Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad (NYT)

[kpete]

Bound, Blindfolded and Dead: The Face of Atrocity in Baghdad

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: March 26, 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — Mo
hannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.

In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.

Mr. Azawi was among the few Sunni Arabs on the block, and, according to witnesses, when a Shiite friend tried to intervene, a gunman stuck a pistol to his head and said, "You want us to blow your brains out, too?"

Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.

In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was especially gruesome, with at least 191 corpses, many sadistically mutilated, surfacing in garbage bins, drainage ditches, pickup trucks and minibuses.

lots more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/international/middleeast/26bodies.html?ex=1301029200&en=dd8fedf8798bbc1c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

[donco6]

1. Another Hutu/Tutsi massacre.

And it's all our fault, this time.

[Midnight Rambler]

2. It's the media's fault!

They don't wanna admit that Freedom(TM) is on the march!

[donco6]

6. But I bet there was a school painted somewhere.

So it's not all bad news. :sarcasm:

[BrklynLiberal]

3. but but There is no civil war! The media is not reporting the GOOD news!

:cry:

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. May I edit? BUT BUT BUT! IT's all the MEDIA's fault. They caused it

by reporting bad news! If there will be civil war, Cable News programs, except for Fox, are the reason. So, in Patriot II, we are concocted new rules which limit the news media to reporting only Happy News from now on. We hereby create a new commission, with Gonzales, Addington, Rice and Cheney as the nation'sl editors granting all pre-approval for news broadcasts.
And presto - all the problems in Iraq will disappear!



and for my next trick, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.


AGAIN?

[BrklynLiberal]

12. Well done!

[ChairmanAgnostic]

14. it's all in the use of three buts.

[patdem]

4. But wait..aren't there now 30 mil..er uh 29.9 mil not drilled or killed

or maybe about 20 mil since the start of the first gulf war still alive though maybe not well.

[Hissyspit]

5. The good news is...

Oh, fuck, see? They've changed the debate and got us even talking about this nonsense. It's ridiculous.

[Inland]

7. Now, Bush....THIS is terrorism.

The guy runs a bird shop. But he's in a Shiite neighborhood. He's tortured and killed and left in a way to be seen. The conclusion that the killers INTEND is that they don't hesitate for any laws of god or man, and that there are no limits to what they will do. That's the terror.

See this article on the up close and personal, face to face, neighborhood level ethnic cleansings
http://counterpunch.org/patrick03202006.html

[rodeodance]

13. You are right. We have brought terror to ordinary Iraqi people!

[JohnyCanuck]

8. Could be The Slavador Option at work or

quite possibly the intended fallout of the Salvador Option.

For Iraq, "The Salvador Option" Becomes Reality
by Max Fuller

Abstract

The following article examines evidence that the 'Salvador Option' for Iraq has been ongoing for some time and attempts to say what such an option will mean. It pays particular attention to the role of the Special Police Commandos, considering both the background of their US liaisons and their deployment in Iraq. The article also looks at the evidence for death-squad style massacres in Iraq and draws attention to the almost complete absence of investigation. As such, the article represents an initial effort to compile and examine some of these mass killings and is intended to spur others into further looking at the evidence. Finally, the article turns away from the notion that sectarianism is a sufficient explanation for the violence in Iraq, locating it structurally at the hands of the state as part of the ongoing economic subjugation of Iraq.

Mounting evidence indicates that the ‘Salvador Option’ mooted for Iraq is already proceeding at full throttle

On 8 January this year, Newsweek published an article that claimed the US government was considering a ‘Salvador Option’ to combat the insurgency in Iraq (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/ ). The Salvador Option is a reference to the military assistance programme of the 1980s, initiated under Jimmy Carter and subsequently pursued by the Reagan administration, in which the US trained and materially supported the Salvadoran military in its counter-insurgency campaign against popularly supported FMLN guerrillas. The Newsweek article was widely cited in the mainstream media but the allegations were rapidly dismissed by Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld. Though the reports mentioned human-rights violations, they generally made little of the fact that it was the very units that US military advisors had instructed that were frequently responsible for the most unspeakable crimes* and that there was at times a clear correlation between fresh bouts of training and subsequent atrocities (see Noam Chomsky, ‘The Crucifixion of El Salvador’, http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-2-02.html ).

In an earlier interview on 10 January, retired General Wayne Downing, former head of all US special operations forces, took a very different line, stating that US-backed special units had been ‘conducting strikes’ against leaders of the so-called insurgency since March 2003 (cited in ‘Phoenix Rising in Iraq’ by Stephen Shalom, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7227 ). However, Downing was careful to say that implementing a Salvadoran strategy would add an extra ‘type’ of unit to the occupation’s arsenal. What neither the press, Donald Rumsfeld, nor General Downing pointed out was that the Salvador Option was already well underway in Iraq, and far more literally than might have been imagined.

According to an article recently published in New York Times Magazine, in September 2004 Counsellor to the US Ambassador for Iraqi Security Forces James Steele was assigned to work with a new elite Iraqi counter-insurgency unit known as the Special Police Commandos, formed under the operational control of Iraq’s Interior Ministry (‘The Way of the Commandos’, Peter Maass, http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/resources_files/TheWay_of_the_Commandos.html ).

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/FUL506A.html

[mom cat]

17. Thank you for putting these resources together.

[LynnTheDem]

10. "the bodies keep piling up." Thank BUSH.

The bodies in NO keep piling up too. Thank BUSH.

[rodeodance]

11. if i hear bush say optimisism one more time i think i will SCREAM

[BrklynLiberal]

15. Don't let Drudge find out you said that. He will publish it and call you

unpatriotic!!!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2533344

[izzybeans]

16. Hey, why not title your thread: At least he wasn't disappeared.

Your liberal bias betrays you. ;)

Sectarian violence; a predictable outcome of western attempts to "modernize".