January 09, 2005

Last week a journalist sent an email, taking me to task for 'conspiracy mongering' because I speculated weeks ago that Margaret Hassan may be the victim of 'counterinsurgency' dirty tricks intended to discredit the Iraqi resistance ( http://www.uruknet.info/?&p=7324 ). A couple years ago a former copy editor for the New York Times sent an email criticizing me for quoting what she considered less than reputable sources (i.e., the non-corporate media) and thus dismissed my argument as basically tinfoil hatter blather.

Journalists supposedly hunger for facts for instance, the 'fact' that Saudi cave dwellers hijacked airplanes on 9/11, etc. and professionally shrink from speculation, even if that speculation is constructed on past events and behavior. Like Jack Webb's intrepid TV cop Joe Friday, we are expected to believe the corporate media is in pursuit of 'just the facts' (like the 'fact' Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, subsequently carted off to Syria, a future target on the Strausscon roster).

Well, imagine my surprise this morning reading MSNBC's Newsweek World News. 'The Salvador Option,' runs the headline to a story by Michael Hirsh and John Barry, 'The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq.' Hirsh and Barry write ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=8744 ):

NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported 'nationalist' forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

These 'nationalist' forces will consist or 'may' consist (sounds like tinfoil hatter speculation to me, but never mind) of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen who will 'target [assassinate] Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers [civilians], even across the border into Syria,' sort of an up-dated and indigenously based version of the Pentagon's Operation Phoenix in Vietnam. As Maj. Gen.Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq's National Intelligence Service, told Newsweek, 'almost 200,000' Sunni Arabs are 'sympathetic' to the resistance. In other words, 200,000 civilians may be killed or abducted and tortured in Bush's political gulag.

As former CIA employee Ralph McGehee notes, the 'depersonalized murder program' Operation Phoenix claimed the lives of 40,994 Vietnamese from 1968 through 1971 ( http://www.serendipity.li/cia/operation_phoenix.htm ). Phoenix 'security committees' in provincial 'interrogation centers' would determine [the] fate [of] suspected NLF. McGehee quotes Counterspy magazine as describing the Phoenix Program as 'the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the nazi death camps of world war two. It now appears a likewise program in Iraq will give Phoenix a run for its money.

Naturally, this terror campaign failed in Vietnam and it will ultimately fail in Iraq, but not before thousands of Sunni are tortured and murdered. The indigenous character of the Pentagon's 'El Salvador Option' (in El Salvador, U.S. funded and trained sadist Salvadoran thugs killed 70,000 people over a ten year period; see David Kirsch: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/deathsquads_
ElSal.html ) is an attempt by the Bushcons not only to farm out the murder and mayhem and thus claim the Iraqis are taking care of their own business but also an effort to set the stage for civil war in Iraq, part of the Strausscon-Likudite plan for Iraq and the greater Muslim Middle East.

As I have written, probably exhaustively (and with tinfoil hatter gusto), Balkanizing and rendering politically and militarily ineffectual the Arabs (and Iranians) is Job One for the rightwing sociopaths and warmongers in Israel and Washington. As the Strausscon and former CIA director James Woolsey admits, the ultimate goal is 'World War IV' in the Middle East. Civil war in Iraq is part of the plan and setting the Kurdish Peshmerga and Shiite paramilitaries against the 200,000 or more Sunni 'insurgents' and 'sympathetic' civilians is the best way to do this.

Moreover, it is hardly coincidental that John Negroponte ( http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/04/con04175.html ), bloody up to his neck from a stint in Honduras organizing torture and murder squads (and working with Contra terrorists against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua), was appointed as Bush's 'ambassador' to Iraq. Many of us 'speculated' that Negroponte would put his ghoulish experience to work in Iraq and once again we were accused of conspiracy mongering and donning our tinfoil hats. Now that Newsweek part and parcel of the Bush Ministry of Truth has more or less confirmed our suspicions, I suppose we can wear of tinfoil hats as badges of honor.

In circuitous fashion, all of this brings us back to Margaret Hassan. If the Bushcons admit or 'sources' in the Pentagon admit to Newsweek (and they would not 'admit' this unless they wanted us to know) that death squads are being 'debated' (in other words, we can safely surmise they are already working fiendishly away, assassinating Sunnis), is it possible other 'counterinsurgency' operations are underway and have been for some time or should we wait for Newsweek and other 'reputable' corporate news sources to report this before concluding what appears to be fairly obvious? As an insider on active duty in the armed forces, I saw the deep dissonance between the official explanations for our policies and our actual practices: the murder of schoolteachers and nuns by our surrogates; decimations; systematic rape; the cultivation of terror, writes Stan Goff ( http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/US_Counterinsurg_Soldi
er.html ). Of course, I have no direct eviden
ce that Hassan was abducted and presumably killed in a counterinsurgency operation all I have is history and the example of past (and current and admitted) behavior.

If the activities of this sinister agency [the CIA] are not meticulously documented, there is a tendency to mythologize, or even Hollywood-ize, its notoriety and crimes, writes Roland G. Simbulan ( http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/filipinas/doc/cia.html ).


The CIA is the covert overseas intelligence agency of the United States government and is likewise an 'action-oriented' vehicle of American foreign and military policy. The 1975 Church Committee Report of the US congressional investigations into the CIA's covert activities abroad revealed how countless foreign governments were overthrown by the CIA; how the CIA instigated a military coup d'etat and assassinated foreign political leaders like Chilean President Salvador Allende, who merely tried to safeguard the interests of their own country; and how 'special ops' and paramilitary campaigns contributed to the death, directly or indirectly, of millions of people, as a result of those actions.


Considering this, why is it absurd or 'conspiracy mongering' to speculate that the CIA and the Pentagon would kill Hassan who was, after all, as CARE's director in Iraq and a vehement critic of the United States for years, a big fat thorn in the side of the Strausscon plan for Iraq and ultimately the entire Muslim Middle East? It makes perfect sense that she would be abducted, killed, and then the blame shifted to the Iraqi resistance, a resistance (and its sympathizers) now targeted by the Pentagon in a macabre replay of Latin American and Vietnam style death squad campaigns.

Allow me to conclude this entry with a question: is it possible Negroponte's Iraq version of the Phoenix program will get close to the resistance considering their insularity and mistrust of outsiders by pretending to be Sunni resistance fighters, even possibly creating faux resistance groups in an effort to do so, as the British did in Malaya? For more on this, consider the Wikipedia entry on Special Air Service and counterinsurgency ( http://www.infowrangler.com/phpwiki/wiki.phtml?title=Special
_Air_Service ). If so, we cannot dismiss out of hand that Hassan was killed in a counterinsurgency operation, minus strict documentation (or 'sources' as demanded by the corporate Joe Friday media) and photographic evidence.

Now, please excuse me while I look for my tinfoil hat.