[NYTr] Iraq's Laboratory of Repression

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Consortium News - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/112007.html

Iraq's Laboratory of Repression

By Robert Parry

The Bush administration is turning Iraq into a test tube for modern
techniques of repression, from sophisticated biometrics that track
populations to devastating weapons systems that combine night-vision
optics from drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging and deadly firepower
from the sky to kill suspected insurgents.

These high-tech capabilities, when mixed with loose rules of engagement
that allow U.S. troops to kill Iraqis at the slightest sign of
hostility, have contributed to what U.S. generals and a growing number
of American journalists are hailing as an improving security situation.

Or, as President George W. Bush reportedly told Australia’s deputy
prime minister in September, “We’re kicking ass.”

U.S. forces have reported some success, too, in working with Iraqi
paramilitary groups allied with Sunni sheiks, a strategy similar to
operations used in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s to eradicate
leftist guerrillas and their political backers.

Amid these developments and the more favorable U.S. news coverage of
the war, some neoconservatives are giddy at the prospect of claiming
some measure of victory in Iraq, especially after years of facing
hostility from Americans over the worsening carnage, including the
deaths of more than 3,800 U.S. soldiers.

With renewed confidence, neocons are back to baiting Democratic war
critics for failing to appreciate Bush’s courage and foresight in
dispatching more than 20,000 additional U.S. troops for a “surge” under
Gen. David Petraeus.

“Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus' new
counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, Democrats have remained
emotionally invested in a narrative of defeat and retreat in Iraq,
reluctant to acknowledge the progress we are now achieving,” said Sen.
Joe Lieberman, a neoconservative Independent from Connecticut, in a
Nov. 8 speech.

Growing exhaustion with the war among Iraqis is viewed by Bush
strategists as another positive indicator.

According to various estimates, the war has caused the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left some four million – roughly
one in six – displaced. Those numbers explain why many Iraqis are
desperate for a restoration of some semblance of normal life, even if
it is under a U.S.-led occupation that is nearing its fifth anniversary.

Happy Iraqis?

While U.S. generals in Iraq have stressed the gentler aspects of their
latest "surge" successes – and the American press has gone along by
publishing front-page articles about new signs of normalcy in Baghdad –
the darker side of the counterinsurgency has generally been shoved into
brief stories deep inside the newspapers.

On Nov. 20, for instance, the New York Times stressed the upside by
leading the newspaper with photos of happy Iraqis in a feature article
entitled, “Baghdad Starts to Exhale as Security Improves.”

If one reads the story to the jump, however, you find that the positive
news was that some 20,000 Iraqis – or one-half of one percent of those
four million displaced persons – had returned to their abandoned homes
and had begun to get their lives back in order.

(Ironically, when the documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” showed similar
footage of Iraqis enjoying normal lives in the days before Bush’s
“shock and awe” bombing in 2003, director Michael Moore was denounced
as a pro-Saddam propagandist. The truth appears to be that even in
difficult circumstances, people still get married and try to find some
small pleasures.)

Clearly, too, the major U.S. news organizations remain under intense
pressure to play up the positive aspects of the American occupation,
much as they did during the early days when they broadcast footage of
smiling Iraqi children waving at U.S. soldiers and touted how many
schoolrooms had received fresh coats of paint. [For details, see our
new book, Neck Deep.]

The harsh repression surrounding the “surge” has drawn far less U.S.
press attention. The grim reality, however, is that an increasingly
desperate American military has stepped up its indiscriminate killing
and jailing of Iraqis, especially “military-age males” or MAMS.

A conservative counterinsurgency expert recently sent me a video,
spliced together by the U.S. military in Iraq. It showed night-vision
aerial surveillance of suspected “terrorists” as they moved about at
night with what was described as a truck-mounted anti-aircraft gun, the
muzzle still warm from firing.

The tiny figures of the “terrorists” walked into a forested area where
they were mowed down by miniguns from an AC-130. Their truck also was
blown to bits.

It’s not clear, however, how the tiny figures were identified as
“terrorists,” except that the term is applied loosely in Iraq, even
against Iraqis who consider themselves nationalists resisting a foreign
occupation of their homeland.

Other tidbits of troubling information – which often end up below the
fold on the inside pages of newspapers – reveal how Iraq steadily has
been transformed into a more efficient police state than dictator
Saddam Hussein could have ever imagined.

For instance, the “surge” has involved widespread arrests of Iraqi
MAMS, sweeps that detain thousands of young men on the flimsiest of
suspicions.

During a summer 2007 trip to Iraq, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies was briefed on U.S. plans to
dramatically expand the number of Iraqis in American detention by the
end of 2008.

“The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit
30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the
end of 2008,” Cordesman wrote in his trip report, adding that the vast
majority were Sunnis. “Shiite detainees are often freed while Sunnis
are warehoused,” he wrote.

When MAMS are detained, the U.S. military processes their biometric
information, including iris scans, so a database can be built for
tracking suspect Iraqis if they are subsequently released.

Americans rarely get a glimpse of this emerging police state, except
when it gets a positive spin. On Nov. 8, for instance, reporters were
invited to a crowded U.S. detention center at Camp Victory as nearly
500 of these Iraqis were released in a show of good will.

Some of the Iraqis complained that they had been pulled off the streets
and were not allowed to contact their families.

“I was detained in March 2007 for no reason,” said one of the former
prisoners, Tariq Jabbar, a 25-year-old taxi driver from Zafaraniya, a
neighborhood in southeast Baghdad. [NYT, Nov. 9, 2007]

Other Iraqis have been even less lucky. On Nov. 16, a Sunni tribal
group that had been cooperating with the U.S. military said American
forces attacked and killed 50 of its members on the suspicion that they
were insurgents.

The air and ground assault was launched on Nov. 13 near Taji, a town
north of Baghdad. After detecting “hostile intent,” helicopters and
airplanes strafed buildings and ground troops fired on the Iraqis, the
U.S. military said.

“We had some people on the ground who identified these individuals as
bad guys, basically,” Lt. Justin Cole told the New York Times. “That’s
why we engaged.”

Sheik Jasim Zaidan Khalaf, who is part of the U.S.-backed Awakening
Council, said some of his fighters had captured suspected members of Al
Qaeda of Mesopotamia and were planning to turn them over to American
forces when the attack occurred. Frantic phone calls to the American
military failed to stop the assault.

“The whole issue started with a mistake,” the sheik said. [NYT, Nov.
17, 2007]

Sniper Killings

Besides refusing to admit a mistake in the Taji attack, the U.S.
military, in effect, has endorsed claims by members of elite Army
sniper units that they have been granted broad discretion in killing
any Iraqi who crosses the path of their rifle scopes.

On Nov. 8, a U.S. military jury at Camp Liberty in Iraq acquitted the
leader of an Army sniper team in the killings of three Iraqi men south
of Baghdad during the early days of the “surge.” Staff Sgt. Michael
Hensley was found not guilty of murder, though he was convicted of
planting an AK-47 rifle on one of the dead men and showing disrespect
to a superior officer.

In an e-mail interview with the New York Times, Hensley said he was
angry with two superior officers who had encouraged him to boost the
unit’s kill count and then made him the “fall guy.”

Those rules of engagement apparently allow U.S. soldiers to kill
suspected “terrorists” even if the targets are unarmed and not
displaying hostile intent.

“Every last man we killed was a confirmed terrorist,” Hensley wrote.
“We were praised when bad guys died. We were upbraided when bad guys
did not die.” [NYT, Nov. 9, 2007]

In other words, the evidence from these recent cases support the
suspicion that President Bush and the U.S. military high command have
transformed elite units, such as Special Forces and expert sniper
teams, into “death squads” with a license to kill unarmed targets who
are believed to be “bad guys.”

Though this reality has been the subject of whispers within the U.S.
intelligence community for several years, it surfaced into public view
with two attempted prosecutions of American soldiers, including
Hensley, whose defense attorneys responded by citing “rules of
engagement” that permit the killing of suspected insurgents.

The case of Army sniper Jorge G. Sandoval Jr., who served under
Hensley, also revealed a classified program in which the Pentagon’s
Asymmetric Warfare Group encouraged U.S. military snipers in Iraq to
drop “bait” – such as electrical cords and ammunition – and then shoot
Iraqis who pick up the items, according to evidence in the Sandoval
case. [Washington Post, Sept. 24, 2007]

(Like Hensley, Sandoval was acquitted of murder but convicted of a
lesser charge, the planting of copper wire on one of the slain Iraqis
to make it look as if the dead man were involved in making explosive
devices.)

