Fallujah: Pentagon Plans a High-tech Strategic Hamlet (prison)

[donsu]

http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=453



It is now official—the United States does not learn from history. It is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.

In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was introduced in Vietnam, based on a British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In a dismal attempt to prevent the National Liberation Front from “influencing” peasants in South Vietnam, the United States turned villages into concentration camps—they erected stockade walls and patrolled the villages with armed guards. According to figures compiled by the United States, 39 percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in these restrictive hamlets (4,077 strategic hamlets were completed out of a projected total of 11,182).

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Fast forward to the present. In the pulverized wreckage of Fallujah, Iraq, the United States will soon introduce the Strategic Hamlet program once again, albeit with significant differences. Under the new plan, according to the Boston Globe, “troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of suicide bombers, would be banned.” In Vietnam, peasants were forced to build their gulags, while in Fallujah male civilians will be organized in “military-style battalions” and, depending “on their skills” will “be assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.” In other words, Fallujans will be organized into chain-gangs and forced to clean up the criminal mess the United States made of their city. For some reason the Pentagon either does not realize or could not care less about the anger and resistance such humiliation will cause.

“You have to say, ‘Here are the rules,’ and you are firm and fair. That radiates stability,” Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer for the First Regimental Combat Team, told the Globe.

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, ” ‘What are your needs? What are your emotional needs?’ All this Oprah ,” he said. “They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.

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“‘It’s the Iraqi interim government that’s coming up with all these ideas,’ Major General Richard Natonski, who commanded the Fallujah assault and oversees its reconstruction, said of the plans for identity badges and work brigades.” Of course, the “Iraqi interim government” does not bend over to tie its shoe laces first thing in the morning without permission from Bush and the Pentagon. However, pretending Allawi and Crew, handpicked by the United States and almost universally hated by Iraqis, are calling the shots looks good, especially with a rigged election right around the corner. Iraqis, of course, know better, even if a somnolent American public—ultimately responsible for mass murder and war crimes perpetuated by its “elected” leaders—has not a clue about what is really going on.
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I'd like to stuff all that "benevolent, dominant tribe" thinking up Bellon's you know what.

[el_gato]

1. this is just practice for what they will eventually do here in the U.S.

count on it

[radwriter0555]

2. Yes, the first internment camp for dissenters... practice and

experimentation for the coming Gulag in the USI.

[htuttle]

3. East Warsaw?

Wonder if they'll make one of the Iraqis play a piano in the city square every day?