Murder Inc.

Murder Inc.
by Charley Reese
December 13, 2003

Seymour Hersh, with his usual thoroughness, has documented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's latest scheme for Iraq. It is, in short, to set up death squads, trained by Israelis and using Israelis as consultants in Iraq.

The idea is to hire some of the worst of the worst – members of Saddam's old secret police – to infiltrate the resistance and finger key players for the American murder squads. Thus, we climb in bed with the very people our boy president likes to moralize about – those dreaded evildoers. Only now they will be evildoers on our payroll instead of Saddam's. Only now, instead of bringing democratic values to Iraq, we will show the Iraqis we are just as good at murder as Saddam.

If you are one of those superpatriots who like to wrap themselves in the American flag while you watch Fox News, don't be shocked. We did exactly the same kind of things during the Vietnam War. I used to have, now and then, a bloody Mary or several with a CIA man who had run the infamous Phoenix Program in Vietnam.

There, the South Vietnamese would finger members of the Viet Cong, and we would snuff them. Of course, my friend said in his cynical way, if the quota for the month was 50, the South Vietnamese fingered 50; if it was 500, they found 500. How many of the thousands we murdered were actually Viet Cong and how many were innocent Vietnamese, nobody knows, except perhaps the South Vietnamese who were involved. The number of people we murdered ranges from 21,000 (an official figure) to 47,000.

http://www.antiwar.com/reese/reese9.html

but why should I be surprised at anything Rummy cooks up; I'm sure he was involved in the initial playbook for Vietnam.

gotta go out and get those Arabs, cause the only good Iraqi is the one that's dead (to paraphrase Country Joe) . . . makes me ill . . .