[News] US builds concentration camps in Iraq

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Fallujah: Pentagon Plans a High-tech Strategic Hamlet


by Kurt Nimmo

Another Day in the Empire at 
<http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?p=453>http://kurtnimmo.com/   6 
December 2004 <http://globalresearch.ca/>www.globalresearch.ca 7 December 2004

The URL of this article is: 
<http://globalresearch.ca/articles/NIM412A.html>http://globalresearch.ca/articles/NIM412A.html 


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It is now official—the United States does not learn from history. It is 
destined to make the same mistakes over and over again.

In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet program was introduced in Vietnam, based on a 
British counterinsurgency program used in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. In a 
dismal attempt to prevent the National Liberation Front from “influencing” 
peasants in South Vietnam, the United States turned villages into 
concentration camps—they erected stockade walls and patrolled the villages 
with armed guards. According to figures compiled by the United States, 39 
percent of the South Vietnamese population was housed in these restrictive 
hamlets (4,077 strategic hamlets were completed out of a projected total of 
11,182).

As to be expected, this program was a stupendous failure because the 
peasants resented living in concentration camps, far away from their 
ancestral lands. As noted in the 
<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pentagon2/pent4.htm>Pentagon Papers , 
peasants “were herded forcibly from their homes” and locked inside the 
so-called strategic hamlets and their “old dwellings—and many of their 
possessions—were burned behind them.” As the Pentagon saw it, the program 
“was doomed by poor execution,” not the fact that people don’t like being 
locked up in concentration camps and will resist and continue to resist 
until things change. But then, as history demonstrates, there were a lot of 
obtuse “experts” holding down desks at the Pentagon during the Vietnam 
War—obviously, over the last forty or so years, nothing much has changed.

Fast forward to the present. In the pulverized wreckage of Fallujah, Iraq, 
the United States will soon introduce the Strategic Hamlet program once 
again, albeit with significant differences. Under the new plan, according 
to the 
<http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/12/05/returning_fallujans_will_face_clampdown/?rss_id=Boston%20Globe%20--%20World%20News>Boston 
Globe , “troops would funnel Fallujans to so-called citizen processing 
centers on the outskirts of the city to compile a database of their 
identities through DNA testing and retina scans. Residents would receive 
badges displaying their home addresses that they must wear at all times. 
Buses would ferry them into the city, where cars, the deadliest tool of 
suicide bombers, would be banned.” In Vietnam, peasants were forced to 
build their gulags, while in Fallujah male civilians will be organized in 
“military-style battalions” and, depending “on their skills” will “be 
assigned jobs in construction, waterworks, or rubble-clearing platoons.” In 
other words, Fallujans will be organized into chain-gangs and forced to 
clean up the criminal mess the United States made of their city. For some 
reason the Pentagon either does not realize or could not care less about 
the anger and resistance such humiliation will cause.

“You have to say, ‘Here are the rules,’ and you are firm and fair. That 
radiates stability,” Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bellon, intelligence officer 
for the First Regimental Combat Team, told the Globe.

Bellon asserted that previous attempts to win trust from Iraqis suspicious 
of US intentions had telegraphed weakness by asking, ” ‘What are your 
needs? What are your emotional needs?’ All this Oprah [stuff],” he said. 
“They want to figure out who the dominant tribe is and say, ‘I’m with you.’ 
We need to be the benevolent, dominant tribe.

No more Oprah “stuff.” Instead, the Pentagon believes it can pretend to be 
a “dominant” tribal leader—sort of an Americanized version of Saddam—and 
thus win the trust (or fear) of Iraqis, a monumental and culturally 
ignorant—if not completely bigoted—mistake, one certain to engender even 
more animosity on the part of Iraqis and empower the resistance further. 
Bellon understands most Iraqis will continue to hate the United States for 
illegally invading and occupying their country and butchering 100,000 or 
more of their fellow citizens but hopes there will be “mutual respect.” 
Exactly how reducing Fallujah to rubble, sniping thirsty and starving women 
and children, using internationally banned weapons such as napalm, cluster 
and phosphorous bombs, depleted uranium shells, killing doctors and 
hospital patients, and crushing the wounded under the treads of tanks will 
create “mutual respect” is not explained.

Like an act from some macabre theater of the absurd play, the Pentagon 
declares that converting the bombed remnants of Fallujah, with its interred 
civilians, into a concentration camp—with the latest invasive technology 
instead of stockade walls—is an effort to create a “model city.” In other 
words, the Pentagon and its Iraqi stooges plan to use “coercive measures” 
in other Sunni cities; i.e., they will bomb, invade, kill thousands of 
people, and then “reconstruct” the ruins to resemble something out of a 
here-and-now version of the dystopian movie Minority Report, complete with 
retina scan terminals and an omnipresent police state dominating every 
aspect of life.

“‘It’s the Iraqi interim government that’s coming up with all these ideas,’ 
Major General Richard Natonski, who commanded the Fallujah assault and 
oversees its reconstruction, said of the plans for identity badges and work 
brigades.” Of course, the “Iraqi interim government” does not bend over to 
tie its shoe laces first thing in the morning without permission from Bush 
and the Pentagon. However, pretending Allawi and Crew, handpicked by the 
United States and almost universally hated by Iraqis, are calling the shots 
looks good, especially with a rigged election right around the corner. 
Iraqis, of course, know better, even if a somnolent American 
public—ultimately responsible for mass murder and war crimes perpetuated by 
its “elected” leaders—has not a clue about what is really going on.

Naturally, this “firm hand,” as Lieutenant Colonel Leonard DiFrancisci 
characterized the plan for Fallujah, will fail—and fail miserably, just as 
the Strategic Hamlet program did in Vietnam. If the Pentagon believes it 
can lock out the resistance, force it out in the desert where it can be 
conveniently and uniformly liquidated with B-52s and artillery, it is 
seriously deluded. Nothing short of killing every male of military age will 
stop the resistance in Iraq.

If the engineered massacre of Fallujah is any indication, no doubt the 
Pentagon has entertained such a terrible contingency.

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