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Soon more details, this is the letter:
Thursday May 6, 2004
Letter from Yasmin
Dear friends,
For days now, I stood speechless!
Enraged, is a word not strong enough to describe how I feel.
The torture and humiliation that the Iraqi civilian prisoners were subjected to, by the American soldiers is beyond words.
Being an Iraqi and a Muslim, knowing our culture and religion that prohibits Muslim men or women from being naked in front of each other, trying to imagine how these Iraqis must feel being forced to pose in a sickening and weird positions, I can assure you that they would rather be shot in the face than to go through this humiliation and torture.
A week of vacation has just passed, in Portsmouth NH.
Getting my kids back to school, I was greeted by other Moms.
"Did you have a nice week?"; they asked!
A very inappropriate question, by well meaning Moms.
This is like asking New Yorkers a week after Sept. 11 if they had enjoyed their week.
I know that asking some Americans to listen to five minutes of news each day, would be too much.
But, do they not want to know what their own boys, whom were sent by their own government across the seven seas, are doing in other people's country?
If the good people of America aren't interested in knowing what's going on with their armed forces occupying another country , then this is a huge part of the problem.
For days now, I've been doing nothing but reading all I can, English and Arabic reports from more than 30 sites, watching interviews with some of the prisoners who were subjected to this torture on Arabic TV channels, trying to get hold of what's going on in Abu Ghrabe prison. I have learned so many things.
The most important thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
More information about the torture is coming out, every day.
A thousand more pictures, like the ones we saw on TV and worse,showing naked Iraqi men and women in prison, were being circulated among the prison soldiers, now the Washington Post has them, as they've announced to the world, today.
These are not isolated cases, like Rumsfeld wanted us to believe, but rather these are the routine procedures, used by the American soldiers and by private American companies on Iraqi civilian prisoners, men and women alike, to break there will, before interrogating them.
Abu Ghrabe is not the only prison using this criminal act against Iraqis, but rather it is used in prisons all around Iraq .
I heard a testimony after the other, from different Iraqi prisoners talking in shame about their torture.
So much in shame, that some of them did not inform their own family about what's happened to them while they where imprisoned.
I was hearing the same testimonies from different Iraqis, again and again, that the American soldiers would handle a group of Iraqi prisoners at the same time, and after putting bags over their heads and tying their hands; they tore their clothes off using knives or cutters.
Then, (an Iraqi, ex prisoner said): "We could hear that many more soldiers came after there were only a few, and every soldier held an Iraqi. They started holding us, heads covered and not knowing where were we going, running with us until they smash us against a wall or the Iron bars. They kept on repeating this, until we thought that we were going to die".
Then they asked them to stand in different poses, like the photos the whole world watched in horror on TV, and if they refuse to take these poses then the soldiers will start kicking them and hitting them with heavy sticks until they fall unconscious.
After that, each man and woman was placed in a different prison cells. Then they were splashed with cold water and left for three days, naked with a bag over their head and their hands tied, lying on the ground in a puddle of cold water, with no food and no toilet usage.
For three whole days!
Only then, they take them into interrogation.
This was only the beginning.
I wasn't shocked that the American soldiers were torturing Iraqi prisoner. By now, Iraqis know more than anyone else that many of these soldiers are capable of doing almost anything.
But I was shocked because of the fact that almost all of these Iraqis imprisoned in Abu Ghrabe are civilians, taken not in combat, but rather in demonstrations or taken during night raids while they were asleep in their own homes.
They are not even Iraqi resistance!
Why!
Letters were coming out from women prisoners asking the Iraqi resistance to bomb the prison even if it kills them, because they were being tortured and raped.
They were begging to be bombed with the soldiers.
I know that not all soldiers are like that, but many of them are.
They have no business of being in Iraq .
We want them out, now.
I don't want to hear any apology from any American official.
Nothing they will say can improve on the way they are looked at by the Iraqis, the Arabs, the Muslims and by many people around the world.
Their real face is exposed.
I know for sure that many of my American friends along with many American people are hurt as much as I am by all the crimes committed against the Iraqis, f or they believe that PEOPLE ARE ONE.
The first assault and abuse to the Iraqis took place when the Bush administration decided to attack Iraq after 12 years of sanctions .
Iraqis' lives have been destroyed day in day out, even without being imprisoned, by the presence of the US forces in Iraq .
Inside prisons, this torture has been taking place systematically, since the summer of last year, just after the fall of Baghdad .
Now, we know for sure that there were reports that made their way to the pentagon, at least since Jan 04, and no one did anything to stop it until these horrific photos showed up on TV around the world.
Who is responsible for this ?
As one of the great thinkers said, that by releasing monsters into a town, sure the monsters will commit vicious acts, but the real criminals will be those who released the monsters in the first place.
American officials … Apology, not accepted.
We don't care if Rumsfeld resign. Maybe his mother will care, but certainly not Iraqis.
And it's not good enough to punish six soldiers by relieving them from their duties or ten or even a thousand.
We want real actions and not cheep words, too little too late.
Enough is enough.
Take your hands off Iraq and we want all of the US out of Iraq , NOW.
In Peace.
Yasmin.
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