Sunday, June 26, 2005
Can Anyone Here Play This (War) Game?
To see clear points as to just how we are losing the occupation of Iraq and why it is that growing numbers of the American people have turned their backs on Bush's Folly, read this article from the L.A. Times:0 comments
U.S. Plans Expansion of Crowded Iraq Prisons
There are lots of little, telling nuggets of information scatterered throughout this piece. [Note: My emphasis throughout.]
Such as:
Faced with a ballooning prison population, U.S. commanders in Iraq are building new detention facilities at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and Camp Bucca near the Kuwaiti border and are developing a third major prison, in northern Iraq.
Mission Incarcerated.
It's now a race to see if Halliburton can build more permanent U.S. military bases in Iraq, or more prisons.
After the scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers, President Bush had advocated demolishing Abu Ghraib "as a fitting symbol of Iraq's new beginning."
And since at all times, this misdirection administration does EXACTLY the opposite of what it tells you it's going to do, we all knew this quote was the go-ahead for putting that spiffy new wing on that sorry-ass structure.
Following are three separate, but intertwined graphs from this story which are particularly harsh to the administration's echo-chamber rhetoric.
First:
Aggressive operations against insurgents over the last six months have brought a flood of prisoners to U.S.-run facilities—including many believed to be hard-line rebels who have attacked American troops.
Then,
As of June 20, Bucca's population stood at 6,450 prisoners, just 50 below its limit. [Maj. Gen. William] Brandenburg[, who oversees U.S.-run prisons in Iraq] plans to add space for 1,400 more prisoners by November.
Followed up by this:
The crunch has led to a constant state of alert at Camp Bucca, where guards have struggled to contain repeated escape attempts and what Brown called "several large-scale uprisings." The camp is a grid of fenced-in indoor enclosures, each housing up to 800 prisoners. As the population rises, commanders plan to gradually shift to smaller, easier-to-control compounds. Captured foreign fighters are kept in a separate compound, but [Army spokesman Lt. Col. Guy] Rudisill said they numbered fewer than 400.
Ummmm... 6,450 "prisoners" PLUS 1,400 "more prisoners" EQUALS 7,850 prisoners MINUS 400 "foreign fighters" EQUALS 7,450 Iraqi citizens who are fighting to repel invading foreign armies from their country. That's just at ONE prison. We can most likely assume this holds at the others as well. And if that's still a small percentage, then you've got a situation where millions of Iraqis thank us for toppling their dictator, and now want us to get the hell out. Sounds like they already ARE fighting for freedom and liberty, Mr. President.
Now, you parlay all of these with this graph:
Efforts to relieve the prison crowding by speeding up releases have been frustrated, officials say, by an increase in detainees deemed a high risk to commit acts of violence if set free. A Combined Review and Release Board of three U.S. officials and six Iraqis—two each from the ministries of interior, justice and human rights—reviews each prisoner within 90 days of arrival.
The board decides which prisoners can be released and which pose an immediate threat and must be detained. Rudisill, the Army spokesman, said the criteria include: the quality of the evidence against the prisoner; capabilities such as military training or electrical skills that could be put toward making bombs; suspected connections to insurgent cells; and "expressed philosophy."
So, what we see from all this is that the numbers of foreign fighters is still fairly small albeit growing; basically, this is still Iraqis trying to throw the American and British armies out of their country, as the bulk of the armed resistance is Iraqi; and that the U.S. military and the puppet Shiite government in Baghdad are rounding up just about every Iraqi who looks at them cross-eyed. As well as just about every Sunni in the country.
This makes sense short-term for survival purposes. Arrest them all and let the Blackwater Company and Titan Company special ops guys sort them out.
However, when you've taken every taxi driver off the streets of the country, and hauled in every angry, drunken loudmouth from the cafes, you thereby take men who pose no immediate threat, have no quality evidence against them, have no military training or electrical skills that could be put toward making bombs, no connections to insurgent cells, and who have "expressed philosophy" by shouting "Death to the Infidels!" at a rally or drunkenly at a cafe, and toss them into disgusting, overcrowed conditions with Wahabiist radicals, where morality-free Blackwater private-army, mercenary interrogators perform inhumane, unspeakable acts on them and their countrymen, until you soon have men who do pose an immediate threat; who will soon be creating lots of quality evidence against themselves; who have gained clandestine military training and electrical skills that could be put toward making bombs; who now have clear connections to insurgent cells and who now swell with an "expressed philosophy" of killing every American (and every Iraqi who aids them) within a thousand miles of the Persian Gulf.
Give these hard-working guys in this administration a hand!
These are your tax dollars at work, folks.
GO TEAM!!
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posted by Gotham 3:18 PM
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