posted on September 2, 2003 09:45:59 PM new
yep, to be expected by a hypocritical fascist republican government,so what else iS new, there is no liberation, but occupation and despair,for the Iraq people, what a mess, and a very very expensive mess for the US taxpayer....BRING HOME THE TROOPS NOW !!
By Chris Floyd
Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."
Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.
Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out U.S. tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo -- perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad -- and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.
Naturally, the Iraqi people -- even the Bush-appointed leaders of the Potemkin "Governing Council" -- aren't exactly overjoyed at seeing Saddam's goons return, flush with American money and firepower. And they're certainly not reassured by the fact that the Bushists have also reopened Saddam's most notorious prison, the dread Abu Ghraib, and are now, Mukhabarat-like, filling it with Iraqis -- men, women and children as young as 11 -- seized from their homes or plucked off the street to be held incommunicado, indefinitely, without due process, just like the old days. As The Times of London reports, weeping relatives who dare approach the gleaming American razor-wire in search of their "disappeared" loved ones are referred to a crude, hand-written sign pinned to a spike: "No visits are allowed, no information will be given and you must leave." Perhaps an Iraqi Anna Akhmatova will do justice to these scenes one day.
However, the sahibs' unabashed embrace of their soulmates in the Saddamite security forces did provide some sinister comedy in the Post story. The wary reporters and Raj officials displayed the usual hilarious delicacy in coming up with reality-fogging prose to protect the tender sensibilities of the American people, who must never be told what their betters are really getting up to.
For example, the U.S. alliance with Saddam's killers -- yes, the very ones who inflicted all those human rights abuses which, we're now told, was the onliest reason the Dear Leader attacked and destroyed a sovereign nation in an unprovoked war of aggression -- was described demurely as "an unusual compromise." (As opposed to, say, "a moral outrage," or "a putrid stain on America's honor," or "a monstrous copulation of rapacious conquerors with bloodthirsty scum." However, the Post hastens to assure us that the wise sahibs do recognize the "potential pitfalls" of hooking up with "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment."
Those kidders! Surely they know this "potential pitfall" is actually one of the main goals of the entire bloody enterprise: to intimidate the "Arab world" until they straighten up and fly right -- i.e., turn their countries over to Halliburton, Bechtel and the Carlyle Group. That's why you buy an "instrument" like the Mukhabarat in the first place. You certainly don't employ professional murderers and rapists if you are genuinely interested in building a "decent, open, democratic society," as the Bushists claim in their imperial PR.
But like vaudeville troupers of old, the media-sashib double act saves the best gag for last. First the Postmen present the seamy Bush-Mukhabarat humpa-humpa as some great spiritual agon -- "an ongoing struggle between principle and-the practical needs of the occupation" -- instead of what it is: business as usual for the American security apparatus, which happily incorporated scores of its Nazi brethren into the fold after World War II, and over the years has climbed into bed with many a casually raping and murdering thug -- such as, er, Saddam Hussein, who spent a bit of quality time on the CIA payroll.
In fact, the entire Baathist organization -- including the Mukhabarat -- was midwifed into power by not one but two CIA-backed coups, as historian Roger Morris reports in The New York Times. And shall we mention the intimate relations between Saddam's regime and U.S. intelligence services back when Saddam was merrily gassing his own people -- and the Iranians -- with the eager connivance of Ronald Reagan, George Bush I and their "special envoy" to Baghdad, Donald Rumsfeld? Yes, let's.
So the new alliance is no "struggle:" It's a veritable Bush family reunion, a happy homecoming for Rummy and his old Mukhers. But "this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood" -- or to Post readers, anyway. Our vaudevillians, eager to keep the fleecy Homeland flock nestled comfortably in its cozy amnesia, skip the history and go straight to the punchline: Raj officials say that it's OK to hire the most hardcore killers, rapists and torturers -- as long as you "make sure they are indeed aware of the error of their ways."
You guys! What yocks! "So, Mr. Mukhabarat Man, are you indeed aware of the error of your ways?" "Oh yes, boss, I got my mind right!" "Not going to rape or torture anybody anymore?" "Oh no, boss, no -- not unless you tell me to!" "Okey-dokey then! You're hired! Get on over to Abu Ghraib -- you've got some interrogating to do!"
What? It's not funny? What do you mean? Look at those Iraqi kids over there, those American soldiers -- they're grinning from ear to ear! No, wait -- that's just their skulls. The new Bushabarat are using them for soccer practice.
posted on September 2, 2003 10:00:15 PM new
Ex-U.S. Official Says CIA Aided Baathists
CIA offers no comment on Iraq coup allegations
by David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA—If the United States succeeds in shepherding the creation of a post-war Iraqi government, a former National Security Council official says, it won't be the first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing that country's rulers.
Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the NSC staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, says the CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.
Morris says that in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem.
"This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American culpability ....
"As in Iran in '53, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground," says Morris, referring to a U.S.-backed coup that brought the return of the shah to neighbouring Iran.
Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath party.
At the time, Morris continues, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup.
In fact, he claims the former Iraqi president castigated by President George W. Bush as one of history's most "brutal dictators" was actually on the CIA payroll in those days.
"There's no question," Morris says. "It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."
In 1968, Morris says, the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé in 1979.
"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris says.
His version of history is a far cry from current American rhetoric about Iraq — a country that top U.S. officials say has been liberated from decades of tyranny and given the chance for a bright democratic future.
There's no mention of America's own alleged role in giving birth to the regime.
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment on the claims of CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups but said Morris' assertion that Saddam once received payments from the CIA is "utterly ridiculous."
Morris, who resigned from the NSC staff over the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia, says he learned the details of American covert involvement in Iraq from ranking CIA officials of the day, including Teddy Roosevelt's grandson, Archibald Roosevelt.
Now 65, Morris went on to become a Nixon biographer and is currently writing a book about U.S. covert action in Afghanistan and Iraq.
He regards Saddam as a deposed U.S. client in the mold of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
"We climb into bed with these people without really knowing anything about their politics," Morris says. "It's not unusual, of course, in American policy. We tire of these people, and we find reasons to shed them." But many experts, including foreign affairs scholars, say there is little to suggest U.S. involvement in Iraq in the 1960s.
David Wise, a Washington-based author who has written extensively about Cold War espionage, says he is only aware of records showing that a CIA group known as the "Health Alteration Committee" tried to assassinate Kassem in 1960 by sending the Iraqi leader a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief.
"Clearly, they felt that Kassem was somebody who had to be eliminated," Wise says.
Morris contends that little is known about CIA involvement in the Iraqi coups because the Middle East did not hold as much strategic importance in the 1960s and most senior U.S. officials involved there at the time have since died.
But even if the United States played no role in the rise of Iraq's Baath party, experts say Washington has obviously had to confront unintended consequences of former U.S. policies — including those of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, who was CIA director before becoming president.
"There are always some unintended consequences," says Helmut Sonnenfeldt, guest scholar in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution and former NSC staffer.
"There were unintended consequences in World War I that brought the rise of Hitler."
The United States and other Western powers supported Saddam's regime during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, even after the Baghdad government used chemical weapons to kill thousands of Kurdish villagers in Halabja.
The 1988 atrocity recently was a cornerstone of U.S. justifications for its war to topple Saddam's regime.
Before war broke out last month, a flurry of U.S. headlines also called attention to reports that pathogens used by Iraq for its biological warfare program came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a private Manassas, Va.-based biological samples repository called the American Type Culture Collection.
Officials at the two institutions said shipments of anthrax, West Nile virus, botulinum toxins and other pathogens were sent to Iraq in the 1980s with U.S. commerce department approval for medical research purposes.
Even Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program, which U.S. officials said was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb last year, got under way with help from a 1950s Eisenhower administration program to share the peaceful benefits of nuclear energy called "Atoms for Peace."
That is according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based group co-founded by media mogul Ted Turner and former U.S. senator Sam Nunn to reduce the global threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
James Phillips, senior Middle East analyst for the Heritage Foundation, disagrees that Bush's war in Iraq is the result of CIA involvement.
But he says the United States did turn a blind eye to the chance to topple Saddam during the 1991 Gulf War, just as it left Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network after Soviet forces left that country.
"I am reminded of the biblical expression about the sins of the father," Phillips says.
"The first Bush administration was the one that decided to cut off aid to the mujahideen in Afghanistan and set them adrift. And they were also the ones who decided not to go to Baghdad during the first Gulf War."
posted on September 3, 2003 08:38:51 AM newThe New York Times reports that both the United Nations and Najaf's Shiite clergymen had asked the U.S. not to provide military protection. The arrogance and stupidity of the **U.N.** is especially striking; the Times reports that it actually continued employing the same Baathist "security guards"--actually spies for Saddam's regime--it had used before liberation.
When Saddam ruled the country, of course, the U.N. and the Baathists were de facto allies, since various U.N. arrangements assured that Saddam would remain in power[/b]. The U.N. leadership does not seem to have grasped that Saddam's overthrow destroyed the U.N.'s usefulness to him.
And these are the people we're supposed to let run U.S. foreign policy?
only if those on the far far left have their way. lol
However, the Post hastens to assure us that the wise sahibs do recognize the "potential pitfalls" of hooking up with "an instrument renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment."
