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CIA Operating Phoenix-like Assassination Program in Iraq
(Douglas Valentine, Counterpunch, May 8/9, 2004)
Even as we examine our policies and policy-makers, US Army snipers are peering out of minarets, picking off civilians on the bloody streets of Fallujah and Najaf, and a dozen other anonymous outposts in Iraq. So while the opportunity presents itself, let's be quick about this, and ask the overarching question: How did we get from 9/11 to Abu Ghoryab? . . . In particular, I blame the journalists who chose not to call for restraint in the aftermath of the Twin Towers, but who filled their columns and articles not with calls for restraint, but for swift revenge. . . . Fist came the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan, then the promulgation, six months before the invasion of Iraq, of "The National Security Strategy of the United States," through which the Bush Regime conferred upon itself the divine right to devastate any nation it disliked, or had vast oil fields that it coveted. . . . In 1995, when a CIA employee was linked to the murder of "an American innkeeper and the Guatemalan husband of an American lawyer," Deutch issued a "scrub order" that prevented the CIA from hiring murderers. After 9/11, this "scrub order" seemed absurd. If it takes a thief to catch a thief, then it takes a killer to kill a killer. The logic was irrefutable, and suddenly the corporate media was begging the military and the CIA to adopt the torture, detention, and assassination techniques of the Israelis . . . We were at risk and unable to strike back against terrorists, because the CIA had stopped putting tough agents in the field, Hersh reported . . . Having said that, he drew a blueprint of exactly what was to come: "in Afghanistan," [Hersh] said, "or anywhere in the Middle East or South Asia, a C.I.A. operative would have to speak the local language and be able to blend in. The operative should seemingly have nothing to do with any Americans, or with the American embassy, if there is one. The status is known inside the agency as "nonofficial cover," or NOC. Exposure could mean death.” . . . Is this not a recipe for the type of "contractors" who flooded Iraq after the invasion and occupation? The only difference is that a CIA agent under "non-official cover" is no longer referred to as a NOC, but as an OGA, for Other Government Agency. . . . Try, if you can, to imagine a trial by jury, or tribunal, in which a CIA officer was sentenced to death for killing an Iraqi civilian. . . . Then come quickly to your senses, and realize that CIA officers have a license to kill, just as Army snipers can assassinate Iraqi civilians with impunity. The fact is, the war crime of murder is not punishable by death under the Bush Regime, for it was the Bush Regime that lifted all the moral and legal restraints on its soldiers and spies in the first place. So far, murdering Iraqis carries with it only a less than honorable discharges. . . . Just to remind everyone, Vice-President Dick Cheney defended CIA Director George Tenet after Hersh broke the Abu Ghoryab scandal, and said that Tenet had Bush's "full confidence." This is important to note, for it establishes the chain of command, which leads from Bush, through Cheney, through Tenet, to the CIA people who did hire Messrs. Stephanowicz and Israel; and even more to the point, it illustrates how policies made by Bush and company flow through the corporate media to the public, and become directly responsible for the kidnapping, illegal detention, torture, rape and murder of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraqi. . . . This unstated connection to the Phoenix Program, which was a major factor in the May Lai Massacre, is also significant in understanding what Hersh wants us to infer from his articles on national security issues. Specifically, as Hersh informed us in a December 2003 article in The New Yorker (titled "MOVING TARGETS: Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?"), the CIA had formed a new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, to neutralize Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination. According to Hersh, many of the anonymous officials he interviewed for his article feared that the new operation, called "preemptive manhunting" by one of them, had "the potential to turn into another Phoenix Program." . . . "Phoenix," Hersh went on to say, without mentioning the CIA, "was the code name for a counter-insurgency program that the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special Forces teams were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed to be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong." . . . The Phoenix Program "got out of control," Hersh reported. "According to official South Vietnamese statistics, Phoenix claimed nearly forty-one thousand victims between 1968 and 1972; the U.S. counted more than twenty thousand in the same time span. Some of those assassinated had nothing to do with the war against America but were targeted because of private grievances." . . . Two things require our attention here. First, why has no one in the press, or Congress, devoted the same degree of attention to the CIA's death squads roaming around Iraq, as they have to the Abu Ghoryab scandal? We know from CNN's David Ensor that "An Iraqi prisoner who died in November while being interrogated by a CIA officer and contract translator arrived at Abu Ghraib (sic) prison with "broken ribs and breathing difficulties" after being arrested by Navy SEALs, U.S. officials said Thursday. Unnamed Pentagon officials were quoted Wednesday saying the man had been delivered to the prison in "good health." . . . We know from Hersh that Phoenix is policy in Iraq, and that it got out of control in Vietnam. We also know that Navy SEALs are one of CIA's primary unilateral facets of its Phoenix-style Program in Iraq ­ but there’s no accounting for the number of Iraqis killed, abducted or tortured through the Program. . . . There are so many other buried stories, one can only guess at the extent of the war crimes that have, and are being committed. Which leads us to the conclusion that once the Hawks had invaded and occupied Iraq, the only thing they really needed was an unbridled CIA ­ now totally over 500 officers ­ with its own secret detention and interrogation facilities, and assassination squads, and, most importantly, control over the information that reaches the Iraqi and American public. . . . Hersh, of course, isn’t to blame for America’s preemptive strategy for fighting the phantom war on terror. That is a projection of our president's sadistic personality, and his message of hatred that appeals to what is perverse in American culture of knowingly doing what is wrong, for the sake of power over others, but denying it to one’s self. In this way Bush’s immorality has, in the name of righteous sake, been adopted by the soldiers and spooks he has sent to fight a war on behalf of giant corporations. . . . Even though Bush let the dogs out, others of inconsequence will pay for his war crimes. And therein lies the tragedy of this tale.

posted by LoZo 9:57 AM