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FourthBase wrote:Well, that kind of weapon would be worse, sure.
Still better than being ripped to death with bullets and schrapnel, though?
elfismiles wrote:Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death
By Robert Parry / December 13, 2007
http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/121307.html
Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death
By Robert Parry
December 13, 2007
U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi’s biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.
"A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?” Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.
Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a “lab in a box” for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.
The labs – collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia – will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.
Duong said the next step will be to shrink the lab to the size of a “backpack” so soldiers who encounter a suspect “could find out within minutes” if he’s on a terrorist watch list and should be killed.
Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.
"I don't want My Lai in Iraq," Duong said. "The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror – just like in Vietnam – is to know who the bad guys are. How do we make sure we don't kill innocents?"
In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military units already are operating under loose rules of engagement that allow them to kill individuals who are identified as suspected terrorists or who show the slightest evidence of being insurgents. American forces also have rounded up tens of thousands of Iraqi military-age males, or MAMs, for detention.
During a summer 2007 trip to Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was briefed on U.S. plans to expand the number of Iraqis in American detention by the end of 2008.
“The detainees have risen to over 18,000 and are projected to hit 30,000 (by the U.S. command) by the end of the year and 50,000 by the end of 2008,” Cordesman wrote in his trip report.
The sweeps have enabled the U.S. military to collect biometric data for future use if and when the Iraqis are released back into the general population.
JackRiddler wrote:.
An incredibly simple sequence occurs to me.
1) Begin with Plan A: carpet bomb, invade, "shock and awe," kill everything that moves, pull down the statue, secure the oil and interior ministries, allow the central symbols of Iraqi identity to be looted and destroyed. Dissolve the army, the only functioning institution.
2) Wait for the people to greet your forces with strewn flowers and happy songs.
3) Iraqi people fail to strew flowers or sing happy songs.
4) The period of waiting and seeing what the occupation will bring passes. As anyone glancingly familiar with history expects, a native insurgency begins.
5) Time for Plan B: foment a "civil war." US intel "predicts" the arrival of an "al-Qaeda" component to the insurgency under the mysterious Zarqawi. This indeed inserts itself into Iraq as a foreign element -- funded through friendly Saudi Arabia -- and proceeds to push irrelevant fundamentalist hate rhetoric... and to bomb the Shia shrines in a series of horrific signature attacks on civilians that foment an irretrievable conflict between Shia and Sunni.
6) Focus entirely on the "al-Qaeda" element in the insurgency, as though it represents 90 percent of the fighters when in fact it's about 1 percent of them. Blame everything that happens on "Zarqawi." Level Fallujah to the ground. "Kill" Zarqawi.
7) Now the Shia brigades turn on the Sunni in earnest. Arm the Shia death squads and insert them into the Interior Ministry.
Offer to pay the Sunni insurgents (now besieged by the Shia) to "awaken" their strongholds and join your side. Announce a simultaneous "surge." Oversee ethnic cleansing of Baghdad. Build big walls through the city.
9) Use your "al-Qaeda" infiltrators and the new Sunni allies to completely roll up any Sunni fighter who's not playing the new game. This was how they "killed them all," as Woodward claims Bush said. They probably did kill all fighters who didn't join the "awakening," or who were sucker enough to cooperate in any way with the "al Qaeda" operation.
10) Shia have won the land struggle and control the government, with joint Iranian-US support. (!) Sunni "allies" are on the payroll. Four million people are refugees in other countries. A few hundred thousand are dead. The stuff of future conflict is sown: for a Sunni "re-awakening" in the other direction, for Sadr vs. the government, for Shia vs. the US.
But in the meantime, it looks like success.
11) To help mystify and cover up the above, and to intimidate future enemies, dispatch Woodward to make the claim that the victory was the result of a magic new killing system that entirely wiped out the enemy, a "game changer."
Tim Rutten:
An Afghan 'October surprise'?
New technology used in Iraq and Afghanistan to hunt down and kill terrorists may inject itself into the presidential race.
Tim Rutten
September 13, 2008
Friday, The Times' Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes reported that the United States has escalated its war against Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies by "deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq."
It's a story whose significance may extend well beyond the benighted hills and valleys of Pakistan's violent Pashtun hinterlands and onto the hustings of our current presidential campaign. Coupled with Thursday's report in the New York Times that President Bush has signed a secret order permitting Afghanistan-based U.S. special operations forces to cross into Pakistan without Islamabad's permission, the odds of an "October surprise" that could influence the general election have risen appreciably.
U.S. officials also told The Times that the new surveillance systems allow the operators of the unmanned Predators to locate and identify individual human targets "even when they are inside buildings. ... The technology gives remote pilots a means beyond images from the Predator's lens of confirming a target's identity and precise location."
The Times' story confirms the most sensational revelation contained in Bob Woodward's new book, "The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2007," which was published this week. Woodward revealed the technology's existence but, heeding requests from intelligence officials, declined to describe its operations except to say that it had allowed U.S. forces to locate and kill decisive numbers of senior Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi insurgents. In what may be the book's most controversial claim, Woodward argues that the secret technology and the so-called Anbar Awakening -- in which counterinsurgency techniques developed by the Marines won over tribal leaders in that crucial Sunni-dominated province -- had as much or more to do with stabilizing Iraq as the "surge" in U.S. troop numbers.
Beyond the purely military considerations, there are potentially significant political implications. First and most obvious is the question of the surge's efficacy. The answer matters, particularly to John McCain, who has been one of the surge's most resolute supporters. If it turns out that it was only one -- and, perhaps, the least consequential -- in a confluence of successful American initiatives, then McCain could go from steadfast to stubborn in voters' minds.
The real wild card pops up if this new surveillance technology allows U.S. forces to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Bush wouldn't be human if he didn't desperately want to see the Al Qaeda warlord dealt with before inauguration day 2009. Moreover, as Woodward writes, the president frequently relishes the death of individual extremists and insurgents in a way that even our professional soldiers find striking. Then-American commander in Iraq Gen. George W. Casey Jr. "told a colleague in private that he had the impression that Bush reflected the 'radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, "Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you'll succeed." ' Since the beginning, the president had viewed the war in conventional terms, repeatedly asking how many of the various enemies had been captured or killed."
If U.S. special operations forces capture or kill Bin Laden, or if a CIA technician pushes a button and puts a Hellfire missile between his eyes, Bush will have made good on the vows he made seven years ago to bring the Al Qaeda leader to some sort of justice. In the eyes of many who supported him over the years, that would allow the president to leave office with at least part of his historical reputation intact.
There also are many Republican activists who must hope that an October surprise involving Bin Laden would give McCain -- unswerving supporter of the war and advocate of a muscular, hard-line foreign policy -- a boost by association. At the very least, anything that makes his connection to his party's now dismally unpopular president less of a stigma helps the GOP candidate.
Still, it's also possible that this particular October surprise might also help Barack Obama, at least at the margins, which is where this election increasingly looks to be decided. The Democratic nominee, after all, opposed going to war in Iraq, in part because it was a distraction from the conflict with the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda, which had, after all, committed the 9/11 atrocities. If a military technology heretofore monopolized by operations in Iraq finally brings Bin Laden to answer for his crimes, Obama and his supporters can argue that the war in Iraq delayed the day of reckoning in Afghanistan.
That's the thing about surprises, no matter what the month: The consequences frequently are as unlooked-for as the event.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
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