Did US inaction on recent Iraqi prison torture flame civil war?

5 Comments

1. 

   Arcturus on April 24, 2006 at 2:20 pm

   They never really cared one way or the other about Iraqi’s reactions to the torture — other than the effect of the message delivered to any who dared oppose their policies.

   As events continue to unfold, as more & more evidence emerges that the US has indeed pursued an Iraqi version of The Salvador Option as their Plan B, once it became clear Allawi wasn’t going to be able to take over for them. A civil war falls neatly into those pplans, despite all the rhetoric one reads in the media. It’s madness to think the US can control the outcome, but madness in US foreign policy isn’t exactly unknown. I don’t buy the ‘they ignored the possibility of civil war’ narrative.

   In a recent interview with Robert Fisk, one of the most experienced observers of the Middle East, Fisk said:

   “I still go along and say what I said before – Iraq is not a sectarian society, but a tribal society. People are intermarried. Shia and Sunnis marry each other. It’s not a question of having a huge block of people here called Shias and a huge block of people called Sunnis any more than you can do the same with the United States, saying Blacks are here and Protestants are here and so on. But certainly, somebody at the moment is trying to provoke a civil war in Iraq.

   “Someone wants a civil war. Some form of militias and death squads want a civil war. There never has been a civil war in Iraq. The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. I’d like to know what the Americans are doing to get at the people who are trying to provoke the civil war. It seems to me not very much. We don’t hear of any suicide bombers being stopped before they blow themselves up. We don’t hear of anybody stopping a mosque getting blown up. We’re not hearing of death squads all being arrested.

   “Something is going very, very wrong in Baghdad. Something is going wrong with the Administration. Mr Bush says, “Oh, yes, sure, I talk to the Shias and I talk to the Sunnis.” He’s talking to a small bunch of people living behind American machine guns inside the so-called Green Zone, the former Republican palace of Saddam Hussein, which is surrounded by massive concrete walls like a crusader castle. These people do not and cannot even leave this crusader castle. If they want to leave to the airport, they’re helicoptered to the airport. They can’t even travel on the airport road. What we’ve got at the moment is a little nexus of people all of whom live under American protection and talk on the telephone to George W Bush who says, “I’ve been talking to them and they have to choose between chaos and unity.” These people can’t even control the roads 50 metres from the Green Zone in which they work.”   link

   • 

     poco on April 24, 2006 at 2:57 pm

     I was listening to someone named Michael Goldfarb on NPR today who was making a point related to what Fisk is saying. Goldfarb said that in all the books about modern Iraq there has never been any serious mention of the division between Shia and Sunni. The divisions have been tribal sometimes, but more often the nation was divided among those who supported the communists or the socialists–never Shia or Sunni. This religious divide is very much a post-Iraq war phenomenon.

     Clammyc is right that torture chambers will lead to simmering resentments and burning hatreds–how can they not!!

     My tin-foil hat theory: These torture chambers which further encourage the deepening of sectarian divide are all meant to keep the Iraqis from demanding their own control of their land. We see what major and massive street protests and marches can do–think of Bolivia, Venezuela and of course, today, Nepal. But massive insecurity in the streets forestalls any attempt at such an uprising, the divisions between the Shias and the Sunnis subverts any united movement arising to challenge the illegal occupation. And the puppets installed in Iraq do the bidding of the puppet masters….    

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     clammyc on April 24, 2006 at 3:16 pm

     wow–very interesting read.  thx for the link.

2. 

   Arcturus on April 24, 2006 at 2:52 pm

   Newsweek, Jan 14, 2005, The Salvador Option:

   . . . the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. <snip>

   Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called “snatch” operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

   How clearly does the writing on the wall need to be spelled out?

   Max Fuller in his Nov 10, 2005 article, Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq includes an examination of the Wolf Brigade, a special forces unit attached to the Interior Ministry, and the Special Police Commandos. He connects them with US intelligence through the figures of “James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war” and “Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as ‘rumor and innuendo’. . Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia’s Drugs Wars of the 1990s, as well as working alongside local forces in Peru and Bolivia.”

   . . . centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking place in Iraq today under the auspices of crackdowns like Operation Lightning, which make use of so-called Rapid Intrusion Brigades to make widespread, well orchestrated arrests (Financial Times). It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense). In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications, computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US (Defend America). Interestingly, supplying a state-of-the-art communications network to coordinate mass murder was part of the plan in Indonesia as well (Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p 30); it is doubtless common practice.   [snip]

   It seems that a nebulous Wolf Brigade linked to Badr, full of vengeful Shiite militiamen serves as a useful foil for allegations of ‘state terrorism’, but that when the accusations are sufficiently well-grounded, it is easier to keep it out of the spotlight for fear that a pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights might start to emerge. <snip>

   In fact, the entire intelligence establishment is a creation of the Anglo-American secret services (Los Angeles Times), which began building at least as early as the beginning of the occupation (Detroit Free Press), although it may be suspected that the process was conceived long before. The new Iraqi establishment was staffed by long-term CIA assets, such as General Mohammad Shahwani, who had been nurtured by the CIA since the late 1980s (Asia Times Online) and became director of the new National Intelligence Service (the Mukhabarat). Like Thabit and Flayyih, other old CIA hands, Shahwani had participated in attempted coups against the government of Iraq. Further agents (presumably existing intelligence assets for the most part) were recruited from Iraq’s main political groups, consisting of SCIRI, the Dawa Party, the two main Kurdish parties, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord. These agents became the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), whose principal job was to ‘turn raw intelligence into targets that could be used in operations’ (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.). Initially, ‘operations’ were carried out by a paramilitary unit composed of militia from the five main parties, who, under the supervision of US commanders, worked with US special forces to track down ‘insurgents’ (Washington Post). <snip>

   These new intelligence agencies supply the data for the Interior Ministry to make arrests . . . Like Thabit and Flayyih, Shahwani has retained his position under the transitional government and continues to report directly to the CIA (Seattle Times). Clearly, however, the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries, especially Shia control of the Interior Ministry (which, as Beaumont correctly points out, is the centre of the horror), are to blame, is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved; it is known as establishing ‘plausible deniability’. For example, in Colombia, where the US as been deeply involved for decades, paramilitary death squads are invariably described in the media as a third force in the armed conflict, despite the fact that their victims are typically civilian opponents of the government, their members are drawn directly from serving members of the armed forces and they are only able to operate with the active complicity of the army (Human Rights Watch: The “Sixth Division”). In reality, they function as part of a shadow state, which exists to implement policies that must remain unaccountable.

3. 

   Damnit Janet on April 24, 2006 at 6:16 pm

   I stand in such horror and anger at my govt.

   Thanks for piecing this all together Clammy.