Biometric Control: What’s good for Fallujah is good for Reno?

by Karen Button

In November 2004 the US led their second siege against the city of Fallujah, Iraq, all but destroying it. Up to 200,000 of the city’s 300,000 residents fled. The story of those who stayed is horrific, and by now well-known. Hundreds of civilians were killed alongside resistance fighters through indiscriminate aerial bombing, the use of illegal white phosphorus against a civilian populations and US snipers shooting at ambulances.

Yet the horror wasn’t over. When the first couple thousand refugees were finally allowed to return home in December, they found 50-70 percent of their city reduced to rubble and that it was now surrounded by wire fence. US forces controlled checkpoints at which residents faced a choice: get a biometric ID card, which allowed them to move through the city to designated areas, or face being shot. NBC reporter Peter Engel told Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News that Marines had been authorised to use “deadly force against anyone refusing the new rules.”

The new ID card, required to be carried at all times, included a retinal scan, fingerprints and personal information, all entered in to a database which would make its way into an international Department of Defense (DoD) database in Virginia. There, the information is funneled, along with that from other US federal agencies to a high-tech “biometric” database administered by the National Counterterrorism Center.

Biometrics are automated measurements of anything that identify one individual from another—they can include retina and iris scans, fingerprints, palm prints, facial shots, voice, and DNA. Added to these digital dossiers are personal information like birthdate, nationality, work and criminal history, and anything else deemed important to those collecting the information….like living in a city where simply being a resident also equals being a suspect.

The NCTC, newly created in 2004 as the central terrorism intelligence agency, has become the main repository for a database of international terrorism suspects and those who aid them. The list started with 75,000 names in 2003, but quadrupled to 325,000 in just three years. US intelligence and defense agencies began publicly admitting they were collecting biometric data in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in 2004.

Who ends up on these lists? Suspected international and domestic terrorists, the agencies say. But what is a “terrorist”? Disturbingly, though world leaders have accepted George Bush’s “war on terror” and any citizen those nations deem a “terrorist” can now end up the US database, there is no internationally agreed-upon definition of what a terrorist is.

Mr. Bush’s September 2003 directive required federal agencies to gather information on individuals "known or appropriately suspected to be . . . engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism."

One’s imagination need not roam far to see who might be included—Palestine’s democratically-elected Hamas party members immediately come to mind. But having names on a list is one thing, collecting very distinguishable and unique personal information into an international database is quite another.

Debates over privacy and civil rights are raging in this country, but not loudly enough. The far-right has long proposed national ID cards, which have thus far been rejected, but the acceptance of individual data collection is quietly seeping into our everyday lives.

Softened by fear, the American public seems ever more ready to accept the exchange being offered by the US government: your personal freedoms for a sense of security.

Voice recognition systems have been used at US borders since 1997. Pittsburg and other cities, instituted pilot programs in 2001 requiring student fingerprints in exchange for school lunches. Human micro-chip implants are touted as a safety measure for seniors with Alzheimer’s. GPS bracelets track those on parole. Video surveillance cameras are mounted at banks, traffic intersections, gas stations and on public buildings.

But what ought to worry people most are these biometric databases in which government control over its population is not some science fiction fantasy, but an authentic concern.

Two years ago a friend of mine was photographing some anti-war graffiti on a downtown building. A couple months later, weirdly enough on September 11, Homeland Security officers knocked on the door of the house he had once lived, but that day was just visiting. For taking photographs, he was assumed to be linked to potential “eco-terrorist” activities elsewhere in the state and questioned for the next hour. He had been tracked down via facial recognition technology from a camera mounted on the building.

The FBI has already been publicly outed for its spying on such threats to domestic security as the peace group The Ragin’ Grannies and for taking digital pictures at anti-war demonstrations, compiling facial features of protesters into their records.

But it’s really in the US occupation of Iraq where the lock-down society is being truly tested. Iraq is being used as a proving ground for technology that the US government would like nothing less than to employ in the States. There, biometric systems are being utilized across the board to collect detailed information about its citizens, the military says, in an attempt to curb violence.

