While this article is biased, the problem it details is still a problem. I'm not sure what you do about it- but putting murderers on the payroll hasn't worked out so well in the past:
Have thugs will travel
Bush Administration puts former Hussein torturers, executioners, and rapists on America's payroll
Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
09.10.03
In case you missed the latest from the White House:
On Sunday night, President Bush announced that major operations in the war against terrorism were over; Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden has been captured in the mountains of Afghanistan; the Taliban's Mullah Omar has surrendered to an envoy from the Vatican; Iraq's Saddam Hussein was killed outside an ice-cream parlor in Tikrit; and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been discovered buried under an apple tree near Ur, in what some believe was the site of the garden of Eden.
Bush pledged that democracy would be established in Iraq by Christmas and all U.S. troops would be home no later than Groundhog Day; to guarantee fair and free elections, the president announced they administration had cut a deal with the Diebold Co. for its touch-screen machines; Veteran's hospitals in the U.S. will not be closed; benefits for all soldiers serving oversees will be doubled immediately; and a plan for universal health care will soon be sent to Congress.
Finally, the president announced a few personnel moves: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned to join the staff of Fox News; National security advisor Condoleezza Rice signed a long-term contract with Cirque du Soleil; and vice president Dick Cheney has given notice that he was leaving the administration to take an executive position with Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.
And, of course, that's the way it wasn't.
Within the past five weeks or so, four major bombings have taken more than 120 lives in Iraq: On Tuesday, September 2, a car bombing at a western Baghdad police station killed one Iraqi employee and wounded at least 18 others; on Friday, August 29, 83 people, including Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, were killed in the bombing of the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf; on Tuesday, August 19, the United Nations' Canal Hotel headquarters was bombed and 20 people were killed, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.'s top envoy to Iraq; and on Thursday, August 7, 10 were killed in the bombing at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad.
Against this backdrop of death, destruction and utter chaos, President George W. Bush, in a prime time television address from the White House this past Sunday night, announced to the nation and the world that now that Iraq had become "the central front" in his war on terrorism, he needed more money -- some $87 billion -- more international support, and a heck of a lot more sacrifice from Americans.
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, while some intelligence reports claim that terrorists from across the Middle East flocking to Iraq may be behind some of the bombings, for the most part the U.S. has viewed these actions as the work of Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party remnants. Now, those bright folks at the Pentagon have decided that the best way to hunt down Hussein and any remaining Baathists is to put some of the brutal dictator's former buddies on the payroll: They figure if you offer the former regime's torturers, executioners, and rapists enough money and outfit them properly, they can be of great assistance to the occupation forces. St. Petersburg (Russia) Times columnist Chris Floyd recently mused that a headline covering this new enterprise might read "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."
According to Floyd, America's tax dollars are now being used by the Bush Administration "to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo -- perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word," writes Floyd, "seems to be that these bloodstained 'insiders' will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained 'insiders' responsible for bombing the UN headquarters in Baghdad -- and killing another dozen American soldiers..."
The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams first reported on these disturbing developments in late August: "U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here after months of increasingly sophisticated attacks and bombings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials." Although U.S., officials wouldn't say how many former Husseinistas were being put on the payroll, "recruitment" had been "stepped up" despite protestations from members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, "who complain that they have too little control over the pool of recruits."
Don't think that U.S. officials aren't sensitive to the problems hiring former Hussein operatives might cause. They claim they are, but desperate times call for desperate measures. "The only way you can combat terrorism is through intelligence," a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post. "It's the only way you're going to stop these people from doing what they're doing." He added: "Without Iraqi input, that's not going to work."
Shadid and Williams: "The emphasis in recruitment appears to be on the intelligence service known as the Mukhabarat, one of four branches in Hussein's former security service, although it is not the only target for the U.S. effort. The Mukhabarat, whose name itself inspired fear in ordinary Iraqis, was the foreign intelligence service, the most sophisticated of the four. Within that service, officials have reached out to agents who once were assigned to Syria and Iran, Iraqi officials and former intelligence agents say."
As Chris Floyd points out, this isn't the first time the U.S. has embraced world class thugs and killers and put them in service of the homeland: It appears to be "business as usual for the American security apparatus, which happily incorporated scores of its Nazi brethren into the fold after World War II, and over the years has climbed into bed with many a casually raping and murdering thug -- such as, er, Saddam Hussein, who spent a bit of quality time on the CIA payroll."
Bush's neoconservative advisors have thoroughly botched the post-war occupation of Iraq by a) over-estimating the support the Iraqi man/woman on the street would have for Operation Iraqi Freedom and, b) by under-estimating the strength of the resistance. Caught with their pants down, but still claiming success, Bush's neocons, both inside and outside the administration, are clamoring for more troops to be sent to Iraq -- two divisions -- and for more money to be tossed down the occupation rat hole.
As ever, it's easy and oh-so-painless to issue a call for greater sacrifice from America's young men and women from the safety and comfort of a Washington, DC air-conditioned office. Conservative columnist Paul Craig Roberts recently wrote that the "war plans [of the neocons] are taking us back to the draft... Lacking sufficient military forces to occupy Iraq with its small population of 25 million, what would we do once neocons get us mired down in Iran or Egypt with their large populations?"
In early September, the Washington Times reported that "A secret report for the Joint Chiefs of Staff [titled "Operation Iraqi Freedom Strategic Lessons Learned"] lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that 'limited the focus' for preparing for post-Saddam Hussein operations.
This past February, a report issued by the Army War College warned that "Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation, the US may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making." As prescient as "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario" appears to be, the authors couldn't possibly have envisioned the chaos and instability now embodying day-to-day life in Iraq.
If William Kristol, Robert Kagan and their Weekly Standard crowd still think that Iraq is a noble enterprise, this would be just about the right time for them to escort their sons, daughters, nephews, nieces and cousins to a nearby recruiting office. And while they're at it, they might want to enlist as well.
For more please see the Bill Berkowitz archive.
Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.
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