Assassin of thousands on left, innocent gorilla on right
Spend a little time getting familiar with General Stanley McChrystal, who soon will take over Obama’s Af-Pak war. What the appointment means is the export of the Phoenix Program — mass assassinations of resistance sympathizers and leaders — from Iraq to Afghanistan. The following by James Petras is suitably roaring in outrage:
Obama’s Animal Farm: Bigger, Bloodier Wars Equal Peace and Justice
by James Petras
May 18th, 2009“The Deltas are psychos…You have to be a certified psychopath to join the Delta Force…”, a US Army colonel from Fort Bragg once told me back in the 1980’s. Now President Obama has elevated the most notorious of the psychopaths, General Stanley McChrystal, to head the US and NATO military command in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s rise to leadership is marked by his central role in directing special operations teams engaged in extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions. He is the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building. Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal directed the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSO) Command which operates special teams in overseas assassinations.
The point of the `Special Operations’ teams (SOT) is that they do not distinguish between civilian and military oppositions, between activists and their sympathizers and the armed resistance. The SOT specialize in establishing death squads and recruiting and training paramilitary forces to terrorize communities, neighborhoods and social movements opposing US client regimes. The SOT’s `counter-terrorism’ is terrorism in reverse, focusing on socio-political groups between US proxies and the armed resistance. McChrystal’s SOT targeted local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan through commando raids and air strikes. During the last 5 years of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld period the SOT were deeply implicated in the torture of political prisoners and suspects. McChrystal was a special favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney because he was in charge of the `direct action’ forces of the `Special Missions Units. `Direct Action’ operative are the death-squads and torturers and their only engagement with the local population is to terrorize, and not to propagandize. They engage in `propaganda of the dead’, assassinating local leaders to `teach’ the locals to obey and submit to the occupation.
. . . Putting McChrystal in charge of the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan military operations means putting a notorious practitioner of military terrorism – the torture and assassination of opponents to US policy – at the center of US foreign policy. Obama’s quantitative and qualitative expansion of the US war in South Asia means massive numbers of refugees fleeing the destruction of their farms, homes and villages; tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and eradication of entire communities.
It is just as George Orwell described in Animal Farm: The Democratic Pigs are now pursuing the same brutal, military policies of their predecessors, the Republican Porkers, only now it is in the name of the people and peace. Orwell might paraphrase the policy of President Barack Obama, as `Bigger and bloodier wars equal peace and justice’.
More examination of the psychopathy below, by Tom Hayden, Seymour Hersh, and others.
Hayden was a major leader of the antiwar movement in the late 1960s and early 70s, when a desperate Nixon unleashed the first Phoenix Program on Vietnam.
McChrystal’s Rise: More Secrets, Less Daylight
By Tom Hayden
May 13, 2009One [question for McChrystal] is framed on page 380 of Bob Woodward’s book The War Within, in which the author describes a top-secret operation in 2006 that targeted and killed insurgents with such effectiveness that it gave “orgasms” to Derek Harvey, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus and longtime tracker of Iraqi dissidents. The secret program was led by McChrystal, then a lieutenant general, using signals intercepts, informants and other tools of what McChrystal calls “collaborative warfare” through Special Access Programs (SAPS) and Special Compartmented Information (SCI.) McChrystal, according to the New York Times, conducted and commanded most of his secret missions at night. These missions were consistent with the proposals of Petraeus’s top counterinsurgency adviser at the time, David Kilcullen, to revive the discredited Phoenix Program used in South Vietnam.
This expanding secret war is crucial to understand for three reasons. First, according to Woodward’s claim, it was “more important than the surge” in reducing insurgent violence in Iraq. Second, the Special Ops units served as judge, jury and executioner in hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The targeted victims were from broad categories such as “the Sunni insurgency” and “renegade Shiite militias” or other “extremists.” Third, and most important, the operation was kept secret from the American public, media and perhaps even the US Congress.
Hersh has stated that Dick Cheney supervised an assassination program from the White House, part of that ‘dark side’ he mentioned implementing in the days following 9/11. Was McChrystal the very hands-on manager?
Did Newly Announced Top Afghan General Run Cheney’s Assassination Wing?
By Muriel Kane
May 13, 2009A far less flattering impression of [McChrystal] is given by an Esquire article. . . This article details revelations by a military interrogator, “Jeff,” about the use of torture “at a secret camp used by Task Force 121, the ultimate Special Ops team, the elite titanium tip of Donald Rumsfeld’s spear.”
It was a point of pride that the Red Cross would never be allowed in the door, Jeff says. This is important because it defied the Geneva Conventions, which require that the Red Cross have access to military prisons. “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will they ever be allowed in here?’ And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in–they won’t have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators.”
Given Task Force 121’s history, that was a remarkable promise. Formed in the summer of 2003, it quickly became notorious. By August the CIA had already ordered its officers to avoid Camp Nama. Then two Iraqi men died following encounters with Navy Seals from Task Force 121–one at Abu Ghraib and one in Mosul–and an official investigation by a retired Army colonel named Stuart Herrington, first reported in The Washington Post, found evidence of widespread beatings. “Everyone knows about it,” one Task Force officer told Herrington. Six months later, two FBI agents raised concerns about suspicious burn marks and other signs of harsh treatment. Then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that his men had seen evidence of prisoners with burn marks and bruises and once saw a Task Force member “punch [the] prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention.”
Fred Kaplan at Slate and Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish have already noted Task Force 121’s involvement in harsh interrogations and General McChrystal’s apparent protection of the abuses. Hopefully, these questions about McChrystal will not be overlooked during his confirmation hearings.
Here are the earlier statements by Hersh on Cheney and his ‘executive assassination ring’:
Hersh: ‘Executive assassination ring’ reported directly to Cheney
Muriel Kane
March 11, 2009. . . “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
Don’t forget, our President now is not Cheney or Bush but Barack Obama. Will you side with him and his assassins or with the resistance to his evil empire?
