Afghanistan War Weekly: October 25, 2010

"The Secret Iraq Files" (0:31)

AljazeeraEnglish, Oct. 22nd, 2010

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U-s_S2E2Bo

The video for the full and nearly one-hour report is further below.

Al Jazeera had full access to nearly 400,000 classified US military documents. Our coverage will begin at 2100 GMT, with full coverage starting at 2200 GMT.

"Iraq files 'not surprising'" (3:46)

AljazeeraEnglish, Oct. 22nd, 2010

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD7AlgUzWxM

For the past 10 weeks, working with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London, Al Jazeera has analysed tens of thousands of documents, sourced through WikiLeaks, which cover six years of war - in the biggest leak of US military secrets in history.

The secret files reveal extensive abuse at Iraqi police stations, army bases and prisons.

According to the files, coalition troops reported the allegations to their superiors on more than 1,300 occasions.

Sabah al-Mukhtar, lawyer and president of the Arab Lawyers Association in London, spoke to Al Jazeera about the allegations of "torture", and said Iraqis will not be surprised by the findings.

The above is a short interview, but what Sabah al-Mukhtar says is plenty and like he says, these Iraq War logs released through Wikileaks definitely aren't going to impress Iraqis. They may be very happy that these war logs are now out in the public domain, but most Iraqis, many anyway, surely won't be surprised about the crimes described in these logs. As Sabah al-Mukhtar says, the reality is far worse than what these war logs will tell us about, and I definitely believe that he's right, as some of my posts following this one will illustrate.

I believe that the following report probably the two-part AlJazeera report that David Swanson referred to. And it should be interesting for comparing with what we should already know based on what has been reported in the past.

"The Secret Iraq Files" (56:01)

AljazeeraEnglish, Oct. 23rd, 2010

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNt7T_JTIkk

It is the biggest leak of military secrets ever. Al Jazeera has obtained access to almost 400,000 classified American documents. Torture, claims of murder at the checkpoint - revelations that make a mockery of the rules of combat. This special programme reveals the truth about the war in Iraq.

I'll make some comments on the above report in a separate post, but will also make some now. It's a fine report. It doesn't tell us about important dark realities of this war on Iraq and because of the US and UK, directly, but it's a fine report. I don't think really better could be expected of AlJazeera or any news media. And Julian Assange spoke well.

The Pentagon spokesman lied, plenty.

The Iraqi Interior Minister speaks bullshit and some, if not all, of my posts following this one will strongly illustrate why.

"The Secret Iraq Files - Part two" (29:15)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QMQKcVCJxs

We are getting an insight into the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq - who pays for it and does it get its money? We will also reveal details about Iran's secret war inside Iraq, and America's massive use of air power - is it as pecise as they claim?

Regarding al-Qaeda in Iraq, I'll be providing links and excerpts from important relevant articles in posts following this one; certainly my posts on death squads and covert black ops by the U.S. and U.K. anyway. However, I can also provide an immediate hint as to my belief and it's that AQ in Iraq is either fiction, or it's a covert black op under US control.

The part of the report on Nouri al-Maliki and Iraqi politics, but while I'm referring to when the founder and exec. director of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy speaks is good. As he says, the war logs from Wikileaks don't really tell Iraqis anything they didn't already know. Iraqis welcome that the logs are from an American source, but "Iraqi politicians will use this against each other", he adds. Hence, political troubles are ahead. What's important in what the guest says is what may happen with Iraqi politics and evidently soon; like over coming weeks.

The AlJazeera host asks the guest if he thinks that Iraq may return to a situation like in 2006 and what he evidently means is civil or sectarian war, but that never really happened; as enough people who aren't sufficiently read, but who are sharp, have written about. See my posts following this one; posts on death squads and covert black ops by the US and UK.

Regarding "Iran's secret war inside Iraq", see my posts following this one. They illustrate plenty on what my view is and what the actual reality in Iraq was when the US claimed that Iran was involved in violence in Iraq. People can also learn more from the British Bombers index page at BRussellsTribunal.org that'll be linked in one of my posts after this one, as well as the "Salvador Options and Death Squads" index linked in the home page of the same Web site.

AlJazeera is like many news media, repeating western claims without any critical analysis or questioning.

