US Training of Death Squads in Iraq? - War Is A Crime .org

Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been preplannedthat they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have nointelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they'redoing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cellsoperating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we stilldon't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrificcommunications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way,the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligencepeople. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here,and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitivepeople. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we arebeen taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed thegovernment. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for muchlater historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome thebureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say somethingabout how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comesdown to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. Whatthey have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal ofwhat Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. Therewere people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney,basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said,the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what'shappening. The real target has been "diminish the agency." I'm writing about all of this soon, so Idon't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. Aconcentration of power.On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can't win this war. We can do what he'sdoing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular factthat we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, whowas a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, andis basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July,August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number ofsorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grownexponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embeddedjournalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we're operating out of. No embedded journalists atthe aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of theoperational fights. There's no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what theywant. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent ofbombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing isgoing to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some ofyou remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a "free-fire zone" right in front of us. Hiteverything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task ofbeing an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be asunobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after68