Troops are currently compiling a database of “terrorists, insurgents, local workers and detainees” in Iraq, says Marine Corps News. Anyone detained longer than 72 hours is automatically fingerprinted and entered in to the database, according to Jon A. Davis, a field representative training troops on use of the Biometric Automated Technology System or BATS. In a country where no accurate count of detainees even exists and hundreds of thousands have never even been charged, an overwhelming portion of the population will have been tagged as suspected terrorists.

Fallujah was the test case for Iraqi civilians who haven’t been detained. After the city was effectively brought to its knees by the heaviest aerial bombardment of the US invasion, terrified residents were hardly in a position to question being fingerprinted so they could go home.

An American colleague tells me that in order to enter the city for humanitarian aid purposes, he was “marched right into the line of [Iraqis] checking in. I had to get a retina scan and a 10-finger print. The [Marine] behind the computer typed my stuff in and gave me a sideways look, looked at his screen again and said, ‘fuck it, I’m not gonna do this to you man. If I log you in to this system you are going to be a registered suspected terrorist. If you try to fly, get pulled over for a traffic violation, you’re going to have trouble where ever you go.’”

Now, admits Davis, BATS has been deployed in most cities where major military units are stationed, including AL Qaim, Al Asad, Samarra and the Blue Diamond base outside Ramadi. “There are six control points in Fallujah proper alone and seven [inside] Ramadi.”

Hand-held wireless devices developed by Identix Inc. can be used in the field by troops to record fingerprints and facial IDs to anyone they deem a “terrorist.”

Aishya is an Iraqi colleague and humanitarian worker who delivers aid to communities across Iraq and travels internationally for speaking engagements. She told me she was forced to get the same biometric ID card as other Fallujans when she was trying to deliver aid there. “Of course, I had to do this, if I wanted to help the people. But I don’t know what this will mean for the future when I travel.” She says everyone knows that to hold an ID card from Fallujah means they could be targeted as an “insurgent” (which in Iraq translates to terrorist) no matter where they are in Iraq. If a Fallujan is visiting a relative in Baquba, for example, and is made to stop at a US checkpoint, they are automatically suspect.

When she recently travelled through Jordan, Aishya was pulled aside at the border. They allowed her entry, but not before administering a retinal scan and fingerprinting of their own. They told her the new equipment came from the US.

The US-backed Iraqi government is now issuing new travel documents—for the third time since 2003. Data included in the new biometric passports will be kept at the Ministry of the Interior, an agency whose secret police are torturing Iraqis with the knowledge of US military officials.

Back in the US, where the NCTC maintains its official terrorist database, how many Iraqi names have been forwarded? Is the American colleague who visited Fallujah somewhere on that list?

While NCTC officials insist that US citizens make up “only a very, very small fraction,” they also declined to tell the Washington Post what the number is, nor how many are linked to their domestic wiretapping scheme. But, they did admit known white supremacist and so-called eco-terrorists (read environmental activists arrested for civil disobedience) are in the database.

And if American citizens still think they’re safe if they just “keep their noses clean”, they might want to remember what Jondavid Black, spokesperson for Lockheed Martin’s Horizontal Integration Vision division, told the New York Times about biometric ID systems: “"What they do for the military in downtown Falluja, they can do for the police in downtown Reno.”

US Occupation Adding to “Acute” Health Crisis

by Karen Button

“Iraq is really going down the drain,” Roland Huguenin-Benjamin, spokesperson of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), flatly stated in his assessment of the US-occupied country. “It is a dead end; if new ideas don’t come, I don’t see much opportunity there for change,” he added.

Huguenin-Benjamin was participating in a panel discussion on “Health Needs in Iraq: Where Shortages are Manmade” at the first-ever World Peace Forum in Vancouver, BC. He wanted people to understand the current situation in Iraq against the backdrop of its recent history.

