The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Re: ISIS thugs and their American handlers....

Re: ISIS thugs and their American handlers....
Posted by Marcello (Guest) - Friday, October 9 2015, 3:35:05 (UTC)
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"Soldiers engaged in Operation Iron Triangle carry a body bag containing a dead Iraqi near Lake Tharthar, on May 9, 2006. Photograph by Specialist Teddy Wade.
Soldiers engaged in Operation Iron Triangle carry a body bag containing a dead Iraqi near Lake Tharthar, on May 9, 2006. Photograph by Specialist Teddy Wade.
Three years ago, at a hastily built command center in the Iraqi desert, near Samarra, a U.S. Army colonel knelt over a dust-caked body bag. Inside were the remains of a man who had just been killed by soldiers in the colonel’s brigade, which was engaged in a vast air-assault mission called Operation Iron Triangle. The soldiers had been hunting for militants in nearby villages and crumbling Baathist-era buildings, some of which had been constructed by Saddam Hussein to serve the Al Muthanna chemical-weapons complex—a series of dirt-covered bunkers that rise from the desert like Babylonian temples. After the Gulf War, soldiers working for the United Nations and the U.S. military had sealed the bunkers with concrete. Farmers and herders began occupying the surrounding villages, and after Saddam’s overthrow, in 2003, they were joined by Al Qaeda fighters, who came to the remote area to train or hide. The colonel, looking at the corpse, saw that it was that of an old man who had been shot in the chest—he was unshaved but not bearded, and a white dishdasha that clothed his body was blood-soaked. A pair of dentures, loosened from his gums, protruded from his jaw.

The colonel, Michael Dane Steele, was a man of daunting physical stature and reputation. Forty-five years old, with an angular face and cropped graying hair, Steele had grown up on a farm near Athens, Georgia. He played college football as a walk-on offensive lineman, at the University of Georgia, and eventually earned an athletic scholarship there, practicing so relentlessly that his coach named an award for perfect attendance after him. (Nobody has since managed to win it.) Within the Army, he was best known for his actions in Somalia, where, in 1993, he commanded a company of Rangers that engaged in a fifteen-hour gunfight in Mogadishu. When he landed in Iraq, in 2005, Steele was the only brigade commander there to have experienced sustained urban warfare before 9/11. He arrived with a clear sense of purpose: to subdue violence with violence, to hunt down and kill insurgents in a region of roughly ten thousand square miles within Salah ad Din province, which includes the cities of Samarra, Tikrit, and Bayji. Steele had memorized the faces of dozens of high-value targets in the region—Al Qaeda operatives and other militants—and he inspected the bodies of people his soldiers killed, looking for tattoos and other identifying marks. He personified the motto that his brigade, numbering nearly four thousand men, had adopted during the war: “We give the enemy the maximum opportunity to give his life for his country.”


Steele asked another officer to photograph the corpse for intelligence purposes. A tag attached to the body bag indicated that the man’s name was Jasim Hassan Komar-Abdullah, and that he was seventy years old. Steele walked away. About an hour later, three more body bags arrived by helicopter. These contained the bodies of Akhmed Farhim Hamid al-Jemi—a thin, bearded man wearing a green dishdasha—and two boys, whose tags indicated that they were under sixteen years old. None of them were known militants, either. Their remains had been disfigured by bullet wounds, and engineering tape had been loosely wrapped around their eyes, to blindfold them; around their wrists were severed black plastic zip ties—used by American soldiers to handcuff detainees.

Helicopters were landing nearby, and wind kicked up by their blades caused the unzipped body bags to flap wildly. Using a pocketknife, Steele removed the tape from the face of a corpse, so that it could be properly photographed. A few soldiers, seeing the bodies, sensed that something had gone wrong. Steele’s intelligence officer asked, “Why would we shoot somebody, and then put a blindfold on them?” The brigade had been conducting the operation with members of the Iraqi Army, and the officer wondered if there was a ritual significance to the blindfolds. Steele thought for a moment, and said, “They must have had the blindfolds on when they got shot.”

By the end of the day, it had become apparent that members of Steele’s brigade had fatally shot eight Iraqi men, all of them apparently unarmed, and that they might have killed more had some soldiers not disobeyed a platoon leader’s orders to gun down farmers digging in a field and men gathered near a gas station. Like the 2005 massacre at Haditha—when, in a near-spontaneous response to the death of an American soldier, marines killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians—the killings that occurred during Operation Iron Triangle suggested a grave problem within the chain of command. Determining what went wrong has proved exceedingly difficult; the case is still being debated in review boards and appellate courts, and truth has become obscured by rumor and apocrypha. A number of soldiers, among them General Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s Vice-Chief of Staff, believe that Steele set the conditions for a massacre by cultivating reckless aggressiveness in his soldiers, and by interpreting the rules of engagement in a way that made the killing of noncombatants likely. Shortly after the operation was completed, Chiarelli issued Steele a severe reprimand, effectively ending his career.


