And-and
there's one woman. Her name is Karimah. She and her family, I'd spent
time at their house a lot in 2003 and 2004 and she's a widow and her
husband was killed in the Iran - Iraq War. She has a large number of
kids. And I went to visit her and her son, her oldest son, Aalee had
been picked up at a cafe in a raid. And there were these Iraqi security
forces who were looking for members of the Sadr militia. They picked
him up, detained him, didn't charge him with anything really and
interrogated him, extracting a confession from him and then proceeded to
sort of keep him in prison until the family sold everything they had
and could buy him out of prison basically. And that speaks to the state
of the Iraqi judicial system today. It's a confession-based sort of
system and people are frequently detained and not charged with anything
until people can just buy them out. And that's included in this Human
Rights Watch report. So it's really, the biggest concerns for the
people who are coming up from this new very sort of corrupt and
ineffective Iraqi government, in their words, in the way they described
it and also the infrastructure was just a mess.
-- photo journalists Kael Alford on Friday's Your Call (KALW). She and photo journalist Thorne Anderson have an exhibit, "Eye Level in Iraq," at the de Young Museum in San Francisco through June 16th.