Afghan Parallel

Another recent case of authorized murder of an insurgent suspect
surfaced at a military court hearing at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in
mid-September. Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the
execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group.

Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to
questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006,
he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his
superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army
investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been
operating under “rules of engagement” that empowered them to kill
individuals who have been designated “enemy combatants,” even if the
targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat.

Yet, whatever the higher-ups approve as “rules of engagement,” the
practice of murdering unarmed suspects remains a violation of the laws
of war and – theoretically at least – would open up the offending
country’s chain of command to war-crimes charges.

The troubling picture is that the U.S. chain of command, presumably up
to President Bush, has authorized “rules of engagement” that allow
targeted killings – as well as other objectionable tactics including
arbitrary arrests, “enhanced interrogations,” kidnappings of suspects
in third countries with “extraordinary renditions” to countries that
torture, secret CIA prisons, and “reeducation camps” for younger
detainees.

The U.S. counterinsurgency and security operations in Iraq and
Afghanistan also have been augmented by heavily armed mercenaries, such
as the Blackwater “security contractors” who operate outside the law
and were accused by Iraqi authorities of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in
a shooting incident on Sept. 16.

The use of lethal force against unarmed suspects and civilians has a
notorious history in irregular warfare especially when an occupying
army finds itself confronting an indigenous resistance in which
guerrillas and their political supporters blend in with the local
population.

In effect, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have reestablished
what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program
that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist
political allies.

Bush’s global strategy also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in
which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent
assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

Despite quiet support for these Latin American “death squads,” the U.S.
government presented itself, then as now, as the great defender of
human rights, criticizing repressive countries that engaged in
extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as
Bush waged his “war on terror,” while continuing to impress the
American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human
rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25.

Under Bush’s remarkable double standards, he has taken the position
that he can override both international law and the U.S. Constitution
in deciding who gets basic human rights and who doesn’t. He sees
himself as the final judge of whether people he deems “bad guys” should
live or die, or face indefinite imprisonment and even torture.

Effective Immunity

While such actions by other leaders might provoke demands for an
international war-crimes tribunal, there would appear to be no
likelihood of that in this case since the offending nation is the
United States. Given its “superpower” status, the United States and its
senior leadership are effectively beyond the reach of international law.

However, even if the Bush administration can expect de facto immunity
from a war-crimes trial, the brutal tactics of the “global war on
terror” – as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan – continue to alienate the
Muslim world and undermine much of Bush’s geopolitical strategy. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s Global Dirty War.”]

The ugly image of Americans killing unarmed Iraqis also helps explain
the enduring hostility of Iraqis toward the presence of U.S. troops.

While the Bush administration has touted the improved security created
by the “surge” of additional U.S. troops into Iraq, a survey of more
than 2,000 Iraqis by the BBC, ABC News and the Japanese news agency,
NHK, discovered mounting opposition to the U.S. occupation.

In August, 85 percent of those polled said they had little or no
confidence in American and British occupation forces, up from 82
percent in February, when the “surge” began. Only 18 percent said they
thought the coalition forces had done a good job, down from 24 percent
in February. Forty-seven percent said occupying forces should leave
now, up from 35 percent.

But a core question of the Iraq War always has been how hard the Iraqis
would fight. President Bush and the neocons initially got that question
wrong in March 2003 when instead of a “cake walk,” U.S. troops
encountered surprisingly stiff resistance and, even after taking
Baghdad, faced a determined insurgency.

The neocons now believe the U.S. occupation has turned a corner, that
rank-and-file Iraqis have suffered so severely that they are ready to
accept the continued U.S. military occupation with declining resistance.

In the view of some influential neocons, this “success” in Iraq means
it is now time for the United States to turn its attention to other
troubled Muslim countries, such as Iran and Pakistan.

Two prominent “think tank” backers of the “surge” – Frederick Kagan and
Michael O’Hanlon – were given space in the New York Times “Week in
Review” section to propose a U.S. military intervention in Pakistan if
unrest there spreads.

“If we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they
do?” Kagan and O’Hanlon asked. “If a holding operation in the nation’s
center was successful, we would probably then seek to establish order
in the parts of Pakistan where extremists operate.” [NYT, Nov. 18, 2007]

Having tasted a measure of success in Iraq, the neocons now are raising
their sights toward an even wider war in the Muslim world.


[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. ]