I don’t know if this has been mentioned before here or over at DKos, etc. — but for those of you who had heard that Khalid Jarrar, the brother of Raed, had been arrested by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi version of the secret police, you’ll be happy to hear he is now home and safe. Many, many people were praying for him, spreading the news on their blogs, signing the online petition for his release, and flooding the Iraqi Embassy with emails, and in general offering whatever support they could.
He wrote an account of his ordeal on his blog.
Sleeping in a grave-size space, defined by two walls touching both my head my and feet, and surrounded with human bodies touching me from both sides, in a way that hardly leaves any chance to move at all during the long… long night, in a 12 square meters room stuffed with 35 people trying to sleep, and to hold themselves together in order not to fight…
More on the flip…
I was so lucky that I was taken to the Mokhabarat directly. Usually you have to go through a police station or a center of the national guards to get there, where the standard procedure of torturing is hanging people upside down and beating them with cables for hours, pinching their bodies with electrical drills, burning them with hot water, ripping out their finger nails, breaking bones, using acids on the wounds after whipping them, the dead bodies that are found in the dumpsters in Baghdad even had their eyes taken out of them, and a lot of these things happened with people that I know, or with people that were detained with the people that were with me in this jail, before they were brought here, and the list of torturing techniques is long, and you don’t want to hear them or know about them if you want to sleep at night.
Khalid was lucky — lucky in that he was able to present his case to a judge, is an articulate and confident young man, and had done nothing wrong (except, apparently, read websites in English at the university’s internet cafe). The judge recognized he was innocent and had him released. But many, many Iraqis are not so lucky.
The question is: what about the rest of Iraqis? The ones who don’t have the money or the power to leave places like that? The innocent people who were taken away from their families and loved ones and accused of false crimes? What happens to them? Who will stand for them? What about human rights? What about civil rights? What about humanity?….
…. I hope that these people and all the other Iraqi prisoners will go back home safe. And I’ll work with my family to ask the US administration and the Iraqi authorities to improve the situation of the detention for the Iraqis. People should have the right to inform their families about their location, and they should have the right to appear in front of a judge very soon after being detained without being questioned and tortured, and they should have real lawyers in the court, they should at least know their charges!
His experience has not dimmed his own sense of purpose, either.
May God free everyone that is under such great injustice, and send them back home to their families and friends, about us, we will do what we can to make sure that happens, any kind of help that you can offer, any legal help or support from human right groups will be much appreciated and evaluated, we must do all we can to try to get some rights to those arrested, and being arrested in occupied Iraq, everyday.
Amen, Khalid.