.
Posted earlier in BooMan's diary :: An Iraq Exit Strategy

From start of your discussion on thread ::
Why We're Talking About Impeachment

But unlike in Vietnam, the active insurgency against the government (not necessarily against us) represents a minority (the Sunnis).  Therefore, the weight of the population has an interest in preserving the new government, if for no other reason than to provide some security.

The  majority of Iraqis want the U.S. Forces out of the country NOW!
March 17, 2005 -- An opinion poll conducted in Iraq recently by Zogby International showed that 82 per cent of Sunni Arabs, and 69 per cent even of Shia Arabs, want the US out "now" or "very soon." The main reason for the high Shia turn-out in the January election was that their religious leaders told them a Shia-dominated assembly was the quickest way to get the Americans out.

The Kurds are a satisfied political bloc, as they continu their status of sovereignty since the end of Gulf War I and the U.S. and U.K. imposed "No-Fly" zones.  In addition they are now part of the Central Government in Baghdad and have great political influence, thanks to U.S. and coalition forces. The mixed Arab-Kurd cities of Mosul and Kirkuk will be hot-spots because of Saddam's historical endeavor to have Arabs settle in houses belonging to Kurds. The oil resources will be worth fighting for. The U.S. and Israel will back the Kurds up to Independence. The development will be closely watched by Turkey, Syria and Iran.

The majority of Iraqis are disillusioned, dissatisfied and will never accept U.S. permanent occupation of cities and/or military bases. The reasoning must be obvious, the U.S. led invasion has worsened the daily living circumstances for most Iraqis. The heavy handed attacks by the U.S. troops in areas of both Sunni Triangle, Euphrates valley stretched to Syrian border and the suburbs of Baghdad and nearby cities where Shia rebel leader Muqtada Al-Sadr controls local government.

The Iraqis where optimistic in the first months after March 2003. The horrible security in their neighnorhood leaves most Iraqi families destitute, home bound, still in lack of services as electricity, running water and sewage disposal.

• One Year Later: Women's Human Rights in "Liberated" Iraq
  
• Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and U.S. Armed Forces After 2005 Election
  
• Amnesty International ::
  Iraq - In cold blood: Abuses by Armed Groups

Timeline of Exit of U.S. and Coalition Forces
The U.S. Armed Forces should be replaced by U.N. and NATO forces, similar to the liberation of Liberia from 14 years civil war. All you can do is pray and hope for the best as the U.S. departs from Iraq occupation.

"Treason doth never prosper: what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason."

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY

Re your BBC-link on mass arrests.  Also covered by MSNBC:

UNITED NATIONS - The Iraqi army and multinational forces violated international law during military operations in western Iraq last month by arresting doctors and occupying medical facilities, a U.N. report said Monday.
The five-page report, from the U.N. Assistance Mission in Iraq, said military operations by the two forces had "a negative impact on human rights" and cited figures that more than 10,000 families have been displaced in two restive provinces -- Anbar and Nineveh -- alone.
Covering the period of Sept. 1 to Oct. 31, it said the United Nations has repeatedly sought to draw attention to the issue of arrested doctors and occupied medical facilities during October military operations in Anbar.

today - this line is particularly chilling:

officials believe it may be the tip of the iceberg.

If this is, and it seems to be, pretty common knowledge around Iraq, why haven't any of our hard-working war correspondents reported it? Is this Interior Ministry in the "green zone"?

Thx Oui, as always, for providing us with comprehensive research.

[sigh]  the horror never ends.  

We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit - Octavio Paz / Latino Político

Sunni Arab politicians demanded an international investigation on Wednesday into allegations that Shi'ite militias linked to Iraq's Interior Ministry tortured and abused prisoners in a secret Baghdad bunker.

The underground bunker, near the ministry's compound in central Baghdad, was discovered by U.S. troops during a raid on Sunday night in a development likely to fuel sectarian tensions ahead of December 15 parliamentary elections.

Inside they found 173 malnourished and in some cases badly beaten men and teenagers, some of whom showed signs of having been tortured, Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari said on Tuesday as he ordered an investigation into the chamber's discovery. snip

Hadi al-Amery, the head of the Badr Organisation, a militia group that is tightly allied to SCIRI, a powerful Shi'ite Muslim political party in the government, denied any involvement.

"This bunker is run by the Interior Ministry, the Americans are there every day," he said.

nerdified link

one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan
Blog updated as needed

  There were some reports out along the way about training problems and human/civil rights abuses of prisoners. The whole place is one mistake after another.

Nonetheless, while the Iraqi army seems to be getting up to speed, the training of the 142,000-member police force -- about half the total security forces supposedly needed -- is moving more slowly and fraught with bigger problems than reports by U.S. officials might suggest (see Slide Show: "Inside Iraq's Police Boot Camp").

On Apr. 4, insurgents kidnapped a senior Iraqi police official in broad daylight. A bomb near Kirkuk killed at least nine police officers on Apr. 14. According to U.S. government data, 69% of the 98,000-soldier Iraqi army has been trained and equipped. But only 39% of the national police force of 142,000 is ready for duty. And BusinessWeek Online has learned that the number of actual police may drop sharply once an ongoing head count finishes.
--------------
INFILTRATORS.  After a dozen interviews with government officials and the private-contract employees who are training more than 60% of the national police, it's clear that putting into place a force that can operate effectively without backup from coalition forces remains a long way off. Many police lack the skills, confidence, and gear to help quell a fierce insurgency and safeguard a fledgling democracy.
---------------
RAPE AND EXTORTION.  Contractors and U.S. officials say other daunting difficulties range from ill-conceived training programs to corruption, fraud, and a litany of human rights abuses. "[Recruits] bring up Rodney King," says Harry Ulferts, a retired cop who supervises 31 trainers for contractor Science Application International Corp. (SAIC). "They say American police beat people, too. We tell them those were criminal acts." It's also not uncommon for recruits to go through training, disappear, and then sell their weapons on the black market.
----------------
Most disturbing, in the last half of 2004 Iraqi police have killed political opponents, falsely arrested people to extort money, and systematically raped and tortured female prisoners, according to a February, 2005, State Dept. report on Iraq's human rights record. In one of the worst examples, police in Basra reported last December that officers in the Internal Affairs Unit were involved in the slaughter of 10 Baath Party members. Iraq's Human Rights Minister, Bakhtiar Amin, says it will be hard to teach democratic policing because torture and other human rights abuses were "learned behavior."
-----------------
Full article at CorpWatch : IRAQ: New Police Force is Largely untrained and Unreliable

Abu Ghraib
Blackwater, DynCorp, Global Strategies, Group 4, Management and Training
October 28, 2005 Macon Telegraph
Abu Ghraib means different things to different people. For the people of Iraq, it is where tens of thousands of family members died in Saddam Hussein's death house or were tortured under his regime. Around the world, it is the scene of the infamous prisoner abuse scandal that led to U.S. soldiers doing time for war crimes. For retired Macon firefighter John Wood, it is now home. Before beginning his role as a civilian firefighter working for Wackenhut Services LLC, Wood spent two weeks at Camp Victory near Baghdad, Iraq, to get acclimated to the heat. The prison-turned-military base is home now to some 5,000 detainees, U.S. soldiers and a multinational force that operates a combat supply hospital, Wood said. "It just blew me away," Wood said of his arrival at Abu Ghraib. "I didn't know what to expect, and when I got there, it was beyond my worst expectation."

September 10, 2005 NY Times
The private security company that guards Baghdad International Airport shut down the airport on Friday, saying it had not been paid for the past six months. But the company, Global Strategies Group, announced early Saturday that it had agreed to reopen the airport on Saturday morning after a promise by the Iraqi government to pay half the amount owed. The shutdown on Friday nearly led to a standoff between American military forces and Iraqi soldiers when United States forces rushed to the airport to prevent Iraqi troops from taking it over, according to Iraqi officials and the security company. After Global Strategies closed the airport at dawn on Friday, infuriated Iraqi ministry officials dispatched their own troops to secure the airport. But the Iraqis turned back to avoid a confrontation with American soldiers who had already hurried to the airport from their nearby base, according to Iraqi officials and Global Strategies. Global Strategies has offices in London; Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates; and Washington. The company shut down the airport for 48 hours in June over the nonpayment, he said, but went back on the job after assurances of a resolution. He said the airport could be reopened for civilian passengers by 8 a.m. Saturday.

October 9, 2004 LA Times
One of the highest-profile security companies in Iraq has been suspended from doing business with the U.S. government after being accused of overbilling millions of dollars through a series of sham companies. Custer Battles, a security firm based in Virginia, sent fake bills to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that had run Iraq during the U.S. occupation, according to an Air Force memo obtained by The Times. The company, which provided all security at the Baghdad airport, is also the target of a lawsuit unsealed Friday that accuses employees of systematically bilking U.S. taxpayers and threatening one worker and his 14-year-old son at gunpoint. The firm, which has a former Republican candidate for Congress as one of its principals, is the latest in a string of companies linked to Republicans that have been accused of wrongdoing in Iraq. The company is also under investigation by the FBI and the Pentagon inspector general's Defense Criminal Investigative Services, the memo said. The suspension means that no government agency can issue further contracts to Custer Battles, which had grown from a handful of employees to more than 700 during its time in Iraq. In the lawsuit, known as a false claims action, former employee William Baldwin and a Custer Battles subcontractor named Robert Isakson repeated some of the accusations found in the Air Force memo. The false claims complaint said that after Isakson complained about Custer Battles practices, he and his 14-year-old son were held at gunpoint by company employees. The employees then kicked Isakson and his son off the airport base, leaving him to take a taxi through war-torn Fallouja to return to Jordan.

