Fear and Loathing in Iraq - Death Squads

Death Squads Terrorize Baghdad
Shiite death squads are spreading fear in Baghdad's Sunni neighborhoods. Meanwhile, politicians and police are growing powerless as the outbreak of a civil war becomes ever more likely in Iraq.
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According to a recent United Nations report, this type of "ethnic cleansing" has spread dramatically in Baghdad, a city of 6 million. And no one can stop the death squads, least of all the police. Six neighborhoods have already fallen prey to organized terror. Weeks have passed since the police was last seen in these neighborhoods, and Sunnis are now more afraid of the men in black than of the daily air raids.
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The death squads are well organized, and it's believed that some of the men may be renegade troops of the Interior Ministry. Kamal Hussein, an official at the Interior Ministry, has stated that the black-clad men are not acting on the orders of the government. But Interior Minister Bayan Jabr has long ceased to control his subordinates. The failure to create a new cabinet after the Dec. 15, 2005 elections has resulted in genuine power vacuum. General Rasheed Flayih, the commander of the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry forces, claims they are independent of the Iraqi army. He doesn't deny the existence of death squads. Instead, he euphemistically refers to them as "Field Intelligence Units."
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With each incident, the authority of the state dwindles, and people no longer trust it to protect them. Every party and every organization -- no matter how small -- has its own militia. Every Iraqi is legally permitted to keep a Kalashnikov in his home. Even the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, said recently that the US and its coalition partners have opened a "Pandora's box" by overthrowing Saddam. Ethnic tensions, he added, could not only cause a civil war in Iraq, they could also ignite the entire region.
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Well, that's what the Neocons wanted, and that's what has happened. The PNAC plans are bearing fruit. And nobody is stopping them.

The U.S. has a grim history regarding Death Squads. Negroponte is Lieboy's head of intelligence....the fox in charge of the henhouse. He's currently the Director of National Intelligence having "served" as US ambassador to the United Nations from September of 2001 until June 2004 and as US ambassador to Iraq from June 2004 to April 2005. His pawprints are all over the Iraq war. Is he going to bring death squads to the U.S. to ferret out dissenters in the name of protecting us from terror? Bush wants to build more detention centers here in the U.S., Halliburton got the contract. So, what will go on in these detention centers and who will the inmates be? Us?
But it is his reputation as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 that earned him a reputation for supporting widespread human rights abuses and campaigns of terror. As ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte played a key role in coordinating US aid to the Contra death squads in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras. During his term as ambassador there, diplomats alleged that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina.