On his second day on the job, President Barack Obama promised to shut down Guantánamo by January 22, 2010. As we near the deadline, the U.S. detention center remains open, and nearly 200 detainees are still being held at the prison, including dozens already cleared for release.

To mark the ninth year of detaining prisoners without charge or trial, human rights activists are protesting in Washington, D.C.

On Monday, January 11, Witness Against Torture and the Center for Constitutional Rights collaborated on a vigil in front of the White House and a briefing at the National Press Club, where two former detainees at Gitmo addressed the audience via phone and video link.

“Nothing’s changed inside the prison,” said Omar Deghayes, a former inmate who now lives in the UK. “People are still being tortured, still being beaten, psychologically harmed.”

Former detainee Lakhdar Boumediene was finally released in May after seven years at Guantánamo, including two and a half years on hunger strike. “I try but I can’t forget,” said Boumediene, who called from his home in France. “When I wash my hand, I see the mark of the shackles.”

Boumediene was the lead plaintiff in the 2008 Supreme Court case, Boumediene v. Bush. The court affirmed that Guantánamo detainees have the right to file writs of habeas corpus in U.S. federal courts.

January 11 was also the start of an eleven-day “Fast for Justice” demanding that Guantánamo close and torture end.

One of the reasons some Witness Against Torture activists have decided to fast is to be in solidarity with hunger strikers in the prison. “This isn’t a well known story, but there are a number of men in Guantánamo who have not eaten of their own volition since 2005, who are on hunger strike,” says Frida Berrigan, a national committee member of the War Resisters League who has been organizing with Witness Against Torture since its inception.

“They are being kept alive by force feeding twice a day. This is their act of resistance, of non-compliance, non-cooperation with their illegal detention,” she says. “So for some of us, this fast is our way of putting ourselves in relationship in some small way with the men who remain on hunger strike in Guantánamo.” Fifty people in the D.C. area are fasting, along with 150 nationwide.

Berrigan says that last year, the group decided to not do direct action because candidate Obama pledged to close the controversial facility.

“We were so excited and happy on January 22, 2009, when President Barack Obama, forty-eight hours after taking the oath of office, signed the executive order, and said very clearly, I’m going to shut down Guantanamo and I’m going to do it within a year,” Berrigan says.

“The hope that we felt and that excitement has been replaced by outrage, indignation, and frustration as we’ve seen the Obama Administration create more problems instead of solving the problem left to him by the Bush Administration,” she adds.

So this year, the group has descended upon Washington, D.C., to do direct action and talk to legislative aides. “Some of us did a silent prisoner walk, a very slow walk, through the Hart Building of the Senate, wearing orange jump suits, with a little banner on the back with the name of a man at Guantánamo who has been cleared for release, but remains at Guantánamo,” says Berrigan.

The foiled Christmas day attack only strengthened Berrigan’s commitment. “We’re facing a more hardened public, a public that is afraid, a public that is awash in hateful rhetoric, for the last three weeks,” she says. “At the same time, the failed terrorist attack proves our point. Where is that young Nigerian man being held? He’s being held in Michigan. He stood before a judge a week ago and pled not guilty. He’s going to have a trial and he will be sentenced if he is found guilty. Our criminal justice system, in this way, works.”

“All of the institutions that are supposed ensure that justice is followed and laws are followed have failed the men at Guantánamo and at Bagram,” says Berrigan. “People are detained throughout the world in the name of security in the War on Terror. So it’s up to us as people to not fail, to do something, to urge these institutions to not fail.”

But not at Guantánamo or at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at secret prisons elsewhere.

Civil liberties took a back seat to national security threats during the Bush Administration. It’s time for Obama to keep his promises to close Guantánamo and end torture.

I’m inspired by the grassroots activism happening at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Police have arrested more than 1000 people so far.

Here’s what my friend and colleague, Molly Stentz of WORT-FM, reported today on her blog from Copenhagen:

We know the drill by now. Head honchos arrive tomorrow. Checklist for today:

• Polish up the Bella Center (vaccum, mop, install more metal detectors)
• Remove untidy protest contingent
• Move in on the groups that police have been surveilling and detain their organizers
• Seize any likely protest equipment
• Arrest & detain now, deal with consequences later

One of the best sources of info is Indymedia Denmark.

For updates from the grassroots, visit Via Campesina, 350.org, and, of course, Democracy Now.

The Yes Men are once again up to their shenanigans.

Looking back and looking forward  . . . to Copenhagen

November 30 marks the tenth year anniversary of the Battle in Seattle, a proud moment in activist history when protesters shut down the free trade talks of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Thousands of people—unionists, students, environmental activists, farmers–took to the streets and joined a nonviolent direct action blockade which circled the Kingdome, where the WTO talks were held.

Police responded in a violent way and tossed tear gas, rubber bullets, and pepper spray at demonstrators, and made around 600 arrests. The city declared a state of emergency and suspended basic civil rights in the downtown area.

David Solnit was living in a Seattle at the time and organizing with the Direct Action Network, one of the main groups behind the Seattle demonstrations.

He, along with his sister, author Rebecca Solnit, offer their takes on what happened, and tackle the myths surrounding the uprising in their new book, The Battle of the Story of the Battle in Seattle (AK Press, 2009).

David Solnit describes the activist myths, such as Seattle was a spontaneous uprising. Solnit points out the massive organizing, alliance building. and strategy that allowed thousands of people to participate. What made the Seattle protests effective, Solnit writes, was “a common strategic framework and massive grassroots education, organizing, alliance building, and mobilizing.”

Solnit also addresses the myth of activist violence in Seattle. Some members of the “black bloc” broke windows of businesses, against the agreement to not engage in property destruction. Solnit notes that authorities have attempted to criminalize protests since Seattle by propagating myths such as “protesters throwing urine,” and fabricated references to overturned police and emergency vehicles. These kinds of fables are used “to create greater public acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties and the use of violence and repression against protests and participants,” Solnit writes.

While Solnit spends an inordinate amount of time talking about the Hollywood movie by Stuart Townsend, The Battle in Seattle, he does offer an insightful analysis about lessons learned from successfully shutting down the WTO.

Rebecca Solnit, too, challenges the myth of the savage activist. She even takes on The New York Times for perpetuating the stereotype of the riot-prone protester. “The significant violence in Seattle was police violence,” she asserts in a letter to the paper.

The correction The New York Times printed gave Solnit no solace. She writes:

“What remains relevant is why the myth of activist violence persists. My belief is that those who characterize us as violent correctly perceive us as a threat. But to acknowledge us as a threat to the status quo is to acknowledge many dangerous things: that there is a states, rather than a natural order, that it is vulnerable, and that actions in the streets can chance it.”

This book is a great read for any activist. It also includes a day-by-day “view from the ground” by Chris Dixon, a participant in the demonstrations.

A few pages later Dixon writes, “As the day [November 30] drew on, confrontation between police and protesters intensified once again. Thos of us near major blockades became more and more used to the burning sensation of tear gas, and a few angry protesters began throwing the canisters back. Like many others, I was hit with rubber bullets while retreating from an intersection.”

Looking back at Seattle ten years later is extremely valuable in and of itself. (The book reprints the original information published in the Direct Action Network broadsheet.)

But now we are days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which will be held in Copenhagen December 7-18. Activists are planning public protests in Copenhagen to push governments to demand action on climate change.

And the environmental group 350.org is advising people to have events and vigils in their hometowns.

With little doubt, activists will once again be portrayed as violent. But we’ll have to wait and see what comes out of the COP15 talks. Civil society has been busy making preparations, and hopefully taking the lessons of the Battle of Seattle to heart.

It has now been eight years since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan with the promise of building a democratic state and liberating women. The invasion has failed on both counts.

Malalai Joya is one of Afghanistan’s leading democracy activists. Joya, the youngest person ever elected to its parliament, was suspended in 2007 for her denunciation of warlords and their cronies in government.

“Rather than democracy, what we have in Afghanistan are backroom deals among discredited warlords who are sworn enemies of democracy and justice,” she writes on her website.

Joya became an international figure in 2003 after she fearlessly confronted the Grand Council of tribal leaders in a constitutional assembly.

“Why would you allow criminals to be present at this Loya Jirga?” she said. “They are warlords responsible for our country’s situation. They oppress women and have ruined our country. They should be prosecuted.”

The Progressive had the opportunity to interview Joya for our radio show back in 2006. Her quiet resolve in the face of death threats touched us deeply.

We profiled her courage in a June 2007 article by Matt Pascarella, “The Bravest Woman in Afghanistan.”

Here’s an excerpt:

“Ironically, Joya’s mission to take on the warlords and the drug lords, to promote democracy and women’s rights, appears to echo the rhetoric of the Bush Administration. And yet, according to Joya, rather than live up to that rhetoric, the U.S. government is actively supporting high-ranking officials who have been accused of corruption, drug trafficking, and war crimes, including mass murders. Several of these are in the cabinet of Hamid Karzai.”

Joya let us publish an adaption of her speech she gave at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression, held in Oslo, Norway, June 1-6, 2009.

She predicted that the Afghan elections, held in August, would be a joke.

“Afghanistan has a presidential election scheduled soon, but everyone knows that the election is a show that is throwing dust in the eyes of our people. The actual choice is with the White House to select its next puppet in Afghanistan and give him legitimacy through this show,” she said two months before the fraudulent elections.

“But we Afghans know that despite international condemnation by human rights organizations and protests by Afghan people, Karzai will be the next president with the two criminals as his vice presidents.”

President Barack Obama, who ran on an anti-Iraq War platform, needs to stop this war, too. He needs to listen to people such as Joya.

“It is due to the wrong and devastating policies of the U.S. government and NATO countries,” she said, “that unfortunately today Afghanistan is a mafia state and ranked at the top of the most unstable and corrupt countries in the world.”

The new documentary, Our Disappeared/Nuestros Desaparecidos, examines the disappearance of 30,000 people during Argentina’s military dictatorship of 1976-1983. Though Argentina’s history differs from ours, we can still take away a valuable lesson: those who participated in state-sponsored torture must be held accountable.

This moving film was written and directed by Juan Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum fled Argentina in 1977 to escape the growing repression in his country. He returns thirty years later after an accidental discovery. Through a Google search, Mandelbaum learned that Patricia Dixon, a college girlfriend, was one of the “disappeared.”

Patricia Dixon

Mandelbaum returns to Argentina to see what happened to Dixon and to others who had also disappeared. He weaves the national narrative—Peron’s return to power and the military junta’s deliberate attempt to destroy the left—with personal ones. We hear from the mothers, fathers, siblings, and even the children of the disappeared. The pain in people’s faces when talking about their missing loved ones is heartbreaking.

The director doesn’t shy away from the violence perpetrated by leftist armed radicals. “But the film leaves no doubt that there was no equivalency between the actions of the left and the repression by the military,” Mandelbaum writes in his director’s statement. “The military represented the State of Argentina, and were obligated to follow the law.”

Instead, people were kidnapped, tortured, and held in secret detention centers. Mandelbaum visits the infamous Navy Mechanics School, which housed a detention center and five torture rooms. It was here that pregnant women were kept alive until the birth of their children, who were then adopted by military and police families. It was here that Mandelbaum’s ex-girlfriend was probably taken.

In an interview on the PBS website, Mandelbaum recounts the this experience:

“Filming at the Navy Mechanics School, where up to 5,000 people were detained, tortured and later thrown alive into the river from airplanes, and where Patricia was almost surely taken, was really tough. There was a moment when I was on the central staircase. I was climbing the stairs and realized that the detainees like Patricia, shackled and blindfolded, would have held the same rail. A small thing like that hit me really hard.”

Mandelbaum incorporates homemade movies, black and white photos, and archival footage into his film. There’s damning footage of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1977 endorsing the military’s president, saying that he hoped they got their terrorist problem under control as soon as possible.

Blanket amnesty laws for those who tortured were passed in the 1980s. In 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court revoked the amnesty laws.

At a time when President Obama keeps repeating that he wants “to look forward and not backward” regarding human rights abuses committed during interrogations, Mandelbaum’s film offers a different take.

“Without opening up the past and facing the truth, there can be no healing,” says Juan Mandelbaum. “Terror will have won.”

Our Disappeared airs this week on PBS.

On the anniversary of 9/11, Attorney General Eric Holder should scrutinize our counter-terrorism policies. The seemingly endless revelations of detainee abuse, which began shortly after 9/11, demand no less.

It’s reasonable to believe that the torture and abuse of detainees have “made us less safe,” says Elizabeth Goitein, director of the Liberty and National Security Project at  the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU law school. The center has been calling for an independent commission of inquiry to examine recent counter-terrorism policies that may have violated the rule of law.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Goitein. (She was interviewed on the Wednesday Eight O’clock Buzz, a show I co-produce on WORT-FM.)

Q: Just a couple of weeks ago the CIA re-released a 2004 report on detainee treatment. Can you talk about that?

