Doug Lorimer
On September 3, Iraqi national security adviser Mouwafak al Rubaie told journalists that the alleged second-in-command of the tiny al Qaeda in Iraq group, Hamed Jumaa Farid al Saeedi, had been arrested a few days earlier in north-east Baghdad. Rubaie said he was the most important leader of the group after Abu Ayyub al Masri, who is believed to have taken control after a US air strike killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi on June 7.
Rubaie said Saeedi was "directly responsible" for the February 22 bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, north of Baghdad. This attack, Associated Press reported, "touched off the sectarian bloodletting between Shiite and Sunni Muslims pushing Iraq toward civil war".
The mosque was a symbol of cooperation between the two major Muslim sects in Iraq — a Sunni-run mosque that housed the Shiite Askari shrine.
The February 23 Washington Post reported that "witnesses said that interior ministry commandos and Iraqi police were cordoning the shrine before the explosions took place". A resident who lived near the mosque told the Post: "I was leaving my house to go to work at 6am, but the [police] commandos did not allow me and said curfew is imposed. About an hour later, we heard the explosions."
Within hours, US officials in Baghdad blamed the bombing on Sunni insurgents "dressed as police commandos" — which is how the next day's New York Times reported the event.
Blaming the mosque bombing on "Sunni insurgents" provided a pretext for Washington's collaborators among the Shiite political-religious establishment to whip up animosity toward Iraqi Sunnis, who have been the main social base of the resistance movement's guerrilla war against the occupation forces.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's top Shiite cleric, for example, issued a February 22 statement calling for Shiite street protests. Tens of thousands of Shiites took to the streets, vowing revenge. Within a few hours, 168 Sunni mosques had been damaged.
Later that day, Iraqi cleric Moqtada al Sadr, an outspoken Shiite opponent of the US-led occupation, read a message on Aljazeera TV denouncing attacks on Shiite and Sunni mosques. He warned that there was "a plan by the occupation to spark a sectarian war".
A week later US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad accused Sadr's Mahdi Army militia of carrying out a wave of killings of Sunnis in the mosque bombing's wake. The March 7 Los Angeles Times reported that Khalilzad claimed "the US has little choice but to maintain a strong presence in Iraq — or risk a regional conflict in which Arabs side with Sunnis and Iranians back Shiites".
Since then, the mantra of a Shiite versus Sunni "sectarian civil war" has dominated Western corporate media reports about Iraq, despite Pentagon figures showing that 90% of "insurgent attacks" target the occupation troops and the US-controlled Iraqi security forces.
The Khalilzad-initiated refrain of "sectarian civil war" has conveniently ended any serious examination in the corporate media of claims, made by Sunnis in the year leading up to the Samarra bombing, that the Iraqi interior ministry's paramilitary police units, led by US "advisers", had been carrying out a large-scale program of abduction, torture and extrajudicial execution of suspected resistance supporters.
On those rare occasions since then that the Western media has reported the activities of these death squads, the role of their US trainers and "advisers" is never examined.
The May 22 New York Times, for example, reported that in August 2005 a police commando brigade is believed to have kidnapped and killed 36 Sunnis in northern Baghdad. Although a warrant for murder was issued by a judge for the unit's commander, "the arrest warrant was never executed, according to court records".
A spokesperson for the Baghdad "Civilian Police Assistance Training Team" told the paper that US military advisers were "attached to the Volcano Brigade last August, but that they were unaware of the allegations concerning the Huriya massacre or the outstanding arrest warrant". The spokesperson's statement was apparently good enough for the NYT.
Only a few weeks before the Samarra bombing, General William Boykin, the US deputy undersecretary of defence for intelligence, confirmed the accuracy of claims that the US is running a death-squad program.
The February 4 NYT reported that Boykin "was asked whether the government should re-establish a program of identifying and assassinating specific adversaries, like Operation Phoenix, conducted in Vietnam by the CIA", under which US-organised death squads killed at least 26,000 Vietnamese civilians between January 1968 and August 1972.
"Emphasizing that he was giving his personal opinion, General Boykin said that America's conventional military forces and its Special Operations teams in Iraq and Afghanistan were 'doing a pretty good job of that right now'."
"I think we're doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do, without all of the secrecy", Boykin added.
Since April 2004, DynCorp International has been the principal "private military contractor" providing training to Iraq's US-recruited police. The May 13, 2002 Chicago Tribune reported that "public records show that DynCorp, which hires former Special Operations military personnel and CIA operators and contracts them back to the government, is linked to at least 50 subsidiaries and satellite companies across the US and around the world".
United Press International reported in July 2004 that through State Department and Pentagon contracts, which account for 98% of its business, DynCorp "implements foreign policy by proxy" and its security personnel "are effectively immune from criminal sanctions".
DynCorp's website boasts that for "more than 50 years" the corporation "has been entrusted with important responsibilities to keep our military personnel safe and ready, help stem the flow of illegal narcotics to the United States, help protect American diplomats and key foreign leaders, [and] train police and military in countries that are critical to US interests".
The corporate media, however, hardly ever reports on the connection between this CIA front company, the Iraqi police and the wave of extrajudicial executions that has steadily mounted since 2004.
A rare exception was the May 22 NYT, which reported that it was after DynCorp employee Jon Villanova "arrived in Basra last spring to help build a police force in southern Iraq when bodies began piling up. Twenty or more Iraqi civilians were dragged from their homes, shot in the head and dumped in the streets.
"The evidence pointed to some of the very people he and his team of foreign police advisers were struggling to train: a cluster of senior officers working out of a station called Jamiat.
"But local officials resisted efforts to prosecute the officers. By the time officials in Baghdad intervened nine months later, the corruption in Basra had gotten so bad that the 135-member internal affairs unit, set up to police the police, was operating as a ring of extortionists, kidnappers and killers, American and Iraqi officials said."