Steele has since entered Army folklore as a cautionary figure—a man who travelled to a murderous place believing, as Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz did, that with the “simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” but ultimately concluding it necessary to “exterminate all the brutes.” Thomas Ricks, in his recent book on Iraq, “The Gamble,” portrays Steele as a soldier whose actions “directly led to atrocities.” At the Army’s Command and General Staff College, Steele has been compared to William Calley, the lieutenant who, during the Vietnam War, led the massacre of villagers in My Lai. Yet Steele is not a convicted war criminal, as Calley was, and at least seven retired or active-duty generals who have worked closely with him, or are familiar with his leadership in Iraq, believe that he is an exemplary, misunderstood military leader. A senior officer who served under him told me, “He’s the soldier you keep behind the panel—the one that reads, ‘Break glass in case of war.’ ” Major General Michael Oates, who, as the 101st Airborne Division’s deputy commander, was one of Steele’s immediate supervisors in 2006, wrote to me from Iraq to say that Steele was “one of the very best combat commanders I have seen in three tours over here.” Even as top leaders in the Army reprimanded Steele, his immediate superiors praised him for running the best brigade in his division, and the military’s Central Command issued his unit an award for combatting terrorism.


Operation Iron Triangle began on May 9, 2006, and lasted for three days, but it emerged from a way of thinking and a set of tactics that were developed more than a year earlier, when Steele first assumed leadership of his brigade. The debate over Steele’s leadership touches upon larger questions about the ethics of modern warfare: about the distinction between killing and murder on the battlefield; about the culpability of officers when their soldiers do wrong; about the kind of force that is necessary to fight an insurgency. As General Oates told me, “The story of Colonel Steele and Operation Iron Triangle is about a fundamental difference of opinion about how to prosecute the war in Iraq.”

Fort Campbell, an Army base on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, is home to the 101st Airborne Division, which fought on the beaches at Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. The 101st includes the only air-assault unit to have fought in the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and Operation Desert Storm; the unit’s members are known as Rakkasans. (The word, which loosely translates as “falling-down umbrella men,” was used by Japanese civilians to describe paratroopers.) William Westmoreland and David Petraeus once commanded Rakkasans, and since the late nineteen-seventies, when the Army began encouraging a sense of regimental identity among its soldiers, the Rakkasans have emphasized aggressiveness and individual initiative. In part, the unit’s ethos emerged from the chaos that accompanies jumping from airplanes, as its soldiers used to do, and descending on ropes from helicopters, as they do now.

In 2004, Steele arrived at Fort Campbell to lead the Rakkasans, and he was on his way to becoming a general officer. Promoted rapidly, he had become known for his emphasis on intense preparation and for his willingness to go into the field with his men. Retired Colonel Danny McKnight, who was Steele’s commanding officer in the nineties, when Steele was a Ranger captain, told me, “He took his company to Thailand for training there, and I went over to visit him, and it was tough, rigorous, hot, ugly training, in terms of conditions.” In 1993, McKnight, impressed by Steele and his subordinates, assigned the company to a task force assembled to capture Mohammad Farah Aidid, Somalia’s most powerful warlord. The deployment came to define Steele’s reputation, largely because of “Black Hawk Down,” Mark Bowden’s account of the tour’s worst day, when American helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu. Soldiers who had served in Somalia later recalled that Steele could be impolitic, and often used bravado-laced language borrowed from football—some Rangers called him Coach. But he also helped guide many soldiers to safety, including one whose shin had been pulverized. Steele earned a Bronze Star for valor during the operation.


Eighteen soldiers died during the Black Hawk Down incident, and Steele took the deaths so hard that he rarely spoke about the deployment. Retired Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, the mission’s tactical-operations commander, told me, “Somalia left Mike Steele with a determination that he would never go into combat with soldiers that he was responsible for without making sure that they were fully prepared. I think he thought that it was problematic that some of the young soldiers were not expecting the impact of trauma, not prepared emotionally for the impact of seeing dead bodies.”

