Innumeracy in the Orchards?
A while back, when the Hussein trial began, I wrote about the irony that one of the crimes Hussein and his associates were being accused of was of destroying the orchards of Dujail. As I wrote then:
Orchard destruction is a routine practice in Palestine and Iraq, and I haven't heard a word of criticism of those practices in the Western corporate media. Indeed, the whole situation would be laughable were it not so tragic for those involved.
And don't even ask about the destruction of Vietnamese farms and forests by the U.S. application of Agent Orange. I'm sure that dwarfs Hussein's destruction of farmland in Dujail by many orders of magnitude.
But in
today's trial coverage, we got a number to go along with the accusation when we read of "the razing of 250,000 acres of palm groves and orchards." Let's see. There are
640 acres per square mile, that makes 390 square miles of palm groves and orchards allegedly razed.
Dujail has (had?) a population of 10,000 people (
this article says 75,000). I don't know how big it is, but Baghdad, by far the largest city in Iraq, covers
250 square miles. That means the defendants are charged with levelling an area more than 50% larger than Baghdad, in a town (and, ok, surrounding countryside) with less than 0.2% of the population of Baghdad (6 million). Possible? Yes. Plausible? Not really. Source of the allegation? Like so many such allegations, completely unknown. I can find
hundreds of repetitions of the claim, all using exactly the same number without even an "approximate" attached, as if it were measured by a surveyor, but not (so far anyway) the ultimate source.
For another way to look at this, 390 square miles is just a little smaller than a square 20 miles on each side. That's a large area! If you had a huge bulldozer with a blade 20 feet wide, you would have to drive it 20 miles, then turn around, and drive back 20 miles, and keep repeating that until you had driven 20 miles more than 5000 times! At 5 mph, it would take you 880 days, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to complete the job. What kind of speed you could maintain while you were knocking down trees along the way I really don't know. But, even with many bulldozers, that's one heck of a job.
Here's another data point for the fire. Central Park in New York, something many people are familiar with, contains 843 acres. That makes the alleged area razed in Dujail just under 300 times more than the size of Central Park! Imagine what it would take just to bulldoze all the trees in Central Park! On second thought, don't imagine it, it's too horrible a thought.
Tariq Aziz surfaces
In the trial, former Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz took the stand as a defense witness. Prominent in the press coverage was his appearance:
The 70-year-old Aziz, a former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, took the stand wearing checkered pajamas and looking pale. Aziz, who is in U.S. custody, has complained of health problems and his family has been pressing for him to be released temporarily for medical treatment.
But nowhere was there any elaboration. Is this some surprising new development? Hardly.
Here's what I wrote back in August, 2005, when Aziz had just had his first visit from his family (one of many gross violations of international law in his treatment) after 28 months of solitary confinement (after
voluntarily surrending to the Americans, just like another one of the Iraqi "disappeared," Gen. Amer al-Saadi):
"He looked like he had turned 80," his wife, Violette, told The Times [That's The Times of London, by the way; the U.S. media doesn't cover stories like this]. "He was frail and too tired to walk, even inside the small meeting room. He had to lean against his American military escort to move a step down.
"Much of his thick hair and moustache had shed and greyed," she added, tears running down her cheeks.
She said that he had lost more than 30lb (14kg). Doctors had pulled out most of his decaying teeth to make way for dentures. He was taking more than a dozen pills a day to control high blood pressure, diabetes and heart problems.
As I wrote then and to the best of my knowledge to date, Tariq Aziz has not been charged with any crimes. His continued detention is itself a violation of all norms of international law.
As for today's testimony in the Dujail case, the broadcast media provided little detail, but buried in some of the print coverage was this information:
He turned the accusations around, saying members of the Shiite Dawa Party--which carried out the shooting attack on Saddam--should be put on trial. He pointed to Dawa leaders who, since Saddam's fall, have become leaders of Iraq's first elected governments: current prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and his predecessor, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Speaking in a hoarse voice, he said the Dujail attack was "part of a series of attacks and assassination attempts by this group (Dawa), including against me." He said that in 1980, Dawa activists threw a grenade at him as he visited a Baghdad university, killing civilians around him.
"I'm a victim of a criminal act conducted by this party, which is in power right now. So put it on trial. Its leader was the prime minister and his deputy is the prime minister right now and they killed innocent Iraqis in 1980," he said.
It's safe to say Aziz' wish won't be granted.
Reprinted from Left I on the News