This is kind of old news, but it still might be worth noting
Have thugs will travel
Bush Administration puts former Hussein torturers, executioners, and rapists on America's payroll Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
09.10.03
("War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals.")
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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."
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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."
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http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15603