At Fort Campbell, Steele added to the standard Army training a program that he called “Psychological Inoculation of Combat.” Believing that soldiers should not witness severe injury and death for the first time in battle, he arranged for officers to visit a morgue, and ordered medics in the unit to ride in ambulances. Though he organized lectures with a military expert to help the men overcome the stress of killing, he was reluctant to share his own war stories. One of Steele’s senior officers told me, “I asked him one day, ‘Sir, it would be a really good idea if you would give a professional-development lecture to all the officers on Somalia.’ And he looked at me kind of funny, and he said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ And I said, ‘Well, I think that there are a lot of good lessons that people could learn from your experiences.’ And he said, ‘If people would read my command philosophy and my training guidance, they’ll know the lessons that I learned. But I have no desire to talk publicly about one of the worst days of my life, and the deaths of eighteen people who were good friends of mine.’ ”

Even within a unit as tough as the Rakkasans, soldiers noticed that Steele had intensified and refocussed their training. “We were not doing Arab cultural awareness,” the senior officer recalled. “We were not doing Arabic-with-Iraqi-dialect language training.” Instead, Steele instituted a harsh regimen of physical conditioning—he led the brigade on eight-mile runs—and incessant practicing at the rifle range. By the time the unit reached Iraq, the vast majority of his soldiers had become expert marksmen. Steele pushed his senior officers to seek out special equipment—such as M14 rifles, which are more often used by Special Forces—and kept a wish list in his pocket, in case a general officer asked him, “How can I help you?” The standard Army pistol is a 9-mm., which often only wounds an adversary. Steele wanted his men to carry more deadly .45s; he tried unsuccessfully to obtain some through official Army channels, but eventually borrowed others from Glock, the gun manufacturer. (Later, in Iraq, the Army ordered Steele to return the Glocks, and he did.)


Steele designed his training regimen to counter a trend within the Army which he believed was deeply misguided. After the Cold War, many deployments, such as those in the Balkans, were peacekeeping operations, and Steele—who had served in Bosnia—felt that these missions had placed excessive nonmilitary burdens on soldiers. As a result, he told his senior officers, infantrymen entered combat without honed fighting abilities. Steele wanted to make his men skilled at killing, but also capable of restraint. He called his soldiers “sheepdogs”—creatures bred to protect the defenseless. General Oates told me that Steele’s single-minded emphasis on core fighting skills put him in conflict with other officers “who do not share his sense of urgency for realistic combat training.” Before deploying to Iraq, Steele announced that Rakkasans would not be firing warning shots: they would shoot to disable or kill. The decision was unorthodox for the American military, and some officers objected to the policy, but Steele argued that police never fired warning shots, because it was too risky, especially in urban settings.

The brigade became known for its cultivated pugnacity. The Rakkasans engaged in fighting tournaments, designed by Steele. After one such event—a platoon-on-platoon brawl—dozens of soldiers sustained injuries requiring medical attention, but many emerged feeling deep kinship with their regiment. The senior officer recalled going to the hospital after a late-night tournament. “I had broken two bones in my hand,” he told me. “I think there were six officers that got hurt. But it was fun. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, I’m hurt.’ It was like ‘Oh, I broke two fingers hitting a major in the back of the head!’ That was a good thing. So word got out across the division: ‘Oh my God, they’re nuts!’ But there was always a point to being physical in that way—it was about teaching soldiers what you do as a soldier. Nobody likes to talk about it, but if you are in an infantry brigade that’s what you do.”

Before the Rakkasans left for Iraq, on September 18, 2005, Steele readied the brigade with speeches reinforcing his core principles: be precise; be lethal; protect yourself. He promised trophy knives for the killing of insurgents or for exemplary service. In one speech, Steele spoke in a darkened auditorium. “The Rakkasans are going into the worst spot in Iraq,” he said, pacing. “That’s not something that you droop your head down [and] say, ‘Woe is me.’ That’s something that you stick your chest out, and you say, ‘You’re damn right we’re going there,’ because where we’re going they couldn’t send a bunch of Girl Scouts and left-handed midgets.” The crowd laughed, and Steele, echoing the “blood and guts” rhetoric of General George S. Patton, continued, “The guy that is going to win on the far end is the one who gets violent the fastest.”


Steele told his men that he wanted “to whip somebody’s ass” when he heard soldiers talk about taking known enemy fighters as prisoners. “They say, ‘Well, you know, they’re shooting at you. What we need to do is, we need to go over and we need to kick their feet out from under them, and flex-cuff them, and bring them back and put them in a room, and give them some water because they’re probably dehydrated and not thinking well—give them some food because they have not eaten well, put our arm around them, give them an open-mouth kiss, tell ’em we love ’em.’ ” Some soldiers laughed again. “After we’ve befriended them, then they’re gonna tell us all this intelligence. Man, that is bullshit.” He continued, “If you go out and somebody presents a lethal threat to you, and you shoot him, do not feel bad and think that you should have brought him back, because I didn’t want to talk to him.” Steele told his men to think of themselves as apex predators (“If you mess with me, I will eat you”), but he also insisted that they act lawfully. “We are not gonna be driving around Iraq raping, burning, pillaging, being undisciplined,” he said. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the moment of truth, when you’re about to kill the other son of a bitch. I do not want you to choke.” "
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/07/06/the-kill-company



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