Houssam Azzam was 17 in 2004 when the U.S. military took over his hometown of Fallujah and detained him as part of a roundup of young men in western Iraq.
His photo, fingerprints, and iris scans were entered into a database, alongside a trove of information about him and his family, even though he said he was only ever involved in peaceful protests against the U.S. presence.
"They were occupying forces. They violated an entire country's rights so of course they would violate an individual's human rights," he said, referring to the U.S. retaining his biometric data.
The photo U.S. forces snapped of the 17-year-old detainee flashed up on the screen at customs, alongside his biometrics, when Azzam, who runs a Fallujah-based NGO, traveled through Baghdad airport last year.
Harvesting the data of millions of Iraqis, like Azzam, was part of the U.S. military's quest for "identity dominance," a term coined by John Woodward, director of the Department of Defense's Biometrics Management Office from 2003-05.
The program led to the biometrics of nearly 3 million Iraqis being stored in a database in West Virginia — where they are still held 20 years later. U.S. military planners saw biometrics as a key tool to fight the insurgency in Iraq and keep U.S. bases safe. Twenty years after the 2003 invasion, the program is held up as an example of how to use biometrics to tackle security threats.
Why? All these years later, so many questions still unanswered about the ongoing Iraq War.
Lisa Ling and Clare Bayard (COMMON DREAMS) write
How did we get here? 20 years after the U.S.-led invasion of the sovereign nation of Iraq, we still refuse to reckon with the last decades of war as yet another decade of violence unfolds. Since the invasion, tens of thousands if not over a million lives have been lost. Millions of Iraqis are still displaced, while tens of millions have endured relentless violence ever since the destabilization of their country beginning in the 1990s through bombing, sanctions, multiple military invasions, and the occupation that began in 2003.
We share these reflections as two antimilitarist organizers in the U.S. who met years after the invasion through our shared work with About Face Veterans Against War (formerly known as Iraq Veterans Against the War). Twenty years ago this weekend, one of us was deployed as a communications technician and heard nothing about the massive protests the other participated in. One of us was organizing with Direct Action to Stop the War, coordinating twenty thousand people to shut down San Francisco's financial district, in an attempt to raise the financial and social cost of invasion that was being steamrolled through despite the largest global street protests in the history of the world.
We know the war on Iraq—like the war on Afghanistan—was a calculated grift for money and power. We can't allow the truth to be manipulated or forgotten. George W. Bush is being reanimated as a folksy painter instead of brought to account for his administration's war crimes. His creation of the so-called "Endless Wars" after 9/11 has so far cost incalculable damage to peoples' lives and over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending. Up to half of that massive amount has piped directly into the pockets of private military contractors.
Those who seek profit from wars rely on our consent, our confusion about what's really happening, and our willingness to submit to historical amnesia. The only voices allowed to speak on large platforms about this 20-year milestone are the ones attempting to rewrite history in favor of the architects and beneficiaries of war. A former speechwriter for Bush wants you to buy that the U.S. "went to war to build a democracy in Iraq," but listen instead to Iraqis like Riverbend (the pen name of a young Baghdadi woman writing during the early years of the occupation) who told us the truth at the time:
"You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq's first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile."
Even now in Iraq, everyday people still struggle daily for the bare minimum. As the nonpartisan Iraqi diaspora group Collective Action for Iraq recently described, "People have continued taking to the streets across Iraq to protest corruption, for basic services and to live their lives in dignity—from Kurdistan, to Najaf, and Dhi Qar. State and local security forces continue to respond with violence and the suppression of dissident voices." These are only a few effects of the cascade of violence triggered by the U.S. occupation.
They write with some awareness and then they blow it later on by bringing up reparations. When a friend at the Center for Constitutional Rights tried to pimp their nonsense this week, I told him, if we were face-to-face, I'd slap you.
And I meant it.
I'm not in the mood for the stupidity.
We have talked about this over and over since idiots first wanted to dismiss the guilt by writing a check.
That's all it is.
If it were genuinely about helping the Iraqi people, they wouldn't offer such stupidity.
Where would the money go? To the Iraqi government? The corrupt Iraqi government that doesn't represent the people? And we're going to count on it -- a bunch of people who have already ripped millions and millions of dollars from the Iraqi people -- to distribute it?
Oh, okay, we'll get it to the Iraqi people themselves.
How?
Are we going to set up a location in Baghdad where they'll come in and get a check? Don't see that happening but, if it did, I'm sure we'd farm it out (outsource) to Iraqi officials or corrupt contractors and I don't see the money getting into the hands of the average Iraqis, the ones who really need it.
I'm also, honestly, offended that people talk about the US government paying Iraqis for their suffering and don't take a moment to note the blood money -- a pittance -- that the US government has paid throughout the war.
November 2003, Rory McCarthy (GUARDIAN) reported:
The US military has paid out $1.5m (£907,000) to Iraqi civilians in response to a wave of negligence and wrongful death claims filed against American soldiers, the Guardian has learned.
Families have come forward with accounts of how American soldiers shot dead or seriously wounded unarmed Iraqi civilians with no apparent cause. In many cases their stories are confirmed by Iraqi police investigations.
Yesterday the US military in Baghdad admitted a total of $1,540,050 has been paid out up to November 12 for personal injury, death or damage to property. A total of 10,402 claims had been filed, the military said in a brief statement to the Guardian. There were no figures given for how many claims had been accepted.
In 2021, Pesha Magid (INTERCEPT) noted:
While reparations for civilian harm can never replace a life, they are, at the very least, an acknowledgment that harm was done and a way to help support those who have lost deeply.
