Blight Unto Nations
January 12, 2007
Prior to the Iraq invasion US troops trained in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with Israeli forces to prepare for urban combat. The skills learned were soon on display in Iraq in the form of Israeli style checkpoints, house demolition, urban assaults etc. In Fallujah, ambulances came under attack, and sniper were positioned on vantage points that shot everything that moved, including old women, and children.
Prior to Abu Ghraib, US interrogators were sent to Israel to receive special training in mental and physical torture techniques. Israeli Orientalists briefed would-be American torturers on the peculiar characteristics of the “Arab mind”. The hooding, sexual humiliation, use of dogs etc. are all techniques honed in Israeli gulags. Robert Fisk wrote the following of the Israeli connected CACI International, one of the two companies which were implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture report by General Antonio Taguba:
One of Staphanovic’s co-workers, Joe Ryan – who was not named in the Taguba report – now says he underwent an ‘Israeli interrogation course’ before going to Iraq.’ J.P. London, the CEO of the company, visited Israel on a trip sponsored by an Israeli lobby group along with U.S. congressmen and other defense contractors. In early 2004 he also attended an ‘anti-terror” training camp in Israel where he ‘was presented with an award by Shaul Mofaz, the right-wing Israeli defense minister’.
AFP now reports that another Israeli tactic employed by the US forces in Iraq
Adapting ideas tracing back from ancient history to modern Israel, US Marines have sealed off flashpoint towns with sand walls in a new counter-insurgency tactic to quell the wilds of western Iraq.
In her language and tone of this AFP repot are noteworthy. Take this clumsy sentence, for instance: “The area has been terrorised by Al-Qaeda fighters who reportedly roam large, beheading civilians to impose fundamentalism.” In another place it describes the insurgency as “pro-Saddam”. Since she has no contacts with anyone except the units she is embedded with, one might ask how she determined the nature of the insurgency? But even if the insurgency is what she claims it is, it couldn’t possibly be both, as Al-Qaida has no sympathies for Saddam, and vice versa.