And note that Iraqi Sunnis who are or were members of the Iraqi government buy the western claim that Iran was involved with violence in Iraq, but it evidently is again believed without critical investigation and Sunnis were highly targeted and know that Iran and Iraq fought a war in the 1980s. US and UK covert black ops and being actually in control of the Interior Ministry of the US puppet government in Iraq while all of this was ignored by most people, including in Iraq, understandably would lead Iraqi Sunnis to think Iran was very responsible for the extreme violence against Sunnis. Yet, that's the sort of outcome often sought with the use of covert black ops by the US and UK. They want to cause divisions.

It's better explained with articles linked and excerpted in my posts after this one. Definitely see those posts. I'm seeing that while it's certainly not the fault of Wikileaks and perhaps also not of the people who provided the logs to Wikileaks, we're still getting western propaganda, deception, cover-up, lies in some of these logs.

"Listening Post: The Listening Post - The ongoing WikiLeaks saga" (22:53)

AljazeeraEnglish, added Aug. 7th, 2010

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNt7T_JTIkk

The truth is out there, but what does it all mean? On this episode of The Listening Post, we turn our attention to figures involved in the WikiLeaks Afghan war logs and the debate over what the US government should do about it. Plus, we take a look at the dark side of online video gaming.

The article further below by Max Fuller, "Crying Wolf: ...", is about the death squads that brutally operated (and possibly sometimes continue to operate) in Iraq during the present war while the U.S. clearly knew about this. The article also briefly mentions some of the brutal torture practiced by US puppet Iraqi government "security" forces or guards against Iraqi detainees. And, in both cases, the US knew and more than knew and Max Fuller isn't the sole person to have excellently written about this.

More can be found in the "Salvador Option and Death Squads" index linked in the home page of BRussellsTribunal.org.

The following piece makes for an excellent introduction for or to Max Fuller's article.

"Uncovering the Roots of American Terrorism in Iraq"
by Mike Whitney, Dec. 2nd, 2005

www.uruknet.info/?p=18360

Max Fuller has written the most important article of the year and perhaps the decade. In his "Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq", Fuller painstakingly lays out the details and documentation to prove that the United States intelligence agencies are behind the vast incidents of murder and torture being carried out in Iraq today. If Fuller’s thesis is correct, then the War on Terror, that mighty engine of imperial carnage, is nothing more than a public relations scam to enlist public support.

(snip)

It means that the "central front in the war on terror" is a phantom; a specter; a chimera that cloaks itself in the dull braying of plutocrats who promise democracy, but only deliver greater deprivation, sorrow and fear. It means that the ideological headwaters of global terrorism is Washington and that behind the scratchy façade of Al Qaida videos and dubious accounts of suicide bombers, the insidious fist of the imperial master continues to pound away at its victims. It means that, as Martin Luther King said, "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own country."

The media has played a central role in trying to obfuscate the details of America’s involvement in the terror-war by characterizing the hundreds of murder victims as the result of tit-for-tat sectarian violence or of rogue Shiite militias loosely connected to the Interior Ministry. But, as Fuller deftly demonstrates, the more likely explanation is that the Ministry is executing a clear strategy of gratuitous terror devised and directed by their American handlers.

(snip)

The one reporter who diverged from these fabrications was Yasser Salihee, reporter for Knight-Ridder news. Salihee had uncovered critical information about the weaponry, vehicles and origins of the death squads, and was expected to file reports on those topics. His coverage, however, was cut short when he was assassinated in a gangland style hit at a checkpoint outside Baghdad by an American sniper. With just one precision shot to the forehead, another unembedded journalist was removed from covering Bush’s folly.

Fuller’s research exposes the Interior Ministry as the hub of the clandestine death squad activity. The assumption that the ministry is manned exclusively by theocratic Shiites is just more misleading media gibberish. In fact, one of the more brutal counterinsurgency groups, the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, is headed by a former officer in Saddam’s Baath Party. ...

(snip)

Needless, to say, the CIA does not move major assets like Steele and Casteel into a prickly situation like Iraq to shuffle papers by a water-cooler. These are the main gears in the machinery of the Iraqi death squads; the movable parts in Washington’s apparatus of state terror. There is nothing either "random" or "disjointed" in the butchery produced by their labors.

