Task Force 121
The Washington Post mentions Task Force 121 in a June 9, 2004
(
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26814-2004Jun9?language=printer)
article linking the Abu Ghraib Iraqi prison scandal to the White House:
US Army Colonel Thomas M. Pappas "said that an 'OGA' team -- or Other Government Agency, a euphemism for the CIA -- known as Task Force 121 had caused problems by bringing detainees they had captured to Abu Ghraib and essentially dumping them without conducting any follow-up. 'It's a very cowboy kind of affair,' he said of Task Force 121."
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Task_Force_121U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 1, 2004; Page A01
A confidential report to Army generals in Iraq in December 2003 warned that members of an elite military and CIA task force were abusing detainees, a finding delivered more than a month before Army investigators received the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison that touched off investigations into prisoner mistreatment.
The report, which was not released publicly and was recently obtained by The Washington Post, concluded that some U.S. arrest and detention practices at the time could "technically" be illegal. It also said coalition fighters could be feeding the Iraqi insurgency by "making gratuitous enemies" as they conducted sweeps netting hundreds of detainees who probably did not belong in prison and holding them for months at a time.
Spec. Duwayne Moore works at Abu Ghraib prison, which became known for photographs depicting detainee abuse. A report warned Army generals early that an elite military and CIA task force was abusing detainees throughout Iraq. (Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
The investigation, by retired Col. Stuart A. Herrington, also found that members of Task Force 121 -- a joint Special Operations and CIA mission searching for weapons of mass destruction and high-value targets including Saddam Hussein -- had been abusing detainees throughout Iraq and had been using a secret interrogation facility to hide their activities.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23372-2004Nov30.htmlMoving Targets
Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?
Seymour M. Hersh
he Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.
The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.
One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there.
Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple terms: “U.S. shooters and Iraqi intelligence.” He added, “There are Iraqis in the intelligence business who have a better idea, and we’re tapping into them. We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.”
http://www.bintjbeil.com/articles/2003/en/1215_hersh.htmlWhen a country adopts a policy such as preemptive invasions of other countries, based on lies, it is very wrong. The Nazis were tried for war crimes for the same things.
The Liquidation of Lidice
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-lidice.htmThe Resistance and Nazi Reprisals
http://courses.drew.edu/FA2002/frsm-1-005/partisans2.htmlCollective Punishment Isn't Self-Defense
Neither the United States nor Israel is equivalent to Nazi Germany, yet both countries have adopted a Nazi-like obsession with collective punishment
By Ted Rall
07/21/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- SAN DIEGO--As commander of a Nazi einsatzgruppen death squad in occupied Poland, Dr. Werner Best came to believe that the most effective response to terrorism was collective punishment. After the fall of France he went on to draft the Third Reich's counterterrorism policy for countries occupied by Germany. Towns where acts of "passive" resistance such as the cutting of telegraph cables had taken place were placed under curfews, fined and slapped with travel restrictions. "Active" resistance--the killing of a German soldier--would be met by reprisal killings of local civilians.
Dr. Best was trying to protect German troops. Rather than be cowed, however, leaders of European resistance groups saw Best's ruthless policy as their chance to radicalize moderates who were still on the fence about their German occupatiers. The insurgents stepped up assassinations of German troops. The killings prompted the Germans to shoot more local businessmen and political leaders. The cycle of violence was spiraling out of control.
Eventually Hitler himself got into the act. Convinced that collective punishment was failing because it wasn't severe enough, the führer issued a September 1941 order to use "the harshest measures" against civilians in areas where the Resistance was active. Arguing that "only the
death penalty can be a real means of deterrence," Hitler ordered that 50 civilians be executed for each German soldier killed.
Some in the German high command argued that punishing innocent civilians in large numbers would alienate the local population and lose the battle for hearts and minds. Although they were eventually proven correct, they were overruled. New reprisals, each worse than the last, strengthened the resolve of the resistance and gained them new recruits. By the end of the war, reprisals had assumed grotesquely lopsided ratios of murdered locals to dead Germans. Entire villages--Lidice in the Czech Republic (340 killed), Oradour-sur-Glane in France (642), Kortelisy in Ukraine (2,892)--were wiped out.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14122.htm
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