Iraq's Cycle Of Bloodletting Continues

Lara Logan: The Attack In Samarra Is Meant To Push Iraq Into Chaos

(CBS)  By CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan

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The night is dark over Baghdad as I look out from the balcony of our hotel, hot summer winds blowing aggressively in spite of the late hour. Moments before I had heard the distant thunder of a massive bomb exploding in another part of the city, most likely an American bomb when the boom is that big, but that's not what's on my mind…

All I can think about, imagine, is what people must be feeling, hunkered down in their homes. Especially Sunni people tonight. Everyone here remembers what happened last time, when al Qaeda first bombed the holy Shiite shrine in Samarra. The death squads and executions, and revenge killings on both sides, and the piles and piles of unclaimed, un-named Sunni bodies filling up Baghdad's morgues. They still are.

No one knows for sure how it will play out this time. But there is one thing I do know for sure: tonight, somewhere in Baghdad, on one of those blackened streets, someone will pay for this act. Someone innocent, someone unarmed, someone who does not deserve to die this way. They will go into a house, wearing masks and carrying weapons, maybe even wearing police or army uniforms. They will take an innocent man from his bed, or from his family, and they will execute him.

If he's lucky, they will be quick. But if not, they may torture him. Maybe they won't have time. Or maybe they will have too many others to kill. But if they do have time, most likely they will use an electric drill.

Videos show that while al Qaeda prefers beheadings, Shiite militias favor electric drills.

The fascinating part is that they both film these activities and use it to recruit people to their causes. It seems unnatural that this should draw people to worship and serve, rather than drive them away in horror.

Clearly it is an aspect to this war that I personally will never understand.

What I can understand and imagine is the terror when a death squad enters your home in the middle of the night. The anger every time you reach for the light switch or go to open the fridge, and you are reminded there is no power … The pain of losing someone you love, and then another person, and another ... And beyond that, the huge losses people have endured here, so many I fail again to fully comprehend.

One of our CBS colleagues lost his father to a death squad. He was an old man who refused to move when the death notice – to move or be killed – came. So, when he took out the trash, they were waiting for him with guns, and he died in a pool of his own blood where he fell in the street outside his home.

His brother-in-law was also killed by a death squad – inside their home. This was too much for his mother who dropped dead from a heart attack in response. Then when the book market was bombed in Baghdad recently, his nephew went missing. They found only part of his body. Fifteen years old.

Now his nineteen-year-old nephew and his brother have been arrested by the Iraqi Army and disappeared into the black hole of Iraq's prisons where there is no access to anything even resembling justice for tens of thousands of people.

There are more than forty thousand prisoners in U.S. and Iraqi custody already, and the number is rising every day. One of the little-noticed points that America's top general made in his first press conference after arriving in Baghdad earlier this year was that they would be building more prisons during the surge. Iraq under Saddam Hussein, he said, actually had a comparatively small prison system compared to its neighbors in the region.

And it's filled to overflowing already.

No doubt in the wake of the latest bombing in Samarra, there will be more arrests. Many more.

Who knows how many of those will be innocent men? And who will care when they lock them behind bars and leave them there to rot? Not the U.S. They don't even have access to the Iraqi prison system- for the most part. It is Iraqi run – and this is a sovereign country.

The Iraqi people who do care have no power to get them released unless they know people in positions of influence. This is the measure many of them use to judge the progress of the surge: what is happening to their loved ones after Iraqi and American security forces take them away. Of course, they all say their loved ones are innocent, but the fact is that some of them really are.

[sjc_1]

One of the Provisional Coalition Governments' first decrees;

1- disbandment of the Iraqi army

This is a key point. Bremmer did exactly the opposite of what he should have done and then they gave him a medal for it...unbelievable.

Who knows explosives and tactics better than 100,000 ex military men. The phrase is keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Once you fire these guys, they have no income, but Al-Qaeda has lot of money for operations. Iran is more than willing to help out.

What an idiot Bremmer was and is. He is like Brownie at FEMA, brainless, mindless and clueless, but they think they are just great.

That is one heck of a combination for disaster...arrogant and incompetent. I guess when you are as dumb and arrogant as G.W. Bush, you get cronies just like you to pretend to fill the positions.

He said he would "get good people". If anyone says that ask them how they define good people. Ask them if they will actually LISTEN to those people.