(snip)

Nearly everything that appears in the corporate media has been intentionally misleading as part of the broader information war, to keep the American people from grasping the truth about the chief perpetrator of terrorism in Iraq today; the US intelligence agencies. As the Los Angeles Times notes, "The entire intelligence establishment is a creation of the Anglo-American secret services, which began building at least as early as the beginning of the occupation."

(snip)

Given Fuller’s thesis, it’s likely that most of the alleged "suicide" bombings are nothing more than stationary vehicles set off by remote-control and reported as suicide attacks by the compliant media to perpetuate the racial stereotypes of crazed Muslim fanatics.

Fuller’s article is a difficult read with hefty documentation that tends to have a mind-numbing effect. Never the less, the ponderous emphasis on facts and actual news reports serve his greater purpose of proving a very tenuous and thorny theory, that the US is overseeing a humongous clandestine operation that has fractured the country and destabilized the region. ...

(snip)

Regarding the "suicide" bombings, my next post is much about this topic, with links to and excerpts from important articles.

"Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq"

Max Fuller, GlobalResearch.ca, Nov. 11th, 2005

www.uruknet.info/?p=17684

Abstract

The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari's Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country.

---------------------------------------

(snip)

The appearance of death squads was first highlighted in May this year, when over a 10-day period dozens of bodies were found casually disposed of in rubbish dumps and vacant areas around Baghdad. (snip)

The evidence was sufficiently compelling for the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni organisation, to issue public statements in which they accused the security forces attached to the Ministry of the Interior as well as the Badr Brigade, the former armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of being behind the killings. They also accused the Ministry of the Interior of conducting state terrorism (Financial Times).

Since then, a steady stream of the victims of extrajudicial killings has flowed through the Baghdad morgue. (snip)

(snip)

The killings have not been confined to Baghdad. (snip) These few examples represent the tip of a rapidly expanding iceberg, with the majority of extrajudicial-style killings seriously under-investigated and underreported.

(snip)

However, instead of placing the blame squarely on the apparatus of the new Iraqi state, the mainstream media has almost exclusively chosen to shift the emphasis away, resorting to a number of standardised literary devices. The first device is to frame extrajudicial killings in the context of a wider panoply of supposed retaliatory sectarian violence. For example, .... The second device is to state or imply that the security forces are closely associated with largely unaccountable Shia militias, especially the Badr Brigade. (snip)

Most importantly, reports variously stress that the government, Interior Ministry and police are under sectarian Shia control. (snip)

(snip) Whilst all of these devices are employed in various combinations, notably absent from every account is any serious examination of the new Iraqi state or, assiduously avoided, the role of the occupying powers, leaving the most thoughtful of journalist to wonder with Beaumont whether the Iraqi state is "stumbling towards a policy of institutionalised torture" or whether human-rights abuses are conducted by "rogue elements" within the security apparatus (Salihee's investigation represents the one exception, with the emphasis placed firmly on the organs of the state, supported by solid primary evidence).

Police Commandos and Disinformation Brigades

An instructive starting point for an examination of the prevailing media consensus is to consider some of the forces of the Iraqi state most closely associated with allegations of serious human rights abuses.

The majority of accusations are general. Journalists refer to the police, security forces, the National Guard or to poorly identified police commandos, but specific accusations have been made against a unit known as the Wolf Brigade. The identification of the Wolf Brigade with cases of abduction, torture and execution in Baghdad was first made on 16 May, .... (snip)

(snip)

On 9 June rightwing US think tank the Council for Foreign Relations published a paper devoted to Iraqi militias (CFR), simultaneously repeated in the New York Times. (snip)

(snip)

Those familiar with Peter Maas's article "The Way of the Commandos", published by The New York Times Magazine just six weeks earlier, will recognise that, in fact, the Wolf Brigade bears a striking similarity to the unit he identifies as the Special Police Commandos. The Police Commandos, too, were formed in autumn 2004 and saw one of their first major commitments in Mosul in November; like the Wolf Brigade, their leader also founded an unspeakably vile television show called Terrorism in the Grip of Justice.

