Page 136 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

126 Chapter 5

lice cars, uniforms and weapons for Badr operations, while people in leadership
positions can say, some of them truthfully, that they don't know about it."'35 The
Badr Brigade, along with the Mahdi Army (claiming inspiration from Moqtada
al-Sadr) has a pattern of engaging in torture; many of their detainees are beaten
severely with blunt objects, other bodies are discovered with holes drilled in
them. Most of their victims are found wearing handcuffs, showing that they
were defenseless at the time of death.'36

Fueling Ethnic Tensions

The U.S. has not escaped criticism when it comes to supporting militias fueling
ethnic tensions. Naluain Toma of the human rights group Bethnahrain, explains
that "Nobody wants to do anything with the Americans anymore. . . . Why? Be-
cause they gave power to the Kurds and to the Shiites" and their militias. "No
one else has any rights."'37 Majid Sari, an adviser for the Iraqi Defense Ministry
in Basra speaks critically of the U.S./Iraqi effort to institutionalize the militia
forces: "They're [the militias] taking money from the state, they're taking
clothes from the state, they're taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is
to the parties [they serve]." As for those who challenge them, "the next day
you'll find them dead in the street."'38
The Guardian of London reported that in the few months preceding March
2006, "more than 7,000 people have been killed by death squads. . . . Reports of
government-sponsored death squads have sparked fear among many prominent
Iraqis, prompting a rise in the number leaving the country."'39 Andrew Bun-
combe and Patrick Cockburn of the Independent of London explained that,
"hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every
month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Inte-
,.ior.,,140
In a fundamental questioning of mainstream media reporting, opponents of
US. support for militias and "counterinsurgency" forces were often uncompro-
mising in their condemnations of the US. Edward Herman, argued in Z Maga-
zine that the U.S. is fueling ethnic tensions and violence through an informal
imperial policy of divide and conquer:

The Bush war has already started a civil war as part of the evolving occupation
strategy. The character of the occupation, with its murderous use of firepower
and harsh treatment of the populace, has steadily enlarged and consolidated a
resistance. Having failed to get a puppet effectively installed without even
nominal democratic forms, the Bush war managers opted for a tacit alliance
with the Shiites and Kurds, who would be given nominal and possibly a modi-
cum of real power via an electoral process, but with much of the legal and
power arrangements of the occupation left intact and with the United States
staying on to protect the new quasi-rulers from the Sunni-based insurgency.
This provoked and institutionalized a civil war, with the occupation maintained
as the military arm of one side. Thus the idea that the United States should stay
on to avert a civil war is a laugher - it produced the resistance and then moved
on to a tacit alliance with the Shiites and Kurds to fight the Sunnis on behalf of