Goitein: What it showed was that the abuses that happened under the interrogation program went far beyond what people believed and outside of practices the Justice Department had authorized, such as water boarding. Specifically, what the report showed, was there were mock executions, detainees were threatened with power drills and loaded firearms. Their families were threatened. Some really shocking things like that.

Q: And for the purpose of what?

Goitein: That is an excellent question. There is a default assumption that the purpose was to prevent another 9/11 by getting very valuable intelligence from the detainees. There is still, after all of this debate, no evidence that any valuable information was gained from these detainees relating to an imminent terrorist attack. And there’s certainly no evidence that any of the information that was gained could not have been gained through legal techniques.

Beyond that, there is some evidence from a Senate Armed Services Committee report that was released back in 2007 that one of the main purposes of this interrogation program was to try to get detainees to say there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda in order to justify the war in Iraq. To the extent that there’s some evidence of that is really quite shameful.

Part of the problem with practices like torture and some of the unlawful conduct that happened after 9/11 is that there is really a lot of reason to believe that it has made us less safe. It’s provided a recruiting tool for terrorists. It’s alienated our allies. There are instances when allies have refused to cooperate with us because of our practices. And I think to some degree it’s put our own troops at greater risk. Because when the United States plays fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions, it takes away our ability to insist on other countries respecting those Conventions. So that when American soldiers are captured I think they are at greater risk today.

There is no evidence that these practices have made us more safe. But there is evidence that they have made us less safe. It’s not just about civil liberties; it’s about our national security and the best way to preserve that security going forward.

It’s time for us as a nation to take a serious look at what went wrong and what went right so we can have the systems in place to ensure that our policies are smart, effective, and respectful of basic human rights and civil liberties.

Unfortunately, when you had a history of the kind of widespread government-sanctioned abuses that we saw, that’s an indicator that something has gone wrong at a systemic level. It’s not as simple as some rogue actors disobeying the law. It’s more a case of institutional safeguards that are supposed to prevent that sort of thing from happening having failed. So in order to make sure that we don’t find ourselves in that situation again, it’s very important to figure out what went wrong and how we need to reform our system to put those safeguards back in place.

Q: What about Attorney General Holder’s naming a prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA interrogation abuses?

Goitein:  One important point to be made is that the Attorney General has said he’s asking the prosecutor to only focus on conduct that went beyond what the Justice Department authorized.  I think that’s a real mistake. It doesn’t really serve anyone well to focus on the so-called bad apples and to ignore the fact that government policy itself crossed the line. So to make sure that going forward we have respect for the rule of law, it’s important to look at the government-sanctioned abuses that happened. It’s my view that the most comprehensive way to do that is through an independent commission of inquiry.

Q: What about the Obama Administration’s assertion of state’s secrets privilege?

Goitein: That’s been a real disappointment. One of the most troubling abuses of the Bush Administration was its misuse of the state’s secrets privilege, which is a privilege that enables the government to shield certain evidence that could harm national security of released. But instead of using that in a narrow way, the Bush Administration would use it as a way to shut down cases at the very outset before the evidence had even been identified. They would say this case is so sensitive that we can’t even find out what the evidence is, not even behind closed doors, with the highest security precautions. And not coincidentally, these were all cases where very serious government misconduct had been alleged.

There was real hope that the Obama Administration would take a different position and a more narrow view of the privilege. So far in every case, the Obama Administration has taken exactly the same position as the Bush Administration in terms of the state’s secrets privilege and asserting that it can’t allow cases to go forward.

In one particular case, the plaintiff’s attorneys had already seen a document and the Obama Administration argued that if the court allowed the plaintiff’s attorneys to see the document again, the government would actually come to the court and take the  document away from the judge essentially rather than allow that to happen. So it’s a very extreme form of the privilege. It’s unfortunate that the [Obama] Administration has continued it.

The President has this mantra about wanting to look forward and not back. It’s unfortunate that he takes that view because it’s a false choice, much like the false choice between our safety and our values that he talked about in his Inaugural address. You can’t responsibly look forward without understanding what happened in the past.

The general at the center of the military coup in Honduras has a connection to the U.S. military—General Romeo Vasquez attended the School of the Americas (SOA).

(photo: REUTERS/Edgard Garrido)

The School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), is a combat training school for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Georgia. General Vasquez attended trainings at least twice–in 1976 and 1984, according to the watchdog group School of Americas Watch.

Graduates of the School of the Americas/WHINSEC have a long history of repression and anti-democratic actions. The School has produced at least 11 Latin American dictators, including SOA grad General Juan Megler Castro who became military dictator of Honduras in 1975.

