After World War II, the OSS/CIA recruited former Nazis to ‘get the Commies’-this turned into an international fascist network that engineered coups from Iran to Congo to Chile, created torture states in Latin America and elsewhere, became international drug and weapons and terror-merchants…A lot of this information emerged during the Contra war in Nicaragua. General John Singlaub, Michel(?) Sindona, the Banco D’Ambrosiano/Continental of Illinois scandal…The strategy described below is out of the book. Same book. Same guys.

Operation Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of history
Death squads didn’t work in Vietnam, but the CIA is betting they’ll be great in Iraq
by Nick Schou

Never pretty, the war in Iraq is about to get a whole lot uglier. U.S. officials have begun to recruit ex-officers of Saddam Hussein’s infamous Mukhabarat, or secret police, to hunt down resistance forces fighting U.S. troops in Iraq.

According to human rights groups, the Mukhabarat was responsible for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians during Hussein’s brutal reign. Nonetheless, the CIA has already reportedly begun sending paychecks to dozens of Saddam’s former thugs, who reportedly assisted in the successful hunt for Hussein and suspected Iranian and Syrian spies in Iraq.
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And who are these inmates in U.S. prisons, and who are the torturers?

By Fox Butterfield
Published: May 8, 2004
Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women’s pink underwear as a form of humiliation.
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by Rootsie
Imagine that-American tax dollars go to pay for torture.

Like I have said before, we are past the time when ‘but I didn’t know!’ can pass for an excuse. It’s like the people in the town of Oswiecim in Poland saying ‘but we didn’t know!’ as the human ashes from the ovens at Auschwitz rained down on their heads. If this democracy business is not a total sham, it is our business as citizens to ‘know’. What I remember most clearly about 9-11 was my feeling of disgust that the American people really had no clue as to why ‘they’ hated us enough to turn their bodies into bombs and slam them into skyscrapers.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s, CIA-trained and American financed torturers ran rampant all the way from Guatemala down to Chile. I remember the story of a Brazilian female activist who was found dumped by the side of the road, horribly beaten and raped, her mouth sewn shut. When the doctors opened up her mouth, they found that dogs’ fangs had been implanted in her bleeding gums. The first thing she said was ‘They will never silence me.’
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by Firas Al-Atraqchi

2004-04-29 | The popular perception in the US is that Iraq is a country of uncivilized criminals and terrorists raised to hate America because common people hate freedom and liberty, “ragheads” and “sand niggers” who brought down the Twin Towers in New York City and attacked the Pentagon. US-based columnists have taken to calling Iraqis lazy and ungrateful…

Racism is the answer. There is an arrogance in the West that everything Western is superior, exemplary and ideal for all cultures. In 2002, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Belusconi said that Islamic culture was inferior to the advanced Western civilization. This school of thought is prevalent throughout every sector of US society and has been nudged on by the various “hate-films” that Hollywood churns every year. Arabs are portrayed as stupid, animalistic, ammoral, sex-starved, abusing, wife-battering terrorists who seek to kill themselves – and their children – so that they can languish with 72 virgins in heaven. That Arabs saved Western civilization by translating the Greek philosophies and complementing them, introducing algebra, geometry and astronomy to Europe is left out. That the first medical institute in world history was established in – wait for it – southern Iraq by the Muslims is also lost on the US public.
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by Rootsie
June 20, 2003

Samuel Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations was published in the early 1990’s. Right wing policy-makers have apparently picked it up and run with it. Huntington concludes that Muslim and Judeo-Christian ‘civilizations’ are incompatible. That democracy as the West understands it is not within Islamic capacities, which of course begs the question as to whether democaracy is within European/American capacities. But leaving that aside for the moment, what conclusion is one to draw from Huntington’s thesis? Well, the ruling elite has drawn theirs, and it is that Islam must be wiped from the face of the earth.

But what if Islamic civilization IS the antecedent of all we consider to be European? In the broad range of history of course this is so, as the early African civilizations seeded the development of the civilizations of the Fertile Crescent and India 5000 years ago, but the sea- change of which I am speaking now came over Europe fewer than 800 years ago.

And I now pose my question: was the decimation of Iraqi history a primary objective of this war? Does the ‘New World Order’ mean that, like the twin towers, the old must be razed to clear the way for the new?

rootsie.com
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TORTURE AT ABU GHRAIB
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
The New Yorker
Issue of 2004-05-10
Posted 2004-04-30

In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib twenty miles west of Baghdad, was one of th world’s most notorious prisons, with torture weekly executions, and vile living conditions As many as fifty thousand men and women—no accurate count is possible—were jamme into Abu Ghraib at one time, in twelve-by-twelve-foot cells that were little more tha human holding pits

In the looting that followed the regime’s collapse, last April, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed, including doors, windows, and bricks. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a new medical center added. Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of “crimes against the coalition”; and a small number of suspected “high-value” leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.

Last June, Janis Karpinski, an Army reserve brigadier general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and thirty-four hundred Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.

General Karpinski, who had wanted to be a soldier since she was five, is a business consultant in civilian life, and was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St. Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, “living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn’t want to leave.”

A month later, General Karpinski was formally admonished and quietly suspended, and a major investigation into the Army’s prison system, authorized by Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior commander in Iraq, was under way. A fifty-three-page report, obtained by The New Yorker, written by Major General Antonio M. Taguba and not meant for public release, was completed in late February. Its conclusions about the institutional failures of the Army prison system were devastating. Specifically, Taguba found that between October and December of 2003 there were numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” at Abu Ghraib. This systematic and illegal abuse of detainees, Taguba reported, was perpetrated by soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company, and also by members of the American intelligence community. (The 372nd was attached to the 320th M.P. Battalion, which reported to Karpinski’s brigade headquarters.) Taguba’s report listed some of the wrongdoing:

Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.
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