US-sponsored militias and death squads in Iraq

US program unleashes ex-Baathist enforcers


Why was Rumsfeld ordering the new Iraqi govenment to back off these militias during his whirlwind trip last week?

Everyone should read this story posted on NYC Indymedia:

Let a Thousand Militias Bloom
By A.K. Gupta

In trying to defeat the Iraqi insurgency, the Pentagon has turned to Saddam Hussein’s former henchmen. Under former Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, U.S. officials has installed many of the hated Baathists who tormented Iraq in high-level posts in the interior and defense ministries. But the new Iraqi government, overwhelmingly composed of Shiites and Kurds who suffered the most under Hussein, have announced that they are going to purge the ex-Baathists, putting them on a collision course with the United States.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made one of his surprise visits to Baghdad last week, warning the new government not to ``come in and clean house'' in the security forces. The official line is that the U.S. is worried about losing the ``most competent'' security forces. But there is a deeper concern that purging the security forces could feed into sectarian tensions and explode in civil war.

Gupta writes about a very disturbing aspect of this US-backed program:

...one militia in particular—the ``special police commandos'' -- is being used extensively throughout Iraq and has been singled out by a U.S. general for conducting death squad strikes known as the ``Salvador option.'' The police commandos also appear to be a reconstituted Hussein security force operating under the same revived government body, the General Security Directorate, that suppressed internal dissent.

The Pentagon evidently is betting on Saddam's old enforcers to contain the anti-American resistance. Therefore, the new government will not be allowed to purge the program as it was developed by the puppet regime of Ayad Allawi.

It should be made clear that the existence of US-sponsored death squads in Iraq is not a new story. For example, see Seymour Hersh's piece on ``preëmptive manhunting'' from December 2003 where he compares the US Special Forces Task Force 121 to the Vietnam era Phoenix Program. In January 2004, Robert Dreyfuss wrote about a quiet $3 billion appropriation slipped during the fall of 2003 into the special war funding bill. The funds were to be used for ``the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen'' and the ``bulk of the covert money will support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force.''

So Rumsfeld was very keen to preserve these perceived covert ``successes'' from Shiite meddlers entering the new Iraqi goverment.

Also striking in the Gupta piece is discussion of a TV program called ``Terrorism in the Hands of Justice'' broadcast in Iraq by a US propaganda network. This show evidently has become somewhat popular with Iraqis, giving the Americans some actual traction with the population. It has been reported in US stories over the last couple of months pretty much as straight-up news about an Iraqi ``reality show'', without much delving into what really is behind it. But Gupta cites the better reporting on the subject:

Gay Orgies
The police commandos have been supplying suspects who confess their crimes on the TV show, ``Terrorism in the Hands of Justice.'' Described as the Iraqi government's ``slick new propaganda tool,'' the program runs six nights a week on the Iraqiya network, which was set up by the Pentagon and is now run by Australian-based Harris Corp. (a major U.S. government contractor that gave 96 percent of its political funding, more than $260,000, to Republicans in 2004). According to the Boston Globe, camera crews are sent ``wherever police commandos make a lot of arrests.''

The show features an unseen interrogator haranguing alleged insurgents for confessions. Virtually every press account notes that the suspects appear to have been beaten or tortured, their faces bruised and swollen. The London Guardian states ``some have… robotic manners of those beaten and coached by police interrogators off-camera.'' The Boston Globe observed, ``The neat confessions of terrorist attacks at times fit together so seamlessly as to seem implausible.'' And then there’s the nature of the confessions. Many suspects admit to ``drunkeness, gay orgies and pornography,'' according to the Guardian. The Financial Times reported that, ``One long-bearded preacher known as Abu Tabarek recently confessed that guerrillas had usually held orgies in his mosques.'' Another preacher giving a confession says he was fired for ``having sex with men in the mosque,'' the Globe account stated that suspects ``frequently admit to rape and pedophilia.''

Lovely. The Americans, after many months of trying, have finally found a television propaganda hook into Iraqi sensibilities in order to draw viewers into a Fox-News-like swamp of lies.

For some more links posted previously in Deep Blade, please see this post.