“From 1980-82, the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates),” says SOA Watch.

It’s worth noting that John Negroponte, former ambassador to Iraq under Geoge W. Bush, was ambassador to Honduras 1981-1985. As filmmaker Paul Laverty wrote in the July 2005 issue of The Progressive, “a prizewinning series in the Baltimore Sun in 1995 demonstrated that Negroponte knew about the torture and murders that Honduras’s Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA, was carrying out. He then covered them up by whitewashing reports back to Congress about Honduras’s human rights record.”

The United States used Honduras for years as a staging ground for its proxy war against the Sandinistas. The United States still stations troops at Cano Soto Air Base, near Tegucigalpa, which was used as a base of operations for the U.S.-backed Contras.

And while U.S. assistance to Honduras does not quite match the incredible sums spent during the 1980s, between 2005-2010, military and police aid to Honduras will reach more than $40 million.

FY 2010 Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations report, which was released May 2009, states that “U.S. foreign assistance to Honduras focuses on partnering with the Government of Honduras to enhance security, strengthen democracy and rule of law . . .”

Given the history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, Obama faces a skeptical audience when he talks about upholding the rule of law. His State Department’s budget request says “Honduras has the lowest level of public support for democracy of the 22 countries surveyed in the Americas.”

Let’s hope that when the story behind the coup emerges, taxpayer dollars, through groups such as USAID, are not found to be supporting the coup plotters, like it did in Venezuela.

President Obama has said he was “deeply concerned” and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Zelaya’s arrest should be condemned.

At least Obama did not endorse this ill-fated coup, unlike the Bush Administration’s immediate diplomatic recognition of coup plotters in Venezuela in 2002. But Obama could do more.

My friend and colleague Roberto Lovato writes, “Beyond immediate calls to continue demanding that Zelaya and democratic order be reinstated, protesters in Honduras, Latin America and across the United States will also pressure the Obama Administration to take a number of tougher measures including: cutting off of U.S. military aid, demanding that Hondurans and others kidnapped, jailed and detained be released and accounted for immediately, bringing Vasquez and coup leaders to justice, investigating what U.S. Ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, did or didn’t know about the coup.”

In the early 1990s, I spent a few months in Honduras. Most of my time was spent in a Chiquita banana plantation town in the north near San Pedro Sula. Honduras’s utter poverty was overwhelming, even compared to Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chiapas, Mexico. Social movement groups, such a human rights organizations, seemed beaten down.

Now, though, times have changed. The poverty remains but “civil society” seems pretty upset about this coup. Kristin Bricker, a writer for NarcoNews, reports, “It is clear that Hondurans are resisting. People are taking the streets in Honduras despite incredibly hostile conditions created by the military. Radio Es Lo De Menos reports that their colleagues on the ground have been fired at by snipers who are positioned in rooftops around the city. They stress that the gunfire at this point has only been in the form of ‘warning shots’ and no one has been reported injured from gunfire.”

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) wrote in a communique, “We tell everyone that the Honduran people are carrying out large demonstrations, actions in their communities, in the municipalities; there are occupations of bridges, and a protest in front of the presidential residence, among others. From the lands of Lempira, Morazán and Visitación Padilla, we call on the Honduran people in general to demonstrate in defense of their rights and of real and direct democracy for the people, to the fascists we say that they will NOT silence us, that this cowardly act will turn back on them, with great force.”

Meanwhile, the “kidnapped” Honduran President Zelaya, in an interview with Al Jazeera, is calling for peaceful resistance.

Malalai Joya is one of the bravest people in the world. She’s the outspoken Afghan parliamentarian who was unlawfully suspended from parliament for speaking out for human rights and against the warlords ruling her country. This is her speech at the Global Forum on Freedom of Expression held in Oslo, Norway in June.

Here’s part of her speech:

I am honored that my voice has become the voice my oppressed and unfortunate people. They are supporting me. I announce from your tribune that I will not stop for a moment from telling the truth in the face of death threats and intimidations, as I know achieving our rights requires force and risks. No one will donate to us freedom of expression and other human rights unless we struggle to achieve them. I believe in the inspiring words of Dr. Martin Luther King: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.

Vogue magazine, that is. Vogue has been ga-ga about the oh so stylish Obama Administration. It has covered Obama’s fashionable advisors, such as Valeria Jarrett and Desiree Rogers, and it gave the cover to Michelle Obama in March.