October 16, 2003 AP
A remote-controlled bomb tore apart an armored vehicle in a U.S. diplomatic convoy Wednesday, killing three American security guards and wounding a fourth in the first deadly attack on a U.S. target in the Palestinian territories. The attack, on a convoy of U.S. Embassy diplomats entering Gaza to interview Palestinian candidates for a Fulbright scholarship, was a dramatic departure from typical militant operations, which usually target Israeli soldiers and civilians. It was almost certain to lead to greater U.S. pressure for a Palestinian crackdown on militant groups.  The State Department identified the slain Americans as John Branchizio, 36; Mark T. Parson, 31; and John Martin Linde Jr., 30 -- all employees of DynCorp, a Virginia-based security firm. The wounded American was initially treated at a Gaza hospital before being transferred to a hospital in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.

April 21, 2003 The Times
A subsidiary of El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. is among a handful of U.S. defense contractors secretly invited to submit bids for a long-term contract to rebuild Iraq's national police force, prisons and judiciary, according to State Department officials. The CSC subsidiary, DynCorp of Reston, Va., already is recruiting 150 current and former U.S. law enforcement offices for Iraq under an International Police Missions contract first award in 1996 for work in the Balkans, State Department officials said. CSC acquired DynCorp last month. The new contract DynCorp is seeking would be far more extensive, providing as many as 1,00 advisors to recruit, retrain and reequip Iraq's national police and prison staffs, State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said Thursday. The police, prisons and judiciary contract is one in a series exempted from the U.S. government's usual requirement for "full and open competition."

Iraq Hall of Shame

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

An alarming trend appeared early on in the dual roles of security for diplomats-training forces and the high number of training programs infiltrators by insurgents.

When private contractors are not held to standards of respecting human rights then it's no surprise when the ones they train don't either.

Most contracts awarded were to companies that have been under investigation or lacked experience for the jobs awarded.

and read descriptions of the kind of torture carried out by the Diem regime. Here we find the same methods in Iraq 2005 although we still await the first report of the deliberate destruction of female reproductive organs.
How many times and by how many people has it been said that nothing happens in Iraq without the US allowing it or authorzing it? Different time. Different client regime. Same result.
 Reports also seem to indicate that most Iraqis have at least suspected this kind of behaviour for a long time. A critical question may also be why was it discovered now?

I found an article from ABC news US distances soldiers from secret Baghdad prison and this part jumped out at me

The United States Government says it does not believe American soldiers were involved in the Iraqi prison where more than 170 detainees were found starving and mistreated.

US troops took control of an Interior Ministry building in Baghdad on the weekend and found the traumatised prisoners inside.

Investigations into the abuse have started, but US State Department spokesman Adam Ereli says the prison was controlled by Iraqi forces not Americans.

"There's no issue of American involvement in this. Were there to be, then obviously our procedures and regulations would apply," he said.
emphasis mine

I would like to wrap this around the head of whoever wrote it.

Haven't we been battling the wrong justification for this war as SACRIFICING LIVES TO STOP THE TORTURE OF IRAQIS BY THEIR OWN PEOPLE? Isn't that why the hell we're there in the first place?

What's wrong with people?

Taken from the BBC story:

Deputy interior minister Hussein Kamal, who saw some of the abuse victims personally, said: "I've never seen such a situation like this during the past two years in Baghdad, this is the worst.

"I saw signs of physical abuse by brutal beating, one or two detainees were paralysed and some had their skin peeled off various parts of their bodies."

This is fucking outrage! Like it or not, the USA is responsible for these actions because they are the occupying country.


Support BooTrib

.
Posted earlier in diary by Carnacki ::
The Man Responsible for the Iraq War Is ID'ed

Enlistment has become a choice of morality, not of being patriotic to your country. The surge of men and women joining the U.S. Armed Forces after the attacks of 911 has ended - see Pat Tillman.

BTW it is always a moral choice, and depends on trust in leadership and your government.

The Vietnam War depended also on telling the American people as it was, or living by deceit & lies. In 1966 for the careful listener and in 1967 one could understand the goals set were not being met, DoD McNamara lost credibility.  The following crucial year, set in motion by the Viet Cong in the TET offensive, demoralization of the home front started. In the end, the men and women fighting on the frontline of a dirty war were abandoned by all.

Looks like Donald Rumsfeld has read the Vietnam files of his predecessor McNamara and begins scapegoating his innocence. A bigger fool cannot be imagined. In any size corporation his ass would have been booted a long time ago.

▼▼▼ READ MY DIARY

.

▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY