(archived from June 21, 2014)
by Scott Creighton
“This is one of the great untold stories of the Iraq War, how just over a year after the invasion, the United States funded a sectarian police commando force that set up a network of torture centers to fight the [Sunni] insurgency,” James Steele: America’s Mystery Man in Iraq
“This cannot be the United States being the air force of Shia militias,” David H. Petraeus
“Potentially what this could amount to is the U.S. arming or advising Iranian proxies, some of which are on the terror list,” Phillip Smyth
When I first started my analysis of the The ISIS™ Crisis, watching the photo shoots of Shiites being loaded up onto the backs of trucks with AKs at the ready to go fight “the terrorists”, I figured this was nothing more than a rekindling of the Salvador Option in Iraq designed to suppress a real uprising that had been taking shape and threatening to dismantle all of our corporate profits in the new client state. I wasn’t wrong.
“This has been done SO MANY TIMES when we install neoliberal regimes in the past. It was done in Indonesia. It was done in Chile. It was done most recently in India. “Boko Haram”? al Qaeda in Yemen? South Sudan? “KONY 2012″? Take your pick. When our “interests” are at stake in our client states, the “turrurrurists” always seem to show up right on time to justify U.S. involvement or a good old fashioned death squad cleansing of the dissidents. Remember those bombs that went off in Egypt just as al Sisi needed justification to start rounding up the opposition before the election?
It’s such a tired little trick, it’s almost a cliche when you think about it and God knows I’ve written about it time and time again.” me, June 14th
Turns out I wasn’t wrong at all… just a little behind the times. The death squads, though they kicked it up a notch once the ISIS™ marketing campaign took off, were already doing their work.
(read:The ISIS Crisis: Iraq: Fighting Terrorism or Political Opposition? )
“The increase in targeted killings comes even as the U.N. reported that the overall death toll for November dropped to 659, compared with 979 in October. More than 8,000 people have been killed since the start of the year…
… Mazin Sabeeh, a Sunni government employee from northern Baghdad, said he has started avoiding Shiite neighborhoods to avoid being captured and killed by militiamen.
“Apparently, some people from the other sect are still determined to take revenge upon Sunnis,” he said. “With the current security vacuum and deterioration, they think it is the time to settle old scores.” New York Post, Dec. 2, 2013
As far back as October of last year, “experts” were saying the best way to avoid all out civil war in Iraq (and the possibility of losing our corporate profits) is to bring back the same death squads from 2007 or the Salvador Option as it is commonly known.
Iraq does not want a civil war between Shia and Sunni, mainly because this would be seen by outsiders as a genocide by the Shia majority against the Sunni minority. Many Iraqi Sunnis want to avoid this as well, but the Iraqi Islamic radicals will not negotiate and are increasingly violent against Iraqi Sunnis who do not cooperate with the terrorist campaign against the Iraqi Shia. But the only solution may be another round of vigilante violence by Shia against Sunnis in Iraq. That’s what halted most of the Sunni terrorism in 2007. Back then terrorist deaths went from 29,000 in 2006 to 10,000 in 2007 and kept falling until 2011 (when there were 4,100 deaths).” Strategy Page, Oct. 2013
Yes, the only possible solution to allowing Iraqis to figure out their own destiny is for President Peace Prize to ship over 300 Special Operations “advisers” and a couple dozen drones and let the death squads sort it all out.
Here’s a little reminder of what death squads under a republican president looked like. Of course we all know, under ObamaGod, it’s all daisies, fluffy kittens and cherry pie.
Does any of this sound familiar?
“After one year in Iraq the US government secretly enlisted retired Special Forces operatives to train Shia militia in the art of torture and other war crimes that fueled the Iraqi civil war, according to a new report.
Just over year into the Iraq War a desperate US government secretly organized and funded small militia groups to set up torture camps across the Middle Eastern country under the direction of a retired US Special Forces commander, according to a new report.
James Steele, who came out of retirement in 2003 after guiding US-backed commandos in El Salvador in the 1980s, was deployed to Iraq as an “energy consultant” not long after the invasion began. A member of General David Petraeus’ inner circle, Steele quietly trained a Iraqi paramilitary force numbering in the thousands. With the help of Col. James Coffman, another Special Forces operative, he freely dispatched Shia militias to torture Saddam Hussein’s Sunni soldiers in order to learn the details of the insurgency. ” RT 2013
Just for the fun of it, what do you think happens to American journalists and bloggers who expose the death squads in Iraq?
Yep, that’s pretty much the size of it. If you lie and get with the program, you get rewarded like Di$info Jone$ and Jon Stewart. If you do your job as a journalist, you get picked up by the police and you get dead.
“American journalist Steven Vincent was kidnapped and murdered August 2 in Basra, the southern Iraqi city where he had been working as a freelance writer and blogger. Suspicion for this killing, the first of an American reporter in Iraq, focuses not on Al Qaeda or Sunni-based insurgents, but on the police of the Shiite-based administration installed in Basra with the support of US and British occupation forces.
Vincent and his translator and assistant, Nour Weidi, were seized Tuesday evening outside a currency exchange shop by five men dressed in police uniforms and driving police cars. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, “One witness, who refused to give his name, said he recognized one of the abductors as an Interior Ministry employee”—that is, a functionary of the US-backed puppet regime in Baghdad. “The man also recognized me, after I saluted him,” the eyewitness told the Times. “He said to me: ‘Do not interfere! It is our duty.’”
A few hours later, the journalist’s body was found dumped by a road outside the city, with multiple bullet wounds to the head. He suffered bruises to his face and shoulder, had been blindfolded and his hands were tied in front with plastic wire. Weidi was seriously wounded but survived. She was taken to a local hospital.
On Sunday, July 31, Vincent received his widest media exposure with an op-ed column in the New York Times describing the takeover of the Basra police by Shiite militants, some loyal to radical cleric Moqtada Sadr, others to the two main Shiite parties which run the US-backed government in Baghdad.
He wrote, “A police lieutenant confirmed for me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations—mostly of former Baath Party members—that take place in Basra each month…. He told me that there is even a sort of ‘death car,’ a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.” Two days after these words were published, a “death car” came for Vincent himself.” Patrick Martin, 2005
Of course, Vincent was working in Iraq at the time. I have nothing to fear here in the states, right? Of course, I live in Tampa Fl., home of Special Operations Command and the home base of the Global War of Terror (a.k.a. The Global Free-Market Wars)
So there you have it. Not only are we reactivating the Iraqi death squads via the Salvador Option and sending in Obama’s favorite diplomacy tools, the drones, but we also have a nifty little marketing campaign designed to craft suitable public support for it as well all financed by central banks and corporate advertising on the terrorists’ Twitter feed.
Sorry Mr. Vincent. Apparently we learned nothing from your sacrifice.
No comments:
Post a Comment