He certainly did not listen to Colin Powell. They had Colin in the wood shed from the get go for speaking the truth too often.

[bluestardad]

You can see by the AIPAC advertisement below this PAC is selling influence to American Elected officials. If you follow the money trail you will find that most of those elected officials who support the war in Iraq are under the influence of AIPAC.

http://www.aipac.org/forms/join_aipacClubs.htm

Here are a list of the Republican Senators up for Reelection in 08. Ask them how much AIPAC influences their vote on Iraq? Is their support for Israel more than their duty to the Americans living in their states?


Alexander, Lamar- (R - TN)
Allard, Wayne- (R - CO)
Chambliss, Saxby- (R - GA)
Cochran, Thad- (R - MS)
Coleman, Norm- (R - MN)
Collins, Susan M.- (R - ME)
Cornyn, John- (R - TX)
Craig, Larry E.- (R - ID)
Dole, Elizabeth- (R - NC)
Enzi, Michael B.- (R - WY)
Graham, Lindsey- (R - SC)
Hagel, Chuck- (R - NE)
Inhofe, James M.- (R - OK)
McConnell, Mitch- (R - KY)
Roberts, Pat- (R - KS)
Sessions, Jeff- (R - AL)
Smith, Gordon H.- (R - OR)
Stevens, Ted- (R - AK)
Sununu, John E.- (R - NH)
Warner, John- (R - VA)

[grumpas]

It's amazing how extremist's like notblue manage to spin a web of lie's to cover up their incompetence. While they dutifully ignore the truth of the matter. This war was started on a lie and no amount of spinning is ever going to change that. Anyone with a brain in their head knew this was going to be the end result of taking Saddam Hussein out of power. Why do you think George Sr didn't get into it in the early 90's? Because there was to great of a chance of civil war taking Saddam out. When you have a clash of religions in a country this is often the result. He could see himself mired in a mess for years to come. So, grow up and admit you made a mistake like millions of other's did. When you bought into the lies!

[neoconrcrazy]

Suni's as in the old Bathists, the minority in Baghdad that are causing the unrest, violence and barbarism. All the U.S. did by removinmg Sadaam was give the MAJORITY Iraqis a chance at FREEDOM for the first time in there history.

Posted by notblue at

you fail to address the "why" ?

it was the policy of Rumsfeld's underlings Wolfowitz and Feith which created the sunni insurgency;

they issued the Provisional Coalition Governments' first decrees;

1- disbandment of the iraqi army
2- banning from office all Baathist party members

Their reasoning: saddam/baathism = Hitler/nazism

The results:

1- the iraqi army went home with their weapons
2- the baathist bureaucrats burned down every ministry (except the oli ministry) effectively destroying iraqs' civil administration

The pro-israel hawks used the holocaust as precedent for political decisions in iraq - and failed.

[neoconrcrazy]

Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings have died because this trash wanted to play power politics.
Posted by Prinzowhales


true - and until this country gets its executive branch under control - more adventures are in store. don't think that the neocons are an isolated or recent event. they've been around in one form or another since 1945, calling for "democractic imperialism", i.e. american dominated world political system.

[sjc_1]

"Guess you don't keep up with current events as it pertains to the deficit."

The deficit is about $250 billion per year, but that does not account for "off budget" items like Iraq, Afghanistan, the S&L bailout and other items like pension insurance defaults.

The actual deficit is more like $500 billion, which is why the DEBT has increased $3 trillion in only 6 years.

[feelfree1]

It appears that Ms. Logan's Bush boosting deception efforts for this event, will be for domestic consumption, at best:

"Both Sunni and Shias Iraqis have accused the U.S. of being behind the bombing the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest Shia religious sites, in order to further incite sectarian violence between the two rival Islamic groups and provide a justification for the American surge."

http://prisonplanet.com/articles/june2007/130607Shrine.htm

The American people seem to be the only ones who remain partially fooled by this neo-con nonsense, but I suspect that we are beginning to awaken.

[prinzowhales]

The Zionists play on the fears of Jews the way the leaders of the Evangelicals play on the fears and hopes of Christians. Boths groups are guided into the service of Finance Capital. So much religious fervor has gone into stirring up the 'Crusade', the 'Holy War' against Islam for the sake of Big Oil and the neo-colonial enterprise known as "Israel."