That sounds very American for a tv show to me.

But there are fundamental distinctions between these units as well. The Police Commandos were founded on the initiative of then Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, the son of a former Iraqi Chief of Staff, believed by many to have been a major CIA asset (National Review Online), under the command of his uncle, an ex-Baathist, Sunni military intelligence officer and CIA coup-plotter called Adnan Thabit. (snip)

A key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country's civil war. Steele was responsible for selecting and training the small units (or death squads) who were boasted to have inflicted 60% of the casualties caused in that 'counterinsurgency' campaign (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). Principally, the tens of thousands of victims were civilians.

Another US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as 'rumor and innuendo'. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia's Drugs Wars of the 1990s, as well as working alongside local forces in Peru and Bolivia (Maas op. cit.). Whilst Casteel's background is said to be Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the operation against Escobar was a joint intelligence effort, involving the CIA, DEA, Delta Force and a top-secret military intelligence surveillance unit knows as Centra Spike (Marihemp, SpecWarNet). (snip) However, the operation did lead to the formation of a death squad known as Los Pepes, which was to form the nucleus for Colombia's present paramilitary death-squad umbrella organisation, the AUC, responsible for over 80 percent of the country's most serious human-rights abuses (Colombia Journal). Whilst no official connection was ever admitted, Los Pepes relied on the intelligence data held in the fifth-floor steel vault at the US Embassy in Bogota that served as the operation's nerve centre. (snip)

Casteel's background is significant because this kind of intelligence-gathering support role and the production of death lists are characteristic of US involvement in counterinsurgency programs and constitute the underlying thread in what can appear to be random, disjointed killing sprees. Probably the best-attested example of such an operation is Indonesia .... Similar cases can be made for the CIA supplying death lists and/or overseeing operations in Vietnam (OC Weekly), Guatemala, ..., and El Salvador, .... For an extensive list of countries in which the CIA has supported death squads, see the database compiled by Ralph McGehee (Serendipity).

The link for the page at Serendipity.li is no longer valid, but a Web search using "Ralph McGehee" and "death squads" turns up links and the following is one of the links. The page provides a long "list of countries in which the CIA has supported death squads".

"An International Guide to CIA Death Squads"
by Ralph McGehee (a former agent or officer CIA who became a whistleblower or lamplighter)

www.whale.to/b/mcgehee.html

Continuing with Max Fuller's article:

Such centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking place in Iraq today under the auspices of crackdowns like Operation Lightning, which make use of so-called Rapid Intrusion Brigades to make widespread, well orchestrated arrests (Financial Times). It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense). In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications, computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US (Defend America). Interestingly, supplying a state-of-the-art communications network to coordinate mass murder was part of the plan in Indonesia as well (Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p 30); it is doubtless common practice.

Finally, we know that by 30 January of this year, the Police Commandos had six functioning brigades and in early April the Al-Nimr (Tiger) Brigade took over from the Al-Dhib (Wolf) Brigade in Mosul (UNAMI). Interestingly, one of the Police Commandos' first Brigade commanders was a Shiite, apparently called Rashid al-Halafi, but Maas noted that "he was regarded warily by other Shiites because he held senior intelligence posts under Saddam Hussein".

Untangling the Web

Clearly, the Wolf Brigade, though commonly treated in media reports as an autonomous entity, is actually one component of the Interior Ministry's Special Police Commandos. (snip)

(snip) It seems that a nebulous Wolf Brigade linked to Badr, full of vengeful Shiite militiamen serves as a useful foil for allegations of 'state terrorism', but that when the accusations are sufficiently well-grounded, it is easier to keep it out of the spotlight for fear that a pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights might start to emerge. The significance of this lies far beyond merely being able to expose sloppy journalistic practices, but actually reveals key characteristics of both the US imperial war machine and of the nature of their current occupation of Iraq.

