AP: U.S. Raid Nets Whole Iraqi Village

[spinbaby]

HABBARIYAH, Iraq - American troops in helicopters swooped down on this remote sheepherding village in the desert and detained nearly all the men, one as old as 81, one as young as 13. A month after the raid, apparently aimed at preventing terrorists from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, only two of the 79 captives have been freed.

(snip)

The U.S.-appointed mayor of Habbariyah and its deputy police chief believe the Americans rounded up so many men and boys to punish the village because of suspicions it maintains contact with desert smugglers or infiltrators from across the border, 80 miles away.

U.S. military officers refused to talk about the operation...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=1&u=/ap/20031023/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_all_the_men

[FlemingsGhost]

1. So what! A U.S. invasion netted a whole country...

and lots and lots of oil.

[tom_paine]

2. If My Lai happened today, would we hear about it?

Of course not.

Maybe it already has. Like Saddam and the Kurds would anyone here be surprised if the My Lai's village just disappeared from future maps?

[progressiverealist]

9. it would come out in the alternative media eventually...

and the reporters would be labeled "conspiracy theorists"- the current right-wing term for anyone who catches this administration with their collective pants down.

[Robb]

3. Anyone else find this embarrassing?

"Wow, got the whole village, mm?"

"Yup."

"Sneak up on 'em, did ya?"

"Yup."

"That 81 year-old give you any trouble?"

:eyes:

[gWbush is Mabus]

4. why do the soldiers always take their GOLD JEWELERY

that seems like burglary and kidnapping...and torture

[arcane1]

5. sigh... I'm getting sick of hearing all this "teach them a lesson" crap

:grr:

"punishing" an entire VILLAGE???


some tidbits:

The men were transported to the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, once used by Saddam to house political prisoners.

All but two remain there.

----

He also said the Americans searched every house and confiscated cash and gold jewelry, used as currency among Bedouin, desert tribes with a nomadic tradition.
-----------------
He quoted the soldiers as saying they were trying to trace the source of a telephone call placed from the area. The only phone the mayor knew of was his own satellite telephone.

"I gave it to them, they checked it, gave it back to me and then retook it," he said. "They still have it."


when do we actually start "liberating" these people??? :wtf:

[DulceDecorum]

19. Remember the town of Tulia, Texas?

When the dust settled after the 1999 arrests, 17% of Tulia's black community was under indictment for felony drug distribution charges. They have been leaving for long stays in the Texas prison system ever since. Swisher County juries convicted and sentenced young first-time offenders eligible for probation to 20 and 25-year sentences. One man with a prior conviction got 90 years. But the hardest hit of all was William Cash Love, a white man who fathered a child with a local black woman. On the basis of a previous drug conviction and finding him guilty of making several drug deliveries -- the largest being an ounce of crack -- jurors gave Love a 435-year sentence. That is not a typo.
http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/154/tulia.shtml

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.
Right now, we are in 2003.
Man, that dude got the MOTHER of a sentence!!!
That is what I call DECIMATION.
In everyday usage, "to decimate" means to wipe out, to cause great damage to, to destroy a large number of the enemy. Literally, it means to kill, destroy, or eliminate one out of ten. Either sense of the word is appropriate in describing what drug-fighting sheriff, a gung-ho prosecutor, a shady undercover cop, and the good jurors of Swisher County, Texas, did to the small African-American community in the town of Tulia.


The same type of justice will be coming shortly
to villages and towns in Iraq.
This message brought to you by courtesy of the 87 Billion Dollar Man.
We can rebuild it.
We destroyed it with our technology.

[kayell]

20. The Iraqis may soon be looking at the old Saddam regime

as the good old days, at the rate we are terrorizing the population.

[Barrett808]

6. I predicted mass detentions just last week...

...reports of after collective punishment (bulldozing Iraqi farmers' fields).

Massacres can't be far behind.

[The Stranger]

7. It seems as if they are using the same prison that Saddam Hussein used,

as well as the same oppressive tactics that Saddam Hussein used.

And what was the Chimpanzee asking? The world is better off without the Iraqi dictator, but now it seems that the world has worse . . .

