U.S. Won't Allow Private Guards in Iraq

[maddezmom]

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Shiite cleric, sitting before a tapestry embroidered with verses from the Quran, urged the U.S. commander to allow armed guards to patrol the streets around his mosque because he couldn't count on police to do the job.


But the Americans turned down the request like dozens of others from Iraqis who increasingly look to militias or armed guards to protect them from the violence gripping Baghdad.

"We cannot have men with guns outside mosques and homes because then the law comes unto them and not from the government," Lt. Col. Gian Gentile told the cleric. "If I say that your men can shoot at the men laying these bombs, then the next stop is for them to go looking for these men."

That's the dilemma facing U.S. troops as they try to stem the influence of armed groups, including organized militias, whose existence threatens the authority of the Iraqi government.

more:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060506/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_militia_worries;_

God, this is so f'd up. What about CusterBattles and Blackwater? :eyes:

[mallard]

1. Re: No security will stand in the way...

... of the process leading to civil war a a break-up of Iraq.

Militias yes, security guards NO??

[izzie]

2. I am sure I just read that they do this

In the Washington Post story, on line, today.

[NYC]

3. There are private guards all over the U.S.

Many of them are armed. (Not to mention all the mercenaries in Iraq.)

[saigon68]

4. Here are some of these thugs

[pretzel4gore]

5. if bush farted, they'd all run like hell, screaming for mercy!

something about massively well armed, well fed, well educated boors who serve the corporate interests (backed by millions $ of publicly funded soldiers and trillion dollar military) against peasant farmers and civilian teenagers with nothing but guts and spirit - who, btw, always seem to win the 'war' in the end

[saigon68]

7. Amazing how that happens

And then when profits fall

THIS HAPPENS

[NYC]

11. Is that Bremer being escorted by private guards?

Well armed private guards. But the Iraqis can't have private guards. Do as I say, not as I do.

[0007]

15. There are 15,400 of 'em

[Chrisduhfur]

23. You sure?

Diplomatic security agents are often dressed in a similar manner.

[FloridaPat]

6. Considering all the stories about US & British troops planting some

of those bombs, I can see why the US gov't doesn't want more eyes watching what they do. And what's wrong with neighborhood watches? Works well in the US. That would allow the Iraqi civilians to defend themselves - against the "insurgents" and the US troops that like to shoot them for sport.

"If we allow Iraqi civilians to carry weapons all along the streets, then I believe we are ultimately leading to a broken
Iraq of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds and not a unified Iraq," said Gentile, commander of the 8th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment."

[saigon68]

8. be careful

the powers that be don't like troop thugs being exposed

[Mikimouse]

9. Is that really within the US's sphere? I thought that the Iraqis...

now had their NIB government, and would be taking responsibility for running the country.

[rodeodance]

16. seems 'security' is one of those areas that the Iraqi. gov does not contro

l.

[PATRICK]

10. Any interpretation

or argument emphasizes how mammothly lose/lose this whole situation has become. The occupation forces are clinging to a facade of failed control with only a segment of the population in direct arms against them. If you knew nothing else you would suspect the fact that this mathematically untenable has been more than proved in time.

[Crunchy Frog]

12. Private guards are only ok if they're ours.

We can have them, but Iraqis can't, as dictated by us. That's the nature of Iraqi soveriegnty.

[mom cat]

22. Bingo!

[leftchick]

13. wait, whose country is it again?

what bullshit.

[Orsino]

14. Great line.

"We cannot have men with guns outside mosques and homes because then the law comes unto them and not from the government."

Chowderheads should have thought of that before they invaded.

[One Honest Guy]

18. Nice catch!

[Rose Siding]

17. That's what I was thinking-

"God, this is so f'd up. What about CusterBattles and Blackwater?"

A student asked bush what laws governed military contractors. He was clueless- hadn't even thought about it, was going to ask Rumsfeld, that icon of widom and success. The questioner had already done that and gotten no answer there either.

[bigdarryl]

19. Iraqi guards

I see we are still telling these people how to run there own country.the word democracy is a total joke because we are there in Iraq for one thing and its the oil.

[Rex]

20. So 180,000 mercs is okay, because they don't kill troops

just Iraqis and we all know how Bush feels about Iraqi civilians.

[Vidar]

21. No thugs but our thugs!

[benEzra]

24. That doesn't even begin to make sense...

"We cannot have men with guns outside mosques and homes because then the law comes unto them and not from the government," Lt. Col. Gian Gentile told the cleric. "If I say that your men can shoot at the men laying these bombs, then the next stop is for them to go looking for these men."

Er...if someone is planting a bomb next to your house, and you shoot them to stop them from blowing up your neighborhood, that has NOTHING to do with vigilante squads going house-to-house trying to find suspected bombers. They're not even close...

[Judi Lynn]

25. Hope someone might find this interesting:The Salvador Option has been invo

The Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq

The American public is being prepared. If the attack on Iran does come, there will be no warning, no declaration of war, no truth.

By John Pilger

05/04/06 "ICH" -- -- The lifts in the New York Hilton played CNN on a small screen you could not avoid watching. Iraq was top of the news; pronouncements about a "civil war" and "sectarian violence" were repeated incessantly. It was as if the US invasion had never happened and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians by the Americans was a surreal fiction. The Iraqis were mindless Arabs, haunted by religion, ethnic strife and the need to blow themselves up. Unctuous puppet politicians were paraded with no hint that their exercise yard was inside an American fortress.

And when you left the lift, this followed you to your room, to the hotel gym, the airport, the next airport and the next country. Such is the power of America's corporate propaganda, which, as Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism , "penetrates electronically" with its equivalent of a party line.

The party line changed the other day. For almost three years it was that al-Qaeda was the driving force behind the "insurgency", led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a bloodthirsty Jordanian who was clearly being groomed for the kind of infamy Saddam Hussein enjoys. It mattered not that al-Zarqawi had never been seen alive and that only a fraction of the "insurgents" followed al-Qaeda. For the Americans, Zarqawi's role was to distract attention from the thing that almost all Iraqis oppose: the brutal Anglo-American occupation of their country.

Now that al-Zarqawi has been replaced by "sectarian violence" and "civil war", the big news is the attacks by Sunnis on Shia mosques and bazaars. The real news, which is not reported in the CNN "mainstream", is that the Salvador Option has been invoked in Iraq. This is the campaign of terror by death squads armed and trained by the US, which attack Sunnis and Shias alike. The goal is the incitement of a real civil war and the break-up of Iraq, the original war aim of Bush's administration. The ministry of the interior in Baghdad, which is run by the CIA, directs the principal death squads. Their members are not exclusively Shia, as the myth goes. The most brutal are the Sunni-led Special Police Commandos, headed by former senior officers in Saddam's Ba'ath Party. This unit was formed and trained by CIA "counter-insurgency" experts, including veterans of the CIA's terror operations in central America in the 1980s, notably El Salvador. In his new book, Empire's Workshop (Metropolitan Books), the American historian Greg Grandin describes the Salvador Option thus: "Once in office, Reagan came down hard on central America, in effect letting his administration's most committed militarists set and execute policy. In El Salvador, they provided more than a million dollars a day to fund a lethal counter-insurgency campaign . . . All told, US allies in central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands and drove millions into exile."
(snip/...)

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12945.htm