What Old is New Again

Death Squads and Assassination Teams never go out of style.  They may be coming to Iraq.  What a concept!  According to Newsweek, Donald Rumsfeld is considering the option of counter-terrorist death squads.

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.)

Have to make sure we don’t end up raping and killing any nuns this time.  Catholics do vote.  (El Salvador - December 2, 1980 - four American nuns are killed by a death
squad in El Salvador - financed and armed by the United States - key policy guy for El Salvador was John Negroponte – see CNN here.)

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The Wolf Man Lives

Wolfowitz Says He Will Keep Job At Pentagon

The Washington Post, Saturday, January 8, 2005; Page A04

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz sought yesterday to dampen speculation that he is leaving, saying he had been asked to stay on and intends to do so. …

"I have been asked to stay and have accepted," Wolfowitz said yesterday in a brief statement issued through a spokesman. "I can't imagine life after Don Rumsfeld."

Huh?

Golden Oldie here - 

Mr. Wolfowitz...opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, "wildly off the mark." Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops.

....In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo.

He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

... Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. "I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact," Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high... Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.

Kevin Drum - “You just can't make this stuff up.”

Loyal.  On message.  Firm.  Wrong.  Incompetent.  He stays.

The Department of Oops

Associated Press - Saturday, January 08, 2005

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The United States military said it dropped a 500-pound bomb on the wrong house outside the northern city of Mosul on Saturday, killing five people. The man who owned the house said the bomb killed 14 people, and an Associated Press photographer said seven of them were children.

Interesting.

Winning hearts and minds, eh?

Terror Suspect Alleges Torture

Detainee Says U.S. Sent Him to Egypt Before Guantánamo

Dana Priest and Dan Eggen, The Washington Post, Thursday, January 6, 2005; Page A01

They took me inside the building and started to scream at me. They stripped me naked, they asked me, "Do you pray to Allah?" I said, "Yes." They said, "Fuck you" and "Fuck him." ... Someone else asked me, "Do you believe in anything?" I said to him, "I believe in Allah." So he said, "But I believe in torture and I will torture you. When I go home to my country, I will ask whoever comes after me to torture you." Then they handcuffed me and hung me to the bed. They ordered me to curse Islam and because they started to hit my broken leg, I cursed my religion. They ordered me to thank Jesus I am alive. And I did what they ordered me. This is against my belief. They left me hang from the bed and after a while I lost consciousness."

Winning hearts and minds, eh?

Why don’t they like us?  Saddam is gone.  We got his sons and displayed their mutilated bodies?  What’s the problem?

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Mozart as Weapon

From the Economist – 

Co-op, a chain of grocery stores, is experimenting with playing classical music outside its shops, to stop youths from hanging around and intimidating customers. It seems to work well. Staff have a remote control and “can turn the music on if there's a situation developing and they need to disperse people”, says Steve Broughton of Co-op.

The most extensive use of aural policing so far, though, has been in underground stations. Six stops on the Tyneside Metro currently pump out Haydn and Mozart to deter vandals and loiterers, and the scheme has been so successful that it has spawned imitators. After a pilot at Elm Park station on the London Underground, classical music now fills 30 other stations on the network. The most effective deterrents, according to a spokesman for Transport for London, are anything sung by Pavarotti or written by Mozart.