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![]() Just Above Sunset
November 27, 2005 - Explaining the Inexplicable (and Iraq as El Salvador)
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Enough of the congressman
from the squat mountains east of Pittsburgh (Johnstown and that area) saying it's time for an orderly but rather rapid withdrawal
of our troops from Iraq, as they've done as much as they can do, and keeping them there is making many things worse. The firestorm
raging from that proposal last week goes on and on, and sucks in other issues - whether we were conned into this war and all
the rest. There's been a good deal of name-calling as to who's a coward and who's not, and who's delusional about what we
have achieved, and can reasonably achieve, and who's not. Leaders of Iraq's sharply
divided Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis called Monday for a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S.-led forces in the country and said
Iraq's opposition had a "legitimate right'' of resistance. The Bush-Cheney administration
has argued with great energy that that last thing we should have is any kind of timetable for withdrawal. That would play
into the hands of the bad guys - they'd just wait for us to leave and then do whatever bad guys do, and everything we've fought
for would be lost. And here the three key groups we're doing all this for, say no, they do want a timetable. A "legitimate right" of
resistance to what? Would that be to our guys
on the ground, or are our guys there "to provide for the welfare of Iraqi citizens." The ambiguity is maddening.
This can be interpreted as the combined factions saying, "Don't call us terrorists if we exercise our legitimate right to
resist the foreign occupiers of our country." What else could it mean?
Ten days after the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing
that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there
was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records
and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter. There's lots of detail,
and this information was withheld from the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Forgive me for interrupting,
but for the last few hours I've been struggling with a post juxtaposing the Christian right's obsession with sexual morality
and theocracy with their lack of concern about torture and murder. I can't finish. It's too painful to address satirically.
Sometimes you just cannot
do satire. It's just wrong. "If you talk to people
who have been tortured, that gives you a pretty good idea not only as to what it does to them, but what it does to the people
who do it," he said. "One of my main objections to torture is what it does to the guys who actually inflict the torture. It
does bad things. I have talked to a bunch of people who had been tortured who, when they talked to me, would tell me things
they had not told their torturers, and I would ask, 'Why didn't you tell that to the guys who were torturing you?' They
said that their torturers got so involved that they didn't even bother to ask questions." Ultimately, he said - echoing
Gerber's comments - "torture becomes an end unto itself." That's where we are. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan
coined the phrase "defining deviancy down" he couldn't ever have dreamed that we would in a few short decades be at a place
where torture is no longer considered a taboo. It certainly makes all of his concerns about changes to the nuclear family
(and oral sex) seem trivial by comparison. We are now a society that on some official levels has decided that torture is no
longer a deviant, unspeakable behavior, but rather a useful tool. It's not hidden. People publicly discuss whether torture
is really torture if it features less than "pain equivalent to organ failure." People no longer instinctively recoil at the
word - it has become a launching pad for vigorous debate about whether people are deserving of certain universal human rights.
It spirals down from there. And there's this from The Observer (UK) – Baghdad's Medical Forensic
Institute - the mortuary - is a low, modern building reached via a narrow street. Most days it is filled with families of
the dead. They come here for two reasons. One group, animated and noisy in grief, comes to collect its dead. The other, however,
returns day after day to poke through the new cargoes of corpses ferried in by ambulance, looking for a face or clothes they
might recognise. They are the relatives and friends of the 'disappeared', searching for their men. And when the disappeared
are finally found, on the streets or in the city's massive rubbish dumps, or in the river, their bodies bear the all-too-telling
signs of a savage beating, often with electrical cables, followed by the inevitable bullet to the head. And there's this from Seymour Hersh – "Do you remember the
right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?" the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led
gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. "We founded them and we financed them," he said. "The objective
now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren't going to tell Congress about it." A former military officer, who
has knowledge of the Pentagon's commando capabilities, said, "We're going to be riding with the bad boys." And this from Bill Montgomery – It's apparent - both
from this story and from reports by human rights groups (note the date on that one) -- that the U.S. and U.K. embassies have
been aware for some time that Iraq's Ministry of the Interior has been turned into what the old National Guard used to be
in El Salvador, or the Presidential Intelligence Unit in Guatemala, or the National Directorate of Investigation in Honduras,
which is to say: death squad central. And so we are. 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. ? One military source involved in the Pentagon debate suggests that new offensive operations are
needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving
to the terrorists," he said. "From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation." And so we have. The death
squads are back. "I'm pleased to announce
my decision to nominate Ambassador John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence ? John brings a unique set of skills
to these challenges." And so on and so forth.
Same crew. Same results.
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This issue updated and published on...
Paris readers add nine hours....
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