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Max Fuller
"For Iraq, the 'Salvador Option’ becomes Reality
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html
"In Iraq the war comes in two phases. The first phase is complete: the destruction of the existing state, which did not comply with the interests of British and American capital. The second phase consists of building a new state tied to those interests and smashing every dissenting sector of society. Openly, this involves applying the same sort of economic shock therapy that has done so much damage in swathes of the Third World and Eastern Europe. Covertly, it means intimidating, kidnapping and murdering opposition voices................
What we do know, however, is that hundreds of Iraqis are being murdered and that paramilitary hit squads of the proxy government organized by US trainers with a fulsome pedigree in state terrorism are increasingly being associated with them." The objective of the death squads is not simply to target one particular group or ethnicity, but to direct the violence outwards creating as much fear as possible in order to pacify the population.

Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq
By Max Fuller
November 10, 2006
The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent
months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed
a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country.
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False Flags, Semiotics and Vulgar Marxists
The French theorist Jean Baudrillard famously once stated that the first Gulf War did not take place. By this he did not mean that nothing happened, but that its presentation in the media consisted of an overwhelming barrage of the signs of War, which bore essentially no relationship to the annihilation of a Third World army by the most advanced military power
in history. In short it was a simulation of war. This was perhaps the most extreme example
of what Baudrilliard referred to as the ‘ecstacy of communication’, that in our Information
Age, concepts spin at such a rate that their outlines become lost and their original
meanings are replaced with empty alternative.
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Whether such tactics succeed in provoking further, autonomous acts of violence directed against the civilian population is much less significant than the impact they are able to
exert within the media. This Anglo-American intelligence operation acts as a factory
churning out the signs of Civil War: a ‘wave of tit-for-tat sectarian violence’ and the
consequent ethnic cleansing. The signs are produced to be picked up by the media and spun
and spun until nothing is left but a nebulous Civil War with no internal logic or structure,
with the occupying forces as powerless to intervene as they were in the Balkans while Iraq
splits into Rubiae’s desired four to six autonomous provinces. Those few journalists, like
Yasser Salihee and Steven Vincent, who break the mould and start to investigate the actual
authorship of extrajudicial killings themselves become victims.
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To penetrate the media smokescreen of spontaneous, uncontrollable violence and understand
the role of intelligence operations in the creation of a beholden, occupied client state or
series of statelets is fundamental to understanding the processes in Iraq today. It is also
fundamental to recognising that the presence of Anglo-American forces in Iraq does not merely exacerbate the present violence; in Iraq we are the violence.
Max Fuller is the author of ‘For Iraq, the Salvador Option Become Reality’ published by the
Centre for Research on Globalisation. He can be contacted at [e-mail].

Uncovering the Roots of American Terrorism in Iraq
Mike Whitney
December 2, 2005
The immense media disinformation campaign is designed to shift blame away from its American
roots and promote the idea of massive sectarian unrest. This feeds the notion of an incipient civil war, which in turn achieves the American policy objective of Balkanizing the country to control its resources. The one reporter who diverged from these fabrications was Yasser Salihee, reporter for Knight-Ridder news. Salihee had uncovered critical information about the weaponry, vehicles and origins of the death squads, and was expected to file reports on those topics. His coverage, however, was cut short when he was assassinated in a gangland style hit at a checkpoint outside Baghdad by an American sniper. With just one precision shot to the forehead, another unembedded journalist was removed from covering
Bush’s folly. ...............................................................
Fuller’s research exposes the Interior Ministry as the hub of the clandestine death squad activity. The assumption that the ministry is manned exclusively by theocratic Shiites is just more misleading media gibberish. In fact, one of the more brutal counterinsurgency groups, the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, is headed by a former officer in Saddam’s Baath Party. (The Commandos were founded by the son of the former Iraqi Chief of Staff Falah al-Naqib, who many believed to be a CIA asset.) The connections of Interior Ministry chieftains to their CIA managers are deep and confusing but, as Fuller notes, "the Police Commandos were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units." (Reuters, National Review Online)

Death Squad Democracy
Mike Whitney
March 19, 2006
The notion that Iraq is now consumed by civil war depends on a number of assumptions that
are inherently false. First of all, it assumes that the Pentagon is ignoring the fundamental
principle which underscores all wars: "Know your enemy". In this case, there’s no doubt
about who the enemy is; it is the 87% of the Iraqi people who want to see an immediate end
to the American occupation. Therefore, the greatest threat to American objectives of permanent bases and occupation is the camaraderie that that manifests itself in the form of Arab solidarity or Iraqi nationalism. To this end, the Pentagon, through its surrogates in the media, has created a "self-fulfilling" narrative that civil war is already under way. Most of the war coverage now makes it appear as though the violence is generated from ethnic tensions and sectarian hatred. But is it? Some of the more astute observers have noticed that other parts of the propaganda war, (like references to the "imaginary" al-Zarqawi) have vanished from the newspapers, as government spin-doctors are now devoting all their time to promoting their latest product-line; civil war.
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In a larger sense, the "alleged" sectarian violence is consistent with what we have seen in
previous CIA-run operations in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Negroponte
are alumna of those conflicts (which, according to Cheney, succeeded quite admirably) so it’s probable that they would apply what they have learned about counterinsurgency to the ongoing war in Iraq. The El Salvador-experiment proved that the masses can eventually be terrorized into compliance.....................................
Death Squad Democracy Video footage of a massacre outside of Nahrwan, east of Baghdad, has appeared on the Internet showing the bodies of Shiite laborers who were allegedly killed by Sunni death squads. Journalist Paul McGeough was given the tapes and is planning to report on their content in the "Sydney Morning Herald". http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12376.htm
In one incident, four adults were pulled from their vehicle and either shot or stabbed to death in front of a 5 year old boy whose father was one of the victims. When the townspeople came to investigate the scene, they discovered the bodies of 48 men and women who had been dumped in a ditch. The corpses showed the signs of having been "systematically murdered. Most were shot but some appear to have been stabbed and mutilated". It is the "stabbed and mutilated" part that should interest us. After all, the intention of the Iraqi resistance is to gather greater support for their cause, not to alienate ordinary Iraqis through gratuitous acts of murder. If, however, this was the work of American-backed death squads, then the alternate goal of "governing through terror" has been achieved.....................
www.uruknet.info?p=21713

What is Covert Action?
J.V. Grady, ICH
September 21, 2005
There are many types of Covert Action operations, not all of them violent. For example, if a government wishes to influence the politics of another country’s government, the government may secretly fund an opposition party in that country in order to influence that country’s elections. Another method is to employ foreign newspaper reporters to write articles that give the version of events, the propaganda, that you want people to believe, even if it is the furthest thing from the truth. Or perhaps the owners or editors of a newspaper or media service can be bought or won over to allow articles or news stories created by the Intelligence organization for propaganda purposes to be planted in the newspaper or media service. A slant can then be given to influence public perceptions. For example, mercenaries can be referred to as “contractors”, thus making people believe that casualties among the mercenaries are innocent civilian construction workers who were unjustly victimized.

The main thing about Covert Action is that it must be deniable. There is a term called “plausible deniability”. When a government authorizes a covert action operation, the operation must be done in such a way that the government can claim that it knows nothing about it; in other words, the operation must not be attributable to the government that authorized it.

Covert Action operations are often Disinformation Operations, which are conducted in such a way as to discredit the opposition or the enemy. This is done, for example, by doing a violent action, such as a bombing, but making it look like the forces of another country or group did it. Such operations are sometimes called False-Flag Operations, meaning that the operation is conducted to make it look like it was done by people serving under another flag, preferably the enemy’s flag. If the operation succeeds as designed, people will blame the action on the wrong party (the enemy). Thus, public opinion will be won over to the side that actually did the killing. Such false-flag, covert action operations are often referred to as Dirty Tricks.

The British regularly employed Covert Action operations in Ireland, with the result that it is likely that the IRA often took the blame for violent actions with which they had no involvement, although they were hardly innocent players in the general mayhem. Many people suspect that the Northern Irish bank robbery that occurred some time back was actually a British Covert Action operation designed to make the IRA take the blame, so that people would believe that the IRA was not honouring the Good Friday Agreement. Incidentally, most of the British Northern Irish bank notes taken were worthless old notes, so they were no skin off anyone’s teeth.
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So, who is behind many of the bombings against the Shi’ia and Sunni populations? It is quite possible, even probable, that many of them are being carried out by American, British, and even Israeli Covert Action operatives. So, when you watch the news, think more deeply about what you’re seeing; and when you read your newspapers, try reading between the lines or wonder about the source or the writer behind the article. Has the article been planted? Is the writer in the pay of an intelligence service?
J.V. Grady is a former member of US Military Intelligence
informationclearinghouse.info/article10356.htm

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