(snip)

In fact, the entire intelligence establishment is a creation of the Anglo-American secret services (Los Angeles Times), which began building at least as early as the beginning of the occupation (Detroit Free Press), although it may be suspected that the process was conceived long before. The new Iraqi establishment was staffed by long-term CIA assets, .... (snip) Further agents (presumably existing intelligence assets for the most part) were recruited from Iraq's main political groups, .... These agents became the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), whose principal job was to 'turn raw intelligence into targets that could be used in operations' (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.). Initially, 'operations' were carried out by a paramilitary unit composed of militia from the five main parties, who, under the supervision of US commanders, worked with US special forces to track down 'insurgents' (Washington Post). As the new Iraqi state apparatus developed, CMAD was split between the ministries of Defence and Interior, with an 'elite corps' creamed off to form the National Intelligence Service (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.). To oversee all three bodies, the National Intelligence Coordination Committee was established, headed, as National Security Advisor (appointed in April 2004), by Mowaffak Rubaie. This 'leading Shiite moderate' had been a spokesman for the Dawa Party in the 1980s when it was a serious terrorist organisation targeting Iraq, before moving on to help coordinate the Iraqi opposition from London (Asia Times Online, op. cit.). In London he worked with the Khoei Foundation, a pro-US charitable organisation that has distributed money for the CIA and is linked with the National Endowment for Democracy through Prime minister Jaafari's advisor Laith Kuba, another long-term CIA asset (Village Voice).

These new intelligence agencies supply the data for the Interior Ministry to make arrests. A graphic and harrowing account of such arrests on 27 June 2004 was provided by UPI's P. Mitchell Prothero, in what he describes as the "welcome arrival of frontier-style law enforcement". (snip) On 29 June members of the Oregon National Guard swept into the grounds of the Interior Ministry and disarmed plain-clothed Iraqi policemen whom they had observed beating bound and blindfolded prisoners (Oregonian). The US soldiers began to administer first aid to the prisoners, .... Steven Casteel was called to help deal with the situation (Boston Globe). After hours of negotiations, the soldiers unwillingly withdrew, leaving the victims in the hands of their torturers. Perhaps their ultimate fate will never be known, but as Casteel commented, "There's always a pendulum between freedom and security".

Like Thabit and Flayyih, Shahwani has retained his position under the transitional government and continues to report directly to the CIA (Seattle Times). Clearly, however, the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries, especially Shia control of the Interior Ministry (which, as Beaumont correctly points out, is the centre of the horror), are to blame, is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved; it is known as establishing "plausible deniability". (snip) In reality, they function as part of a shadow state, which exists to implement policies that must remain unaccountable.

More specifically, in the case of Iraq, this disinformation strategy not only seems to be designed to mask the real intellectual authors of genocidal crimes, but also, increasingly, appears to be directed towards creating the very sectarian divisions that it hides behind.

Towards Balkanisation

In every country where US-backed counter insurgency operations have taken place with their attendant massacres and death squads, the conflict has existed as one dimension in a strategy of neo-colonisation. (snip)

In this respect, Iraq is no different. (snip) This is not a sectarian issue. To the extent to which opposition becomes effective, the leaders and activists of the movement are likely to become military targets for the state death squads, whatever guise they take.

(snip)

While many in the mainstream media and Iraq's puppet government have argued that insurgents linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi and al-Qaida are behind much of the violence, deliberately hoping to inflame sectarian divisions and incite a civil war (eg. News Day), it is interesting to note how closely their dangerous schemes correspond with the avowed aims of one of the most powerful figures in present-day Iraq. Mowaffak Rubaie, the US-installed national security advisor, promotes a vision that he calls "democratic regionalism", by which Iraq would be dismembered into a loose federal system of four to six distinct provinces, with ... and Baghdad as a separate district as well as the seat of federal government, .... Coincidentally, such a plan is well catered for by Iraq's new constitution (NPR), but would amount to the disintegration of the Iraqi state. A de facto civil war would undoubtedly advance this process.

The parallels with the break up of Yugoslavia are obvious. (snip)

In view of mounting evidence of Anglo-American involvement in the bombing campaigns targeting Iraqi civilians, notably the brief arrest of two British SAS men found with a car packed with explosives (William Bowles), it is worth speculating a little on the implementation of their wider strategy. Discounting Al-Qaida and Zarqawi in Iraq as fabrications designed for easy media consumption (Centre for Research on Globalisation), we are left with a situation in which someone is targeting Shias, ..., and someone is targeting Sunnis, .... It is impossible that the Iraqi resistance could account for this pandemic of fratricidal violence, .... It is equally impossible that SCIRI and the Badr Brigade could account for much of it in a milieu dominated by CIA assets and US military forces. What is possible is that both sides of the apparent sectarian violence are run as part of a huge CIA-lead intelligence operation designed to split Iraq at the seams. I tentatively suggest that the intelligence apparatus at the Interior Ministry is contriving attacks on Sunnis and that British and US special forces in conjunction with the intelligence apparatus at the Iraqi Defence Ministry are fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias. Overseeing the entire operation is the "cream" of CMAD under the direction of top-level US intelligence asset Mowaffak Rubaie, a man already experienced at participating in bombing campaigns, undoubtedly working hand in glove with the CIA and the National Security Council in the US.

False Flags, Semiotics and Vulgar Marxists

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard famously once stated that the first Gulf War did not take place. By this he did not mean that nothing happened, but that its presentation in the media consisted of an overwhelming barrage of the signs of War, which bore essentially no relationship to the annihilation of a Third World army by the most advanced military power in history. In short it was a simulation of war. (snip)

Fifteen years later, the same charges can be levelled against the recent Iraq "War" and the country's subsequent occupation. Most importantly, I believe that a process akin to that Baudrillard highlighted is being actively employed to simulate a civil war in Iraq. False-flag intelligence operations are aimed at sowing seeds of a sectarian strife that was largely non-existent prior to the invasion. Thus, even many Sunni Iraqis are coming to believe that the well-organised death squads run from the CIA-controlled intelligence hub are actually the Badr Brigade they often claim to be; and thus British SAS men in Arab disguise plant bombs at Shia religious festivals to be blamed on fanatical Wahabi Sunni "insurgents".

Whether such tactics succeed in provoking further, autonomous acts of violence directed against the civilian population is much less significant than the impact they are able to exert within the media. This Anglo-American intelligence operation acts as a factory churning out the signs of Civil War: a "wave of tit-for-tat sectarian violence" and the consequent ethnic cleansing. The signs are produced to be picked up by the media and spun and spun until nothing is left but a nebulous Civil War with no internal logic or structure, with the occupying forces as powerless to intervene as they were in the Balkans while Iraq splits into Rubiae's desired four to six autonomous provinces. Those few journalists, like Yasser Salihee and Steven Vincent, who break the mould and start to investigate the actual authorship of extrajudicial killings themselves become victims.

When one former CIA operative candidly claimed that "Intelligence services are the heart and soul of a new country" (Washington Post)), .... What they were actually confessing is that the essence of a state is the organisation of violence as the ultimate coercive measure and that the intelligence apparatus functions as its brain. ...

(snip)

Reading the complete article is rather essential and anyone who does certainly will not regret having done so; for people wanting to truthfully understand the violence in Iraq against innocent Iraqis, anyway. The article doesn't really, not specifically anyway, the many so-called suicide car bombings, as foreigners have called these bombings, but we should consider that these, many of these bombings anyway, likely were covert black ops; instead of committed by Iraqi resistance groups.

People who use the "Salvador Option and Death Squads" index linked in the home page of BRussellsTribunal.org will find other important articles by Max Fuller; as well as important related articles by other people.
He also has an author's index at GlobalResearch.ca.

The author of the following article only refers to the Badr Brigade, so keep Max Fuller's above article in mind.

"Iraq's death squads
Deborah Davies reports from inside Baghdad"

by Deborah Davies, Channel 4, Nov. 15th, 2006

www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=3879

(snip)

Another of the children, Hanin, was asleep in her parents' bed. She's almost matter of fact as she describes what happened next. 'I heard a gunshot so I cuddled my Dad. They came into our room and I told them not to kill my Daddy but the man threatened to shoot me. They shot Daddy and then they shot my Uncle.'

Five men were shot dead that night - a sixth had been killed in the street three weeks earlier. Their crime? The head of the family, Sheik Khadem Sarheed, was leader of a well-known Sunni tribe. Now he's dead, along with four of his adult sons and one son-in-law. One of the sons was a policeman and recognised the killers. 'He told them he was a policemen like them', says his widow, 'But they shot him in the neck and in the stomach'.

