A Word or Two about Petraeus
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Petraeus
Is Israel's Greatest Friend
General Petraeus has been
in Iraq for 4 years, and the press is making him out to be another
General MacArthur. But all he has really done is seat in his
fortified headquarters in the Green Zone, fudge causality statistics,
and fueled the Shiite-Sunni civil war.
Arun Gupta, a reporter points out that David Petraeus
has ‘credibility’ and our ‘trust’ mostly because his past actions in Iraq have
gone largely unreported.
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General
Adnan Thabit
Petraeus supported the creation of paramilitary forces in Iraq. One of the most
'aggressive' of these was the "Special Police Commandos", commanded by General Adnan Thabit
with a force of about 5,000 troops.
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Iraq's Secret Militias
Petreaus backs the 'Police Commandos' as the leading force
against the insurgency. Donald Rumsfeld said the commandos
are among "forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing
and eliminating the insurgency."
Petraeus
calls the Police Commandos "a horse to back" and has done so by providing it
with "money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more
weapons."
In a satellite briefing to the press on February 4, Petraeus
repeatedly praised the Special Police Commandos, calling the leadership
"tremendously aggressive" in operations.
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Special
Commandos Are Basic Assassins
Unfortunately, the Special Police
Commandos morphed into death squads that were used against the insurgency and
against Iraqis, in general. Petraeus
doesn't approve the
actions of the death squads, but he failed to put in place
a system to ensure that there would not be those kinds of abuses.
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Ex-Spooks
Recruiting
Investigative reporter Max Fuller in his detailed examination of documents,
stresses that the vast majority of atrocities attributed to ‘rogue’ Shiite or
Sunni militias, "were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos of
‘special forces’, trained by the Americans, ‘advised’ by Americans and run
largely by former CIA agents." (Chris Floyd, ‘Ulster on the Euphrates: The
Anglo-American Dirty War’) Petraeus attempt to play ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’ in order
to ‘divide and rule’ hasn’t gone too well, nor is it likely to succeed now.
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Petreaus
Backs Shiites
As Gutpa
noted with understatement: "This played a key role in terms of stoking and
fomenting the civil war, because you had death squads wearing government
uniforms, being armed and trained by the U.S. going around killing Sunnis
randomly. It generally alienated the Sunni Arab population from the government
and drove them into the arms of the resistance."
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Militias
Are being Well Equipped
"...there are reports that have stated clearly with these militias saying, like,
"Yes, we're getting weapons from the U.S. government." And part of it is, is
that they do want to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is another Sunni-based group.
It's an Iraqi-based group. But their main purpose is they want this money and
weapons and aid to fight the Shiite militias."
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Now Petreaus Backs The
Sunnis
"So here we have them, like in 2004,
setting up these Shiite militias, and now he's setting up these Sunni militias
to fight these Shiite militias. And what it portends is just an absolute
disaster for Iraq. And, of course, it will also be used as justification: "Well,
we can't leave because a bloodbath will result." But we're not looking at the
fact that it's the U.S. that's creating this bloodbath."
Besides whacking folks, the Iraqi security forces under General
Petraeus also
had trouble hanging on to their weapons. Back in October 2006 there was this
account:
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Weapons Given to Iraq Are Missing
The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons — almost 4% of the semiautomatic
pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and
other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003.The Pentagon has lost track of about
190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004
and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those
weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.
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So -- and this was part of the Petraeus strategy, that he was just throwing all
this money and weapons and aid at the Special Police Commandos, because they
were so desperate to create a strategy to defeat the Sunni insurgency. And, of
course, by the time he left his mission in 2005 of training Iraqis, there was
only one battalion that was considered ready. In one year, that's what his work
amounted to.
And now a report just came out, a
commission set up by Congress of four retired US generals, in which they stated
that the National Police, which is what the Special Police Commandos are now
known as, the National Police are so corrupt, so riven
with sectarianism, they're so hated by the public, the Iraqi military and other
police services, that they should just be completely disbanded.
And yet,
none of this is being talked about in Congress or the media.
And, being merely a liar is the benign view of
Petraeus.
Around the same time as the creation of the "Special Police Commandos" was the
creation of Iraq's so called Wolf
Brigade for all practical purposes a Shiite counterpart to the Special Police
Commandos.
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Killing Religious
Leaders
Last May, the Association of Muslim Scholars publicly accused the Wolf Brigade of having "arrested imams
and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of
their bodies in a garbage dump in Shaab
district" of Baghdad.
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Journalists began reporting details of forced confessions through torture and
indiscriminate killing of Sunni
detainees by the Wolf Brigade last summer. Despite this mounting evidence of
systematic torture, the U.S. command had shown no evidence of discomfort about
supporting the Brigade. Some Wolf Brigade sweeps through Sunni neighbourhoods
have been carried out alongside U.S. troops.
On Nov. 10, a U.S. officer described on his personal
weblog a "battalion sized
joint operation" between the "Nightstalkers" (Army Airborne 160th Special
Operations Aviation Regiment) and the Wolf Brigade in southern Baghdad. The
blogger concluded, "As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded
detainees my face stretched into a long wolfish smile..."
The Wolf Brigade obviously had full US
support, not only in tactical matters, but also with manipulation of the Iraqi
media space. The Wolf Brigade became famous for the awful TV program called
"Terrorists in the Grip of Justice" that appeared on the
American-created-staffed-funded-and-controlled Al `Iraqiyya
TV network (should have been called Al Amrikiyya).
The program showed supposed "terrorists", who had clearly been abused, sometimes
badly beaten, and probably also tortured, confessing to a variety of offenses,
some of which were completely ludicrous, such as having homosexual orgies in
mosques. The ostensible purpose of the TV show was to influence the Iraqi
public against the resistance by presenting the "terrorists" as the lowest of
all possible low-lifes - a pretty transparent, and transparently stupid American
P.R. stunt.
Once you penetrate the lies and 'warped' reality smokescreen consciously set up
by folks like Petraeus and the cabal at the Pentagon, terms like 'betrayal' seem
entirely too civil to describe the monster they have had a hand in creating--and
continue to support.
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