Now, the June issue includes a profile of Susan Rice, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Rice tells Vogue “it’s a very exciting time to be the American Ambassador to the U.N. because the amount of hopefulness that much of the world has for the new administration is palpable here.”

She’s going to capitalize on the good will “with concrete policy shifts,” she says. “This is not smoke and mirrors and rhetoric and fairy dust. The change is reflected in many ways that matter to people: in our Iraq policy; our Afghanistan/Pakistan policy; our approach to Guantánamo and torture. It’s a set of policy choices that not only shows some break from the recent past but together combine to manifest a very different philosophy about the nature of American leadership.”

Problem is, the Obama Administration has not created a set of policies that shows a clean break with the recent past, especially on the specific issues Rice names. The Obama Administration is actually giving us the worst of the Bush years when it comes to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Guantánamo.

Iraq: It looks doubtful that U.S. troops will actually leave Iraqi cities on June 30. Obama says he intends to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, but the reality is he plans on keeping a force of 35,000 to 50,000 troops in the country after that date. (And this number does not include mercenaries.)

Afghanistan: Obama’s increased use of drones has led to an increase in civilian deaths. Protesters in Kabul’s streets in early May chanted “Death to America” which doesn’t exactly seem “hopeful.” And Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan, with increased troops and mercenaries, will inevitably lead to more civilian casualties.

As for Pakistan, McClatchy reports that “the White House has asked Congress for - and seems likely to receive - $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital. The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of $740 million.”

And as for Guantánamo, Obama is reported to be talking about “preventive detention” and a willingness to try terrorism suspects in military commissions.

Given that fashion magazines always have an element of fantasy, perhaps I’m being too hard on Susan Rice. But until there are “concrete policy shifts,” Rice’s contention that the current Administration is different than the previous one remains nothing more than fairy dust.

There’s not much talk these days about Iraqi refugees even though the numbers haven’t changed much.  About 2 million Iraqi refugees live in the neighboring countries of Syria and Jordan. Another 2 million are internally displaced.

“The majority of Iraqi refugees come from urban areas—Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk—and those are still volatile areas,” says Tim Irwin, senior media officer at the United National High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). “You see in the news that there are fairly regular suicide bombings, particularly in Baghdad. So the majority of Iraqi refugees do not feel like it’s safe enough for them to return.”

Most Iraqis, especially Baghdadis, are “prima facie refugees,” says Irwin. “We know the situation they fled was one of violence and persecution.”

Conditions for Iraqis in Damascus and Amman are difficult. They are living in rented accommodations, for the most part. They are not able to work legally and often have trouble getting their children into schools. They have been living off of their savings for several years but now funds are running low.

The UNHCR surveyed a group of Iraqi refugees who returned home and asked them why they did so. “Most of them said they were returning home because they had run out of money,” says Irwin. “They had run out of options in their countries of asylum. They could no longer support themselves so they needed to go home and try to find work.”

“While the host governments are very generous in allowing Iraqi refugees to stay, they still face hardships,” he says.

A year ago I visited Iraqi refugees living in Zarqa, Jordan, a bleak industrial city forty minutes north of Amman. The squalor of some family’s living quarters was shocking. (Several refugees were quite critical of the UNHCR, saying the agency wasn’t doing enough for them.)

One woman, Athra Al-Duleimi, fled Baghdad due to death threats. She said her family was targeted by Shias after the U.S. invasion. She had a cousin in construction in Baghdad. His neighbors said he was a spy and he was shot in the head in front of her house. Her husband was shot and she was, too, but they both survived. Her cousin did not.

Athra said her husband had a grocery store near a palace taken over by U.S. troops. He sold goods to everyone. People said he was a spy and became a target for Shiite militias.

Days after her cousin’s death, she found a threatening letter and four bullets—one each for her, her husband, and two sons—outside her house. So they left everything and went to Jordan in October 2006.

I bet that Al-Duleimi is still living in Zarqa. She told me she had applied for immigration to the United States but was denied.

In 2007, the United States had only admitted 1,608 Iraqi refugees, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. For fiscal year 2008, the number jumped to 13,823, though it’s still is a pretty small number considering the Iraq War has displaced at least 4 million Iraqis. As of February 4, 2009, the United States has admitted 4,479 Iraqi refugees, 0.1 percent of the refugees its war created.

(The quotes from Tim Irwin come from an interview on the 8 O’clock Buzz, a radio program I work on at WORT-FM. Click here to listen. It starts about 10 minutes in.)