Neighbours saw the police cars parked outside the house and recognised the uniforms of the notorious police commandos. They're highly trained, heavily armed officers, more like soldiers than ordinary policemen. And they report directly to the Ministry of the Interior. Over the last eighteen months these commandos - who are almost exclusively Shia Muslims - have been implicated in rounding up and killing thousands of ordinary Sunni civilians.

A hundred dead bodies a day

Up to a hundred bodies a day are found dumped on waste ground and rubbish tips around Baghdad. They've usually been dreadfully tortured. Acid and electric drills are the favourite methods and many of the bodies are still wearing police handcuffs.

As we discovered, there is even compelling evidence that the secret prisons of Saddam's day are back - stinking hell-holes where hundreds of victims are herded together to be raped, tortured and maimed for no crime other than belonging to the wrong sect.

And it's all happening under the eyes of US commanders, who seem unwilling or unable to intervene. These are the chilling findings of a special investigation, filmed for a Channel 4 documentary, The Death Squads that reveals how one of the most senior ministers in Iraq's new administration stands accused of presiding over a campaign to torture, maim and execute his enemies. And this is the dossier that utterly explodes the myth that peace and a liberal democracy are blossoming in the new 'liberated' Iraq.

In the bloody mayhem of Baghdad it's very difficult to untangle exactly who's who amongst the various death squads who now rule the streets. There are organised criminal gangs, kidnapping and killing for ransom money, and there are private militia groups loyal to particular clerics or clan leaders. But there is no question that among the most efficient of the death squads are the police commandos.

As part of our investigation, we traced how these commando units have been deliberately infiltrated and taken over by one of the most militant Islamic groups, the Badr Brigade. They're the military wing of an Iraqi political party, The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI was set up in the early 80's in exile in Iran and its aim was always to overthrow Saddam and his Sunni government and replace them with a Shia government. Now, very helpfully, the Americans have done that for them.

Return of the Badr Brigade

(snip)

I just did a Web search to see if there's an online copy of Channel 4's documentary and the following video posted roughly three years ago clearly matches.

"The Death Squads" (45:25)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-377952052252839443

The torture and slaughter of Iraqi civilians is reaching unprecedented heights with estimates of up to 655,000 dead. Night after night death squads rampage through Iraq's main cities. In Baghdad, up to a hundred bodies a day are dumped on the streets. Often they've been tortured with electric drills. Yet those doing the killing have little to do with al Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. The majority of the killings are carried out by Shia death squads who want to turn Iraq into a Shia state aligned to Iran. This shocking film investigates the links between the death squads and high-ranking Shia politicians. It reveals how the Shia militia that these politicians control have systematically infiltrated and taken over police units and even entire government ministeries. It investigates how these units are closely linked to the death squads, indeed they often are the death squads. And the killers act with impunity -- there's little investigation into their activities.

The following evidently is only a slightly longer copy of the Channel 4 documentary, but, and while I haven't started to play this copy yet, maybe it's not in English, or perhaps it is, but while also displaying translations in (I guess) Arabic.

"The Death Squads" (46:53)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2055734209233161557

The same documentary, except in two parts:

Part 1,

www.liveleak.com/view?i=82f_1193118431

Part 2,

www.liveleak.com/view?i=2e5_1193119028

What I am wondering now, with the release of the Iraq War logs through or by Wikileaks, is whether these logs inform readers about some of the highly important covert black ops the U.S., and U.K., oversaw and also partook in committing in Iraq. If not, then these ops are very important to learn about; essential.

UPDATE:

I just came across the following online flash video movie for Max Fuller's article further above, "Crying Wolf: ...".

www.cryingwolf.deconstructingiraq.org.uk

If for some reason you don't see the "Play" button in the above home page, for I don't see it, then the film can be directly played with the following flash video file, .swf.

www.cryingwolf.deconstructingiraq.org.uk/cryingwolf.swf

The following (above) flash movie examines the epidemic of violence sweeping Iraq and considers who should be held intellectually responsible. Every statement that is made is based on solid evidence drawn from mainstream media sources.

Viewers should be aware that due to the nature of the subject, some images ... are of a disturbing nature.

The implications of the evidence are even more disturbing.