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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAtrocities Committed By U.S.-Trained Iraqi Forces — Again
I hope stories like this don't detract from all the good that's come from the US invasion of Iraq.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/13/iraqi-military-forces-equipped-u-s-commit-atrocities/
ATROCITIES COMMITTED BY U.S.-TRAINED IRAQI FORCES AGAIN
BY PETER MAASS
Investigative reporter James Gordon Meek broke an important story this week: He revealed that U.S.-backed forces in Iraq are committing the same type of horrific war crimes wanton killings of prisoners, beheadings, torture as the Islamic State fighters on the other side of the front line.
Meeks report, broadcast by ABC News and based on photos and cell phone videos that Iraqi fighters had proudly shared on social media, shows the Humvees and M4A1 assault rifles that the U.S. government has supplied in abundance to Iraqs armed forces. In its effort to push the Islamic State out of Iraq, the U.S. is providing Baghdad with nearly $1 billion a year in weapons, in addition to training by several thousand American advisers.
U.S. and Iraqi officials professed surprise at what is happening, and told ABC that investigations would be launched to get to the bottom of it. If this sounds familiar in a Casablanca way gambling in the casino, stop the presses it should. Back in 2005, when Facebook was a curiousity used by just a few thousand students and Instagram was years away from being invented, the sorts of abuses that Meek recently found on social media sites were well underway.
Back then, I visited Samarra, a contested town in the heart of what was known as the Sunni Triangle, and wrote about the abuses I saw while accompanying Iraqi and U.S. forces on joint raids. I saw beatings, witnessed a mock execution, and heard, inside an Iraqi detention center, the terrible screams of a man being tortured. I received the same sorts of reactions that greeted Meeks story: U.S. and Iraqi officials expressed surprise and promised to punish any wrongdoers.
Nothing changed.
Thats because torture, rather than being an aberration, was embedded in a strategy that was described, at the time, as the Salvadorization of Iraqthe use of dirty-war tactics to defeat an insurgency. It is more than a footnote of history that the origins of this policy appear to date to 2004, when the effort to train and equip Iraqi forces got underway in earnest under the leadership of Gen. David Petraeus, who went on to command all U.S. forces in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, then became director of the CIA, then resigned and pleaded guilty to disclosing a trove of highly-classified information to his lover and biographer, Paula Broadwell, and lying to the FBI about it.
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malaise
(268,851 posts)It was policy - torture was policy. Depleted uranium was policy but it is the victims who are the barbarians.
Don't you dare forget that.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)We painted a school in Iraq today!
(You fooled me. )
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)Iraqi forces are about to take a major victory in Tikrit, could not be better.
The news coverage will be of the "atrocities" - not the sacrifices made to take Tikrit.
Do not trust the corporate news or their 'investigations', there is always a hidden corporate and propaganda agenda.
In this case it is "let Obama's ISIS strategy get no credit".
P.S. There are about 40 Iranian military advisors involved, that will be inflated for domestic anti-Iran consumption.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Col. Ted Westhusing thought Gen. Petraeus was ethically challenged.