280 bodies found in Baghdad in last 24 hours. Did I hear that right?

[Philosoraptor]

please tell me I'm not the only one who just heard a newscaster say that on msnbc.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON OVER THERE?

[sabra]

1. reports say 60, not that 60 is anything good...

[Hissyspit]

2. Holy Fuck!

And I don't use that phrase lightly.

[Skidmore]

3. You heard it correctly.

Winning hearts and minds one corpse at a time.

[jhuth at work]

4. I hear about bodies that have been tortured EVERY WEEK.

Has anyone done a grand total of these? I bet there have been hundreds every week for many months.

Who are the dead, and why have they been tortured?

[Philosoraptor]

5. I'm guessing a couple thousand

[The Magistrate]

11. The Dead, Sir

Are mostly people who live in the wrong neighborhood, chiefly Sunni Arabs who live in a Shia Arab neighborhood, but sometimes the reverse. There is a slow-motion ethnic cleansing going on in Baghdad, solidifying the positions for future expansion of the civil war already in its opening stages.

[barb162]

30. I think you're right

Nothing else makes sense

[Subdivisions]

6. I'm beginning to suspect (self censored) genocide....

...the purposeful and systematic elimination of the resisting Iraqis, be they Shia or Sunni.

[The Magistrate]

12. You Would Be Wrong, Sir

This is the action of local bodies, acting for their own purposes.

[me b zola]

24. I would suggest that you are wrong...

...There is evidence that the death squads in Iraq are a creation of Pentagon policy.

The following is a Newsweek article published Jan 14, 2005:

‘The Salvador Option’
The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq
Nuns pray over the bodies of four American sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980
AP

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Hirsh and John Barry
Newsweek
Updated: 5:59 p.m. PT Jan 14, 2005


~snip~
Now, 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. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

~more @ link~
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek

*Emphasis mine*

[The Magistrate]

25. Spit In A Monsoon, Ma'am

The thing is far too widespread to be a foreign concoction: you cannot contrive things like this if there are not many locals eager to do it on their own. That is not only true of Iraq today, but of Central America in the eighties. Some assistance and cover was given: the phenomenon was native, and in fact, traditional to the political life of the place.

[barb162]

29. "...many locals eager to do it on their own."

There you have it.

[me b zola]

36. de Nile isn't just a river in Egypt

Too widespread? Most of the early reports that I have seen regarding the victims of the death squads indicate that the people were killed in groups or in one area @ a time. No where in the article that I provided did it state that the Pentagon was going to train one death squad, so to assume that there couldn't be several death squads operating in different areas of Iraq is silly.

Whether or not locals have decided to retaliate by creating their own death squads is unclear. What is clear is that there were no death squads in Iraq until the Pentagon is on record as stating that they were going to implement the Salvador Option in Iraq, and therefore the Pentagon is in all likelihood the petri dish from where the death squads were created.

[The Magistrate]

38. A Poor Pun Off The Oprah Show, Sir, Does Not Constitute An Argument

The claim there were no murders across sectarian and tribal lines in Iraq prior to the date of that article is surely an exercise in comedy. The people of Iraq deserve an energetic defense against the slanderous charge they are so lacking in ordinary human qualities as to require instruction in cruelty and murder from mere Saxons and Franks....

[me b zola]

40. Now I see what the problem is

You have mistaken my subject line for my argument. :D

I am aware of the tribal differences in the ME and the competition for power between them. Tribal differences were not an issue in Iraq until the creation of death squads by the US. Saddam actively tore down barriers between tribes and encouraged integration and intermarriage. Not only was there no tension between the tribes in Iraq, but christians and Muslims lived side by side without hostilities. Discrimination and hatred is not genetic and simply held back by tyranny, discrimination, fear and hatred must be taught/instilled.

I am not @ home now and do not have access to my files, but I believe that it was April of '05 that there were reports coming out of Iraq of a movement to expel the Americans. The group gathering over 100,000 signatures for a petition stressed how people of all tribes, muslim & christian, signed the petition and marched in a large protest, coming together as one people--the people of Iraq--to expel the occupiers.

You can call it an exercise in comedy and stay in the dark, or you can open your mind enough to consider the information that is before you.

[The Magistrate]

41. Whatever You May Have In Your Files, Sir

It will not suffice to demonstrate that tribal and sectarian differences were not a killing matter in Iraq two, three, five, ten, twenty-five, eighty, or a hundred or a thousand years ago. It is true that Hussein made attempts to weaken and co-opt potential power structures that might be turned against him, but your picture of his enlightened ushering in of an Eden of peace and tranquility between the Tigris and Euphrates will not bear a feather's-worth of weight. It might be an afront to your desires concerning human nature, but the facts of history more than lisence the view that hatred, discrimination, and all manner of viciousness are the normal state of human behavior, loosed whenever opportunity presents itself. Your view that a covert action by a foreign element can contrive the degree of chaos and murder seen today in Iraq grossly over-rates what can be achieved by such means, and your determination to find the U.S. at the bottom of any evil on display is nothing but a predisposition to which any facts you may encounter will be somehow wedged in to fit, whatever their actual weight or signifigance might be.

"It's like fudge, only made of pigs!"

[Subdivisions]

26. Hence the underlying implication and suspicion behind my OP

I was reacting emotionally to my suspicion that, barring any other alternative, maybe it is the systematic reduction of the population as a whole by some outside force.

[The Magistrate]

32. And That Is Flat Nonesense, Sir

It is early going in a civil war between well established faction that harbor traditional hatreds for one another they are now free to express in the state of chaotic misrule prevalent in the place.

[aquart]

13. Stop throwing that word around.

Darfur is genocide. This is Civil War. It's bloody. It's sectarian. They mutually hate each other's guts and have done for centuries. Yet neither group has been eradicated.

Either or any side would happily speed the other off the earth. Sectarian hatred is not genocide, however. Not till one side totally has all the power.

[Subdivisions]

21. Perhaps it is the wrong word when you compare what's going on

in Iraq to what is going on in Darfur. However, there are a couple of other, less applicable to Darfur, definitions.

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-02%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=define%3A+genocide

I digress. Sigh. It's almost certainly the result of civil war.

[The Magistrate]

33. No Perhaps About It, Sir: It Is The Wrong Word

The usage here is analogous to claiming loss of a couple of fingers is the same as amputation of the arm at the shoulder.

[aquart]

7. Civil War.

Nasty, isn't it.

If it makes you feel slightly better, it was always going to happen. It would have happened ten minutes after the death of Saddam. We speeded up the process.

Of course, a whole lot of people would have gotten to live ten or so extra years......but what's that to a great nation like the United States?

[mzteris]

10. I heard some time ago that

brutal as Saddam was - he was keeping greater brutalities from happening by keeping them all under control.

Without the "controls"- civil war seems to be settling in. When we leave, it will only get worse.

[aquart]

39. Yes. Until the new strongman emerges.

Or three strongmen holding separate nations.

The arrogance of trying to fit our culture onto theirs was begging for failure.

But we truthfully never really intended them to have a democracy. Just as our government never intended for the American people to continue democracy. Installing puppets and feeding the people PR bread and circuses was the BushCo intent from the getgo. Everything else is their smokescreen. Which many members of their party mistook for truth.

[Saphire]

8. It amazes me that there are still any people in Bagdad.

it started with about 5 mil, but how many are left?

[malaise]

9. WTF! Freedom from life is

on the march. Ask Bushco.

[madokie]

14. lotsa of killing sounds to me like

it is totally out of control and this crew* is in denial

[Ian David]

15. Relax. It's just a "comma" according to Der AWOLfuhrer. n/t

[ClintonTyree]

16. Thank goodness Saddam is gone.........

and they don't have the 'death squads' anymore. :eyes:

This FAR surpasses anything during the Saddam era. I imagine most people in Iraq would trade the Saddam days for george bush's 'freedom' days in a heartbeat.

[leftchick]

17. I think they said so far in October

and 32 dead US soldiers so far.

[John Gauger]

18. Numbers like those are so common that they have begun

to lose their meaning. It is difficult for me to get perspective on just what that means. Every single day a large number of people in Baghdad are rounded up and murdered. Each of those people is an individual, with a family; many lives are disrupted by each of these killings.

[The Backlash Cometh]

19. Sounds like the last throes are going nuclear.

[Hubert Flottz]

20. K & R ...The Plan is What's going on!

MOVING TARGETS

Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH



The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.

One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there.

Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple terms: “U.S. shooters and Iraqi intelligence.” He added, “There are Iraqis in the intelligence business who have a better idea, and we’re tapping into them. We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.” ...MORE...

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/031215fa_fact

[me b zola]

42. I wish that I had scrolled down to see your post B-4 I posted upthread

The Hersh article seems to go hand in hand with the Newsweek article that I posted upthread, #24. I had not seen the Hersh article before, thanks for posting.

[Cocoa]

22. 60 bodies found

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2006-10/10/content_705313.htm

[Philosoraptor]

23. that's what I read this morn, but heard the later figure after noon on t.v

[barb162]

27. I thought it was 60

but 260 wouldn't surprise me the way they are killing each other off there

[Supersedeas]

28. Nothing to see here--feed them more images of Korean missiles

Fear Fear - Terra Terra

[Hugin]

31. If I see that 20 year old parade again...

:eyes:

They've gotta turn CA republican don't you know!

[progressoid]

34. Whew! Good thing we got rid of the Butcher of Baghdad.

[Recursion]

35. 11 weeks since Riverbend posted anything...

:cry: :cry:

[bdamomma]

37. the Negroponte death squads are systemically ethic cleansing the

country.

[cassiepriam]

43. Whoever is doing it, clearly our fault.

They all would be alive and well if it weren't for the US
invasion.