[HIMC] Charlie Reese: Murder Inc.

[robert]

Subject: Charlie Reese Murder Inc.



       
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        For Wednesday, December 17, 2003 
       
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        Murder Inc.

        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 Israeli role is supposed to be hush-hush, but not only
Hersh, in his New Yorker article, but also a British reporter in the
Guardian have confirmed the Israeli role. That will win a lot of hearts
and minds in the Arab world. About the only government they hate worse
than ours is Israel's.

        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.

        Another friend of mine, on loan to the CIA from the Green
Berets, paid Nung mercenaries $5 for each Vietnamese head they brought
in. They brought them in by the croaker sack full, but of course a
severed head can't tell you if the person who used to wear it was a Viet
Cong or just a poor farmer the Nungs happened upon. After all, they
hated all the Vietnamese without regard for ideology.

        The same thing will happen in Iraq. Our paid evildoers will
finger people they have a personal grudge against or, if they are smart,
innocent Iraqis actually on our side. That way our death squads will
endear us to the Iraqi people just as the Israeli death squads have
endeared them to the Palestinians.

        Think of a wrong way to conduct an occupation, and the Bush
administration will adopt it.

        The important thing about all of this is that the American
people remember this filthy tactic the next time we hear some politician
waxing eloquent about our great gift of freedom to the Iraqi people. The
fatal flaw in our foreign policy is that we always talk one way and act
another way. Cold-blooded murder is cold-blooded murder, whether the hit
man works for the mob or the U.S. government. Assassination violates
every principle we claim to stand for.

        The truth is that war and occupation are a dirty business, and
they contaminate everything and everybody involved. There are no good
wars, and there are no good guys on either side. All you have are
degrees of evil. We committed enough crimes against humanity in World
War II that if we had lost, it would have been our politicians and
generals in the dock for war crimes.

        If we can't refrain from acting like Murder Inc. and from
sleeping with the evildoers, let's at least drop the self-righteous bit.
Hypocrisy so ill becomes us.
       
        
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        © 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc. 
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