Special Forces Goon Squads to Target Afghan Civilians

Obama's Pick to Lead Afghan War, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal Linked to Abuse of Prisoners & Secret Assassination Unit

AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts on this hearing last week? What questions weren’t asked?

TOM ENGELHARDT: Well, I think you have to actually go beyond the issue of mistreatment of detainees, because they were being mistreated for a reason. What General McChrystal was involved in was, if you remember the Vietnam era, a kind of a mini Phoenix Program. It was a massive targeted assassination program. Bob Woodward, with some exaggeration, referred to it as the equivalent of a Manhattan Project for Iraq. Seymour Hersh has said that it was an executive assassination wing being run out of the Vice President’s office. And we don’t know. It was very secret, so we don’t know how many people were killed. Possibly hundreds. And we’re talking here—Al McCoy, who’s an expert on torture, says this wasn’t boots on the ground; this was bullets in the head.

And I think, rather than counterinsurgency, this guy is being brought into Afghanistan to run an already dark war, and he really comes from the dark side.

And I think, you know, what we might expect is that they—we have news now that they’re bringing a thousand new Special Forces people—Special Operations people into Afghanistan. That’s about 5,000. He’s bringing two Special Operations people, generals, from Washington with him. I think we could well see another massive assassination campaign in Afghanistan. I think that’s what this could mean. And I think that’s one of the things that we really do have to think about and look out for...

But we do know that this guy really—he is a legacy figure from the worst of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era.

Winning hearts and minds by blowing apart bodies

The war is expanding at several levels, and the—I mean, he may bring a powerful—this is McChrystal—a powerful targeted assassination campaign on the ground. We already have a targeted assassination campaign in the air, going on, you know, twenty-four hours a day, because we have these CIA-run drone aircraft that are flown from we don’t know where, probably somewhere in the United States, over the Pakistani tribal areas. Reports from those areas—and we can’t—you know, reporters basically don’t get into them—indicate very high casualty levels of non-targeted people. And this is—I’ve always said that strikes like this are not a war on terror but a war for terror, because they create—they create enemies, they create terror.

The Salvador Option and the "DICK, Cheney, an assassination program that goes back to the days of the Vietnam War.

In April of 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that Stuart Herrington recently visited Iraq as a counterinsurgency consultant to the Pentagon, and they quoted Herrington as saying, "when I was [in Iraq], I favored using Shiites and Kurds to go after the Sunnis." They also wrote that Reuel Marc Gerecht confirms that death squads, consisting of Kurdish and Shia commando teams, have been assembled to go after Sunni insurgent leaders, and quoted Gerecht as saying, "[The Pentagon] is trying to expand these units and deploy them more aggressively."

Bonus Section: General McChrystal is the same general that helped cover up the assassination of U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, the former football star who signed up after 9/11 and was sent to Afghanistan where he quickly became disillusioned in that war, telling friends that when he returned home on leave the next week, he was going to give interviews telling Americans they were fighting the wrong war.
The Pentagon freaked upon learning this, since Tillman had been their "Golden Boy" for recruiting and PR. So Pat was silenced with three bullets to the forehead in what was first said to be the result of enemy fire.
Which then changed to a "friendly fire" casualty, all that fog of war stuff.

"Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman's forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player's death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

"'The medical evidence did not match up with the, with the scenario as described,' a doctor who examined Tillman's body after he was killed on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2004 told investigators.

"The doctors – whose names were blacked out – said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away."

Three taps to the forehead is a targeted hit, not a mistake. And the Tillman family have been getting LIED to by the White House, Congress and the Pentagon since Day One.

Why?