Formula for U.S. Wars On Islam Comment by Larry Ross, December 1, 2005
The U.S. is practising Machiavellian
tactics (a hallmark of Bush's neoconservative administration) at home
and abroad and using Orwellian techniques to befuddle, terrorise and ultimately
sell it to the American public.
Compiled and Edited by Tom Engelhardt, November 30, 2005 During his embattled summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush managed to launch a new promotional ditty for his war in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Since then there has been much commentary from the administration, from military officials, and from the media on the question of how successfully the Iraqi military is actually "standing up." (Not especially successfully is the usual answer.) There has, however, been scarcely any serious discussion about what that new Iraqi army, heavily infiltrated by Shiite and Kurdish militiamen from the ruling parties in the Iraqi government, is actually going to stand up for. And yet this is an important question. Only recently, for instance, American forces uncovered some striking evidence of what our new Iraq has increasingly come to look like. In a bunker in Baghdad they discovered a detention and torture center run by the Interior Ministry, itself headed by Bayan Jabr, a senior member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the main Shiite religious party in the government and has a 20,000-man strong militia, the Badr Organization. While the bunker's discovery caused an uproar here (and in Iraq), it is but the tip of the iceberg. In some sense, it is not even a new story. For well over a year now, Human Rights Watch has been cataloguing Interior Ministry abuses and warning about a human rights catastrophe unraveling in "our" Iraq. Last July, Peter Beaumont of the British Observer revealed that the Shiite religious/political powers-that-be had set up not one detention-and-torture center but a whole "ghost network" of them -- in some cases, he gave locations in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, partly financed by British and American funds originally intended for the rebuilding of the police force. In these centers, torture methods "resurrected from the time of Saddam" were being used; and the centers, in turn, were connected to paramilitary commando units (and police units) -- basically kidnapping and death squads -- being run by the Interior Ministry as well as by the Shiite religious parties. Such units are increasingly engaged in a war of revenge with Sunni insurgents and in an ever growing campaign of assassinations, summary executions, and disappearances in Sunni neighborhoods which months ago reached "epidemic levels." Human rights organizations in the country have hundreds of cases of disappearances on their lists -- as well as assassinations, torture of every sort, and an endless raft of human rights violations. Continue........
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