by StarmanSkye » Tue Jun 27, 2006 2:39 pm
Flash video:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.cryingwolf.deconstructingiraq.org.uk/">www.cryingwolf.deconstruc...aq.org.uk/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>***<br>Below-linked (with excerpt) an in-depth, detailed case-study that explores the primary role of the US-aligned and supported Interior Ministry with brutal Death Squad violence, which the US/western press emphasizes and blames on 'rebel' forces linked to SCIRI, Badr and Mahdi fighters engaged in sectarian revenge-killings.<br><br>But more and more evidence is surfacing that these western reports distancing the official police forces under Interior Ministry control to be a convenient fiction that disguises the seemingly sectarian violence, acts of brutality and mass-arrests, kidnappings and executions and dumping of bodies and torture as 'uncontrollable' and random and unauthorized --instead of deliberate strategy, integral to the Police Forces working closely with US troops -- <br><br>In a related note, there's evidence that western press reports have grossly underplayed (and selectively NOT reported) the number of ongoing attacks by 'insurgents' against US/UK troops (also minimizing civilian casualties of US actions) while overdramatizing and exaggerating the number of apparently 'sectarian' attacks and civilian victims of civil conflict.<br><br>Tuesday, June 27, 2006 <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://leninology.blogspot.com/">leninology.blogspot.com/</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br>Iraq Resistance: Bigger, Badder and Uncowed.<br>--quote--<br>Despite repeated attempts to smear the resistance as an anti-civilian sectarian movement riddled with psychos and under the thumb of Zarqawi and his putative successors, it is understood by US intelligence that the movement is indeed an anti-occupation resistance. For instance: <br><br>New data reveal, surprisingly, that the vast majority of the Iraqi insurgents' attacks are still aimed not at Iraqi security forces or at civilians, but rather at U.S. and coalition troops. In other words, as much as was the case a year or two ago, the Iraqi insurgency is primarily an anti-occupation insurgency. <br><br>The statistics -- compiled by the multinational military command in Iraq and reproduced in a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office -- raise anew a basic question in the debate over the future of U.S. <br>policy toward Iraq: Is the presence of American troops doing more harm or more good? <br><br>And here are the stats (click below to see graph) <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6998/196/1600/060209_ws_chart_Ex.jpg">photos1.blogger.com/blogg...art_Ex.jpg</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br><br>Of course, this is a huge surprise for those who hoover up impressionistic media reports: <br><br>This is a surprising finding because so many news stories from Iraq have been reporting a rise in attacks on Iraqi security forces and in clashes between Sunni and Shiite factions. The graph confirms that those attacks have risen, sharply. But they still constitute a small percentage of the attacks overall. <br><br>The graph reveals another discouraging trend. Since August 2004, the number of attacks has stayed about the samebobbing up and down between 2,000 and 3,000 per month, recently hovering around 2,500. <br><br>The resistance is not going to be defeated any time soon. The US has killed tens of thousands of people, whom they claim are resistance fighters - and yet they have consistently estimated the resistance at no more than a few thousand, ten thousand at the most. The truth is, there are tens of <br>thousands of fighters and a large pool of passive and active supporters. <br><br>The last time they polled Iraqis, they found a growing number of people supporting resistance attacks - a majority outside Kurdish areas. <br><br>******<br>This continuing trend of a determined, authentic Iraqi resistance fighting against foreign occupying forces, an illegitimate US-manipulated government and military aggression, is likely the motive for American forces working closely with the Interior Ministry and paramilitary support services to conduct and coordinate intelligence with Death Squad violence against the population, to provoke sectarian strife and so deflect attacks against the occupying troops.<br>Starman<br><br>***<br>June 26, 2006 <br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.brusselstribunal.org/DiyalaFuller.htm">www.brusselstribunal.org/...Fuller.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--> <br><br>US Collusion with Iraqi Death Squads <br>Diyala - A Laboratory of Civil War? <br>By <br>Max Fuller <br><br>A recent case study in the dynamics of occupation and sectarianism <br><br>--quote--<br><br>Implications of the reports <br><br>This illustration of an intelligence-based counterinsurgency operation undertaken by US-trained proxy forces, which could have been written just as well about Vietnam, the Philippines, El Salvador or present-day Colombia, reveals a number of important points about the conflict in Iraq. <br><br>(i) SCIRI had no part in orchestrating Operation Knockout. <br>One of the most important conclusions to be drawn is that we can be certain SCIRI had absolutely nothing to do with the 13 November raid on Baquba and its environs. This simple fact discredits 99% of what has been written in the mainstream media about the role of SCIRI and Badr within the new Interior Ministry. <br><br>(ii) Even within Iraq it is very difficult to accurately assess security operations. It is striking in this case that, if we are to believe Hesss sources, even public representatives on the ground in Iraq are unable to distinguish between what they perceive to be sectarian paramilitaries and the forces operating directly on behalf of the Occupation. This is in no way intended to represent a criticism of those on the ground, but only highlights the duplicity of the US Imperial war machine, whose goal is to cover its own tracks and spread discord amongst its enemies. <br><br>(iii) The Wolf Brigade continues to be used by the media as a fob-off.