For instance, the U.S.-led coalition has carried out 34,781 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014, and the U.K.-based monitoring group Airwars estimates that coalition actions led to the deaths of between 8,317 and 13,190 civilians, of whom 3,715 have been identified. The coalition itself only acknowledges the deaths of 1,417 civilians. An Intercept review of public records shows that only one person whose family members were killed by a coalition airstrike in Iraq or Syria has received official compensation.
At an earlier stage of the 9/11 wars, the U.S. and its allies did pay compensation to civilians. By 2007, the U.S. had paid at least $32 million in compensation for civilians harmed in Iraq and Afghanistan, not including condolence payments.
At THE INTERCEPT today, Peter Maass observed:
If you write a 4,500-word article about a 20-year war, you might want to mention how many people were killed.
While that seems obvious, Max Boot, an energetic backer of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has written a lengthy article on the war’s 20th anniversary that fails to note the number of deaths. The toll is in the hundreds of thousands, if not more — the carnage is too vast for an exact count — but Boot merely mentions a “high price in both blood and treasure” and quickly moves on.
How high a price? Whose blood? There is no explanation.
Boot is hardly the only anniversary writer unable to mention the apparently unmentionable. Peter Mansoor, a retired colonel with several deployments to Iraq, likewise failed to squeeze a reference to the death toll into his 2,000-word assessment of what happened. Mansoor’s story, like Boot’s, was published by Foreign Affairs, which is funded by the Council on Foreign Relations and is pretty much the true north of establishment thinking in Washington, D.C.
Their failure, which is replicated in about 99 percent of America’s discussions about Iraq, is a lot more than sloppy journalism. The Pentagon and its enablers prefer to turn the killing and maiming of civilians into an abstraction by calling it “collateral damage” so that it becomes a detail of history that we can pass over.
Ignoring civilian casualties is a necessary act of erasure if you wish to avoid a frank assessment of not just the Iraq War, but also the legacy and future of U.S. foreign policy. If you specify those casualties — which is not just hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis in an illegal war begun with lies, but also millions of people injured, forced out of their homes, and traumatized for the rest of their lives — the discourse must change. The “high price” reveals itself as so grotesque that discussions can no longer center around the finer questions of how to better fight an insurgency or why “mistakes were made” by supposedly well-intentioned leaders. It becomes a matter of when do the trials start; who should be in the dock with George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice; how large should Iraq’s reparations be; and when can we impose on ourselves something like the constitutional ban on the use of military force to settle disputes that we imposed on Japan after World War II?
A lot of people are interested in Iraq -- or at least pretending to be. THE REAL NEWS NETWORK sent a questionable piece to the public account (common_ills@yahoo.com) and I was bothered by reading it. THE COMMON DREAMS column we highlighted above bothered be only regarding reparations (which I'm all for if it gets to the Iraqi people, not their corrupt government). There was another COMMON DREAMS article that I won't be highlighting -- a pretense of Republicans being War Cheerleaders. No, it wasn't just the GOP. But I kept finding things in the RNN article that bothered me because the writer seemed a bit stunted, as though he couldn't process. Was he really that stupid? No, turns out he's a liar. In the article -- this is his smallest mistake -- he refers to Peter Hart as "FAIR's Peter Hart."
No.
Peter left FAIR long ago, years ago. In fact, go to his Twitter account and he explains he is at FOOD AND WATER WATCH and "formerly @fairmediawatch." If Peter were still at FAIR, we'd have a reason to note them because Peter was honest and had ethics. And, here's the thing about this writer repeatedly citing FAIR, he never discloses that he worked for FAIR himself. That's why I'm calling him a liar. He worked there until 2021. He knows Peter left FAIR. More to the point, when you're rightly calling out Anne Appelbaum for failing to disclose, you probably need to have your own ducks in a row and do your own disclosures.
That is FAIR, by the way. That's why we had to walk away from them. They finger-point at others while doing exactly what they call others out for. We were the biggest supporter early on but we expected that the ethics they demanded of others were standards that they applied to themselves. That was not the case. And when Peter Hart left, any reason to note them left with him.
At MIDDLE EAST EYE, Nazia Kazi writes:
The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 made several things about the American political system abundantly clear.
First, there was a remarkable consensus between the two political parties. While Americans, eager to individualise the follies of empire, typically blame George W Bush for the devastation visited upon Iraq, it was Democrat Joe Biden who, as then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agitated for the invasion and Democrat Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker who refused to bring articles of impeachment against Bush for falsifying reasons for the invasion.
First, there was a remarkable consensus between the two political parties. While Americans, eager to individualise the follies of empire, typically blame George W Bush for the devastation visited upon Iraq, it was Democrat Joe Biden who, as then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, agitated for the invasion and Democrat Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker who refused to bring articles of impeachment against Bush for falsifying reasons for the invasion.
It was also Democratic President Bill Clinton who, before Bush, had enforced genocidal sanctions on Iraq that led to the deaths of countless children.
The invasion also exposed the culture of repression that defines wartime in the US. The American media was banned
from showing images of fallen soldiers’ flag-draped coffins returning
from war, effectively downplaying the losses suffered during the
insurgency.
Public figures who spoke out against the war such as journalist Phil Donahue or the country music band The Dixie Chicks were censored and effectively had their careers destroyed.
Today, two decades have passed. Where I was then a college student
and one of the countless anti-war demonstrators, I am now at the head of
the classroom, teaching courses about race, empire, and the war on
terror.
What’s remarkable to me as an educator is the undeniable campus legacy of the Iraq war.
On the one hand, the campus is undeniably militarised, awash in
defence dollars and intelligence funding, ensuring the production of
students and research agendas that shore up the global ambitions of US
statecraft.
And, on the other, we have a student body that is, perhaps by design,
armed with very little in the way of historical context about US
involvement in Iraq or the war on terror itself.
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