Blogger Arrested in Iraq

As tends to happen when new forms of communication and repressive conditions collide, it seems as though blogging has become a crime in Iraq. The Iraqi woman blogger Riverbend - always a good site to read for a kick-in-the-head look at what life under occupation is really like - alerted me to the situation.

Khalid of the "Tell me a secret" blog was "abducted by the new Iraqi mukhabarat." Mukhabarat is the "Arabic term for intelligence, as in intelligence agency." In other words, a nonviolent Internet writer has been arrested by an Iraqi government agency, which of course operates under the auspices of the U.S. occupation force.

According to Khalid's brother Raed (another blogger who writes in English - which gives you a sense of the high educational level in Iraq), if you're going to be abducted, you want it to be by the Mukhabarat, because:

The other options include: To be tortured, executed, and thrown in garbage by SCIRI [the political party called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq] and their Badr brigades. To be held by the Iraqi police and left to choke to death in one of their cars. To be held by the US troops then disappear and be mistreated for months in one of their many prisons. To be kidnapped by one of the countless criminal gangs and cost your family some tens of millions of Iraqi Dinars and/or your life.

Raed dryly notes:

If your child or sibling vanishes for two days then calls from the secret service jail in any other place on earth, that would be considered a disaster and a violation of human rights. In Iraq, however, it's Happy News.

So, there's a bit of good news from Iraq, for all the conservative Republicans and other knee-jerk patriots who claim that there's "good news on Operation Iraqi Freedom you're not hearing from the old line news media." To paraphrase Jon Stewart, you never hear about all the cars that don't explode in Iraq...

Back in the reality-based world, this arrest places occupied Iraq in the company of such antidemocratic, unfree countries as Iran and Malaysia.

PS - Important Haitian community leader Father Gerard Jean-Juste, who was detained on trumped-up charges for over than a month last year, has been detained again by the Haitian police force (probably a worse group than the Mukhabarat). Follow the link for more information, including who you can contact to insist he be immediately and unconditionally released.