I expect to see his killers on TV.” The show aims to change the minds of Iraqis who see insurgents as noble, patriotic Muslims. [...] ''Previously Iraqi people saw the resistance as fighting the occupation,“ Abdurahman said. ''But when people saw how they talk, and the details of their actions, they became despicable in the eyes of Iraqi society. They're not resistance. None of them say they are fighting Americans. They are killing Iraqi National Guard and Iraqi police, only Iraqis.”

In the show’s opening montage, the theme song from ‘’1492: Conquest of Paradise“ by Vangelis plays over images of hooded members of Tawhid and Jihad about to execute an American hostage in an orange jumpsuit, a bloodied corpse, and finally two smiling Iraqi children holding paper signs that say ‘’No to Terrorism.” Then a police special forces trooper in camouflage uniform and a red beret extols the work of ‘’our brave, noble Iraqi law enforcement brothers.“ Who are the perpetrators of the daily bombings and ambushes that have killed hundreds of civilians, Iraqi police, and soldiers? According to the taped confessions, the answer is, essentially: lowlifes. The fighters almost never describe themselves as patriots or holy warriors; they say they fight for pay. Many of the men admit to homosexual acts, considered particularly shameful in Iraqi culture. They frequently admit to rape and pedophilia, and clips often end with the unseen interrogator excoriating the detainee for having no honor.

On a recent episode, alleged members of an insurgent cell from Mahmoudiya — a town south of Baghdad in the dangerous ‘’Triangle of Death” — admitted to murdering and raping several Iraqis. A man who identified himself as Azawi Hassan Azawi said the leader of a criminal cell induced him to kidnap and kill a young boy by offering Azawi his sister in marriage. Another man, identified as Hassan Mahdi Hassan al-Kafaji, said he used to fight in the Saddam Fedayeen militia. After the war he joined Tawhid and Jihad, the jihad group led by Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as a killer for hire; he said he pops pills before each mission. ‘’They pay me $100 or $150 for each person I slay,“ Kafaji said Talal Ra’ad Ismail al-Abassi came next; he said he led an insurgent cell in Mosul. According to the interrogator, Abassi had been imam of a mosque but was fired by religious authorities under Hussein for having sex with men inside his mosque. Abassi said his group had killed a dozen Iraqi ‘’collaborators” — once a leader can claim 10 kills, he becomes an ‘’emir,“ or prince — to earn $1,500 a month from Saudi financiers of the insurgency. ‘’I do not believe in jihad in Iraq,” Abassi told the camera. ‘’It was important for my group to kill enough people that I could become an emir and get the $1,500 salary.“ [...]

''Our work is being appreciated. That's the biggest objective,” [police colonel] said. ''People are demanding that the cruelest punishment be inflicted on those shown on TV.“
[Boston Globe]

Video Clips of Confessions from Al-Iraqiya TV's “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice”: March, 2005

The Middle East Media Research Institute TV Monitor Project has posted several clips from Al-Iraqiya TV's “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice”:

[MEMRI TV]

Transcript of Confession on Iraq's “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice” TV Show: March 18, 2005

March 14, 2005 edition of “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice” on Iraqi TV:

Theme music: Vangelis' score from “1492: Conquest of Paradise.”
Opening shot: A web capture of Tawhid and Jihad about to execute an American hostage in an orange jumpsuit.

Title displayed: “Terrorism in the Hands of Justice.”
Next two shots: Bloodied corpses
Fourth shot: A suspect on the show confessing
Fifth shot: Two smiling Iraqi children on street
Sixth shot: A smiling mother holds a baby
Seventh shot: Two children hold up a sign that reads “Down with terrorism.''
Show starts: The suspect is named Mohammed, from Mosul.
Mohammed: ”The fifth operation, we kidnapped two girls from the university, and had fun with them. We took them to Dora (a neighborhood in Mosul), and had fun with them, and then we slaughtered them.“
Interrogator: Mohammed, I want you to say out loud the information about your family.
Mohammed: Well, sir, mother used to be a pimp. My family is not honorable. ... Our other colleagues had sex with us.
Interrogator: You have sexual abnormality.
Mohammed: Yes sir.
Interrogator: You have no manhood. Let the mujahedeen see who has ruined the reputation of jihad.
[Boston Globe, includes video]