On Wed, 09 Apr 2003 23:22:24 -0500, <cuito61 at onebox.com> wrote:
> CIA STAGES ANOTHER BOGUS PSY-OP/PHOTO-OP
> ABOUT FIFTY IRAQUIS SHOW UP FOR THE BIG RALLY
>
> http://www.voxfux.com/archives/00000085.htm
> ...about seventy of what appeared to be Iraqi dregs and delinquents...
You mean the Fedayeen Saddam? The BBC report by Rageh Omaar here, http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/video/_39076261_baghdad22_omaar_vi.ram shows way more than 70.
The final paragraph below from TNR reminds me of a story from a Chilean friend from UCSC. The Pinochet era military recruits in boot camp would adopt a dog, and at the conclusion of their training have to kill the pooch.
WHO ARE THE FEDAYEEN SADDAM? Secret Service by Ryan Lizza Post date: 04.03.03 Issue date: 04.14.03
...In hindsight, it seems obvious that the fedayeen would have some success in terrorizing the anti-Saddam southern Shia into quiescence. Since the Gulf war, the mission of Saddam's security forces has been to prevent a repeat of the 1991 Shia intifada that almost overthrew the regime. The Fedayeen Saddam--founded in late 1994 by Saddam's deranged son Uday--are key to this goal. Jamal Al Qurairy, an Iraqi defector who presided over mass executions of Shia in 1991, and who says he was instrumental in organizing and training the fedayeen, recently told a London newspaper, "[T]he training had a central emphasis--how to surround and control a city." The newspaper added that Al Qurairy said the fedayeen's mission was "to use all means possible 'to protect Iraqi cities from an urban uprising' and to crush it should it begin. In the event of a foreign attack, the Fedayeen was tasked to fight for Iraqi cities block by block." (The CIA debriefed the defector, but he claims they seemed less than interested in his information.) Nor were the fedayeen's exploits in Iraq in the '90s hidden from the outside world. In 1995, the fedayeen were used to quell a revolt actually staged by Sunnis, the branch of Islam from which Saddam and his power base come. Sunni tribesmen in a city west of Baghdad were reportedly upset that the regime had sent the mutilated body of a mutinous air force officer back home to their city. One tactic used by the fedayeen to put down the disturbance was to hold hostage the wives and daughters of some of the tribesmen until they gave up. In 1998, the fedayeen poured into Karbala after an assassination attempt on Izzat Ibrahim, the number-two man in Iraq. The militia arrested dozens of Shia. The following year, the fedayeen crushed the most widespread Shia uprising in Iraq since the 1991 intifada. It began when the regime assassinated the country's top Shia cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Sadek Al Sadr, who had called for the release of jailed religious leaders. In Baghdad, the fedayeen reportedly sealed off Shia sections of the city to prevent riots from spreading. In Najaf, where the assassination occurred, militiamen used a more devious method to control the population: According to a witness interviewed by the British newspaper The Independent, security forces stormed through the town in gas masks and chemical-warfare suits terrorizing the residents--who are keenly aware of Saddam's use of chemical weapons against other dissident minorities in Iraq--into thinking a poison-gas attack was imminent. This tactic could explain the presence of all those chemical-warfare suits found recently in Nasiriyah. They may be there to intimidate the Shia population rather than to protect Iraqi forces from actual chemical weapons. In another widely reported operation aimed at terrifying potential dissidents, in 2000 the fedayeen began publicly beheading some 200 women who the regime claimed were prostitutes but who were mostly political opponents. Often, a victim's severed head was dropped on her family's doorstep. In some cases, the family was even forced to display the head outside their home for several days. It's not surprising, then, that, in the run-up to the war, fedayeen in the south warned the Shia and potential army deserters that they would be killed if they turned against the regime. Fedayeen confiscated the leaflets dropped by the United States, and, as paramilitaries began to occupy cities just before the war, they announced through loudspeakers that unusual activity or disobedience would be met with death. All this suggests that, while the predictions of an immediate uprising in the south were too optimistic--many simply didn't take into account the terror instilled in the Shia by the fedayeen and the Baathists-- some of the current pessimism is also off the mark. In one of the most prescient prewar comments, an Iraqi Shia told The Washington Post in January, "When we are sure that Saddam's security apparatus has collapsed, we will arise. But not before." One final surprise has been the fedayeen's suicidal loyalty to the regime. Many expected the sort of mass surrenders that we saw in 1991, when conscripted Iraqi soldiers gave themselves up to TV crews. But the fedayeen have been indoctrinated and welded to the regime in a manner that didn't exist before the Gulf war. Uday has often recruited desperate men from orphanages or prisons. As the fedayeen became more professionalized, he recruited only Sunnis from the central Iraq tribes most loyal to Saddam. The men are paid salaries many times higher than other government workers. They are given land, free health care, and extra food rations, all enormous perks considering the sanctions against Iraq. And they know they have no future without Saddam. In the mid-'90s, the government also started a frightening program called Saddam's Lion Cubs (Ashbal Saddam), a military training camp for children as young as ten. The Cubs spend a month of their summer vacation enduring 14-hour days of small- arms training and political indoctrination. A recent Brookings Institute report notes the kids are trained in "techniques intended to desensitize the youth to violence, including frequent beatings and deliberate cruelty to animals." The best of the Cubs are asked to join the Fedayeen Saddam. The climax of the Fedayeen Saddam's training is an initiation ceremony where dozens of half-naked trainees rip apart a large dog and eat its innards with their bare hands. The blood-soaked men jump about, tearing at the dog as they shout in rhythmic unison, "Our souls and blood we sacrifice for you, Saddam!" We should not be all that shocked at this either. A video of the ceremony was played regularly on Iraqi television. Ryan Lizza is an associate editor at TNR.
-- Michael Pugliese