[Malva Zebrina]

8. Black Hawk Down

. this is really embarrassing--everything done is now done on "suspicion"--anyone can make up any kind of a "suspicion" to justify this type of intimidation. Sooner or later as the people begin to chafe at the bit, the "suspicion" will materialize. It seems to get worse by the day--Bush is not a success here--and not a success in getting anyone to help pay the costs--get out Bush--you are no commander in chief--you are simply a tyrant at this point.

[Dover]

10. Yeah that's it! Arrest EVERYONE! Arrest the WORLD!

...n/t

[niyad]

11. beginning to remind me of the last scene of "sex and the single girl"

where the nutso cop is standing curbside at the airport, ordering all the planes down, ordering all the cars to stop, and indicating that he is going to arrest everyone.

[FlemingsGhost]

12. Or Billy Crystal in "Forget Paris"

He plays an NBA ref who loses it one night, and ejects everyone from the game.

[jokerman93]

13. William Burroughs saw it coming

He said back in the 80's that American foreign policy was moving towards establishing our military as a supra-national police force.

World police state baby! Our boys are just getting the kinks worked out of performing as (a neocon revisioning of) fascist storm troopers. Most of them probably don't even realize it.

Personally, I doubt there ever was or will be a real plan for "liberating" or "democratizing" the Iraqi people. At this point, the Bush administration appears to be improvising as they go. The idiots thought this whole catastrophe would be an easy spin -- they could get their loot and move on to wider wars. I remember once last year, Rumsfeld patronizingly explained to the press during a conference that all you have to do is just keep repeating something and people will believe it. They were counting on being able to lie consistently and persistently.

Ha! Arrogant F'ks!

I'm guessing the strategy now is, if possible, to get the rest of the world to rebuild Iraq since they're so concerned, and at the same time, find a way to move on to the next "unavoidable" conflict on their timetable.

Syria looks like it could use a little policing...

[CWebster]

15. "World police state...."

And what us Democrats need to show up that twirp, Bush, is our very General... Yeah, we will show them how we have such a better world view...

[Voltaire99]

14. "We had to destroy that village in order to save it."

Plus ca change...

[gratuitous]

16. No, no, no

It's not the same thing at all! Before, yes, under Democratic presidents, we destroyed villages in order to save them. Now, under the benevolent Republican leadership of our Kompassionately Konservative Khimp Executive, we just arrest the entire village in order to save it. Lots different. See?

See?

[rocktivity]

17. If the terrorists are coming in from Saudi Arabia, guard the border

better yet, "liberate" Saudi Arabia, too.


rocknation

[DulceDecorum]

18. Don't open your mouth for the devil

He has enough ideas as is.

KPFA's Dennis Bernstein conducted an interview with Scottish MP George Galloway in mid-November in which Galloway reported reading a Rand Corporation report pushed by Richard Perle, director of the quasi-governmental Defense Policy Board. Currently floating around Washington and London, this plan has the US taking over Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon after installing a puppet government in Iraq.

In the interview, Galloway said, "Iraqi war aims are much wider than the excuses given. The US wants to redraw the map of the Middle East. Jordan would be united to the new Iraq." One version advocates "taking the Saudis out of Saudi Arabia" and seizing oil fields and holy sites. "If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia, Osama Bin Laden would win in a landslide. Saudi Arabia can't let the US use its air bases to invade Iraq. The population would rise up like they did with the Shah. Iraq is to be the tactical point, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot with Egypt the prize." Concerning American militarists, Galloway states, "The chicken hawks are always ready to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood, the cost will be severe."
http://www.coastalpost.com/02/12/09.htm


Mr Galloway also claimed that he was on the side of the British troops, whom he described in Parliament as "lions" led by "donkeys".

As well as the "inciting Arabs to kill British troops" charge, Mr Galloway was also accused of committing three other "grossly detrimental" acts: urging Plymouth voters to reject Labour MPs (at a public meeting in January); urging British troops to disobey orders, or "illegal orders" as he described them (on the ITV news in April); and threatening to stand against Labour as an independent (on Newsnight, in April).
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/10/24/ngall124.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/10/24/ixnewstop.html