Now American blood and treasure is being squandered in the sands of the Middle East so that a few vile men--David Rockefellar, George Soros, the Mellons and the Rothschilds to name but a few--can control the oil resources of Iraq...and to best achieve that, they see a region of weak, little states as preferable to strong and relatively powerful states like Iraq. States that are developing in industry, technology with skilled workers and building a prosperous future for their people aren't so easy to intimidate and defraud.

We are in Iraq to destroy it, not to democratize it or even for the freedom of the Iraqis.

[prinzowhales]

It has been the strategic goal of the Israelis to break apart the larger states of the Middle East, at least since the 1970s so as to make them unable to challenge Israel as a regional hegemon. The pipe dream of the extreme Zionist fanatics has always been 'a Greater Israel'... one stretching from Mesapotamia to the Nile... of course, few Arabs could be found who could appreciate the vision of these madmen.

The goal of the Anglo-American leadership has been to play the existing powers off against each other as the Romans played peoples on the borders of their empire off against one another.
We managed to alienate the Iranians by supporting the Shah and his SAVAK torturers. We then used elements of the Ba'athist party around Hussein to fight a war against the revolutionaries who overthrew the Shah. We deceived Hussein, through Amb. April Glaspie's lie to him that the Kuwait question was seen as an inter-Arab matter and not the concern of the United States. Hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of human beings have died because this trash wanted to play power politics.

[prinzowhales]

America, as the occupying power, bares responsibility for the situation in Iraq. Americans are under the impression that we had no plan beyond removing Saddam when we invaded Iraq and opened this front of the Stupid People's War.

The plan from the beginning was to destroy the integrity of the state of Iraq. Immediately the US armed forces shot and killed security personnel guarding State buildings and museums and over loudspeakers encouraged the Shi'ia poor to loot and destroy...saving only the Oil Ministry...afterall, we could not forget why we came there...rather like how we spared the Reichsbank from bombing in World War II...

Virtually the whole of our air campaign was directed at civilian targets--electric and water works, bridges etc....it was a campaign designed to create a dependent people who would gratefully eat out of hand and sing paens to their American liberators....'we will be greeted with flowers' a Bush official said. Flowers, indeed.

[notblue]

Understand this, it is Al Qeuda or Suni's as in the old Bathists, the minority in Baghdad that are causing the unrest, violence and barbarism. All the U.S. did by removinmg Sadaam was give the MAJORITY Iraqis a chance at FREEDOM for the first time in there history. It is EVIL extremists trying to destroy that chance not AMErica or it's forces that are fighting for freedom and stability. Anyone you claims it's Amercicas occupation fomenting the violence are propogandists for the extremists. THe simple reality is if the extremists would stop killing innocent civilians and bombing on a daily basis the soldiers could come home and the majority of Iraqis could live in peace!

[tejasdemo]

Pathetic

[toldyouso21]

Understand this: it is our US invasion and occupation that unleashed all of this. And it is our continual presence that fuels and justifies it in the minds of all the factions.

[ubikvalis2]

"It will take decades to repair the damages and pay the deficits created by George W. Bush Jr."

You mean it will take decades to pay the massive DEBT created by George W. Bush Jr.

[sparks224]

I'm shocked, shocked to discover a civil war going on here!

[clestes-2009]

Thank you.

[infidel_us]

"It will take decades to repair the damages and pay the deficits created by George W. Bush Jr."

Guess you don't keep up with current events as it pertains to the deficit.

[sjc_1]

Only 7% of the oil is under the control of private oil companies, the rest are state owned companies. Aramco has no stake in Iraq, but the private companies have, do or want to.

Saudi Arabia has many concerns. They would like to see stability in their neighbor Iran. If turning over control of the oil to private companies will bring that stability, then that is a bargain that they may be willing to make.

[hungry1968]

I nominate you to for entry in the world's Hall of Shame right along side Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam himself for the category of World's Worst Leaders.
You have definately qualified.
Posted by clestes at 10:19 AM : Jun 14, 2007

Right on brother. He is definitely right there with the worst of them.

[hungry1968]

Two stories with two headlines regarding the occupation of Iraq:

"Iraq Buildup Troops In Place -- Now What?"
"Iraq's Cycle Of Bloodletting Continues"

The last I heard, we were told to wait until all of the "surge" troops were in place before we saw a marked improvement. Could it be - gasp - that they are somehow wrong?!?