<br>It is extremely revealing of the mainstream media position that even in Hess s relatively detailed and informative report, the responsibility for a joint MOI/MNF-I operation was subtly shifted towards SCIRI and that it was the Wolf Brigade which was reported to have carried out the raid. While Hess does not underline the point in this piece, the reference is unlikely to be missed altogether. The significance of the attribution is that in many media analyses of human rights abuses related to the Ministry of the Interior, the Wolf Brigade has been singled out for blame. Rather than seeking to analyze its structure, most commentators have been content to describe it as a police commando unit attached to the Interior Ministry with a specifically Shiite leaning (for instance, see the Knight Ridder report by Hannah Allam, now very hard to find on the Internet). In this UPI report, the US military spokesperson describes the Wolf Brigade as a public order Brigade rather <br>than as police commandos. In fact, the MOI special police forces are made up of both police commandos and public order brigades, all of them trained and supported by embedded advisors from MNF-I. According to Greers account, the 13 November raid was planned by a Public Order Division and was conducted by Public Order Division elements, reinforced by a brigade of Special Police Commandos, probably the Wolf Brigade. The effect of the UPI report is once again to divert attention from structure and organization and frame <br>discourse within narrow sectarian lines that exclude US responsibility. <br><br>(iv) Counterinsurgency operations are not in the remit of backroom militias.<br>In view of the persistent reports that the majority of extrajudicial killings can be attributed to members of the security forces following the detention of the victims (eg UN Human Rights Mission, Iraqi Organization for Follow-up and Monitoring), it is beholden on all interested parties to take any insight into the workings of those forces and the processes by which targets are selected for arrest with the utmost seriousness. Yet no journalist has so much as mentioned the existence of an Operations Directorate, still less MNF-Is cell within the MOI National Command Center, while the one journalist that seems to have written about Operation Knockout has fallen back into the familiar groove of allegiance to Shiite groups etc. The reason that I have quoted from Greers account at such length is to demonstrate the enormous behind-the-scenes effort required to conduct counterinsurgency warfare. <br>. . .<br><br>The accounts offered in the Independent and Azzaman appear to stand in total opposition to one another. If the Resistance has spread control over Diyala, surely a communitarian civil war of the kind alluded to in the independent is extremely unlikely to be taking place. That is, unless we are prepared to entertain a very special definition of civil war. Such a definition would require us to accept that the Resistance represents an exclusively Sunni faction (not even borne out in the US militarys statistics for detained suspects, see above) and that the security forces, especially the counterinsurgency brigades, represent an exclusively Shiite faction (not borne out in any credible analysis of their composition, nor in their relationship to the occupying powers, including the presence of special police transition teams). Thus, with a fierce conflict taking place between the Occupation and the Resistance, it might indeed be possible to conclude that a sectarian civil war was underway. This seems to be the preferred definition for the Western media establishment. It is possible that angry Sunnis have responded to perceived sectarian assaults in kind, but, assuming that this story is real, it seems much more likely that she and her family are the victims of a cruel deception designed to fracture the country along ethno-confessional lines. <br><br>More and more evidence of such a pattern is starting to emerge, including a recent account published by the BRussells Tribunal anonymously from within Iraq, which refers to evidence that the same special covert units are employed to fabricate sectarian attacks against both Sunni and Shiite <br>Iraqis. In addition, there are indications that other killings are being carried out by death squads operating from within the paramilitary Facilities Protection Service. <br><br>If we want to make sense of what is happening in Iraq we need to recognize that words like SCIRI, Badr and Mahdi, together with phrases like civil war, sectarian violence, revenge killings and tit-for-tat murders all serve to deemphasize the centrality of the occupation and mystify what is a very real and deadly counterinsurgency war. <br><br>From an external perspective, it is extremely difficult to discern whether the Resistance has seized control of Diyala or whether a genuine civil war along sectarian lines has broken out. What we must suspect, though, based on concrete reasoning, is that the security forces trained, armed and guided by the British and Americans will be committing terrible crimes against humanity in their role as attack dogs for the occupation. <br><br>This is not to try to say that every single killing is carried out by the security forces, but it is to say that the security forces are so obviously involved in a great many cases that the Western media and other apologists for the occupation and abettors of genocide have been forced to resort to claiming that the security forces have been infiltrated by various militias. If there are militias in the Ministry of Interior, you can be sure that they are militias that stand to attention whenever a US colonel enters the room. And if there are masked gunmen claiming to be from Badr of Mahdi or anywhere else, the first question we should all be asking is where did they get their lists of victims from? For my money, they will have come straight out of the Intelligence Office of the Operations Directorate at the US-run Ministry of <br>the Interior. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>
