IRAQ

Orange County Weekly: Operation Phoenix Rises from the Ashes of history
Death squads didn’t work in Vietnam, but the CIA is betting they’ll be great in Iraq

Never pretty, the war in Iraq is about to get a whole lot uglier. U.S. officials have begun to recruit ex-officers of Saddam Hussein’s infamous Mukhabarat, or secret police, to hunt down resistance forces fighting U.S. troops in Iraq.

According to human rights groups, the Mukhabarat was responsible for torturing and murdering tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians during Hussein’s brutal reign. Nonetheless, the CIA has already reportedly begun sending paychecks to dozens of Saddam’s former thugs, who reportedly assisted in the successful hunt for Hussein and suspected Iranian and Syrian spies in Iraq.

Ex-CIA officials have compared the program to Operation Phoenix, an agency operation that assassinated and tortured tens of thousands of mostly innocent South Vietnamese civilians between 1967 and 1970, a period that marked the most brutal years of the Vietnam War.

"They’re clearly cooking up joint teams to do Phoenix-like things, like they did in Vietnam," said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro in a Jan. 4 London Sunday Telegraph article.