“The ICRC is in 80 countries, which are mostly poor and underdeveloped. Iraq is special case,” he said, because it was once a donor nation. “They used to give money to UNICEF,” and other international programs. “Iraq was very modern in the ‘70s.” It had a high “level of technology, state of the art medical care, and a high level of proficiency with the doctors.”

Iraqis “lived with top medical facilities…[and now] suddenly Iraq has been bombed to the middle ages.” He said that since sanctions were imposed during the 1990s, over 30% of babies are
now born under 2 kilos.

This June the ICRC said they were alarmed by a “very acute” water, fuel, and power “crisis” in Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City, a poor neighborhood of Baghdad. In Fallujah and Ramadi the shortages are exacerbated by US-led troops restricting access to the cities.

Under the US-led occupation, Huguenin-Benjamin continued, there is a serious lack of clean drinking water and “large portions of sewage flowing into rivers. You can imagine the medical result.” People are dying from “medical diseases that are easily solvable. Many children die of diarrhea.”

He also pointed out the that since “there is fighting on major roads, there is no way to get to medical facilities. Some medical facilities are under operation of armed gunmen. Roadside bombs, air raids, snipers…all these [factors] lead to a high number of causalities.

“Now there are even unclaimed bodies in the morgue due to the danger of just going to the morgue.”

US-led troops have also contributed significantly to the casualties, frequently occupying hospitals, said Rana Al-Aiouby, an Iraqi humanitarian aid worker based in Baghdad who was also on the panel.

Al-Aiouby was in Fallujah during the April 2004 US siege. “I saw 15-20 [US] snipers on just one roof,” she said. “I was with a medical team in an ambulance and the ambulance was shot at. They also killed an old woman who was holding a white flag.”

By now an infamous photograph, Al-Jazeera News shot on-the-scene footage at Fallujah General Hospital when US troops arrested several doctors and patients at that time, claiming the facility was an “insurgent stronghold.” They are shown handcuffed and lying on the floor, US soldiers with assault rifles standing guard over them.

Al-Aiouby was also able to enter Fallujah after the second siege in November 2004 where she saw the city all but destroyed and most of its residents reduced to refugees. “It is normal for [the US] to use cluster bombs in the cities,” she said sadly. US air strikes flattened the Nazzal Emergency Hospital during that siege.

But, Fallujah is not an isolated situation.

In Ramadi, where US-led troops are currently conducting a huge military operation, Al-Aiouby said residents are very worried. “Many in Ramadi couldn’t leave. And they have learned from the hard situation in Fallujah about the refugee camps.”

In March 2005, US troops stormed a women and children’s hospital in Ramadi, ordering medical staff and patients alike to leave, while detaining other staff members.

On Wednesday of this week, hundreds of US troops raided the Saddam Hospital in Ramadi, claiming it was being used by “insurgents” to treat their injured and to fire upon them.

Al-Aiouby said US-led troops also raided Haditha’s hospital, not for the first time, last November. “They beat the director, Walid Al-Hadithi, and arrested him, accusing him of supporting the ‘insurgents’. But he answered that [as a doctor] he should give medical treatment for anyone…if it is an American soldier, an ‘insurgent,’ anyone. Patients in the surgery were arrested.”

"What we're seeing is most clearly deliberate violations of the most fundamental conventions of international law," said Huguenin-Benjamin, specifically of US military actions in Fallujah in 2004.

Al-Aiouby, who delivers medical supplies to conflict areas, said there is a also a serious lack of medical supplies throughout Iraq. In Haditha, for example, “they have two incubators, but one is not working. After [an incubator] is used once have to leave it for three days, so if you receive another case like this you cannot put the baby inside.” She said, in Haditha, “they really don’t have anything.”

Huguenin-Benjamin, underscoring how Iraqis have had to cope with a serious deterioration in their heath care, said that the World Health Organisation life expectancy is now 51 years for Iraqi men and 61 years for women. “Look back 20 years and it was as high as anyone in the West. Iraqis are living with the memory of having quality medical services….now Iraqis are stuck in deep shit. [The country] is a catalogue of international faliures.”