'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Faiza, Khalid, Raed

There is a lovely meditation on Faiza's blog last night. She was recounting a conversation she had with God recently...

we said after the war : OK, this is America coming to Iraq , it will teach our new leaders how to respect human rights , and how to accomplish democracy in our country...we were anxious to see how is the freedom and democracy look like !

but now, after two years and more, we are depressed, and fled out of our horrible life in iraq. and still dreaming that one day we can really achieve freedom and democracy in our country

i mean real one , not fake ...

and still believe that we all can work to make the change we want , its not individual dream or action, it should be done by the big groups of people...

and God is watching and waiting to see our actions..

and in the judgment day He will ask everyone : what you have done to help oppressed people on earth ?

what you have done to achieve justice and peace on earth?

its our responsibility....

God will never send angels to make peace on earth... its our responsibility...

my heart still sad for iraq and iraqis..

but still i have hope that we can all work together to stop this madness .

And here is a long post on her son Khalid's blog describing what happened to him during his recent imprisonment. He got beaten a few times, but met many people inside the Ministry of Interior building where he was held who had been treated a lot worse than he was. Most of them were, like him, Sunnis. (He comes, actually, from a mixed Sunni-Shiite family.)

The "reason" they picked Khalid up was because at the university where he studies he'd been surfing the internet and reading the comments on his brother Raed's blog...

Three days or so after his detention, he was taken before a judge:

On Thursday, the judge decided that I was innocent. He figured out that the papers [i.e. the printouts from raed's blog's comments section] were from a public forum, and he didn’t find any comments posted by me.

I wasn’t released till Saturday morning, after I was forced to sign a paper committing that I wouldn’t tell the families of the arrested people that they are arrested, and that I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything that happened while I was arrested or tell them what I saw inside the jail, and that I would report any case of breaking the law that I know about to the authorities (at this point I laughed and asked: even if someone drove his car through a red traffic light?), and that I wouldn’t visit terrorism websites.

I, of course, told all the families I could that their sons are arrested in the seventh floor of the ministry of interior in the hands of the Mukhabarat, and here I am telling you everything that happened with me, and I am planning to visit all kind of websites as much as I like as long as I want.

Khalid and his elder brother Raed are launching a campaign to try to make sure the basic habeas corpus rights of all Iraqi detainees are respected.

Lots of us in the west don't even really think much about the importance of habeas rights any more. We should! They can get taken away from any of us at a moment's notice.... Ask Jose Padilla. Or any of those hundreds of detainees still stuck in various branches of the gulag the Bushiteshave been running around the world without having any right to contact their families or to hear the charges against them.