[Previous entry: "Gaza: A Prison for Palestinians"] [Next entry: "UK accuses Iran over killings of soldiers"]

10/06/2005:

"Death Squads And Diplomacy"

10/05/05 "TomPaine.com" -- -- A flurry of Arab diplomacy over the last few days is unfolding in a rear-guard effort to prevent the crisis in Iraq from exploding into what Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned last month could be a regional civil war involving not only Iraq, but all of its neighbors.

The main, and well-deserved, target of Saud’s ire was the increasingly authoritarian and brutal rule of the main Iraqi Shiite parties, especially the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose Badr Brigade militia are terrorizing Iraq’s secular, urban Shiite population and carrying out death-squad attacks against Sunnis. The attacks against the Sunnis are aimed not only at the Iraqi armed resistance but at secular, nationalist Sunni leaders and activists.

Last week, I reported on the fear of Shiite militias and death squads as reported by Aiham Al Sammarae, an Iraqi oppositionist and former minister under the interim government in 2004 who is trying to broker a deal with the Iraqi resistance. Since then, other reports have surfaced concerning the extensive violence carried out by paramilitary forces tied to SCIRI and to Al Dawa, SCIRI’s partner in the Shiite religious bloc in Iraq. By now it is clear that if Tony Soprano lived in Iraq, he’d be a member of the Shiite militia. Consider the following report from CBS News:

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports there is a secret, ruthless cleansing of the country's towns and cities. Bodies—blindfolded, bound and executed—just appear, like the rotting corpses of 36 Sunni men that turned up in a dry riverbed south of Baghdad.

CBS News traced 16 of those men to a single street in a Baghdad suburb, where family members showed CBS News how the killers forced their way into their homes in the middle of the night and dragged away their sons and fathers.

"My uncles were tortured, they even poured acid on them," a young boy told CBS News.

Clutching photographs of the murdered men, the women and children left behind came together to grieve.

One woman said as her husband was marched away she sent her son after him with his slippers, but his abductor sent the child back with a chilling message: No need for slippers—he will come back dead.

They were targeted for one reason alone: all were Sunnis.

Or this, from the Chicago Tribune :

In the dead of night, bands of armed men in Iraqi commando uniforms stormed Baghdad's Hurriyah neighborhood in late August, breaking down doors with sledgehammers and grenades.

If the family inside was Shiite, the gunmen moved on to another house, witnesses said. If the family was Sunni, the gunmen tore through the building, demolishing furniture and manhandling those inside. More than 70 young Sunni Arab men were whisked away.

Countless atrocities, too, have been perpetrated by Sunni gangs and by terrorists associated with Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. But the killings by the Shiite militias are far more chilling because they have an entirely different quality: They are carried out by gunmen tied to the U.S.-supported regime in Baghdad. They don’t draw criticism from U.S. officials, and most American media reports continue to portray the Shiites as victims and the Sunnis as aggressors.

Still, it is the ferocity of the Shiite fanaticism governing Iraq today, and the ruling circle’s ever-closer ties to Iran, that prompted Prince Saud to warn of a regional civil war sparked by the Shiites. He brought that message to Washington last week, talking to senators and to the Washington press corps. He then flew back to the Middle East to attend a meeting of Arab foreign ministers, including Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hossein Zebari. We’ll come to the Arab League meeting shortly, but first some background:
informationclearinghouse.info

Wolfowitz and Negroponte: "The Salvador Option."

A Wolfowitz in sheep's clothing
10/04/05 "New York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON - Paul Wolfowitz is having fun.

"It's fun to have the chance to be a retail politician again," he told Andrew Balls of The Financial Times on a recent trip to India. It was an economic odyssey designed to warm up his image by tipping off the press to record his shirt-sleeve visit to a slum and his street-dancing with children in Andhra Pradesh.

When the reporter noted that Wolfowitz's role as No.2 at the Pentagon must seem distant, he agreed, saying, "Yes, it does seem like a long time ago."

A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other wooly-headed war theoretician, Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa.

Unlike the Powell maxim "If you break it, you own it," the Wolfowitz philosophy is "If you break it, walk away from it."

Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war?

Puppets, Policies and Priorities
...The most flagrant example of this tactic in the modern world is the Presidency of the United States of America, where one expendable, and not totally obedient, President has been replaced by another who has been programmed to do exactly as his operators wish. We saw this when disaster struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the current puppet was seen to be seeking help in reading from a class of small children, or, when the hurricane Katrina struck the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans was flooded, the string-pullers overlooked the need to tell him about it for several days. In both cases, he was left for vital (though short) periods without instructions, since the puppet-masters had not realised that this time-lag would be noticed by so many.

I am not suggesting that these shadowy and extremely sinister figures should come out of hiding to speak for themselves, but it makes it essential for every citizen to try to unmask these manipulators who exercise real power over the state and the lives of every single person within it.

What we do know, because of the policies which have been revealed to the world, is that these puppet-masters have no interest in, or loyalty towards, the country which they control. They clearly have other loyalties, and there are three groups which have come to light, and some of the rulers are loyal to all three, others to two of them and still others just to one. The common factor in these three loyalty groups is that they are all bound to harm the interests of the general population of the U.S.A.

Although they are often intertwined, it is worthwhile to examine each of these strands of crude treachery separately, and I will call them, for the sake of simplicity, rampant capitalism, Zionism and (supposedly Christian) obfuscation.