A Word or Two about Petraeus

Petraeus Is Israel's Greatest Friend General Petraeus has been in Iraq for 4 years, and the press is making him out to be another General MacArthur. But all he has really done is seat in his fortified headquarters in the Green Zone, fudge causality statistics, and fueled the Shiite-Sunni civil war. Arun Gupta, a reporter points out that David Petraeus has ‘credibility’ and our ‘trust’ mostly because his past actions in Iraq have gone largely unreported.

General Adnan Thabit Petraeus supported the creation of paramilitary forces in Iraq. One of the most 'aggressive' of these was the "Special Police Commandos", commanded by General Adnan Thabit with a force of about 5,000 troops.

Iraq's Secret Militias Petreaus backs the 'Police Commandos' as the leading force against the insurgency. Donald Rumsfeld said the commandos are among "forces that are going to have the greatest leverage on suppressing and eliminating the insurgency." Petraeus calls the Police Commandos "a horse to back" and has done so by providing it with "money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons." In a satellite briefing to the press on February 4, Petraeus repeatedly praised the Special Police Commandos, calling the leadership "tremendously aggressive" in operations.

Special Commandos Are Basic Assassins Unfortunately, the Special Police Commandos morphed into death squads that were used against the insurgency and against Iraqis, in general. Petraeus doesn't approve the actions of the death squads, but he failed to put in place a system to ensure that there would not be those kinds of abuses.

Ex-Spooks Recruiting Investigative reporter Max Fuller in his detailed examination of documents, stresses that the vast majority of atrocities attributed to ‘rogue’ Shiite or Sunni militias, "were in fact the work of government-controlled commandos of ‘special forces’, trained by the Americans, ‘advised’ by Americans and run largely by former CIA agents." (Chris Floyd, ‘Ulster on the Euphrates: The Anglo-American Dirty War’) Petraeus attempt to play ‘Good Cop/Bad Cop’ in order to ‘divide and rule’ hasn’t gone too well, nor is it likely to succeed now.

Petreaus Backs Shiites As Gutpa noted with understatement: "This played a key role in terms of stoking and fomenting the civil war, because you had death squads wearing government uniforms, being armed and trained by the U.S. going around killing Sunnis randomly. It generally alienated the Sunni Arab population from the government and drove them into the arms of the resistance."

	Militias Are being Well Equipped "...there are reports that have stated clearly with these militias saying, like, "Yes, we're getting weapons from the U.S. government." And part of it is, is that they do want to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is another Sunni-based group. It's an Iraqi-based group. But their main purpose is they want this money and weapons and aid to fight the Shiite militias."

Now Petreaus Backs The Sunnis "So here we have them, like in 2004, setting up these Shiite militias, and now he's setting up these Sunni militias to fight these Shiite militias. And what it portends is just an absolute disaster for Iraq. And, of course, it will also be used as justification: "Well, we can't leave because a bloodbath will result." But we're not looking at the fact that it's the U.S. that's creating this bloodbath." Besides whacking folks, the Iraqi security forces under General Petraeus also had trouble hanging on to their weapons. Back in October 2006 there was this account:

Weapons Given to Iraq Are Missing The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons — almost 4% of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003.The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, according to a new government report, raising fears that some of those weapons have fallen into the hands of insurgents fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.

So -- and this was part of the Petraeus strategy, that he was just throwing all this money and weapons and aid at the Special Police Commandos, because they were so desperate to create a strategy to defeat the Sunni insurgency. And, of course, by the time he left his mission in 2005 of training Iraqis, there was only one battalion that was considered ready. In one year, that's what his work amounted to.

And now a report just came out, a commission set up by Congress of four retired US generals, in which they stated that the National Police, which is what the Special Police Commandos are now known as, the National Police are so corrupt, so riven with sectarianism, they're so hated by the public, the Iraqi military and other police services, that they should just be completely disbanded. And yet, none of this is being talked about in Congress or the media.

And, being merely a liar is the benign view of Petraeus. Around the same time as the creation of the "Special Police Commandos" was the creation of Iraq's so called Wolf Brigade for all practical purposes a Shiite counterpart to the Special Police Commandos.

Killing Religious Leaders Last May, the Association of Muslim Scholars publicly accused the Wolf Brigade of having "arrested imams and the guardians of some mosques, tortured and killed them, and then got rid of their bodies in a garbage dump in Shaab district" of Baghdad.

Journalists began reporting details of forced confessions through torture and indiscriminate killing of Sunni detainees by the Wolf Brigade last summer. Despite this mounting evidence of systematic torture, the U.S. command had shown no evidence of discomfort about supporting the Brigade. Some Wolf Brigade sweeps through Sunni neighbourhoods have been carried out alongside U.S. troops.


On Nov. 10, a U.S. officer described on his personal weblog a "battalion sized joint operation" between the "Nightstalkers" (Army Airborne 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment) and the Wolf Brigade in southern Baghdad. The blogger concluded, "As we passed vehicle after vehicle full of blindfolded detainees my face stretched into a long wolfish smile..."

The Wolf Brigade obviously had full US support, not only in tactical matters, but also with manipulation of the Iraqi media space. The Wolf Brigade became famous for the awful TV program called "Terrorists in the Grip of Justice" that appeared on the American-created-staffed-funded-and-controlled Al `Iraqiyya TV network (should have been called Al Amrikiyya). The program showed supposed "terrorists", who had clearly been abused, sometimes badly beaten, and probably also tortured, confessing to a variety of offenses, some of which were completely ludicrous, such as having homosexual orgies in mosques. The ostensible purpose of the TV show was to influence the Iraqi public against the resistance by presenting the "terrorists" as the lowest of all possible low-lifes - a pretty transparent, and transparently stupid American P.R. stunt.

Once you penetrate the lies and 'warped' reality smokescreen consciously set up by folks like Petraeus and the cabal at the Pentagon, terms like 'betrayal' seem entirely too civil to describe the monster they have had a hand in creating--and continue to support.

source